Young people have formed an international movement against globalization. They believe that fighting it will improve the lives of the world’s poor. They target summits, and meetings of the IMF and World Bank.
We’re protesting against the World Bank and their policies, building for the demonstration in Genoa against the G8… where people are going to be demonstrating against the G8 implementing World Bank and IMF policies.
Demonstrating against the very bodies designed to help poor countries…
It shocks me and angers me, and I find it distressing.
From Seattle, to Washington, to Melbourne, to London, the protest juggernaut rolls on… Demonstrators hurl missiles at police … they’re answered with tear gas, water canon and bullets.
Faceless and ruthless, the security forces are seen as defending the institutions of the current world order.
They are attacked by a volatile mix of labour rights activists, environmentalists and anarchists.
In Prague, as elsewhere, the mob targets McDonald’s. A collective wrath is unleashed against a company that symbolizes globalization run riot. This film will try to understand why.
THE GLOBAL TRADE DEBATE
In the cold light of day, the protesters might ask themselves if this is the only way. Have corporations become the target of mob rule, because they, like governments, have stopped listening to their critics?
McDonald’s, for example, has been vandalised in France, the USA, the UK and Switzerland. The company has an annual turnover of $30 billion. Protesters seem to see it as fair game.
But those who criticize McDonald’s openly, as Dave Morris and Helen Steel did, discover the might of this corporation. In court for 2 ½ years, they fought McDonald’s in the longest trial in English history.
This is about the public’s right to know what the most powerful organizations in the world, which are multinational corporations, are really doing.
Their London group campaigns on issues such as third world debt. Back in 1986 it wrote a leaflet called ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’, accusing the corporation of everything from exploiting workers and contributing to heart disease, to destroying rainforests.
McDonald’s hit back with a lawsuit.
We believe that we have a very good story to tell. We have over a million customers a day in the UK, who enjoy coming to McDonald’s and trust us. We believe that to repay that trust we have to establish that these allegations are untrue.
McDonald’s has taken globalization to new heights, employing more than a million people worldwide and opening a new store every 6 hours. In many countries where unemployment is high, a Mcjob is seen as a step up.
Hard work doesn’t frighten the youth of today. Not at all. They want to be part of something that’s victorious. Something they can see as the shining light.
But Helen & Dave argued the company dehumanizes its workers. The trial judge agreed that McDonald’s discouraged unions which might press for greater rights,
and found that its adverts ‘pretended to a positive nutritional benefit that McDonald’s food did not match’.
However, the protesters could not prove several accusations, like links with heart disease and rainforest destruction, and were found guilty of libel. But David had taken on Goliath.
The McDonald’s campaign has picked on a company that’s so much in the public eye, that seems to symbolize a whole system, a whole way of life, a whole, you know… mass production, mass society, everything the same, junk food. To have a leafleting, an education campaign against McDonald’s is putting the alternative point of view.
Anyone who might seriously be concerned about McDonald’s products, will take one look at their use of libel and the way they’ve used it to silence people in the past and think well hang on I can’t drag my institution, my magazine, my newspaper into all of this, so they go and look at something else. And I’m just concerned that we have this massive corporation that nobody dares speak out against.
Clearly globalization is linked with trends that make its critics uneasy, like cultural homogenization. But what is globalization in economic terms? Loosely speaking it is trade liberalization – the dismantling of import and export barriers - as well as increasing foreign direct investment (or FDI). The volume of world trade is 16 times higher today than it was in 1950. Foreign investment has risen even more, twenty-five fold during the last quarter of a century.
Thanks to trade and investment, more developing countries have closer links to the world economy. And globalization of labour has meant the spread of western culture.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers… where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?!
Phone operators for a Delhi call centre have elocution lessons. The company services businesses in the US and Britain, but operators aren’t supposed to tell customers they’re in India.
In marketing speak, it’s called ‘voice neutralization’. They also get ‘cultural education’.
Q: What are these?…They’re football clubs.Q: Do you see the picture next to that?Can you identify who it is?David Beckham.
In a country where it’s still an achievement to make a successful local call, an entire industry has been built upon millions of daily connections across the globe. Call centres are one of the world’s fastest growing industries, a beneficiary of the boom in foreign direct investment.
In the real world boundaries and barriers are disappearing and the service requirements will move to wherever they can best be fulfilled and to an extent we have a role to play and we will play it.
Just as Britain lost its textile and steel industries to cheap competition from Asia – the same looks set to happen to the customer service industry. But whilst call centre workers in the west are largely treated as unskilled factory fodder, in India, with around 30% unemployment for graduates, this is a big career opportunity.
Although they work for a tenth of the wages of their British counterparts, Delhi’s call centre operators are from a very different social stratum. They travel to work in a chauffeured company vehicle – one of the trappings of the middle class to which they belong. In a country mired in poverty, the educated at least are profiting from the high tech revolution.
Free trade and foreign investment stimulate efficiency and technological advance. Economies grow, and incomes rise. But activists argue liberalization happens too fast, before the unskilled, and uneducated, can adjust.
The anti-globalization movement backs many causes, often confused in the melee of mass protest. But sheer weight of numbers means that corporations and governments are starting to listen, and protesters can claim some major recent victories.
The thing around the patents in South Africa was obviously really successful and we had a little victory with that. And I think the more people come out onto the streets, it’s about numbers I think, more than the media portraying it as violence.
The rich! The rich! We gotta get rid of the rich!
