Globalisation’s punches
by Najma Sadeque, Pakistan

Globalisation goes back a couple of centuries at least, but our greatest problem today has been around at least since World Bank/IMF got its teeth into our economies, is countries being intimidated into taking steps against their better judgement and all common sense that go against the public interest.

It used to be understood that any system to be involved between countries has to be based on choice and mutual agreement of the peoples. This however is no longer the experience in the decolonised South. The evil of corporate globalisation has been the taking away of public choice and forcing the breakup of long-established self-protective norms from peoples. There is scarcely any sovereignty left in effect in most Southern countries. What is allowed is merely recognition of territorial borders which enables governments to administrate and contain their people, not necessarily to their own benefit.

Most countries have not even been allowed to achieve a common-sense level of self-reliance so that in the event of a blockade or other untoward event, the people can at least enjoy food security.

The Global financial system
Apart from the other kinds of harm that have arisen with such unbridled export-orientation, the global misdistribution of essential resources, job-loss and poverty arises from the effects of arbitrary values accorded to goods and services, but most of all from the monopolization and over-valuation of buying power that has been achieved by an unsatisfactory and unjust global financial system created by Northern interests.

If there is one area in which some Northern countries are not democratic and do not recognize equal rights, it is in the market system that places demand and supply, and competition on a pedestal above all else, irrespective of the human cost, as if it were the supreme virtue transcending the human condition. The Northern conception of traditional Asian economic systems, for example, is as if we never had any such thing as a market system until the colonials came and taught us. The actual difference was that the market operated after basic family or community needs were fulfilled, essentially food security.

Just because someone could not earn did not mean he had to go hungry or depend on charity. Family and community food security was both right and duty, which does not fit into the Northern corporate value scheme that has been imposed on the world through manipulated or corrupted governments. It is a value we now endeavour to retrieve.

Taking economic activity to the extreme of appropriation and profiteering, globalisation depends on control over the value-exchange system, that is the global financial system -- to the extent of making national currencies almost meaningless. A currency, whatever its physical or abstract form, is meant to be a public convenience, not a means of enabling huge and undue profits at the cost of entire populations. But this practice has been made a legitimate business, and we have this situation where a tiny minority of people make millions and billions through speculation in the world’s trade and investments, causing already rich areas taking away even more from the already destitute, but never lifting a finger to contribute to the productive economy, even while they destroy others economies and millions of lives in the process. They are the true parasites; but the minds and fingers behind the global financial system are the least addressed by civil society and NGOs simply because they are carefully kept in ignorance.

Currency exchange rates have both virtues as well as their evils. But since it is a man-made device, their consequences emerge from good or bad intentions, and sometimes ignorance, which they usually bother to correct. The most serious problem arises in the currency of a weaker, less developed country being valued against the currency of a strong, industrialized country, without ensuring that local values and needs are not undermined. That is the protection governments are supposed to provide by keeping control over and limiting the role of Northern foreign currencies and investments in their countries. When the national resource requirements of the citizens, that is of the domestic economy, suddenly become auctionable to the highest bidder especially export industries, and those with little or no money cannot cope with price rises, that is a violation of human and civil rights. But governments don’t see it that way, and unfortunately, most Southern civil society don’t understand the connection. Even politicians are allowed to believe that these are unavoidable economic inevitabilities in poorer countries with growing populations, not that poverty and extremes of inequality are actively facilitated by the global financial system.

We have today buying power represented in different forms, mobile but concentrated in the hands of less than a million people, that can purchase ten times as much actual raw resources, manufactured goods and services that actually exist in the world. Why have ten times the purchasing power been created? It’s a long story going back to the origins of the banking, which essentially boiled down to paper statements of value being allowed to represent the real value of gold, silver or tangible, lasting goods. It is one thing to have a little more paper money than what it really represents, within manageable proportions. It is quite another to stretch it to impossible limits the way it exists today.

It is important to know the dangerous consequences of a runaway financial system that allows claims of worth with worthless bits of paper or numbers on a computer to unlimited lengths. As you know, in the market, those with more money can out-purchase other buyers by offering more than the asking price of something with limited supplies. It enables not only the rich buying more than they need of essentials, but for small entrepreneurships being forced to sell out to bigger companies, thereby enabling monopolies to be built up, the killing of self-employment and millions of jobs from small enterprises, leading to more poverty. Then all these medium-sized and large companies end up on stocks exchanges and get gambled with, putting employees at risk on an ongoing basis. $2 trillion is traded every day on foreign exchange markets alone that has nothing to do with production and trade of tangible goods – legitimised global gambling of pretended wealth that puts country economies at risk.

