Flavours of Globalisation

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The information on this page has not been verified or updated since the 2003 hardcopy version of the GreenGuide. Its accuracy is therefore uncertain. Please help to verify this page and update it if necessary.

The problem is not “loss of national sovereignty”, or the increase in interconnectedness amongst the world’s peoples, but how it is currently happening. Trade has a potential to be a useful way to benefit some of the poorest people on the planet, and maybe even the environment, but not if trade is organised purely to benefit the already-megarich. The way international trade is currently going, it is an environmental and social disaster.

It seems that every time we negotiate an international treaty, it happens quickly if it will help out the rich, but can take forever it is is to help the poor or the planet as a whole - witness G.W Bush’s recent pronouncement regarding the Kyoto Protocol. And yet, barely a year goes by without more powers being granted to the WTO, the World Trade Organisation. And the WTO has a terrible track record in taking into consideration social and environmental concerns. For example: the WTO typically forbids discriminating between products that have been produced in an environmentally sound manner, and products that were produced with heaps of pollution or dolphin killing or whatever. Some examples: In May 1999 the USA tried to use the WTO to force the European Union to drop its ban on beef contaminated with 6 hormones at least one of which gave kids cancer. The WTO charged the EU $117 Million dollars of sanctions as punishment. The US continues to threaten to use the WTO to prevent labelling of GE foods, and may make the EU have to drop its plans to make polluting electronics manufactures responsible for recycling their own products.

Humans must make a transition to products with more environmentally sensitive production methods if they are to reduce the negative environmental effects of their consumption. Two methods to encourage this transition are productlabelling schemes based on a life cycle assessment of a product’s environmental impact (“eco-labelling”) and “handling” policies prescribing the producer’s responsibility for recovery and safe disposal, re-use or recycling of their products. These schemes are illegal under the WTO. We are often sold these restrictions on the basis that they will help the poor. But it seems these benefits have largely failed to materialise for those in most need. In 1990 the richest 20% of the world’s citizens earned 60 times that of the poorest 20%. In 1997 this had risen to 74 times, today it is 86 times. Developing countries are also losing their share of world trade. When World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum listed “narrowing the gulf between rich and poor” as one of his “Seven Challenges of Globalisation” he effectively admitted: that globalisation must be made to work for the world’s poor because a more equitable distribution of world incomes is not a natural consequence of the current system of global governance. What can we do? Well, it helps if we can do a bit of thinking for ourselves about the social and ecological consequences of the trade that we participate in, and all of us do participate in it, every day. Many products that we purchase in the supermarket come from overseas, and they are often produced by underpaid labour, or in environmentally unsound conditions. We look at coffee and clothes in this chapter, but the same thinking can apply to everything from Italian pasta to Indonesian-made shoes to imported Korean cars. Think about who made your product, how and how it got to you. Was it sent to Canberra using a fuel-wasting plane, or an efficient ship? What would the workers who made it have been paid? Did it produce pollution to manufacture, somewhere else on the planet? There are organisations that can help you work out what sort of hidden costs your imported products cost. Try New Internationalist Magazine www.newint.org, or the groups listed in the “coffee and clothes” article. And maybe you could think about approaching our own government to support labelling of environmentally and socially sound products... Remember, globalisation doesn’t have to be about ripping off the poor. It can be about sharing knowledge, co-operation, and helping each other out, no matter which country we are born in.

For more information on any of the facts in this essay, consult researcher Kathryn Smith, u3239338@anu.edu.au.

Coffee and Tea

Currently, within Australia it’s much easier to find organic food brands than fair trade ones. This has a lot to do with the fact that Australia doesn’t have a labelling system for fair trade products. However, it is important to support fair trade brands when you can, not only because these brands are often certifiably organic, but also for the sake of those coffee and tea producers in ‘developing countries’ who are continuously ripped off by the giant multinational food corporations, including Nestle (whose brands include Nescafe and Gold Blend), Kraft (Maxwell House, Jacobs, Café Hag), and Sara Lee (Douwe Egberts, Moccona and Harris).

Products like coffee and tea are ideal fair trade products in that they require no additional ingredients and simple processing - hence the fairness of the trade taking place between growers and shipping and roasting companies can be relatively easily assured.

Coffee and tea growers appreciate the fair deals that fair trade companies give them, including better prices for their produce and increased access to world markets. They show this through giving such companies their best produce.

Clothing

As with fair trade coffee and tea products, fair trade clothing often uses organically produced textiles in its production. Buying fair trade clothing also ensures that the garments you wear were not made under ‘sweatshop’ conditions where (mostly female and minority) workers in free trade zone factories within ‘developing countries’, and illegal sweatshops within ‘developed countries’, are treated like dirt/animals/appendages of a machine, working under conditions that violate their rights as workers and human beings, while receiving only a few cents a day for the ‘privilege’.

Making a difference through buying organic and fair trade products By buying fair trade products you actively boycott companies that exploit ‘Third World’ labour and resources. Yet, it’s little use avoiding mainstream brands unless you tell the companies that own these brands that you are doing so, and the reasons why. Many of the fair trade web sites listed above offer information on how to go about informing companies of your reasons for boycotting their products. Some even offer examples of emails to send to companies (for example, the Starbucks Fairtrade Campaign at http://www.organicconsumers.org/starbucks/). A simple way of informing companies of your actions is to phone up the information or consumer lines listed on their products, or to simply look up their contact details online or in phone directories. And, most importantly, tell everyone you know about what you’re doing and why as well!

External Links

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