FROM PORTO ALEGRE TO LYON: Advancing the Debate on Globalization
© Hazel Henderson, February 2002 www.hazelhenderson.com
For InterPress
Service
Lyon, France:
Lyon, 2000-year old World Heritage city, home of France’s first stock
market in the 16th century, also hosted the first Earth Dialogues on ethics
for humanizing globalization. Over 1000 delegates gathered from
around the world – parliamentarians, diplomats, business leaders,
academics and civic leaders – many fresh from the World Social Forum
in Porto Alegre, Brasil.
Launched by Mikhail Gorbachev, now President of Green Cross International
and Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the
Dialogues were splendidly hosted by the Mayor and the City of Lyon at
a dinner reception at the historic town hall. French Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin, now running neck and neck with President Jacques Chirac
in France’s upcoming presidential elections, warmly endorsed the
Dialogues in his keynote speech. Jospin stressed the importance of the
conference goals of putting ethics and human values at the center of globalization
processes.
Even the officials representing the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO were
conciliatory. They listened to the chastisements of Ann Pettifor
of the worldwide Jubilee grassroots campaign for debt relief and Jean-Luc
Cipiere of ATTAC, which advocates currency exchange taxes for poverty-alleviation
and is one of the organizers of the Porto Alegre World Social Forums.
The WTO’s Deputy Director Paul-Henri Ravier was obdurate. After
reciting the familiar WTO mantra about its status as an inter-governmental
body not obliged to deal with civic society and not competent on environmental
issues, he left the Roundtable on Reforming International Financial Institutions.
Thomas Dawson of the IMF and Kristalina Georgieva of the World Bank admitted
the many faults and mistakes of their respective institutions, and stressed
reforms now being undertaken to correct them.
Mr. Ravier of the WTO could have benefited from hearing all the well-reasoned
arguments of critics. They showed how much more socially and environmentally-sound
WTO rulings would be if informed by full-cost pricing, corrected national
GNP accounting for external costs, social capital and ecological assets.
If all world trade in goods were thus accounted in accurate prices, it
would reveal that, generally, local and regional trade is the most efficient.
This fact is also masked by huge taxpayer subsidies to trade: infrastructure,
roads, airports, harbors, shipping and energy. Arguments against
the patenting of life forms, GMO foods and life-saving pharmaceuticals,
led to recommendations that all these should be outside the WTO and TRIPs
agreements and remain in the public domain.
This Roundtable reported out policy proposals including allowing heavily-indebted
countries to declare bankruptcy, following Chapter 9 US laws, which allow
bankrupt municipalities to maintain all public and social services.
The IMF no longer resists such proposals – after its involvement
in the financial meltdown of Argentina. Other proposals included
international taxation of currency transactions, airline tickets, fuel,
carbon emissions, arms sales, etc.. to fund global public goods: health,
education, clean water and environmental protection. A lively debate
over the role of currency trading (currently $1.5 trillion daily) and
“hot money”, i.e., short-term investment speculative capital
flight and the plight of Argentina, led to some new proposals.
Developing countries were urged to help themselves, by diversifying their
currency reserves away from over-reliance on US dollars toward euros,
since this desire for dollars merely drives its current over-valuation
(by some 15%) and helps precipitate crises in countries whose currencies
were tied to the dollar, such as Argentina. Holding more of their
reserves in euros would create a better world currency reserve system
of both euros and dollars. These two strong currencies might then move
toward parity, and could be pegged together – offering a new measure
of global financial stability. The fundamentals of the euro zone
countries are sounder in any case than the fundamentals of the US economy,
which is burdened by huge corporate and household debt, yawning trade
deficits and losing its charm as the world’s haven for flight-capital.
These issues of finance are vastly more important than those of trade,
since 90% of global flows represent speculative finance versus only 10%
that represent actual trade on goods and services.
The “galloping unilateralism” of the USA was decried by most
of the other seven roundtables (business, politics and democracy, media,
religious organizations, global governance, former foreign ministers and
civic society). Resentment was widespread about the USA’s penchant
for throwing its weight about, abrogating treaties, and simplistic bombast:
“Are you for or against the US in the fight against evil?”
Mr. Bush’s immoderate rhetoric is distasteful in Europe and the subject
of many cartoons in major newspapers. Other targets were transnational
corporations and particularly media corporations that were criticized
as monopolistic, promoting unsustainable forms of over-consumption, violence
and human degradation. All corporations should adopt “triple
bottom line” accounting (economic, social and environmental), promulgate
standards and principles of ethical behavior and corporate responsibility
to be externally audited for compliance – particularly companies
that have engaged with the UN Global Compact and similar statements of
principles of good corporate citizenship.
New institution-building at the global level was seen as a prerequisite
for the continuation of globalization processes. Many pointed out
that today’s economic globalization, the result of 1980s deregulation,
privatization and spread of markets was already unstable and might end
in a global depression, as in the1930s. Globalization could not
continue without a new framework of global ethics, values, norms, treaties
and regulations to protect the global commons. Taxing commercial
exploitation of these common natural resources could provide global public
goods, as well as to protect human rights, labor standards, cultures and
traditional informal sectors and livelihoods.
The goals of many delegates revolved around the two world summits of 2002,
on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, March 18-23 and that
on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, S. Africa in early September.
US obstructionism on reform of the global financial architecture, together
with the bi-lateral politics between President Bush and President Vicente
Fox of Mexico might abort the aspirations of the Monterrey Summit.
Only a large contingent of activist NGOs with Internet and media skills
will keep the hopes for Monterrey and Johannesburg alive. The old
“Washington Consensus” development model is now discredited
after the meltdowns in Asia, Russia, Turkey, Argentina and rising world
poverty gaps – not to mention the current Enron and accounting scandals.
Like the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, the Earth Dialogues spelled
out a viable, rich vision of sustainable, equitable, ecologically-sound
development. Lyon confirmed that “Another World is Possible!”
****
Hazel Henderson, author of Beyond Globalization and other books, is a
partner with The Calvert Group (USA) in The Calvert-Henderson Quality
of Life Indicators (updates on www.calvert-henderson.com). She participated
in The Roundtable on reform of global finance at the Earth Dialogues.