About 60,000 multinational corporations with around half a million affiliates employing only 60 million worldwide plus another 100 million or so in the subsidiaries against a world population of 6 billion plus, have more or less taken control of all the most productive sectors in the world, the top fifty corporations monopolising the most. The globalisation of finance helped in no small measure.

And when you allow unlimited foreign currency the luxury of being freely interchangeable with the local one -- which then amounts to your own currency being nothing than some additional paper convenience to simply facilitate the ordinary masses operating in the domestic economy -- the fictitious currency can virtually buy out the country. (Example of ‘Idli’ in an Indian state). All that is globalisation effected through the proxy of unregulated and fictitious money.

It is bad enough that the developing world, both governments and the private sector, buys worthless dollars from a predatory country that earns most of its money from a destructive as opposed to a productive sector, the war industry, that is nevertheless itself deep in debt and which has plainly said it will never redeem its dollars to other countries for gold or other precious metal, if called upon to do so. True, most people are ignorant of the mysteries of global finance, but governments and investors are not.

This situation is slowly, too slowly, being realized in a few countries and small groups and communities are painstakingly trying to bring about awareness and initiate change by creating local, alternative currencies. It has been proposed and being struggled for in South Africa, and it already exists in some pockets in America. One American example is the Liberty dollar that’s backed by gold. The other is a novel American currency based on hours of productive labour, called Ithaca hours. Yet another form, also in America, incorporates barter into everyday economic activity, focusing on scarce essentials or secondary needs on a priority basis. Information about all of them can be found on the Internet. Even America is finally waking up to the need of monetary reform.

The globalisation of foreign aid
During the long process of globalisation, the laws pertaining to international trade, investment and bilateral relations, already biased to the powerful, began to take precedence over social and economic rights and norms within countries. They worked their way into agreements between borrowing or dependant countries and donor agencies. The process formally began with by the World Bank, which made secrecy, non-transparency and unaccountability the norm.

Although these were civil matters, the public was never informed let alone any public consultation and debate being held. If any IFI condition or agreement with any country resulted in public inconvenience or violation of human and civil rights, so be it. It made no difference, for example, whether hundreds or millions of people were uprooted from their ancestral homes and turned into economic refugees without compensation. Or that people died or fell deeper into poverty from lost wages because they no longer received free or subsidized health care thanks to structural adjustment that imposed user fees on the poor. In Pakistan, to date, you still cannot access detailed information on the distribution and ownership of agricultural and other lands which has become extremely concentrated with military officers joining the ranks of feudal landlords.

World Bank/IMF in fact gave justification to governments not to explain itself or its actions to their citizens and to act unilaterally on every score. It led to government widening the scope of withholding access to public information, and institutionalized secrecy to the most innocuous and pettiest of levels which in turned created universal opportunities for bribery for government especially at the lowest levels which system preyed on the public at large – whether it entailed a petty records clerk to move a file, or a senior civil servant or politician manipulating or routing information to suit vested interests.

World Bank/IMF have pioneered the corruption of governments in the latter twentieth century often fronting for industrialized countries with a particular interest in specific raw materials, and corporations took up where they left off.

This state of affairs shows no signs of letting up because even civil society has not comprehended the extent to which self-serving law has taken control over people’s lives and freedom of action. While more and more lawyers are turning to corporate law, there are fewer and fewer to defend the public interest and sue against government injustices. Government-supported legal aid is largely non-existent while private efforts are inadequate and confined to urban areas.

The globalisation of the corruption of governments
While it is true that Southern country governments are corrupt, many Northern country governments, particularly America, haven’t proved much better. The difference is only in scale, the Southern takings being miniscule in comparison.

It is worth remembering also that people from a poorer, weaker country are less in a position to make demands, but are more amenable to taking offers. Mr. Sadruddin Aga Khan, formerly in UNESCO and UN High Commissioner for Refugees openly wrote in the press that “businesses from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries pay huge amounts to win friends, influence and contracts. These bribes are conservatively estimated at $80 billion a year, roughly the amount that the United Nations has suggested is needed to eradicate global poverty.”

