The World Trade Organization, a group representing 135 nations’ efforts to reduce trade barriers, is meeting in Seattle this week to work out the details of new trade talks that would restructure the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a 51-year-old document that sets trading rules for the world. Its recent history, however, shows that for all the talk about mutual benefits, the organization is equally willing to leave people behind.

On paper, free trade sounds great: One nation sells what it makes or does best to other nations, and vice versa. And most people can agree that if global trade is to be a reality, some organization — in this case, the WTO — has to define what constitutes free trade and defend those rules.

But free trade is not a free lunch — it has its pitfalls, ones not so easily addressed by an organization such as the WTO, which is often accused of seeing trade as a virtue in itself.

There are questions of fundamental fairness to workers. Free trade can have the perverse effect of rewarding a few in nations where the many are subject to abuses of human and labor rights. The WTO seems particularly ineffective at doing anything about this.

Our three inalienable rights are life, liberty and property; it does little to give Third World workers the last of those rights, without ensuring the former.

And what about American workers? Should not they be able to defend their jobs against subsidized imports? Should we all fear losing our best-paying jobs to new factories in nations where the environment, living wage rates and freedom are alien concepts?

Even in Maine, it is easy to see that the vine of fair trade does not always bear fruit. Ask any potato farmer, logger or retailer in the Pine Tree State if his lot against Canadian competition has improved since the North American Free Trade Agreement. We think we already know the answer.

And then there’s the environment. It’s hardly progress if smaller nations see more industrial growth but fail to implement the protections needed to protect the world from toxins and pollution. Globalization of economy may be at hand, but it’s in the entire world’s interests to condition trade on treating Earth properly.

Free trade ought to mean more than a free-for-all. It ought to mean ensuring that every human being, regardless of his nation, has the chance to make a fair wage in labor that benefits himself, his neighbor and his neighborhood.