Popping up in the candidates’ discourse is the issue of trade, especially fair trade, U.S. policy concerning African and Latin American economies, and labor standards enforcement. Here are some things the candidates have said about trade:

Clinton, from AFL-CIO Debate Chicago: August 7, 2007
“I believe in smart trade. I’ve said that for years. Pro- American trade; trade that has labor and environmental standards; that’s not a race to the bottom, but tries to lift up not only American workers but also workers around the world.”
Read more.

Dodd, from AFL-CIO Debate Chicago: August 7, 2007
“I agree [NAFTA] requires modification, but we also need to do something else here. In addition to having trading agreements that include labor, environmental health provisions in them and insisting upon those provisions in any trading agreement here, we need to stop exporting the jobs in the country that already are here.”
Read more.

Edwards, from speech on Trade Policy in Iowa: August 6, 2007
“As president, I will seek to restore America’s moral leadership of the world, and our trade policies with these countries can help. But we are going to be tough in our negotiations because the overriding obligation of the president of the United States is to put America’s workers, economy and national interests first.”
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Gravel, from Democratic Debate at Howard University: June 28, 2007
“No, outsourcing is not the problem. What is the problem is our trade agreements that we have that benefit the management and, of course, the shareholders, and have neglected on either side of the issue, whether it’s in Mexico or in other countries or the United States. That’s the problem that must be addressed.”
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Guiliani, from his “12 Commitment’s Pledge”:
Aggressively Advance Free Trade: Rudy will tear down the walls to free trade and create new markets for American-made products. He will protect America’s innovations and intellectual property by enforcing our trade agreements aggressively.
* Reduce corporate tax rates and regulatory burden so that Americans can better compete in the global economy.
* Reform the excesses of Sarbanes-Oxley that are driving our corporations overseas to list on foreign exchanges.
* Reenact the Presidential Fast-Track Trade Promotion Authority and complete the Doha Development Round.
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Huckabee, from speech in Iowa, April 28th, 2007
“If somebody in the presidency doesn’t begin to understand that we can’t have free trade if it’s not fair trade, we’re going to continually see people who have worked for 20 and 30 years for companies one day walk in and get the pink slip and told ‘I’m sorry but everything you spent your life working for is no longer here.”
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Kucinich, from AFL-CIO Debate Chicago: August 7, 2007
“In my first week in office, I will notify Mexico and Canada that the United States is withdrawing from NAFTA. I will notify the WTO we’re withdrawing from the WTO.”
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McCain, from Conference on Bio Economy in Ames, IA November 5, 2007
“Our future prosperity depends on our competitiveness. Globalization is here and globalization is an opportunity not a threat. The American farmer is the most productive and innovative farmer on the planet and can compete with anyone. Period. But farmers can’t compete if they can’t get into the game. My friends, 95 percent of the world’s customers live outside the borders of the United States. While my Democratic opponents play politics with trade — using words like a trade “time out” to disguise their protectionism — I don’t intend to sit out opportunities and challenges of the world’s economy. I intend to seize those opportunities to ensure, as every American generation has done, that our children’s lives will be even more prosperous than were ours.”
Read more.

Obama, from his paper, “Connecting and Empowering all Americans through Technology and Innovation”:

Promote American Businesses Abroad: Trade can create wealth and drive innovation through competition. Barack Obama supports a trade policy that ensures our goods and services are treated fairly in foreign markets. At the same time, trade policy must stay consistent with our commitment to demand improved labor and environmental practices worldwide. In its first six years, the Bush Administration has filed only 16 cases to enforce its rights under WTO agreements. This compares to 68 cases filed during the first six years of the Clinton Administration. President Bush has failed to address the fact that China has engaged in ongoing currency manipulation that undercuts US exports; that China fails to enforce U.S. copyrights and trademarks and that some of our competitors create regulatory and tax barriers to the delivery and sale of technology goods and services abroad. Barack Obama will fight for fair treatment of our companies abroad.
Read more.

Richardson, from speech at UCLA: October 24, 2007
”We must promote trade agreements that include strong and enforceable labor, environmental, and human rights standards. Free and fair trade can benefit both Latin American and US workers. It will benefit consumers throughout the region. And it will bind closer the nations of the entire hemisphere.”
Read more.