Excess money has enabled corporations to hijack the law and have corporate law moulded to suit itself. It goes further to remove the distinction between the rights and laws and make them appear to be one and the same. In this way, the law made by the stronger becomes law that override the rights of peoples that may be affected, including any national laws made to protect those rights.

With economic globalisation, so has corporate law become globalised. A major part of the battle is to distinguish in the public mind between human and other rights, and law, which does not necessarily uphold and defend human rights.

Export Credit Agencies
While most developing country people are aware of the role of the World Bank and IMF in their countries, most ordinary citizens – apart from businessmen --are unaware of an institution that invests far more in developing countries, although not for the sake of the latter’s development. The World Bank is largely restricted to development projects – whether or not they are successful or have the potential to succeed is another matter – but after which implementation World Bank can safely expect repayment of its loan with interest.

But there are other areas of investment in developing countries, that industrialized countries are also interested in that the multilateral banks do not fund for various reasons, and which require a lot more investment.

The solution to this problem has been the Export Credit Agency and Investment Insurance Agencies, which together are known as ECAs. They are public institutions through which their governments channel loans and credits as well as guarantees and insurance to private companies from their own country to do business in less popular areas abroad. Almost every industrialized country has at least one ECA. Currently there are 17 from OECD member countries, and 9 from non-OECD countries. Together, in recent years, they have been investing between $50 - $70 billion dollars a year in the South. They fund as much as four times the amount of oil, gas and mining projects that all the multilateral ‘development’ banks (including World Bank) put together do.

The OECD countries supporting ECAs are USA, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Australia. The non-OECD countries are Taiwan, South Africa, Slovenia, Singapore, Malaysia, Israel, India, Hong Kong (China), and Argentina.

Why would the industrialized-country or advanced-developing country governments want their own companies to go in where even the World Bank, despite more clout to ride roughshod over the South, hesitates to go? -- Because the target country has something the investing country hopeful needs or wants – it could be, for example, an uncommon ore that is crucial to sophisticated industries. Or it can be a huge infrastructural project promising high profits, but the country happens to be a financially risky or a politically volatile one, or both. So a company is absolutely unwilling to risk its own money, which could be easily lost before getting its returns. -- It’s another matter though if someone else puts up the money with no strings attached so that even if it has to clear out in a hurry in the event of a disaster of any kind, the company has lost nothing but its time.

So the government steps in and helps them out with public funds, that is to say taxpayers money, in the name of investment abroad that will bring in even profits for the country. The finer details that the public would feel less comfortable with are left out. It is spurring globalisation indiscriminately. ECAs have turned out to be a deceitful front by which to exploit via corporations that industrialized country governments cannot do openly and lawfully.

While the World Bank and other bilateral financial institutions have very low minimum social and environmental standards, ECAs have none. They have no compunctions whatsoever about going in for an environmentally ‘dirty’ industry -- using technology banned in industrialized countries which particular fact the Southern governments may be unaware of or overlook because they cannot afford better. The determining factor is potentially high profits. This way the ECAs are able to get away to an extent with what the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was supposed to legitimize but failed against global protest. Because the MAI sought to give decision-making power from governments to unaccountable, private corporations that were investing in their countries, thereby doing away with democracy and the public interest laws.

This exposes the hypocrisy of industrialized countries that on the one hand condemn the South in the United Nations and from other diplomatic pulpits, for corruption and violation of human and social rights, but on the other hand actively mete out and perpetuate the same behaviour. Not surprisingly, almost everywhere that ECA-backed projects have gone, human rights abuses have followed. Transparency International reports that bribery of government officials and politicians is viewed as a routine part of the package and is widespread, especially in public works and military goods. ECAs account for around 25% of total developing country debt, more than half of which is owed to official agencies.

While World Bank, because of its proclaimed developmental purpose and high visibility, can sometimes be forced to subject some of its projects to environmental impact assessments, ECA-funded private corporations cannot as it is not required of them. -- Because the condition laid down by the private companies is no accountability. There is no question of conducting public hearings before a project is proposed or consulting communities that may be affected. They refuse to meet community representatives and even ignore findings of enquiries made by other OECD bodies. The devastation that ECA-financed companies wreak is absent or under-reported as compared to the impacts of the multilateral development banks.

