About The International Forum On Globalization

WWW.IFG.ORG

THE INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON GLOBALIZATION (IFG) is a North-South research and educational institution composed of leading activists, economists, scholars, and researchers providing analyses and critiques on the cultural, social, political, and environmental impacts of economic globalization. Formed in 1994, the IFG came together out of shared concern that the world's corporate and political leadership was rapidly restructuring global politics and economics on a level that was as historically significant as any period since the Industrial Revolution. Yet there was almost no discussion or even recognition of this new "free market," or "neoliberal" model, or of the institutions and agreements enforcing this system—the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other such bureaucracies. In response, the IFG began to stimulate new thinking, joint activity and public education about this rapidly rising economic paradigm.

Unique in its diversity, depth, and breadth, the IFG works through an active international board of key citizen movement leaders; a small, dedicated staff; and a network of hundreds of associates representing regions throughout the world on a broad spectrum of issues. Our work is closely linked to social justice and environmental movements, providing them with critical thinking and frameworks that inform campaigns and activities "on the ground."

The IFG produces numerous publications; organizes high-profile, large public events; hosts many issue-specific seminars; coordinates press conferences and media interviews at international events; and participates in many other activities that focus on the myriad consequences of globalization. During the last few years, the IFG has launched a pioneering program that focuses on alternative visions and policies to globalization that are more just, equitable, democratic, accountable, and sustainable for people and the planet.

POSITION STATEMENT

The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) promotes equitable, democratic, and ecologically sustainable economies.We were formed in response to widespread concerns over economic globalization, a process dominated by international institutions and agreements unaccountable to democratic processes or national governments. Speaking the language of "free-trade" and poverty alleviation, organizations like the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank impose a development model which seems designed to benefit transnational corporations over workers; foreign investors over local businesses; and wealthy countries over developing nations. When the IFG first presented its globalization critique a decade ago, the economic globalization model was widely accepted. Today, the institutions of globalization are undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Corporate scandals such as Enron and Worldcom, the failures of IMF and World Bank policies and programs, the recent break down of WTO negotiations, and other events reveal that the benefits of globalization that were promised by its advocates have not come to fruition.

Even the policy consensus that governed development thinking during most of the past two decades, the so-called Washington Consensus, has broken up with notable "defectors" such as former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz and the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs. From conservative circles, the Meltzer Commission, along with Walter Wriston, Henry Kissinger, and William Simon also have issued strong critiques against Bretton Woods institutions.

But perhaps the greatest indictment against globalization is the unprecedented global citizen movement that has emerged during the last decade, demonstrating that the benefits of globalization have gone to the few at the exclusion of many. This extraordinary alliance brings together numerous diverse groups and perspectives — union members, farmers, landless peasants, people of faith, women's organizations, youth organizations, environmentalists, AIDS and other health activists, politicians, civil servants, immigrants, peace and human rights organizations, intellectuals, consumer advocates, and many others. While promoters of globalization proclaim that this model is the rising tide that will lift all boats, citizen movements find that it is instead lifting only yachts. In fact, the actual beneficiaries are obvious. In the United States, for example, during the period of the most rapid economic globalization — the 1990s — the top corporate executives of the largest global companies made salaries and gained options in the tens of millions of dollars (often in the hundreds of millions), while real wages of ordinary workers either remained stagnant or rose insignificantly.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) reports that American CEOs were paid an average of 458 times more than production workers in 2000, up from 104 times in 1991. The degree of wealth concentration of the world's 475 billionaires is now worth the combined income of the bottom half of humanity. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Program's 1999 Human Development Report revealed that the gap between the wealthy and the poor both within and between countries is growing steadily larger. It notes inequities of the current global trading system as one of the key contributors to this trend. Even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concurred. In its Global Trends 2015 report, issued in 2000, the CIA maintained that globalization will create "an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today. [Globalization's] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic volatility and a widening economic divide…deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. [It] will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it."

All over the world, evidence points to the failure of globalization and the so-called "free trade" policies of the last decade - loss of jobs and livelihoods, displacement of indigenous peoples, massive immigration, rapid environmental devastation and loss of biodiversity, increases in poverty and hunger, and many additional negative effects.

IFG PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

IFG PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES are dedicated to examining the myriad effects of globalization and to promoting diverse solutions to the current model.We advocate alternative visions and economic policies based on the following principles:

LIVING DEMOCRACY: Democratic and accountable regional and/or international institutions that do not disempower or undermine sovereignty of communities and nation-states.

SUBSIDIARITY—FAVORING THE LOCAL: Rules and structures that consciously favor local control over issues that have local consequences; a model of subsidiarity that recognizes the inherent democratic right to self-determination and self-reliance. In regard to trade agreements and institutions, the IFG supports fair trade based on a framework that favors local production for local consumption, supplemented by long-distance trade for those goods and services that cannot be supplied regionally.

ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY: Environmental protection, sustainability and biodiversity are keystones of any viable economy. The current globalization system contributes to rapid destruction of the environment in a variety of ways: through vast increases in transportation infrastructure and fossil-fuel based transport, excessive resource extraction, harmful industrial agriculture methods, and other myriad problems intrinsic to globalization.

COMMON HERITAGE: Equitable sharing of common resources such as water, air, forests and other natural resources; recognizing that culture and knowledge are collective creations of communities and regions; and promoting the right of everyone to "modern" common resources that address basic needs such as healthcare and education.

DIVERSITY: Cultural, ethnic, religious and economic diversity are key to the vitality, resilience, and innovative capacity of any living system and must be respected.

HUMAN RIGHTS: It is the duty of governments to not only ensure civil and political rights, but also to guarantee economic, social, and cultural rights.

JOBS AND LIVELIHOODS: Sustainable societies must protect the rights of workers in the formal sector and address the livelihood needs of the greater numbers of people who subsist in what has become known as the informal sector.

FOOD SECURITY AND SAFETY: Local self-reliance in food production and assurance of healthful, safe foods should be central to any economic model. Current trade policies undermine local food security by emphasizing an import-export model, making people dependent on food sources thousands of miles away.

EQUITY: Social justice and greater equality—among nations; within nations; between and among ethnic, cultural and religious groups, classes, and men and women—are cornerstones of sustainable societies.

THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE: All economic regulatory activity should abide by the Precautionary Principle which states that when a practice or product raises potentially significant threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary action should be taken to restrict or eliminate it.

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The Day After: An Overview of Bali Results

By Walden Bello

A day after the dramatic ending of the Bali climate talks, many are wondering if the result was indeed best outcome possible given the circumstances.

The US was brought back to the fold, but at the cost of excising from the final document--the so-called Bali Roadmap--any reference to the need for a 25 to 40 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 to keep the mean global temperature increase to 2.0 to 2.4 degrees Celsius in the 21st century.

Reference to quantitative figures was reduced to a footnote referring readers to some pages in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Report which simply enumerate several climate stabilization scenarios. The alternative scenarios ranged from a 2.0 to 2.4 degree rise in temperature to a 4.9 to 6.1 degree increase. This prompted one civil society participant to remark that the Bali roadmap is a roadmap to anywhere.

Would it have been better to have simply let the US walk out, allowing the rest of the world to forge a strong agreement containing deep mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the part of the developed countries? With a new US president with a new policy on climate change at the beginning of 2009, the US would have rejoined a process that would already be moving along with strong binding targets. As it is now, having been part of the Bali consensus, Bush administration negotiators, say skeptics, will be able to continue their obstructionist tactics to further water down global action throughout the negotiations in 2008.

One wonders what would have happened had Washington remained true to its ideological propensities and decided to stomp out of the room when the delegate from Papua New Guinea, releasing the conference‚s pent up collective frustration, issued his now historic challenge: We ask for your leadership and we seek your leadership. If you are not willing to lead, please get out of the way. As everyone now knows, after last-minute consultations with Washington, the American negotiator backed down from the US‚s hard-line position on an Indian amendment seeking the conference‚s understanding for the different capacities of developing countries to deal with climate change and said Washington will go forward and join the consensus.

The single-minded focus on getting Washington on board resulted in the dearth of hard obligations agreed upon at the meeting except for the deadline for the negotiating body, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention, to have its work ready for adoption at the Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP 15).

Many delegates also felt ambivalent about the institutional arrangements that were agreed upon after over a week of hard North-South negotiations.

An Adaptation Fund was set up, but it was put under the administration of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) of the US-dominated World Bank. Moreover, the seed funds from the developed countries are expected to come to only between $18.6 million to US$37.2 million--sums which are deemed severely inadequate to support the emergency efforts to address the ongoing ravages of climate change in the small island states and others on the frontlines of climate change. Oxfam estimates that a minimum of US$50 billion a year will be needed to assist all developing countries adapt to climate change.

A strategic program for technology development and transfer was also approved, again with troubling compromises. The developing countries had initially held out for the mechanism to be a designated a facility but finally had to agree to the watered-down characterization of the initiative as a program on account of US intransigence. Moreover, the program was also placed under the GEF with no firm levels of funding stated for an enterprise that is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

The REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) initiative pushed by host Indonesia and several other developing countries with large forests that are being cut down rapidly was adopted. The idea is to get the developed world to channel money to these countries, via aid or market mechanisms, to maintain these forests as carbon sinks. However, many climate activists fear that indigenous communities will lose be victimized by predatory private interests that will position themselves to become the main recipients of the funds raised.

Still, many felt that the meager and mixed results were better than nothing.

Perhaps the best indication on whether the conference was right to bend over backward almost 180 degrees to accommodate the US will come next month in Honolulu during the Major Economies Meeting, a Washington-initiated conference that was originally designed to subvert the United Nations process. The question on everyone's lips is: Will the Bush adminstration revert to form and use the conference to launch a separate process to derail the Bali Roadmap?
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Walden Bello, Board Member, International Forum on Globalization, is senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South, a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org), and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. He was an NGO participant at the Bali Conference on Climate Change.