Romney, from Trade Advisory Group Press Release: October 31, 2007
”Opening markets to our goods and services is key to expanding opportunity here at home. Expanding trade is pro-growth, pro-industry, pro-agriculture, and pro-American leadership in the world,” said Governor Romney. “With years of public and private sector experience working on trade related issues, this group will provide valuable insight into what we can do as a nation to expand trade opportunities around the world.”
Read more.

Many of the above quotations are from the Center for Global Engagment’s Candidate Position Tracker.

You can also learn more about the candidates’ stances on trade at the Council on Foreign Relations website.

The following post also appears today in the Center for Global Development’s blog, Views from the Center.

The security and well-being of each and every American is tied to the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders, according to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The theme of global interdependence is the bedrock of Obama’s new strategy for America’s engagement in the world, in which global development matters, a lot.

Obama unveiled his new strategy (download full strategy document, PDF, 71k) for “Strengthening Our Common Security by Investing in Our Common Humanity” at a foreign policy forum in New Hampshire last week (video footage available here and news coverage in the Concord Monitor). The new strategy explains:

The United States should provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and common humanity. We must lead not in the spirit of a patron, but the spirit of a partner. Extending an outstretched hand to others must ultimately be more than just a matter of expedience or even charity. It must be about recognizing the inherent equality, dignity, and worth of all people. It will require American leadership that leverages engagement and resources from our traditional allies in the G-8 as well as new actors, including emerging economies (e.g. India, China, Brazil and South Africa), the private sector and global philanthropy. Yet, while America and our friends and allies can help developing countries build more secure and prosperous societies, we much never forget that only the citizens of these nations can sustain them.

Obama’s strategy reiterates a promise to double U.S. foreign assistance to $50 billion by 2012 that my colleague Steve Radelet discussed in a CGD blog several months ago. Also of note are commitments to:

* Expand prosperity through investments in agriculture, infrastructure and economic growth so the benefits and burdens of globalization are shared equally and economic policy is seen as central to security policy;
* Create an Add Value to Agriculture Initiative to promote a Green Revolution in Africa in addition to other measures to increase poor farmers’ access to agricultural markets;
* Establish a $2 billion Global Education Fund for primary education to help eliminate the “global education deficit”;
* Launch a Global Energy and Environment Initiative, create an Emerging Market Energy Fund, and spur the creation of an open-source, real-time mapping system to forecast the impacts of climate change country-by-county to address climate change and other global environmental challenges;
* Lead efforts to reform the International Monetary Fund and World Bank;
* Develop a rapid response fund for societies in transition;
* Invest in global health infrastructure, including creating health care systems that train and retain health care workers; and (last but not least)
* Coordinate and consolidate the twenty-some U.S. agencies currently involved in U.S. foreign assistance (including the Millennium Challenge Account and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in a restructured and empowered U.S. Agency for International Development.

Obama was joined at the forum by his foreign policy advisers including Richard Danzig, former secretary of the Navy; Tony Lake, former national security adviser; Adm, John Hutson, former U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General; Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of human rights and foreign policy; and Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs. Together they discussed these and other ideas for U.S. global engagement should Obama become the next president.

Long before Obama’s speech, the Center for Global Development and many other organizations including the ONE Campaign and Center for U.S. Global Engagement have been working to put global development onto the agenda of the 2008 presidential campaigns. This is indeed the focus of our Global Development Matters website and the documentary film footage it uses to tell the story of why global development matters for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

I encourage my CGD colleagues and others to comment further on the details of Obama’s proposals and extend my own applause for the Obama campaign’s vision and as yet uncommon commitment to addressing global development in the 2008 presidential campaigns. Sadly, Obama’s foreign policy goals are no longer the headline on his campaign website, nor did they seem to make national press coverage this weekend. Here’s hoping that other candidates, Republicans and Democrats alike, start saying as much and more about their commitment to global development and their vision for America’s role in the world, and that the media and others start taking notice.

Immigration has been a hot topic during this election season—and immigration impacts global development quite a bit. Increasing labor mobility can improve the economic conditions of both rich and developing countries.

As you may know, yesterday the Republican presidential candidates gathered for the CNN YouTube Republican Debates. Here are some highlights dealing with immigration:

Check out this playlist to see all the candidates talk about this contentious issue:

Missed the Democrats on YouTube? Here’s the recap of the CNN YouTube Democrat Debates.