BEN HIRSCHLER, Davos, Switzerland | Monday
SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki has led a group of political leaders in slamming globalisation for having failed the world’s poor, and called for reform of global institutions to protect the poverty-stricken.
Echoing street protests outside the World Economic Forum, Mbeki condemned the impoverishment of millions caught in Africa’s debt trap and the collapse of the Indonesian economy two years ago – both crises laid at the door of globalisation.
”When people talk about globalisation, what we see is a global world that is divided into two. There is a structural fault of poverty. On one side of that fault are the powerful and the wealthy; on the other side are the powerless and the poor,” he said.
The forum, a meeting of the business elite and annual celebration of global commerce, has been buffeted by an anti-globalisation movement that has gained momentum since clashes at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the world’s poor needed a better deal from the global economy.
”But it is not the case that most people would wish to reverse globalisation. It is that they aspire to a different and better kind than we have today.”
The Davos summit has made this year’s theme ”Sustaining growth and bridging the divides”.
In the eyes of John Sweeney, president of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations, the bid to smooth over the difficulties misses the point.
”This isn’t a public relations problem, this is a reality problem,” he said.
In discussions at the Davos forum over the last few days, political leaders from the South have produced a succession of examples to highlight how developing countries are disadvantaged in a world economy subject to increasing trade and capital flows.
”Attempts to sugar-coat the present form of globalisation with compensatory policies are not enough, not nearly enough in the very divided and unequal societies that now occupy so much of the globe,” Mexican President Vicente Fox said.
Yashwant Sinha, India’s finance minister, said the developing world did not need charity but needed the North to play fair.
”On April 1, India will lift its last quantitative restrictions on imports. But why do we have to wait until 2005 for restrictions on textiles and clothing to be lifted?” – Reuters