GLOBALIZATION

How globalization has had a positive effect on less developed countries

How globalization has had a positive effect on less developed countries

Introduction

Corporate campaign targets are now being expanded to include the crucial but often hidden players in globalization from above-private financial institutions. The Rainforest Action Network has launched a campaign against "the financiers of ecological destruction and human suffering," focusing on Citigroup, the largest private financial institution in North America. It highlights Citigroup's role as chief financial adviser in the Chad/Cameroon Oil and Pipeline Project in Africa, which will pollute pristine rainforest and disrupt indigenous forest communities; its role in financing redwood logging operations in California; its firing of unionized janitors; its financing of Monsanto and other genetic engineering companies; its role in predatory lending and denial of loans to African-Americans; and its profits from prison construction and privatization. (Hutton, Will and Giddens, Anthony, 2000, 65-78)

Explanation

The campaign to restrict genetically modified organisms forced Monsanto and US negotiators earlier this year to accept the Cartagena Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity, allowing GMOs to be regulated. Greenpeace called the protocol "a historic step toward protecting the environment and consumers from the dangers of genetic engineering." Monsanto not only accepted the protocol, it announced a decision to withdraw from the business of selling sterile seeds and to participate in a dialogue with Greenpeace. (Hutton, Will and Giddens, Anthony, 2000, 65-78)

This example shows the multilevel strategies that globalization from below is using to parlay its power. While asserting authority superior to the WTO, the protocol also illustrates the crucial positive role that international institutions can play in limiting the depredations of global corporations and markets. And it empowered national governments to regulate GMOs and the corporations that purvey them. The campaign put pressure both on governments and directly on corporations like Monsanto, while other governments put pressure on the US government, a leading force against regulation of GMOs. It may well have been the pressure on Monsanto and its resultant change of heart that changed the position of the US government. (Hutton, Will and Giddens, Anthony, 2000, 65-78)

Globalization-from-below activists are also intervening in sophisticated ways in national politics. When South Africa tried to pass a law allowing it to ignore drug patents during health emergencies, the Clinton Administration lobbied hard against it and put South Africa on a watch list that is the first step toward trade sanctions. But then Philadelphia ACT UP began hounding presidential candidate Al Gore on the issue. According to the New York Times, "The banners saying that Mr. Gore was letting Africans die to please American pharmaceutical companies left his campaign chagrined. After media and campaign staff looked into the matter, the Administration did an about-face" and, while certainly not doing enough to make AIDS drugs available, accepted African governments' circumvention of AIDS drug patents. (Hutton, Will and Giddens, Anthony, 2000, 65-78)

No doubt The Economist exaggerated when it wrote that the new wave of protest around globalization is "more than a mere nuisance: it is getting ...