A common thread that ties this mass of protest groups together is disdain for an economic system in which the poor lose out.
The WB & IMF run about 90 southern countries’ economies. They are accused of forcing poor governments to pursue trade liberalization at the expense of public welfare, promoting sweatshops rather than helping the poor.
Today’s system, and what’s been put into place with the World Bank, the IMF and the introduction of GATT, will mean that things no longer belong to people, they’ll just belong to corporations.
We have to pay global prices for those commodities. They’re not related to the wages people earn, they’re related to some global standard that is set by the multinationals and the finance houses. These are the people with the power.
One of those people is World Bank President James Wolfensohn, speaking here in Prague. He claims he is ready to listen to these concerns, and says the Bank is committed to ending poverty.
Outside these walls young people are demonstrating against globalization. I believe deeply that many of them are asking legitimate questions, and I embrace the commitment of a new generation to fight poverty. I share their passion… but I believe we can move forward only if we deal with each other constructively, and with mutual respect.
But if everybody’s talking the same language, then where’s the rub?
It’s OK for people in the UK and it’s OK for people in the States to smile and say Capitalism works for us. And OK, yes, from time to time it does. We all have nice clothes, nice shoes, a lot of people have cars, big houses, but you’ve got to remember the majority of the world’s population, probably 80%, don’t have any of that.
700 million people live in the 42 so-called Highly Indebted Poor Countries, in extreme poverty. Clearly, that’s not the fault of globalization, as jobs exported to low-wage countries generally benefit the poor. But there are still many abuses of third world labour rights – low wages, no unions and child workers.
These children spend their days here in Mindanao searching for mercury that’s spilled during gold extraction. They earn $4 a day, while the mercury pollutes their bodies.
The International Labour Organization estimates there are 250 million children in work. Many of the goods made by their nimble fingers end up in foreign shops. In a globalized world it seems hard to understand how children are still living like this, yet the trade in child workers is far from being stamped out. 1
As long as there is a demand for these children and as long as there is a supply of children wanting to do this type of work, it would be very difficult for employment agencies not to engage in the trade.
We ate like dogs. Our food was rotten sardines mixed with vegetables. If we didn’t get up straight away in the morning our employer beat us, and our eyes couldn’t see.
Luck turned for Brian and the other children working in this bleach factory when it was raided in a joint operation by the Philippines government and charities backed by the UN Children’s Fund. But it’s not only small operations that exploit workers. Wal-Mart, Adidas, Disney, Nike and Gap factories have all allegedly violated various labour rights in the past year.
In the south of India children make matchboxes all day at home.They are paid per box: for 1’000 glued boxes they make 9 rupees - about 25 US cents.Whilst child labour is inevitable in many poor communities, there is a growing awareness that children are being exploited.
When the Child enters into the labour force they enter into the labour force between the ages of 5 and 6. They work more than 12 hours a day, so they don’t have any time on their own. They work, work and work – they exhaust their whole charm of life in labour. It is why we say child labour is stealing away the childhood.
A 1999 UN study, found that trade liberalization is adding to unemployment and poverty in some developing countries. This is because it encourages food imports, without an increase in exports. Farmers make up three quarters of the labour force in the poorer countries, and many are going out of business. Their children who have traditionally worked the fields with them, have become a burden and are forced to seek other types of work.
In contrast to peasant farming, agricultural production in Australia, the EU and America is often subsidized.
When trade barriers fall, it is more difficult for poorer, unsubsidized farmers around the world to compete. A real crisis has emerged: almost 90 food-deficit countries are spending half their foreign exchange earnings on food imports. The World Trade Organisation has to make sure agriculture remains viable for the third world, or people may starve.
In my view it’s better to be in the city. It’s no good in the countryside. You can only just manage to keep your belly full. It’s very hard.
Many argue that the loss of peasant agriculture is no bad thing. Workers move into better-paid manufacturing, as in Taiwan and South Korea. So although trade liberalization generates some immediate pains, these can mask the long-term benefits for economies as a whole. However, not all those who migrate to cities find jobs and homes, and children work at great risk.
Jubilee 2000 is an international church-based group campaigning for debt relief. This mock funeral highlights the three million people who die of preventable diseases each year. Jubilee 2000 argues that poor countries repay IMF and World Bank loans at the expense of health and education.
Q: You blame the IMF and the World Bank for those children dying??The IMF and World Bank are one of the institutions who decide about that. But of course especially the national governments are responsible.
Some leading economists are now echoing the view that the economic policies forced on nations to qualify for more IMF & WB loans, intensify some of the already significant pains of liberalization.
You’re putting money into Structural Adjustment Policies, then the same thing’s happening on a Third World scale, where the wealth is being taken more into the rich hands and less into the poor. This idea that there’s a dribble down effect just doesn’t work, and it’s been proved again and again that it doesn’t work.
I’ve spent the last five years really addressing frontally the issue of poverty. I’ve been to 110 countries, I’ve been in more slums and villages and dealt with more human stories than I think most of the demonstrators, so it rankles.
Some protests are funded well enough to leave the streets and adopt the techniques of modern advertising. This ad was bankrolled by Christian Aid, but was deemed too biased to broadcast on TV.
Know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Tanzania?No. What do they call it?They don’t!Excuse me! He owes us $250.$US.You see the men we work for lend money to make money. You borrow, you pay it back. A debt is a debt is a debt.Lucky he’s not Mozambican. Otherwise it would be $350.Of course you can always borrow more…
The environmental lobby is also calling for more consideration for the third world. Although the developed world accounts for most harmful emissions, it’s the developing countries in the tropics that will suffer most from pollution-related climate change.
