Free trade must also be fair trade

India must not accept the European Union's demand on sustainability clauses in FTA

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With Donald Trump guillotining the multilateral trading order by first declaring differentiated tariffs on other countries and then announcing that the US will conduct bilateral negotiations to remove them, there are many who are mourning the demise of free trade in the world.

While what is happening today is far from ideal, free trade always had an Orwellian twist of being freer for richer countries. This inequality of opportunity in accessing export markets was achieved through myriad mechanisms other than tariffs which put a prohibitive economic burden on developing countries.