Nguyen Khanh Chi | Dec. 2, 2005 | Vietnam News
Are we asking ourselves of-ten enough if the world’s policy makers are protecting the cultural diversity of their own countries in their rush to sign free trade agreements?
Mexico provides a bitter example of the damage that can be done by agreements that ignore a cultural imperative.
The quantity and quality of its movies nose dived immediately after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect.
The truth is that free trade and cultural diversity are compatible only if a country’s culture and cultural industries are reduced to doing no more than meeting the needs of economy and commerce.
But if we agree that all people have the right to their own texts, their own images, their own sounds, their own symbols, their own myths and to develop them according to their own imagination, then we must acknowledge that cultural products are not like other commodities.
As French Federation of Entertainment Trade Unions secretary Claude Michel maintains: Without systems of support and the application of quotas and subsidies, culture is likely to become hostage to a market where only profitable cultural goods survive.
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