Global warming is perhaps one of the most serious issues raised by globalization. After the Industrial Revolution came two centuries of burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees. Most of the world’s scientists agree that too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being poured into the air, blocking escaping heat and so the earth is heating up.
If nothing is done to reduce CO2 emissions, climatologists predict rising sea levels and even more catastrophic weather events.
These events we’re seeing are precisely consistent with what the scientists have told us we’re going to see. The only difference is we’re seeing them earlier than we originally projected.
The latest computer models show that large parts of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth, will choke and die in less than 50 years. Environmentalists want governments to act on what the science is telling us, but the US in particular, is dragging its feet.
The fossil fuel lobby has spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on these disinformation campaigns, because they know in today’s world, unless the US takes action, the rest of the world really can’t do too much.
America won’t ratify any climate change law that doesn’t have the same binding emissions for developing nations. The oil and gas sector funded the last US elections to the tune of $9 million, and oil lobbyists continue to deny global warming is real.
American people have good sense. They’re not going to commit themselves to a treaty like what happened in Kyoto, which will in the end be a massive shift in wealth away from the western democracies over to countries like China, and other developing countries, which are run by dictators and crooks by and large. The American people aren’t going to lower our standard of living for that! Especially when it’s over some issue like global warming which is not scientifically proven and could well be just a bunch of baloney.
But the fact is that every year there are more than three billion tonnes of extra carbon left in the air that the natural system can’t absorb. Almost two thirds of world emissions come from electricity generation and transport, and the US is the Superpolluter – producing more than a fifth of world emissions. The 1997 Kyoto protocol agreed a cut of 5% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. The science says a 50% cut is needed.
The point is that the Kyoto protocol is an effort to try and restrain the industrial countries, who have made the mess, to give the example in beginning to clear it up.
The air and water are cleaner in developed countries than 50 years ago. So economic growth can help, if the environment is taken into account when trade and investment policies are made.
You’re blocking the highway. Now clear the junction, otherwise you’re liable to arrest! We’re just innocent cyclists, riding around!
I’m here to protest about the way the earth’s resources are exploited and moved around all over the world for no reason at all, other than profit. I’m here to argue for localization, for things to be produced and grown as near to the place that they’re going to be used as possible.
One billion people live on or near the coast. Their land may literally go under water as global warming continues.
Of course, many countries and many cities, will be able to buy their way out of it, but at a cost, by putting up better sea defences. But if you live in Bangladesh, or if you live in South China, or if you live in the Nile Delta of Egypt, if you live in islands in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, then much of your land will disappear. Tens of millions of people live on that land, and they’ll become refugees.
If climate change is ignored, the freak weather it causes may wash a torrent of refugees towards developed nations. Add this to the huge surge in economic migration.
In the early morning light, an inflatable dinghy is tossed by the waves. It’s come from Morocco and is heading for Spain. It carries economic migrants, dreaming of a better life in Europe. The narrow Straits of Gibraltar see such boats every day, designed for eight people, they often carry sixty hopefuls paying up to $5000 each. These migrants have paid dearly for their chance and they’re not stopping for anyone.
Hundreds could be dying this way, washed out to the Atlantic. The crossing season has only just begun and this is the 27th corpse found on these beaches this year.
In fact experts in migratory movements estimate that 20 million Africans from these troubled countries have started moving, trying to get to Europe.
The global asylum system is creaking under the strain of massive movements of up to 21m migrants a year.
The UN High Commission for Refugees is now calling for “managed immigration policies” to provide a legal route for economic migrants to the west, so that governments, rather than organized crime, determine where the world’s refugees end up. Britain is considering a quota system for economic migrants, like the Green Card system in the States.
More and more migrants are coming from China’s Fujian province. Lin Zheng Yu (Lee jeng you) is thinking of attempting a trip.
It’s a household topic, who has gone where, which country. Somebody has arrived in the USA, how much money he has made, or news about a certain boat seized by the authorities. Where the people were detained and how many people were on the boat, and so on.
Lin is not hungry, politically persecuted, or desperately poor. But he has no wish to work the land. What he wants is the opportunity to earn real money and send it home.
Locals say that 99% of construction in Fujian is due to money sent home by relatives working illegally overseas.
About 80% of the people around us are pretty well off. A person with one person abroad would have about $120 US. A person with two or three people abroad would be able to have hundreds of dollars a month.
The surge of economic migration is due to higher aspirations. Third world peoples want to be first world consumers.
Since economic migrants generally do the dirty work, perhaps globalization calls for a world without borders, where not only trade is free, but people are free to migrate. It would stamp out the international trade in human beings, one of the world’s most shadowy crimes.
I think what we need to see more of is the opening of global borders, for a start. A reduction on the restrictions of the movement of people, that’s the most important thing.
Is Capitalism to blame for the third world’s ills? Its critics are split between those who want its global institutions disbanded, and others who call for them to be radically reformed.
In 1998, the US Congress set up a commission to advise how to reform bodies like the IMF. The commission said the IMF should only lend to those who can realistically repay its loans. So it should stop long-term lending, stop lending to Africa and other poor countries, stop trying to manage third world economies and cancel its loans to the poorest.
The commission also encouraged the World Bank to focus on the issues that really affect the world’s poor, rather than funding power plants and damns. In particular it said the Bank should stop lending to the richest developing nations, like Mexico, Brazil and China, write off its grants to the poorest, and focus money on research into malaria, climate change and tropical food production.