Since 1996, NGOs from many countries have been conducting an international campaign for the reform of ECAs, and finally USA, UK, Japan, Canada and Australia, are purportedly making attempts in this direction. But real change is yet to be seen since corporate co-operation is still voluntary, not compulsory. The demands are not very different from what protesting peoples the world over demand from World Bank/IMF and multinational corporations, the most common denominator being transparency. (The demands are listed in the Jakarta Declaration for Reform of Official Export Credit and Investment Insurance Agencies, 2000, endorsed by 300 NGOs).

Tax havens and transfer pricing
Greed is never more starkly portrayed than in tax evasion. And tax havens, are hidden safely away from the eyes of the world’s ordinary masses who can understand tax evasion very well even if they cannot the financial system itself. One of the major ways that developing countries get cheated of their rightful share of revenue from foreign investors is transfer pricing and tax evasion.

According to Oxfam and other independent research institutions, tax havens cause losses of revenue for developing countries amounting to at least $50 billion every year, and that is the most conservative estimate. This is a matter of outrage because only half this amount would cover the annual costs towards universal primary education and primary health coverage. There would be still half left to do so much else that would reduce the need for foreign loans to the minimum or to the manageable.

Untaxed money removed from the country of earning is stolen money that could have been rolled back into public services and development thereby reducing the amount of foreign loans needed to be taken by developing countries.

It is also hidden potential but unwarranted ability to appropriate or control real economic assets, especially by non-citizens. Some believe tax evasion is twice as much of the minimum estimate, because this $50 billion does not include tax havens that are used in transfer-pricing to under-report real profits. All it takes is to create a shell intermediary company on paper registered in the Cayman island or other such tax haven, where it exists only in the form a mailing address. The parent company, for example, exports its product cheaply to the intermediary in the tax haven, so that the taxes are very low. Then the shell company re-sells the product to the parent company at high cost so that when the parent company further sells it, the profit made on it would be seemingly low, and so would the tax. The corporation not only cheats the host country it is investing in, it’s cheating its own country as well of taxes. What is worse, no movement of goods necessarily takes place. It all happens on paper.

An estimated one-third of total world GDP has been spirited away to financial and tax havens. Most of it is not disclosed or taxed. Things have gone so far that even industrialised countries have become concerned and seek to crack down on tax evasion and money laundering, largely indulged in by multinationals and trading companies. So far the OECD has only hit on the small island tax havens while avoiding those occurring right under their noses in their own countries.

Developing country governments attract foreign investment by offering tax holidays and lowered taxes, completely overlooking the fact that this amounts to permitting a high degree of free use of local resources that is unaffordable. As one country lowers its taxes, others feel forced to follow suit until allowing foreign investment becomes a meaningless and self-defeating exercise that only helps to line a few pockets. But even this does not satisfy insatiable appetites for money. And helping them in this are global accountancy firms an hour to advise big business and how to avoid taxes. Considering that they charge a thousand dollars an hour, it can be imagined the scale of taxes they save for their clients.

CEO and other high-rankers salaries reveal where all the money goes when millions have been rendered jobless. Rewarded to kill jobs while increasing output through smaller labour forces for the minimum salary possible, today’s CEO earns over a thousand times more than the average American worker who at a minimum of $ 2000 a month is well off compared than any Southern worker. The CEO then needs advice as to how to avoid taxes on $ 25 million or more a year.

Over a decade ago, taxes payable by foreign investors were approximately the same all over the world -- a third of profits. Today because of such tax competition corporate taxes in the South have dropped to 20% or less. Under WTO that claims uniform rules for all, upholding tax competition and differences especially among poor countries, is practicing double standards, exposing hypocrisy and dishonesty. Because if corporate taxes payable prevailed at around 30% as it still does in OECD countries, developing countries would be making $50 billion more, which would dispense with the need for foreign aid to the extent of making World Bank and other such so-called development IFIs largely redundant.

At the moment, the most tragic figure resulting from globalisation, emerges from a 2002 World Bank study that covered 85% of the world’s population from 91 countries. It found that the top 1% of the world’s population – that is the 50 million richest people in the world who come from the North – earn as much as the poorest 57%, or 2.7 billion people. Because the rich relentlessly kept taking away from the poor, today 80 countries have per capita incomes that are lower than what they were 5-6 years ago.

Agriculture
Deception has not been confined to the world of finance. It was accompanied by the same cavalier attitude in agriculture which has been done irreparable harm by globalising agro-chemical corporations. The greatest damage already done to agriculture and to the environment with the introduction of large-scale chemical monoculture is being compounded by the globalisation of genetically-modified agriculture.

