If anyone can take credit for making global trade an issue of concern to both North American farmers and environmentalists, it’s Mark Ritchie, president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). In 1986, a decade before the World Trade Organization (WTO) came into existence, Ritchie, then a policy analyst for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, began sounding alarm bells about the dangers to family farms and the environment posed by several proposed international trade agreements.

The U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement—precursor to the North American Free Trade Agreement—and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt) were quietly being negotiated by bureaucrats in Washington, Ottawa, and Geneva. 'At that time, most people had blind faith that international trade was a positive thing,' Ritchie says. 'Our biggest challenge was educating people to question this acceptance of free trade as good.'

As one of the founding organizers of the international boycott of Nestlé (for its advertising campaign convincing Third World mothers to switch from breast-feeding to infant formula), Ritchie had extensive contacts with activist groups the world over. Like a modern-day Paul Revere, he began spreading the word that the proposed trade deals were undemocratic and threatened to dismantle environmental, labor, and consumer protections.

'That got progressives thinking about how international institutions were being manipulated by corporations,' says Ritchie. And it helped galvanize a broad, if unlikely, coalition that spanned the political spectrum from Ralph Nader to Ross Perot to Pat Buchanan.

Since then, Ritchie and his colleagues at the iatp have pursued a dual insider-outsider strategy. They continue to stoke the anti-globalization movement’s fires, organizing grassroots opposition to nafta, gatt, and the wto. Key components of the corporate globalization strategy—an expansion of gatt’s authority, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and an expansion of nafta—have been held back, in large part due to activist opposition. At the same time, Ritchie has worked within the system alongside representatives of other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world to influence trade negotiators to address farmer, labor, consumer, and environmental concerns.