Book excerpt: Globalization has reduced many aspects of modern life to little more than commodities controlled by multinational corporations. Everything, from land and water to health and human rights, is today intimately linked to the issue of free trade. Conventional wisdom presents this development as benign, the sole path to progress. Yash Tandon, drawing on decades of on-the-ground experience as a high level negotiator in bodies such as the World Trade Organization, here challenges this prevailing orthodoxy. He insists that, for the vast majority of people, and especially those in the poorer regions of the world, free trade not only hinders development—it visits relentless waves of violence and impoverishment on their lives. This revised and updated edition of Trade Is War shows how the WTO and the “Economic Partnership Agreements” are camouflaged by rhetoric that hides their primary function as the servants of global business. Their actions are inflaming a crisis that extends beyond the realm of the economic, creating hot wars for markets and resources, fought between proxies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and now even in Europe. In these pages Tandon suggests an alternative vision to this devastation, one based on self-sustaining, non-violent communities engaging in trade based on the real value of goods and services and the introduction of alternative currencies.