José María Figueres, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and former President of Costa Rica, and Ignacio Ramonet, co-founder of the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, founder of the ATTAC campaign, and director of the Le Monde Diplomatique, this morning searched for common ground in a public dialogue on globalization.

By Andrew Stallybrass, Christoph Spreng

José María Figueres, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and former President of Costa Rica, and Ignacio Ramonet, co-founder of the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, founder of the ATTAC campaign, and director of the Le Monde Diplomatique, this morning searched for common ground in a public dialogue on globalization.

Both speakers agreed on the ‘immoral, unethical and unsustainable’ nature of global poverty, in the words of Figueres, who noted that the cows he passes on his way to work near Geneva receive higher subsidies (some $5 per day) than the third of humanity who live on less than $1 per day. Figueres pleaded for enlightened self-interest, to rise to ‘the greatest challenge, to advance towards a global civilization with more inclusiveness, more solidarity, that is safer’. Human development, health and education needed to be given as much importance as other indicators, Figueres said.

Ramonet claimed that many of the prophets of a liberal globalization, who ten years ago were preaching it as ‘a miracle solution to every problem,’ were now speaking out about its dangers. Men like George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz could not be accused of being wild leftist enemies of the system. 400 American millionaires were earning more than the 166 million Africans in the countries that George W. Bush was currently visiting, he noted. The United States gave its own cotton growers more than three times the total of its aid budget to Africa. He quoted the just-published report on the United Nations Development Programme, which says that 54 countries, representing a quarter of humanity, have actually become poorer through the 1990s. The UN’s development targets are being pushed further into the next century for many of the most vulnerable, and ‘while we are meeting, 2,500 children will die of easily treatable diseases’. In the same way that the Fall of the Berlin Wall had signalled the failure of state socialism, the collapse of Argentina in 1999 had demonstrated ‘that the Gospel of globalization does not work’, he said. But Figueres disputed this – the World Economic Forum leader blamed ‘bad governance and poor political leadership’ more than external economic forces.

Figueres’ more up-beat view – the environment was ‘a business opportunity rather than a cost’ – contrasted with Ramonet’s more sombre picture. Ramonet noted however that ‘globalization is not to blame for the world’s inequalities – but it wasn’t helping to solve them either’. He called for a change of philosophy, of model, condemning a world were animals seemed to rate higher than humans. In his analysis, the world had very rapidly moved from ‘a capitalism of production’ to a ‘capitalism of financial flows’ – in 1950, their respective ‘shares of the cake’ had been 95% and 5% - and now these figures were reversed. Economics had taken the place of religion or war as the guiding power at the heart of our civilization, he believed. ‘The market and the state are in conflict; the market seeks to reduce the state to the minimum,’ he went on, the individual and the collective were in conflict, as were values of selfishness and values of solidarity. Politicians were encouraged to run their states like businesses.

Figueres noted that the World Economic Forum was only a forum, ‘a platform for dialogue, to look at the global challenges, to seek a broader understanding’, ‘a catalyst for action’, and offered ‘strategic insight’ as the hub of a knowledge network. For the Costa Rican, the four great challenges were that globalization’s spread was unequal and left too many feeling excluded and frustrated; that democracies were perceived as failing to deliver the goods, and citizens felt divorced from their leaders; that no-one seemed to take effective responsibility for the global commons (like the sea); and finally that the current international institutions seemed unable to address these problems.

For Ramonet, the Porto Allegre forum was a ‘united people’s’ meeting, in contrast with the United Nations; it brought together ‘the victims of the pitiless economy’, 120,000 people, without demonstrations. But many still presented the social forum as a movement of protest, when it was in fact putting forward solutions: the elimination of Third World debt; the outlawing of tax havens, ‘the havens of the corrupt’; and the Tobin Tax on international currency transactions. ‘Tobin wasn’t Lenin or Stalin, even though the names rhymed’ but an American economist and Nobel Prize-winner, he said, noting that there had been massive resistance to the introduction of income tax. In his view, there was less resistance to the Tobin Tax, and it would be easier to introduce.

Hi-tech didn’t provide easy answers, Ramonet said. He quoted the example of President Toledo of Peru, who had come to power proclaiming that he would connect every school to the Internet, without taking into account that the backward areas of his country had no schools to start with, and that half of the schools had no electricity or phone connections.

The moderator, former Canadian Ambassador Kimon Valaskakis, now promoting the ‘Club of Athens’ to promote global good governance, in his closing remarks expressed surprise that the two speakers seemed so close in their diagnosis of the world’s problems. Figueres and Ramonet were speaking in the old-fashioned splendour of the former Caux-Palace Hotel, now the international conference centre of Initiatives of Change, within sight of Evian where the recent G8 meeting was held. Ambassador Roderick Abbott, Deputy Director General of the World Trade Organization will give a Caux Lecture this afternoon on the theme “The Global Trading System: Free, Fair or Foul”.

The 2003 Caux Conference for Business and Industry, on the theme: ‘Globalization . . . as if people really mattered’, aims to bring a new dimension to the globalization debate, one based on trust and collaboration rather than protest and destruction. The conference runs to 15th July 2003. For additional information and complete conference information, visit www.cauxinitiativesforbusiness.org or contact: www.cauxinitiativesforbusiness.org

Conference Report

What do you think? Send your comments to Caux Initiatives for Business.

© Caux Initiatives for Business, 2003