About a century ago, agriculture was the only sector that corporations had not been able to break into except with equipment for long-term use and low turnover, and with chemical fertilisers which farmers could choose or not choose to use in place of manure and other free or cheap organic fertiliser. The most important input was seed, the best of which farmers selected from each harvest and saved for the next planting, and seed exchange between farmers was the norm worldwide.

This state of affairs allowed little profit to big business. It was then that big business sought to come up with alternative seeds to lure farmers away from saved seed. Coming up with an irresistible laboratory-modified seed was as difficult as persuading farmers to pay for seed when it was available free. Focus was turned onto rice and wheat, the main staples of the world, since the objective was commercial aiming at a global market.

It was not until the 1960s that America came up with the so-called High Yield or High-Response varieties of rice and wheat seed that could double or treble the normal output. Their drawback was that such high productivity was possible only with several times the volume of water and specific combinations of chemical fertiliser. At any rate, America and World Bank pushed the era of big dams beyond their own country to ensure extra water needed by large-scale Third World farmers. Today, less than half a century later, America officialdom doesn’t publicise the fact that it has given up on dams and is restoring rivers by dismantling as many dams as it can -- although corporations are free to pursue them in the South with the claim that the world needs another 50,000 dams in addition to the 55,000 the world is already saddled with. More than 114 dams have already been removed in three years since 1999, and about 57 were being removed last year.

What was not revealed about what they called Green revolution seeds in the 1960s was that even with meeting the seed-water-chemical fertiliser package requirements, the new fangled seeds gave high output for only a few years before they dropped to less than the average output of normal seeds. This they found out the hard way after the Green Revolution fizzled out in less than a decade.

This was in great part because the chemical fertilisers and the chemical pesticides required by disease that spread more rapidly in monoculture, killed all the earthworms and other micro-organisms in the soil that once prepared the soil for new growth at no cost, and also provided many other trace elements required by crops that were not provided (nor was possible) in manufactured fertilisers. In addition chemicals poisoned the soils, contaminated the groundwater, aided soil compaction caused by heavy agro-machinery, while excess water led to waterlogging and salinity, ultimately rendering soils unfit for crops. Every year hundreds of millions of acres of farmland are rendered dead are abandoned worldwide.

In Europe and America, chemical agriculture was popularised, institutionalised and protected with the huge subsidy system that rewarded big farmers and agro-businesses that destroyed three million small family farms in America alone.

Over the past century ‘modern’ monocultural agriculture has destroyed biodiversity; while germplasm of plants, mostly specific the South, is being stolen, recombined with some other commonplace characteristics, and patented as a new creation with the object of forcing peasants and farmers to have to pay for the right to cultivate crops they too have been combining and modifying through safe and slow means that they have used free for thousands of years.

In hindsight, many are realising how they have been duped by the agrochemical industry. Chemical monoculture is cost-effective only if applied on large scale; this leaves out the majority of cultivators in the world -- all peasants and small farmers. Requiring very expensive inputs which in optimum quantities are possible only in North America and Europe where heavy subsidies protect big farmers while small farmers are not eligible, chemical GM farming is no longer viable as independent commercial enterprises. Without subsidies which ultimately come from taxpayers pockets, they will collapse. The subsidies, in billions of dollars, ensure that big farmers profit even if overproduction leads to selling at below cost, or in the event of crop failure.

Even more absurd and doomed to fail has been the so-called ‘scientific’ approach to agriculture. There are hundreds or thousands of varieties to every kind of plant but not one is found everywhere in the world, only in a few regions, sometimes only in a single niche. This is because each has evolved over millions or billions of years to fit and survive in its own environment determined by climate, altitude, the seasons, rainfall, temperature, soil conditions and the local flora and fauna. Scientists sought to go one up on nature and ‘create’ seeds that could be sown almost anywhere in the world. But the seeds could grow only in an artificially-produced chemical environment, not in a natural one – which was why the ‘environment’ for growing the news crops had to be sold along with the seed, in the form of the seed-fertiliser-dam amalgamation. The demand for huge amounts of water led to the globalisation of dams that were to ultimately seriously damage river systems and basins, displace entire rural populations and cause untold poverty, food insecurity and deprivation.