As this activist video shows, protesters are becoming ever bolder in voicing their views. The target is Renato Ruggiero, Head of the World Trade Organization.
But does this protest bring about change?
The Global Environment Facility, or GEF, is housed and administered by the WB. It was set up in answer to pressure on institutions like the WB to adopt a more ‘green’ and caring face. The GEF has several million dollars a year to spend on ‘green’ projects in developing countries.
We change the development path that countries follow by offering the incentive of GEF financing, on top of a World Bank loan, to redesign a project in a way that is more globally environmentally friendly.
The GEF is funding a project in the Nagarhole National Park in southern India, which is to be cleared of human habitation to allow the Bengal tiger population to flourish. The tribals, who previously lived off this land, are to be re-housed or given other incentives.
But local women complain the eco-project is woefully short-term.
Out of 40 families, one woman got a sewing machine.
Welfare schemes only benefit the powerful people in the village. Government men don’t let us in the forest. They offer us benefits instead for one year, two years, five years, but what do we do after that?
We used to live 30km inside the forest. That place called Kai Mara. Forest officials work there now.
In many instances forced resettlement means the loss of indigenous cultures and languages, making the world a poorer place.
Since we came out of the forest, modernization means traditions are not being followed. For example, our Kolata dances don’t take place so regularly. Since we came to this place we are forced to work as coolies, and whenever we get money we buy rice and rations to eat.
Perhaps a more positive example of GEF financing is to be found in Costa Rica. 85% of Costa Rica’s energy is hydroelectric, and citizens already pay a 5% carbon tax which is used to plant trees and protect forests.
Trees help to clear the atmosphere of carbon dioxide by using it during photosynthesis. Scientists can calculate the carbon dioxide that trees process, and this can be sold as what’s known as a ‘carbon credit’ to countries trying to meet emissions targets set by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Tree planters get US $10 for each tonne of carbon dioxide soaked up by their trees. It’s a globalized solution to global warming.
Franz Tattenbach heads a Non-Governmental Organization called FUNDECOR, which gets some GEF funding. He set up the world’s first carbon offset deal worth $2 million with a Norwegian consortium in 1997. The way he sees it, the global economic machine can give something back to poor countries and the earth.
You’d be surprised how in Costa Rica a farmer, any simple farmer, could tell you about carbon offsets and why they might be producing some sort of global good that might be interested to be purchased by some Norwegian company or the Norwegian government. And that’s quite fascinating, the level of understanding of this global issue that some Costa Rican farmers get now.
Some experts say that carbon credits offer polluters an easy way out, another quick fix, instead of focusing on the real goal of reducing emissions. But the idea is catching on.
BP says it wants to be the greenest oil company in the world and is planting tens of thousands of acres of trees in Western Australia, just to cover the million tonnes of carbon dioxide it emits each year from its Perth refinery.
Certain things are clear. The carbon dioxide concentration is going up. It appears that global temperatures are going up, and that there are other effects happening, so taking a precautionary approach to me makes complete sense.
So some multinational firms are addressing their environmental responsibility. BP and Shell have cut all ties with the anti-Kyoto lobbyists and made strong commitments to renewable energy. It’s clear from their stance that consumer pressure is changing global business practise.
We have taken a position which we think is right for the planet, right for our company, because what this is really about is saving the company, not saving the world.
From cleaner energy to an end to the use of child labour, consumers and governments alike must continue to push for responsible business practice.
The west’s anti-child labour campaigns are having an impact in countries like India, where schemes like ‘Rugmark’ ensure no child labour is used in making carpets.
To say that child labour should be removed from the country is not possible. So what we try and do is the best we possibly can, is to remove as many children as we can from the trade, train them, give them alternatives and yet see that the trade is not harmed. There’s no point in putting an end to rug making.
India’s carpet exporters are finding it harder and harder to sell carpets that aren’t Rugmark certified, on the international market. When carpets arrive at this warehouse the peasant weavers are paid less than $20 US. The carpets are then cleaned and graded and exported to the west, where dealers will make up to 50 times their Indian value. It’s a mark-up repeated millions of times in transactions across the globe every day.
It appears the poor reap the smallest rewards of free trade, but the jobs it brings are giving them a chance of entering the global marketplace, and finding a better life.
The debate on the impact of globalization will go on. But in many ways it is a rich-man’s debate, which perhaps rejects rampant materialism, more strongly than it does free trade itself.
We’re buying products that we don’t need, we work in jobs we hate, to buy shit that we have no use for, but that we think and believe that we need. Because we have adverts all around us and beautiful bright signs that make us think that that’s the things that we need to consume. And I think people are tired of that.
This viewpoint implies that the developed world needs to re-examine its own values, rather than seek to reverse globalization and deprive poorer nations of access to jobs, goods and opportunity.
2 billion more people are going to come onto the planet in the next 25 years, and they’ll all be going to developing countries. And unless something is done about that issue of poverty, there’s no way you’ll have peace in the world.
Whilst the challenge is to find new ways of giving global trade a more humane face, the developing world’s entrepreneurs remain upbeat, enjoying their success.
Every government, all people love to have business, to see the prosperity of business. You may have political problems here and there, but nobody wants business problems.
From 1998 at $250 million it is going to be $17 billion in the year 2008.Q: And how many people will be employed? A: Definitely in excess of a million. Q: So from nothing to $17 billion employing one million people in under a decade?A: That’s right.