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The Illusions of Global Capitalism

By John Mohawk

The project of economic globalization is much more complex than many understand it to be. It is not merely the lowering of tariffs to make a level playing field for international commerce. It is, as practiced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and U.S. foreign policy, a plan to coerce all nations of the world into behaviors which were once easily identified as markers of colonialism.

For example, "structural adjustment" is a term used to describe the kinds of measures debtor countries are encouraged, or forced, to adopt by the World Bank and the IMF. These amount to shifting resources away from public benefit programs such as food subsidies and health programs to concentrate on debt reduction. In other words, poor countries are encouraged - indeed coerced - into giving up food and medicine so they can use the money to pay debts owed to foreign banks.

Often the foreign debts were incurred when some regime borrowed money to build infrastructure - roads, pipelines, power lines - to facilitate natural resources extraction which was, in turn, being developed by foreign interests. Sometimes that money was diverted - as in embezzled, stolen, appropriated - by people in the regime.

There are many and complex ways countries get into debt, but the ideology behind globalization involves exploiting these debts to advance international capitalism and (mostly) American cultural hegemony. The advice that accompanies the conditions for loan extensions includes such things as encouraging people to speak English, the international language of commerce. The problem is, many poor countries have populations to which English is no advantage.

The debtor countries are encouraged to sell all assets, including natural resources such as gas or oil, forests or mineral rights, to outside investors. This is privatization to the advantage of foreigners.

Defenders of globalization like to point to the fact that in the search for the cheapest labor, corporations sometimes build plants which bring jobs to already desperately poor people who must now labor without unions, environmental protections, or any kind of legal rights. It is said, and in some anecdotal settings it is true, that some individuals are better off. But the costs are usually unemphasized, and the threats to the whole society are ignored in these accounts.

The mythology that surrounds capitalism is that it grew organically as production, demand and wages fluctuated according to the rules of the market. Historical globalization, as distinct from capitalism, was a product of the British Parliament in the 19th century during a period of military expansion and colonization. It was heavily subsidized, even ordered, by the state. This included the use of powers of enclosure at home and military coercion abroad. When those in power wanted something, they found a way to take it. Without the power of the state wielded in the interests of the investor class combined with overseas use of military coercion, the kind of globalization that emerged in the 19th century is quite unimaginable.

One aspect of this ambitious project was then, and is now, the privatization of the commons. The commons in England was rapidly turned over to men of commerce who built sheep ranches on land formerly used by peasants to grow food. The displaced English peasants were recruited to jobs overseas and in factories at home; and ever since then, historians and economic philosophers have asserted that this was a happy ending. (Let’s call this the British consensus on globalization and empire-building.) It also enriched the rich, impoverished the poor, and set into motion ecological transformations the world has come to regret. Workers benefited to the extent labor movements were able to demand better wages and benefits.

We are now seeing how this great contradiction of privileging the few at the expense of the many is played out in democracies. In Latin America, huge movements of the underprivileged are re-exploring versions of socialism that are defined as anything but the Washington consensus on globalization. The neoconservative vision that wealth can be created by reducing and/or eliminating social services while creating profitable investment opportunities for foreign investors - the kind of model imposed on Latin American countries in recent years - has proved both undesirable and impractical. Now that the United States is distracted by the war in Iraq, societies as different as Argentina and Venezuela are in full defiance of the Washington consensus because they understand it doesn’t work for them.

Indigenous peoples have led the way to roll back this war against the poor. The first, in this modern context, were the Zapatistas of Mexico. Mexico has been a particularly abused victim of neoconservative economics, and the Indians are among the most acute sufferers. It is no exaggeration to state that neoconservative economic policy has served to destabilize Mexico politically and the Zapatista movement was explicit in its assertion that globalization was at the root of Mexico’s problems. They were right. And in Bolivia, large grass-roots movements were energized when an American company tried to privatize all the water in a small city there. Since then, the mass movement has continued to be energized, and at the end of 2005 it helped elect an indigenous man, Evo Morales, as president.

American apologists are painting the Bolivia story as one dominated by cocaine, but it is also dominated by a globalization program which is threatening that country’s small farmers, just as it threatens small farmers in other countries and uses the powers of the state to force ”reforms” which will lead to the local farmers’ demise. Whatever its merits, one of the consequences of globalization, especially in democracies, is the rise of grass-roots movements opposing its imposition.

Three books, each from an author with a distinct perspective, can help those interested in the misguided dilemma of neoconservative economic policy and U.S. foreign policy. Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet takes issue with the consensus in Western culture that economic growth, as measured by economists, is a desirable thing. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, worked in the Carter administration and served as chief economist at the World Bank, explains that the Washington consensus on globalization is not working in a landmark book, Globalization and its Discontents. John Gray, an important political thinker in the Thatcher administration and an intellectual of Britain’s New Right, argues that the globalization project has never worked for the betterment of societies, and won’t work now in an insightful volume, False Dawn : The Delusion of Global Capitalism.

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