Everything Is a Trade Agreement

I spent a significant portion of my professional life in rooms where people negotiated the terms on which things move across borders. Goods, mostly agricultural products, manufactured goods, services, and intellectual property. The work was technical, slow, and often invisible to everyone outside those rooms, which is part of why trade policy has such a reputation for being dull. It is not dull. It is one of the most consequential things that happens in the world, quietly, while everyone is looking elsewhere.

Here is what I learned in those rooms: the rules that govern what crosses a border and what doesn't are never neutral. They reflect the interests of whoever was powerful enough to write them and influence others to agree to them. That sounds cynical, but it isn't meant to be. It is simply an accurate description of how international agreements work. The countries that dominated the post-war trading system built that system to move their goods efficiently. Other countries joined later and inherited a structure that was not designed with them in mind. You can participate in it, you can negotiate amendments to it, you can build coalitions to shift it incrementally. But you cannot pretend it is a level surface, because it is not. "One size does not fit all," as we used to say in WTO plenary meetings.

I have been thinking about this a great deal lately, and not in relation to soybeans, bananas, or automotive parts.

Culture moves across borders the same way goods do, along infrastructure built by specific people for specific purposes, which serves some producers far better than others. A film made in Los Angeles has access to distribution networks, financing structures, marketing budgets, and platform relationships that a film made in Dakar, Bridgetown, or Luanda simply does not. This is not because the American film is better. Anyone who has spent time with the independent cinema from West Africa or the Caribbean over the past decade knows that quality is not the variable. The variable is infrastructure. This is despite co-production audio-visual treaties, one of which I helped design for the CARICOM-EU partnership as a consultant in what seems like another life.

When Amazon built a content operation in Africa and then shut it down after a single year, that was a trade decision. When a streaming platform decides which languages to subtitle and which to leave untranslated, that is a trade decision. When a film wins a major prize at Cannes and then disappears from global view because no distribution deal materializes, that is a trade decision. These decisions are not made maliciously, most of them. They are made logically, by people optimizing for the audiences and revenue streams that the existing infrastructure makes easiest to reach. The infrastructure produces the outcome. The outcome feels like culture.

I used to sit across the table from negotiators who would explain, with complete sincerity, that their country's agricultural subsidies were simply a domestic policy matter and not a trade issue at all. The subsidy made their farmers competitive in ways that farmers elsewhere could not match. But because it was framed as domestic policy rather than trade policy, they expected it to sit outside the negotiating framework. The harm was real. The framing made it invisible.

I notice the same move is made constantly in conversations about creative industries. The dominance of certain voices and certain stories in global media is framed as a matter of taste, of quality, of what audiences want. It is almost never framed as a structural question: who built the pipes, who owns the pipes, and whose product flows most easily through them.

Those are trade questions. I know trade questions when I see them. And I have spent enough time now watching the independent film world to know that the filmmakers asking them are overdue for a better answer.