Posted on 3-11-2003
A
Global Alternative
by Hazel Henderson, www.hazelhenderon.com
Brasil’s leadership in forming the Group of 21 (now 22) developing
nations
opened a new era in world trade at the Cancun WTO meeting. No
longer
will narrowly-calculated trade rules and negotiations trump
fairness and
higher human values and goals. Brasil’s President Luiz Inacio
Lula da
(Silva) has emerged as a world leader in alternative paths toward
sustainable economies. Also articulated at Cancun by Ricardo
Young
(Silva) of the Instituto Ethos de Empresas e Responsabilidade
Social, was
a new model of socially-responsible business management. He
called for
these higher standards of social and economic performance to
be
incorporated, along with full cost prices and life-cycle costing
into WTO
rules and accounting practices.
The new indicators of sustainable human development and quality-of-life
call into question the traditional GNP-growth model. The social
costs,
waste and ecological destruction of this obsolete model are
now
self-evident. The first international conference of world-class
statistical experts on these expanded national accounts, ICONS,
will
convene with Brasil’s leaders in these new statistics of sustainability
in
Curitiba, October 26-29, www.sustentabilidade.org.br.
The United Nations
Human Development Map shows that from 1991-2000 quality of life
has
increased in most Brasilian cities.
The obsolete neoliberal model applied to world trade, also drove
World
Bank advice, which led developing countries to focus on short-term
export-led growth – and resulted in many of today’s glutted
markets in
commodities: from coffee to computer chips. Such short-term
strategies,
often with tax-holidays, export platforms and reliance on cheap
labor,
minimum regulations and all the other Washington Consensus policies
have
led to today’s global “race to the bottom.”
The new Group of 22 has opened the door to a necessary struggle
between
powerful countries, corporations and financial interests versus
more
numerous, weaker developing countries, corporations, smaller
and
medium-sized enterprises, labor unions and civil society worldwide.
These
new global dynamics will be driven by electronic networks and
mass media
and the world’s newest superpower: global public opinion. Brasil
led in
founding the World Social Forum of alternative global thinking
to rival
the Davos-based World Economic Forum.
The WTO has been weakened, the IMF discredited as too aligned
with global
creditors and banks and the World Bank is still in the messy
process of
trying to change its paradigms. Awareness is growing about how
the
neoliberal world trade paradigm increases the power and wealth
of powerful
countries and corporations. Regional integration strategies,
including
MERCOSUR become more attractive to developing countries – including
eventually, a common currency to increase Latin-American trade
–
independent of US dollar, euro and sterling reserves.
|