We’re protesting against the World Bank and their policies, building for the demonstration in Genoa against the G8… where people are going to be demonstrating against the G8 implementing World Bank and IMF policies.
Demonstrating against the very bodies designed to help poor countries…
It shocks me and angers me, and I find it distressing.
From Seattle, to Washington, to Melbourne, to London, the protest juggernaut rolls on… Demonstrators hurl missiles at police … they’re answered with tear gas, water canon and bullets.
Faceless and ruthless, the security forces are seen as defending the institutions of the current world order.
They are attacked by a volatile mix of labour rights activists, environmentalists and anarchists.
In Prague, as elsewhere, the mob targets McDonald’s. A collective wrath is unleashed against a company that symbolizes globalization run riot. This film will try to understand why.
THE GLOBAL TRADE DEBATE
In the cold light of day, the protesters might ask themselves if this is the only way. Have corporations become the target of mob rule, because they, like governments, have stopped listening to their critics?
McDonald’s, for example, has been vandalised in France, the USA, the UK and Switzerland. The company has an annual turnover of $30 billion. Protesters seem to see it as fair game.
But those who criticize McDonald’s openly, as Dave Morris and Helen Steel did, discover the might of this corporation. In court for 2 ½ years, they fought McDonald’s in the longest trial in English history.
This is about the public’s right to know what the most powerful organizations in the world, which are multinational corporations, are really doing.
Their London group campaigns on issues such as third world debt. Back in 1986 it wrote a leaflet called ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’, accusing the corporation of everything from exploiting workers and contributing to heart disease, to destroying rainforests.
McDonald’s hit back with a lawsuit.
We believe that we have a very good story to tell. We have over a million customers a day in the UK, who enjoy coming to McDonald’s and trust us. We believe that to repay that trust we have to establish that these allegations are untrue.
McDonald’s has taken globalization to new heights, employing more than a million people worldwide and opening a new store every 6 hours. In many countries where unemployment is high, a Mcjob is seen as a step up.
Hard work doesn’t frighten the youth of today. Not at all. They want to be part of something that’s victorious. Something they can see as the shining light.
But Helen & Dave argued the company dehumanizes its workers. The trial judge agreed that McDonald’s discouraged unions which might press for greater rights,
and found that its adverts ‘pretended to a positive nutritional benefit that McDonald’s food did not match’.
However, the protesters could not prove several accusations, like links with heart disease and rainforest destruction, and were found guilty of libel. But David had taken on Goliath.
The McDonald’s campaign has picked on a company that’s so much in the public eye, that seems to symbolize a whole system, a whole way of life, a whole, you know… mass production, mass society, everything the same, junk food. To have a leafleting, an education campaign against McDonald’s is putting the alternative point of view.
Anyone who might seriously be concerned about McDonald’s products, will take one look at their use of libel and the way they’ve used it to silence people in the past and think well hang on I can’t drag my institution, my magazine, my newspaper into all of this, so they go and look at something else. And I’m just concerned that we have this massive corporation that nobody dares speak out against.
Clearly globalization is linked with trends that make its critics uneasy, like cultural homogenization. But what is globalization in economic terms? Loosely speaking it is trade liberalization – the dismantling of import and export barriers - as well as increasing foreign direct investment (or FDI). The volume of world trade is 16 times higher today than it was in 1950. Foreign investment has risen even more, twenty-five fold during the last quarter of a century.
Thanks to trade and investment, more developing countries have closer links to the world economy. And globalization of labour has meant the spread of western culture.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers… where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?!
Phone operators for a Delhi call centre have elocution lessons. The company services businesses in the US and Britain, but operators aren’t supposed to tell customers they’re in India.
In marketing speak, it’s called ‘voice neutralization’. They also get ‘cultural education’.
Q: What are these?…They’re football clubs.Q: Do you see the picture next to that?Can you identify who it is?David Beckham.
In a country where it’s still an achievement to make a successful local call, an entire industry has been built upon millions of daily connections across the globe. Call centres are one of the world’s fastest growing industries, a beneficiary of the boom in foreign direct investment.
In the real world boundaries and barriers are disappearing and the service requirements will move to wherever they can best be fulfilled and to an extent we have a role to play and we will play it.
Just as Britain lost its textile and steel industries to cheap competition from Asia – the same looks set to happen to the customer service industry. But whilst call centre workers in the west are largely treated as unskilled factory fodder, in India, with around 30% unemployment for graduates, this is a big career opportunity.
Although they work for a tenth of the wages of their British counterparts, Delhi’s call centre operators are from a very different social stratum. They travel to work in a chauffeured company vehicle – one of the trappings of the middle class to which they belong. In a country mired in poverty, the educated at least are profiting from the high tech revolution.
Free trade and foreign investment stimulate efficiency and technological advance. Economies grow, and incomes rise. But activists argue liberalization happens too fast, before the unskilled, and uneducated, can adjust.
The anti-globalization movement backs many causes, often confused in the melee of mass protest. But sheer weight of numbers means that corporations and governments are starting to listen, and protesters can claim some major recent victories.
The thing around the patents in South Africa was obviously really successful and we had a little victory with that. And I think the more people come out onto the streets, it’s about numbers I think, more than the media portraying it as violence.
The rich! The rich! We gotta get rid of the rich!
A common thread that ties this mass of protest groups together is disdain for an economic system in which the poor lose out.