That is not all. Chemical fertilisers do not work by themselves either. Living micro-organisms which occur invisibly in the millions in every handful of naturally fertile soil, are still required to make them function. And so, no matter the provision of ideal, optimum amounts of chemical fertiliser applied, manure also had to be added, because they brought back some micro-organisms to replace those killed off in the soil by the chemicals. It became a case of carrying coals to Newcastle; that too of an inferior variety.

All that ‘modern’ globalised agriculture has succeeded in doing is to make corporations and agro-businessmen very, very rich while seriously damaging and partly killing the environment, destroyed hundreds of millions of small family farms, and at least a couple of billions lives and jobs. Under the WTO, the process is one of consolidating and centralising the global food industry. Today 60 % of it is still controlled by only ten corporations dealing in seed, fertilisers, pesticides, processing, manufacture and shipment.

There is more that urban-bound scientists and urbanites at large having little or no contact with nature and agriculture, must realise. Agriculture is not manufacture and it cannot be industrialised in the same way. Manufacture procures inanimate materials and components that are put together in fixed numbers or proportions and configuration to produce unlimited numbers of an absolutely uniform product. But germplasm and seeds and plants are not inanimate, even though they may be dormant for long periods. Provided the appropriate environment – which is all that a farmer essentially does -- they grow on their own. They have a life of their own and each plant is unique, just as each human being is unique – something that is not reflected on much. Once engineered to be identical – although this is restricted to external appearance and shape – they have lost their identity and can only be grown artificially, like comatose patients on a life-support system.

Intellectual Property Rights
With the failures of chemicalised GM agriculture and dams and irrigations systems that have damaged inland waters, wetlands, coastal mangroves that are nurseries for most marine life, and the overall environment, farmers have begun to turn back to organic farming but the process is painstakingly slow, partly because rehabilitating and restoring the bio-diversified environment for organic farming will take time, partly because after two generations or more, the local organic knowledge systems have been lost or forgotten, and mostly because the agro-chemical corporations are not yet willing to give up on a multi-billion dollar industry. They are fighting a last-ditch battle, through the corporate media and by taking advantage of the Intellectual Property Rights regime.

The danger is that even if the seed-corporations give up on agricultural chemicals, they can contrive to appropriate rights over traditional seeds simply by exposing GMOs to the wind to contaminate farmfields worldwide, and then claim contaminated traditional seeds as their property, to be paid for their use, whether or not they are purchased from the patent owner. It is an insidious final step in agricultural globalisation that could kill all biodiversity. But that is the logic of the famous long-drawn case that Monsanto instituted against the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser who recently lost against all sense and science. But then, the judge was neither farmer nor biologist-environmentalist, and probably not clued into human rights and food security issues either.

While America today takes the high moral ground on Intellectual Property Rights, it conveniently forgets its own history as the greatest pirate of intellectual property of both agricultural and non-agricultural nature. Enlisting all personnel abroad from sailor to soldier to merchant and diplomat, it has helped itself freely to the world’s biodiversity, and claimed whatever they chose as their simply by separating the germplasm. And it had no compunctions about pirating books from its own coloniser, England. It was not until the end of the 19th century when America wanted copyright protection for its own publishing industry by which time it was thriving, that Congress passed a copyright act to that gave protection to foreign works brought to America return for the same protection to its own authors abroad.

The environmentally aware know why biodiversity has to be preserved but sometimes even they do not realise that setting aside bio-reserves, even in every country is inadequate, and that man’s survival depends on the survival of nature. Bio-diverse presence has to be very widespread to survive in the long run; Biodiversity thrives at its optimum best when allowed to take its natural course wherever the wind, water, birds and animals carry their seeds. This is why one of the few desirable things that need to be globalised is organic agriculture. Or rather, re-globalised, because natural, organic farming was a globalised phenomenon from the very birth of agriculture.

The Commons
There are three areas that corporations and globalisation must stay out of if the world is not to descend into further violence and war, and these are the global Commons and Public Goods.

There is a third area that corporations should stay away from and that is the business of alleviating human disaster that they themselves have caused. Because now the suffering of humanity has become big business on a global scale, no less. Hunger has long been the excuse for modern agriculture and agro-corporations that claimed to be able to solve world hunger. But as they say, man does not live by bread alone. - The hungry would prefer to be self-reliant, not charity cases, and without outsiders interfering in their way of life. The latest entrants to agricultural horror are pharmaceuticals for the masses of economic refugees, diseases old and new, and foodcrops with built-in vaccines or other medicinal qualities that are introduced through genetic modification known as “pharming;” and the business of cleaning up the environment devastated by corporate behaviour.

