The poor step up
David Ransom finds a baleful legacy and the chance of change in world trade.

Inside a little tiger
The Hyundai Company is at the heart of South Korea. Joe Freeman talks to the behind an 'economic miracle'.

The comparative advantage
of Jane Marcet
How, long ago, a schoolteacher beat a millionaire stockbroker to one of the most famous laws of economics.

Raw materialism
Darn Sandberg diagnoses the affliction.

Cocoa addicts
Ghana lives, breathes, but rarely eats cocoa. John Tanner samples the bitter taste of a key primary commodity.

TRADE - THE FACTS

Halfway to liberation
Nigel Harris argues that the Third World has cause for modest optimism.

Plantations and Planes
Brazil is going hi-tech - but nothing changes for the poor. Sue Branford reports.

Fair trading
Graham Young examines the principles. Plus a round-up of alternative trading organizations.

TRADE! There, I've said it. Have your eyes glazed over? Are you suppressing a quiet groan? You need not feel alone. It's happened to a lot of people I've had to say it to over the past few months. And, all right, it happened to me too.

Trade is hopelessly mundane. As mundane as buying cat food from your local shop. There's nothing special about world trade, which brings you the tin your cat food comes in. But without it we would all be sunk. There'd be no NI for a start.

For good or ill, trade has changed the world, and keeps on changing it. Coffee first came from Africa and went with trade to be produced in Latin America. Cocoa first came from Latin America and went with trade to be produced in Africa. The great sailing clippers and steamships of the nineteenth century didn't just carry tea or machines. People, their cultures and aspirations, travelled with them too - many of them at the point of a gun.

In this century, astonishing technical achievements have linked the far corners of the earth into networks of instant communication that our great grandparents could not even have imagined. Almost anything can now be made almost anywhere. Despite the best endeavours of some to prevent it, ideas and understanding spin ever faster around the globe and interact with each other to create new possibilities. There's no going back, and I for one would not wish to.

This edition of the NI is my first. For the past 15 years or so I've been working with homeless people in the East End of London. Before that I worked for several years in Latin America, leaving just before the military coup in Chile, where my daughter was born. I felt then that the distance between the oppressed in Britain and Chile was not so great, and I still feel that now. All too often it is despair that seems to bind people together. But as I write this, elections have just taken place in Chile: hope is always springing up when you least expect it.

Just a few months ago, trying to get to grips with world trade seemed like a pretty hopeless task. But for me, at any rate, it has turned into a voyage of discoveries - all the more vivid because they were unexpected. And, to my complete surprise, my sense of the world as one place has grown sharper, too. I've come Out of the experience feeling just a little bit more enlightened, and quite a bit more enraged; a whole lot better than the glazed eyes and groans I started out with. If something even remotely similar happens to you then this edition will have achieved its ambition.

I can't reasonably finish without saying that 'my' first magazine for the NI owes many of its better parts to the co-op that has produced them. I've had to lean heavily on my colleagues, on their experience and patience. One of the things that attracted me here in the first place was the fact that it is a co-op. But ideals don't always translate into practice, do they? In editing this magazine I feel I've got as close to seeing ideals and practice brought together - in discussions, sharing ideas and sorting out difficulties - as I could ever reasonably expect. For me at least, that in itself has made the experience worthwhile.

Letters
Letter from La Paz
Update
Endpiece: by Ashok Mitra
Reviews: including Charles Dickens classic
Country profile: Bahamas

FRONT COVER PHOTO:
Liba Taylor / Hutchison Library
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