The WB & IMF run about 90 southern countries’ economies. They are accused of forcing poor governments to pursue trade liberalization at the expense of public welfare, promoting sweatshops rather than helping the poor.
Today’s system, and what’s been put into place with the World Bank, the IMF and the introduction of GATT, will mean that things no longer belong to people, they’ll just belong to corporations.
We have to pay global prices for those commodities. They’re not related to the wages people earn, they’re related to some global standard that is set by the multinationals and the finance houses. These are the people with the power.
One of those people is World Bank President James Wolfensohn, speaking here in Prague. He claims he is ready to listen to these concerns, and says the Bank is committed to ending poverty.
Outside these walls young people are demonstrating against globalization. I believe deeply that many of them are asking legitimate questions, and I embrace the commitment of a new generation to fight poverty. I share their passion… but I believe we can move forward only if we deal with each other constructively, and with mutual respect.
But if everybody’s talking the same language, then where’s the rub?
It’s OK for people in the UK and it’s OK for people in the States to smile and say Capitalism works for us. And OK, yes, from time to time it does. We all have nice clothes, nice shoes, a lot of people have cars, big houses, but you’ve got to remember the majority of the world’s population, probably 80%, don’t have any of that.
700 million people live in the 42 so-called Highly Indebted Poor Countries, in extreme poverty. Clearly, that’s not the fault of globalization, as jobs exported to low-wage countries generally benefit the poor. But there are still many abuses of third world labour rights – low wages, no unions and child workers.
These children spend their days here in Mindanao searching for mercury that’s spilled during gold extraction. They earn $4 a day, while the mercury pollutes their bodies.
The International Labour Organization estimates there are 250 million children in work. Many of the goods made by their nimble fingers end up in foreign shops. In a globalized world it seems hard to understand how children are still living like this, yet the trade in child workers is far from being stamped out. 1
As long as there is a demand for these children and as long as there is a supply of children wanting to do this type of work, it would be very difficult for employment agencies not to engage in the trade.
We ate like dogs. Our food was rotten sardines mixed with vegetables. If we didn’t get up straight away in the morning our employer beat us, and our eyes couldn’t see.
Luck turned for Brian and the other children working in this bleach factory when it was raided in a joint operation by the Philippines government and charities backed by the UN Children’s Fund. But it’s not only small operations that exploit workers. Wal-Mart, Adidas, Disney, Nike and Gap factories have all allegedly violated various labour rights in the past year.
In the south of India children make matchboxes all day at home.They are paid per box: for 1’000 glued boxes they make 9 rupees - about 25 US cents.Whilst child labour is inevitable in many poor communities, there is a growing awareness that children are being exploited.
When the Child enters into the labour force they enter into the labour force between the ages of 5 and 6. They work more than 12 hours a day, so they don’t have any time on their own. They work, work and work – they exhaust their whole charm of life in labour. It is why we say child labour is stealing away the childhood.
A 1999 UN study, found that trade liberalization is adding to unemployment and poverty in some developing countries. This is because it encourages food imports, without an increase in exports. Farmers make up three quarters of the labour force in the poorer countries, and many are going out of business. Their children who have traditionally worked the fields with them, have become a burden and are forced to seek other types of work.
In contrast to peasant farming, agricultural production in Australia, the EU and America is often subsidized.
When trade barriers fall, it is more difficult for poorer, unsubsidized farmers around the world to compete. A real crisis has emerged: almost 90 food-deficit countries are spending half their foreign exchange earnings on food imports. The World Trade Organisation has to make sure agriculture remains viable for the third world, or people may starve.
In my view it’s better to be in the city. It’s no good in the countryside. You can only just manage to keep your belly full. It’s very hard.
Many argue that the loss of peasant agriculture is no bad thing. Workers move into better-paid manufacturing, as in Taiwan and South Korea. So although trade liberalization generates some immediate pains, these can mask the long-term benefits for economies as a whole. However, not all those who migrate to cities find jobs and homes, and children work at great risk.
Jubilee 2000 is an international church-based group campaigning for debt relief. This mock funeral highlights the three million people who die of preventable diseases each year. Jubilee 2000 argues that poor countries repay IMF and World Bank loans at the expense of health and education.
Q: You blame the IMF and the World Bank for those children dying??The IMF and World Bank are one of the institutions who decide about that. But of course especially the national governments are responsible.
Some leading economists are now echoing the view that the economic policies forced on nations to qualify for more IMF & WB loans, intensify some of the already significant pains of liberalization.
You’re putting money into Structural Adjustment Policies, then the same thing’s happening on a Third World scale, where the wealth is being taken more into the rich hands and less into the poor. This idea that there’s a dribble down effect just doesn’t work, and it’s been proved again and again that it doesn’t work.
I’ve spent the last five years really addressing frontally the issue of poverty. I’ve been to 110 countries, I’ve been in more slums and villages and dealt with more human stories than I think most of the demonstrators, so it rankles.
Some protests are funded well enough to leave the streets and adopt the techniques of modern advertising. This ad was bankrolled by Christian Aid, but was deemed too biased to broadcast on TV.
Know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese in Tanzania?No. What do they call it?They don’t!Excuse me! He owes us $250.$US.You see the men we work for lend money to make money. You borrow, you pay it back. A debt is a debt is a debt.Lucky he’s not Mozambican. Otherwise it would be $350.Of course you can always borrow more…
The environmental lobby is also calling for more consideration for the third world. Although the developed world accounts for most harmful emissions, it’s the developing countries in the tropics that will suffer most from pollution-related climate change.
