Nothing has united conservatives and liberals, here and abroad, in recent years as has global trade. This unlikely alliance would seem to assure that concerns about the transfer of jobs from developed nations to places with sweatshop wages and lax environmental regulations will not go away.

It certainly seemed so last summer when the G-8 nations — the seven industrialized democracies and Russia — held their annual summit in Germany. With considerable hoopla, the G-8 announced it would develop environmental standards for Third World projects being bankrolled by First World financial institutions. This announcement was widely hailed as an important step in fashioning a world economy that raises living standards throughout the world.

To that end, the G-8 asked the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to devise those standards. The organization meets in Paris this week, and indications are that progress has been slow, if not nonexistent.

The need for standards is apparent. A recent example of what happens in their absence is the infamous Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River. The environmental and human-rights impacts of this massive construction/population relocation project are enormous, so enormous that U.S. Import-Export Bank refused to provide loans. Other banks in G-8 nations, more concerned with their bottom lines than with the forced evacuation of millions of Chinese, rushed in with money and the project is moving ahead. This gap between noble words and profiteering deeds is evident in hundreds of short-sighted, exploitative projects throughout the developing world.

The OECD clearly has run into the brick wall of commercial self-interest. It is time for the leaders of the G-8 — and, in this country, the candidates for leadership — to yank this important issue from the seclusion of the conference room and to put it back on the public agenda. Global trade may be inevitable. Global degradation must not be.