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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters 'Globalisation
By Faiza Rady
with a human face'?"Even as communication, transportation and technology are driving global economic expansion headway on, poverty is not keeping pace. It is as if globalisation is in fast forward, and the world's ability to react to it is in slow motion."
Ted Turner, owner of CNN, multi-billionaire philanthropist, who recently donated $1 billion (tax-deductible) to the UN. Despite the honourable sentiments attributed to him, quoting media mogul Ted Turner in the 1999 UN Human Development Report is in many ways merely symptomatic of the times -- and, in particular, of the UN's recent attempts to forge closer alliances with big business. Brought to the verge of bankruptcy by the Clinton administration's adamant refusal to settle its outstanding $1.5 billion debt and pushed into a corner by shrinking international funding, the cash-starved agency has in effect been forced to privatise itself, just like those little nation states before it.
In an attempt to stay afloat and even ride the wave, the UN is making the switch to private corporate financing as its chief source of funds. In January, Secretary-General Kofi Annan officially launched the international organisation on this path, when he announced the agency's "partnership" with some 16 giant transnational corporations.
Observers were not slow to criticise what they perceived as the UN's potential loss of independence through this association, especially if it were to turn into dependency. Thus political analyst Bernard Cassen denounced the already-declining role of the UN development agencies, such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which had originally been established to promote more equitable trade relations between North and South. "In order to survive, UNCTAD had to progressively conform to the ideology of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)," Cassen wrote recently in Le Monde Diplomatique. And in support of his claim, he pointed to how, at its 1998 Conference in Lyon, UNCTAD had in effect come out in support of the rich countries' decision to reduce development aid to the South, on the grounds that the private sector would be able to take their place in bringing about the alleviation of extreme poverty.
The 1999 Human Development Report (HDR) from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) follows the line laid down by UNCTAD's conversion to economic neo-liberalism. Indeed, it warmly embraces the ideology it had once denounced for widening the gap between North and South, between the affluent and the destitute, and contributing to spiralling poverty worldwide.
Is this a heartfelt change of conviction -- or just another sign of the UN's new partnership with transnational corporations? In its new-found deference to free market ideology, the report at times literally echoes former US President George Bush's rhetoric of creating a new capitalist world order with a gentler, more humane face.
Chanting its dawn hymn to the era of globalisation -- defined here as ever expanding, more closely integrated and more culturally homogenous markets -- the report claims that "increased trade, new technologies, foreign investments, expanding media and Internet connections... offer enormous potential to eradicate poverty in the 21st century -- to continue the unprecedented progress of the 20th century."
According to last year's HDR, it should be observed, the 20th century's "unprecedented progress" was most notable for its dramatic, often obscene, disparities of income. The result of governments abdicating their responsibilities to their people and disinvesting in food security and social welfare was nothing less than "private affluence among public squalor".
This year's report, however, performs something of a volte face. Positing the market as essential to all economic growth and progress, it calls instead for the regulation of market economies. In its own words, "the challenge of globalisation in the new century is not to stop the expansion of global markets. The challenge is to find the rules and institutions for stronger governance... to preserve the advantages of global markets and competition, but also... to ensure that globalisation works for people."
The result is the prospect of mild reform at best, rather than any substantial challenge to the economics of globalisation as such. The proclaimed attempt to establish "globalisation with a human face" is soon reduced to an exercise in damage limitation. "Liberalisation, privatisation and tighter intellectual property rights are shaping the path for the new technologies, determining how they are used," we are told. "But the privatisation and concentration of technology are going too far." Instead, the report preaches restraint and better governance through the introduction of improved control mechanisms.
Yet behind this disappointing and deceptive rhetoric lies a less simplistic, more ambiguous and multi-layered text. While the HDR brandishes its superficial market-oriented slogans, promoting further liberalisation as the precondition of progress, it also assembles a sheer weight of quite horrific data which ultimately serves to negate its own assertions and subvert the dominant neo-liberal message.
To take one case in point: while the HDR claims that competitive markets may be the best guarantee of efficiency, it also denounces the marginalisation of sub-Saharan African countries in the global economy. Yet this marginalisation is a direct result of these countries' integration into the international trade system -- their exports are currently equivalent to nearly 30 per cent of GDP, compared with only 19 per cent for the OECD countries. Heavily dependent on the vagaries of the fluctuating global market in primary commodities, which has recently slumped to its lowest level in a century and a half, sub-Saharan Africa has little chance of "developing", either by its own or by anybody else's standards, as long as the inherently unequal dynamics of international trade continue to dictate its fate.
The problems facing Africa are just one aspect of a larger injustice, which is comprehensively documented here. The concentration of Northern trade monopolies has resulted in unequal access to and unequal shares in the global marketplace for everyone. Thus, the OECD countries with 19 per cent of the global population, have 71 per cent of global trade in goods and services, 58 per cent of foreign direct investment and 91 per cent of all Internet users. At the same time, there are more than 80 countries in the South which have lower per capita incomes today than they did a decade ago. Out of the world's 174 nations, only 40 countries have been able to sustain average per capita income growth of more than three per cent a year since 1990. The race, as always, is to those who are able to define what it means to be fittest.
Contrasted with the declining collective per capita income of the South, the spiralling growth of the accumulated wealth of the international elite is mind-boggling. As the report rather baldly puts it, "The world's 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion. The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people."
The OECD countries' tightening grip on market monopolies and the overgrowth of private capital is only paralleled by the surging increase in world poverty levels. The old adage, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", applies with a vengeance to the last years of our millennium. "By the late 1990s the fifth of the world's people living in the highest-income countries had 86 per cent of the world GDP -- the bottom fifth just 1 per cent; 82 per cent of the world export markets -- the bottom fifth just 1 per cent; 68 per cent of foreign direct investment -- the bottom fifth just 1 per cent; 74 per cent of the world telephone lines, today's basic means of communication -- the bottom fifth just 1.5 per cent." Contrasts don't come much starker than that.
As the report itself admits, "global inequalities in income and living standards have reached grotesque proportions". Faced with such a weight of statistics that testify to the injustices that run right through the present economic system, the HDR's appeal to the market to right itself, with the help of just a little regulation, soon loses whatever conviction it may once have carried. These are radical problems. But the UN, it would seem, no longer has time for radical solutions.