Global warming is perhaps one of the most serious issues raised by globalization. After the Industrial Revolution came two centuries of burning fossil fuels and cutting down trees. Most of the world’s scientists agree that too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being poured into the air, blocking escaping heat and so the earth is heating up.
If nothing is done to reduce CO2 emissions, climatologists predict rising sea levels and even more catastrophic weather events.
These events we’re seeing are precisely consistent with what the scientists have told us we’re going to see. The only difference is we’re seeing them earlier than we originally projected.
The latest computer models show that large parts of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth, will choke and die in less than 50 years. Environmentalists want governments to act on what the science is telling us, but the US in particular, is dragging its feet.
The fossil fuel lobby has spent millions and millions and millions of dollars on these disinformation campaigns, because they know in today’s world, unless the US takes action, the rest of the world really can’t do too much.
America won’t ratify any climate change law that doesn’t have the same binding emissions for developing nations. The oil and gas sector funded the last US elections to the tune of $9 million, and oil lobbyists continue to deny global warming is real.
American people have good sense. They’re not going to commit themselves to a treaty like what happened in Kyoto, which will in the end be a massive shift in wealth away from the western democracies over to countries like China, and other developing countries, which are run by dictators and crooks by and large. The American people aren’t going to lower our standard of living for that! Especially when it’s over some issue like global warming which is not scientifically proven and could well be just a bunch of baloney.
But the fact is that every year there are more than three billion tonnes of extra carbon left in the air that the natural system can’t absorb. Almost two thirds of world emissions come from electricity generation and transport, and the US is the Superpolluter – producing more than a fifth of world emissions. The 1997 Kyoto protocol agreed a cut of 5% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. The science says a 50% cut is needed.
The point is that the Kyoto protocol is an effort to try and restrain the industrial countries, who have made the mess, to give the example in beginning to clear it up.
The air and water are cleaner in developed countries than 50 years ago. So economic growth can help, if the environment is taken into account when trade and investment policies are made.
You’re blocking the highway. Now clear the junction, otherwise you’re liable to arrest! We’re just innocent cyclists, riding around!
I’m here to protest about the way the earth’s resources are exploited and moved around all over the world for no reason at all, other than profit. I’m here to argue for localization, for things to be produced and grown as near to the place that they’re going to be used as possible.
One billion people live on or near the coast. Their land may literally go under water as global warming continues.
Of course, many countries and many cities, will be able to buy their way out of it, but at a cost, by putting up better sea defences. But if you live in Bangladesh, or if you live in South China, or if you live in the Nile Delta of Egypt, if you live in islands in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, then much of your land will disappear. Tens of millions of people live on that land, and they’ll become refugees.
If climate change is ignored, the freak weather it causes may wash a torrent of refugees towards developed nations. Add this to the huge surge in economic migration.
In the early morning light, an inflatable dinghy is tossed by the waves. It’s come from Morocco and is heading for Spain. It carries economic migrants, dreaming of a better life in Europe. The narrow Straits of Gibraltar see such boats every day, designed for eight people, they often carry sixty hopefuls paying up to $5000 each. These migrants have paid dearly for their chance and they’re not stopping for anyone.
Hundreds could be dying this way, washed out to the Atlantic. The crossing season has only just begun and this is the 27th corpse found on these beaches this year.
In fact experts in migratory movements estimate that 20 million Africans from these troubled countries have started moving, trying to get to Europe.
The global asylum system is creaking under the strain of massive movements of up to 21m migrants a year.
The UN High Commission for Refugees is now calling for “managed immigration policies” to provide a legal route for economic migrants to the west, so that governments, rather than organized crime, determine where the world’s refugees end up. Britain is considering a quota system for economic migrants, like the Green Card system in the States.
More and more migrants are coming from China’s Fujian province. Lin Zheng Yu (Lee jeng you) is thinking of attempting a trip.
It’s a household topic, who has gone where, which country. Somebody has arrived in the USA, how much money he has made, or news about a certain boat seized by the authorities. Where the people were detained and how many people were on the boat, and so on.
Lin is not hungry, politically persecuted, or desperately poor. But he has no wish to work the land. What he wants is the opportunity to earn real money and send it home.
Locals say that 99% of construction in Fujian is due to money sent home by relatives working illegally overseas.
About 80% of the people around us are pretty well off. A person with one person abroad would have about $120 US. A person with two or three people abroad would be able to have hundreds of dollars a month.
The surge of economic migration is due to higher aspirations. Third world peoples want to be first world consumers.
Since economic migrants generally do the dirty work, perhaps globalization calls for a world without borders, where not only trade is free, but people are free to migrate. It would stamp out the international trade in human beings, one of the world’s most shadowy crimes.
I think what we need to see more of is the opening of global borders, for a start. A reduction on the restrictions of the movement of people, that’s the most important thing.
Is Capitalism to blame for the third world’s ills? Its critics are split between those who want its global institutions disbanded, and others who call for them to be radically reformed.
In 1998, the US Congress set up a commission to advise how to reform bodies like the IMF. The commission said the IMF should only lend to those who can realistically repay its loans. So it should stop long-term lending, stop lending to Africa and other poor countries, stop trying to manage third world economies and cancel its loans to the poorest.
The commission also encouraged the World Bank to focus on the issues that really affect the world’s poor, rather than funding power plants and damns. In particular it said the Bank should stop lending to the richest developing nations, like Mexico, Brazil and China, write off its grants to the poorest, and focus money on research into malaria, climate change and tropical food production.