The Old World, or at least Asia, Africa and South America, has always recognised that there are some things that all humans need just to stay alive, and therefore they may not be monopolised or commercialised. Among these are fresh air, water, pastures, deserts, plains, wetlands, forests and such that process and interact to create a world suitable for life, and without which life would not be possible. So they are jointly owned and cared for, for common and sustainable use but cannot be owned by any one entity for exclusive use or profit.
The indiscriminate economic exploitation of most of the world, leaving little for the needs of the peoples of IFI and corporate-ravaged countries, has already brought us to the brink. Academics and politicians and think-tanks may lay blame at the door of fundamentalists, anarchists, terrorists, and envious backward peoples. The fact however is that with the best agricultural lands and all commercial activity thereon having been exhausted, corporations are now encroaching on the Commons. Southerners have already been hounded out of their commons habitat en masse at least twice over – the first time by the colonisers when they “enclosed” public lands as Crown property, and the second time by their own governments for agricultural development schemes, such as dams and mining. With the bid to globalise corporate farming in the South, what is left of the Commons is at threat, putting the lives of 1.5 to 2 billion landless people on the line.

This is a globalisation that has to be stopped at all cost.

Corporate Personhood
To further ease bulldozing their way into every economic activity in the world and to monopolise as much as possible, American corporations are asserting their status of “corporate personhood”, starting with their own country. Corporate personhood means a corporation recognised as having all the qualities that humans have and therefore being entitled to having all the same rights and privileges that citizens receive. The very great difference that is being ignored is that an institution run by many people who keeping changing is not the same as a human being and never can be. The very greater finances, power and clout that corporations put them at an advantage over people anyway, singly or collectively, and they can pay and intimidate their way to run roughshod over people’s rights – which in effect does not make them equal, which they do not have the right to be, but gives them unwarranted power and control over people, resources and the legal system.

American corporations acquired corporate personhood through fraudulent means, and it is matter of time that civil society will fight back to divest them of rights given arbitrarily. Because it occurred over a century ago, and because American corporations did not have occasion to use this legal weapon in the past half century or so since decolonisation, it was dormant. Now it has begun to rear its head, and the danger is that as corporations intrude increasingly into other countries, they will demand the same status wherever they go.

One of the things that many of us in the South find very strange about globalisation’s insistent promoters in the North, is that although they claim they recognize things like human and economic and social rights; the right to food, shelter, clean water, basic healthcare, and jobs; the duty of governments to serve the public interest, and the sovereignty of nations, they suddenly become irrelevant in the case of World Bank or other IFI funded or Northern corporate intrusion in the South. Because the kind of globalisation we’re talking about here is foreign aid and corporate-driven globalisation. The concept of rights and sovereignty alone suggest that it is up to the people to decide what they need or want to have, and how much and when, and at what cost, economic or human or both. They also have the right to examine a gift or bought horse in the mouth and to reject it, and not bound to offer any reason why.

This may come as a surprise to corporate minds, but all people are not competitive and do not want to indulge in cut-throat competition, no holds barred, to get ahead by knocking down others. Most people want to earn enough to be comfortable and to find joy in family and community.
So the full force of the global corporate-controlled media was zeroed on impressionable and ill-informed minds to erode those values that prevented the over-exploitation of renewable but destructible resources and turn people into mindless, insatiable consumers who are taught to make images and accumulation the values of life.

Even less well understood is the fact that most agricultural people, at least of the South, love their own way of life when left alone with their adequate possessions and rights. The minority that exists everywhere in the world that is adventurous and seeks new shores, a new life and a lot more material wealth is not representative of the majority. Shorn of contact with the natural world by a techno-world that pushes comfort to the excess of self-indulgence, well-off urbanites are unable to conceive that a less materialistic society can actually be a voluntary choice. Yet this tyranny of the ‘modern’, educated, financially-advantaged minority in control that undemocratically and arbitrarily impose their narrowly-serving outlook on the world at large.

There is nothing wrong with globalisation at large, as long as it does no impinge on the rights and resource needs of people. The problem is that a minority wishes to monopolise the world’s resources, production, services and markets, without the majority having the right to choose their own way of life.