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.