FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   TRADE IS WAR The West’s War Against the World By Yash Tandon   “This impressive study focuses on Africa, which has suffered hideous crimes. Yash Tandon’s case is a powerful one, and can be extended: The global class war that is institutionalized in the misnamed ‘free trade agreements’ is also a war against the traditional victims of class war at home. The resistance, in Africa and elsewhere, which Tandon describes here, is a source of hope for the future.” —Noam Chompsky “A necessary and timely contribution which goes to the roots of the deep crises we face as humanity.” — Vandana Shiva “… understand that ‘trade is war’ as Yash Tandon beautifully explains in this important book.” — Samir Amin

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 (WTO), 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.

Trade Is War shows how the WTO and the Economic Partnership Agreements like the EU-Africa EPA and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are camouflaged in a 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.

Yash Tandon is the author of numerous books and is an Honorary Professor at Warwick and London Middlesex Universities in the UK. He is the Founder-Chairman of SEATINI (Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute), and former Executive Director of the South Centre, a think tank of the Global South.

MEDIA CONTACT: Matthew Schantz | matthew.schantz@wp.orbooks.com

Trade Is War
Publication date: June 4th, 2015
Paperback, $18, 978-1-939293-81-7
E-book, $10, 978-1-939293-82-4
216 pages