As this activist video shows, protesters are becoming ever bolder in voicing their views. The target is Renato Ruggiero, Head of the World Trade Organization.
But does this protest bring about change?
The Global Environment Facility, or GEF, is housed and administered by the WB. It was set up in answer to pressure on institutions like the WB to adopt a more ‘green’ and caring face. The GEF has several million dollars a year to spend on ‘green’ projects in developing countries.
We change the development path that countries follow by offering the incentive of GEF financing, on top of a World Bank loan, to redesign a project in a way that is more globally environmentally friendly.
The GEF is funding a project in the Nagarhole National Park in southern India, which is to be cleared of human habitation to allow the Bengal tiger population to flourish. The tribals, who previously lived off this land, are to be re-housed or given other incentives.
But local women complain the eco-project is woefully short-term.
Out of 40 families, one woman got a sewing machine.
Welfare schemes only benefit the powerful people in the village. Government men don’t let us in the forest. They offer us benefits instead for one year, two years, five years, but what do we do after that?
We used to live 30km inside the forest. That place called Kai Mara. Forest officials work there now.
In many instances forced resettlement means the loss of indigenous cultures and languages, making the world a poorer place.
Since we came out of the forest, modernization means traditions are not being followed. For example, our Kolata dances don’t take place so regularly. Since we came to this place we are forced to work as coolies, and whenever we get money we buy rice and rations to eat.
Perhaps a more positive example of GEF financing is to be found in Costa Rica. 85% of Costa Rica’s energy is hydroelectric, and citizens already pay a 5% carbon tax which is used to plant trees and protect forests.
Trees help to clear the atmosphere of carbon dioxide by using it during photosynthesis. Scientists can calculate the carbon dioxide that trees process, and this can be sold as what’s known as a ‘carbon credit’ to countries trying to meet emissions targets set by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. Tree planters get US $10 for each tonne of carbon dioxide soaked up by their trees. It’s a globalized solution to global warming.
Franz Tattenbach heads a Non-Governmental Organization called FUNDECOR, which gets some GEF funding. He set up the world’s first carbon offset deal worth $2 million with a Norwegian consortium in 1997. The way he sees it, the global economic machine can give something back to poor countries and the earth.
You’d be surprised how in Costa Rica a farmer, any simple farmer, could tell you about carbon offsets and why they might be producing some sort of global good that might be interested to be purchased by some Norwegian company or the Norwegian government. And that’s quite fascinating, the level of understanding of this global issue that some Costa Rican farmers get now.
Some experts say that carbon credits offer polluters an easy way out, another quick fix, instead of focusing on the real goal of reducing emissions. But the idea is catching on.
BP says it wants to be the greenest oil company in the world and is planting tens of thousands of acres of trees in Western Australia, just to cover the million tonnes of carbon dioxide it emits each year from its Perth refinery.
Certain things are clear. The carbon dioxide concentration is going up. It appears that global temperatures are going up, and that there are other effects happening, so taking a precautionary approach to me makes complete sense.
So some multinational firms are addressing their environmental responsibility. BP and Shell have cut all ties with the anti-Kyoto lobbyists and made strong commitments to renewable energy. It’s clear from their stance that consumer pressure is changing global business practise.
We have taken a position which we think is right for the planet, right for our company, because what this is really about is saving the company, not saving the world.
From cleaner energy to an end to the use of child labour, consumers and governments alike must continue to push for responsible business practice.
The west’s anti-child labour campaigns are having an impact in countries like India, where schemes like ‘Rugmark’ ensure no child labour is used in making carpets.
To say that child labour should be removed from the country is not possible. So what we try and do is the best we possibly can, is to remove as many children as we can from the trade, train them, give them alternatives and yet see that the trade is not harmed. There’s no point in putting an end to rug making.
India’s carpet exporters are finding it harder and harder to sell carpets that aren’t Rugmark certified, on the international market. When carpets arrive at this warehouse the peasant weavers are paid less than $20 US. The carpets are then cleaned and graded and exported to the west, where dealers will make up to 50 times their Indian value. It’s a mark-up repeated millions of times in transactions across the globe every day.
It appears the poor reap the smallest rewards of free trade, but the jobs it brings are giving them a chance of entering the global marketplace, and finding a better life.
The debate on the impact of globalization will go on. But in many ways it is a rich-man’s debate, which perhaps rejects rampant materialism, more strongly than it does free trade itself.
We’re buying products that we don’t need, we work in jobs we hate, to buy shit that we have no use for, but that we think and believe that we need. Because we have adverts all around us and beautiful bright signs that make us think that that’s the things that we need to consume. And I think people are tired of that.
This viewpoint implies that the developed world needs to re-examine its own values, rather than seek to reverse globalization and deprive poorer nations of access to jobs, goods and opportunity.
2 billion more people are going to come onto the planet in the next 25 years, and they’ll all be going to developing countries. And unless something is done about that issue of poverty, there’s no way you’ll have peace in the world.
Whilst the challenge is to find new ways of giving global trade a more humane face, the developing world’s entrepreneurs remain upbeat, enjoying their success.
Every government, all people love to have business, to see the prosperity of business. You may have political problems here and there, but nobody wants business problems.
From 1998 at $250 million it is going to be $17 billion in the year 2008.Q: And how many people will be employed? A: Definitely in excess of a million. Q: So from nothing to $17 billion employing one million people in under a decade?A: That’s right.