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both of these distorted perceptions of the developing countries get
construed into ineffective and potentially damaging foreign policy.
Though the debate on exporting practices originally received
congressional attention in 1978 with hearings called to investigate the
exporting of Tris-treated children's clothes, * it did not receive wide
national press coverage until November 1979 , when a San
Francisco-based muckraking magazine,
Mother Jones,
ran a lengthy
report on the topic, calling it - with typical hyperbole - "The
Corporate Crime of the Century." The slant of the article was that
greedy multinational firms were making enormous profits by selling
products considered inferior or unsafe in the United States to
unwitting victims in the Third World . The editors of
Mother Jones
distributed the article to members of Congress and to the delegates
of the U .N. General Assembly. Within months , the General
Assembly had passed a resolution condemning the "dumping" of
banned products , a bill had been proposed in the House of Repre–
sentatives to control the export of such products by a lengthy
licensing procedure, and, finally, former President Carter signed an
Executive Order* * (later rescinded by Pres ident Reagan) to restrict
the exporting of such products, also via a lengthy interagency review
and licensing procedure.
In the debate over this subject, much was made of the fact that
the United States and other industrialized nations were using a
"double-standard" approach toward the Third World - in other
words, products considered unsafe for use here were judged
adequate for markets in developing countries. In reality, the issues
related to international trade in hazardous products are extremely
complex and in no way lend themselves to such a caricature.
Numerous conflicts in standards and in definitions of what is and is
not a hazardous product exist among the United States, Europe,
Canada, England, and Japan , as well as among various inter–
national agencies such as the World Health Organization, the Food
and Agricultural Organization, the United Nations Environment
• The hearings resulted in the passage of an amendment to the Toxic Substances
Control Act; the 1978 amendment calls for notification to foreign governments
whenever a substance is banned or restricted in the United States.
•• Former President Carter had created an Ad Hoc Working Group on H azardous
Products in 1978, after the Tris-related hearings, and the Executive Order he signed
was the result of recommendations proposed by this group; Reagan rescinded the
order until a review could be made of existin g regulations covering hazardous
exports.
