That is an interesting point. Up in the high country which is mostly all State National Parks, cattle men had been grazing cattle there for a long time, when the environmentalists got hold of this they promoted the idea that free range cattle were destroying the natural habitat and ecosystems. What these folk failed to understand was that those cattle kept the undergrowth under control thereby mitigating the effects of brushfires during the summer months.
Goes against the principles of global trade where there has to be free movement of both goods and people. That is why a nationalist president has thrown a spanner in the works by putting in tariffs for subsidised cheap Chinese imports.
Look at as Aussies, we used to have a viable local auto mobile industry here until GM and Ford shut down their factories and now we are flooded with cheap Korean and Chinese cars. GM imports suv's from Mexico and Ford brings in their vehicles from Thailand. We import oranges and walnuts from California, Citrus pulp from south America when we have a huge citrus industry right here. No wonder we are going backwards.
And capital, may I add, whose freedom of movement has the most wide reaching consequences.
For a counter example, look at countries like Japan, China and Korea, which applied controls to trade in goods and capital to protect their developing industrial sectors (including vehicle making) until they were solid enough to compete on the world stage. This is also what almost every other developed nation in the world did at some point in its history, especially those who are now shouting loudest from free trade.
I would say that, like almost any political construction, free trade has many nuances, and the consequences of free trade policies differ depending on the country they are applied to. It's very rarely beneficial to open a developing economy to unrestricted free trade, because it doesn't give local industry the chance to grow and develop until it can compete with imports from abroad (Ha-Joon Chang develops these points in his very heterodox book Bad Samaritans, which is quite an interesting and entertaining reading).
IPB