The Haves Must Help the Have-Nots

What role can globalization play in eradicating world poverty, for poverty puts an inhuman, outcast mask on more than 3 billion of our world population?

There is no question that we have the resources and the technology to achieve solutions to the problem of our co-existence on one planet, as was confirmed in a declaration, “The Eradication of Poverty,” of the United Nations General Assembly in 1997.

Overwhelmingly, inequality lies on the axis North-South of our maps. Some gains in South-South initiatives have been realized, but there remains for southern and other poor countries unequal access to the benefits of a globalizing economy.

The haves have the bases of communications and financial infrastructure to facilitate such access, which the have-nots do not have. Bhagirath Lal Das, former director of international trade at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, reports that developed countries consider developing countries as “geographical areas, which should be utilized for the benefit of their own economic partners.”

If globalization is to have a human face, its premise must be that development is about people in interaction on the planet we have occupied, so far, without sharing.

It will not be achieved, however, through worldwide shopping on the Internet. In our century, consumption has grown unprecedentedly, reaching around $24 trillion in 1998. But the spending and devouring spree, far from widely benefiting the poor, in some aspects has undermined the truly human prospects for globalization: sustainable human development for all.

Runaway consumption by the developed world has eroded resources such as fossil fuels, forests and fishing grounds; polluted local and global environments, and pandered to the promotion of needs of people to conspicuously display wealth in place of fulfilling the legitimate needs of life.

Those of us who have been the generations of big consumers need to consume less, but for more than 1 billion of the world’s poorest people, increased consumption is a matter of life and death and a basic right: the right to freedom from want. And this is not want of food and clean water alone; there are other forms of want: literacy, technological skills--the basic qualifications for benefiting from globalization.

Whose responsibility is it to bring these things about? That of many, international and national.

It is the responsibility of the organizations that control the balance of world finance between rich and poor countries.

It is the responsibility of the European Community, which flouts the principles of globalization through its blatant protectionism.

It is the responsibility of national governments to bring about just consumerism. Theirs is a legal one: the framing of laws in each country for justice in the access to and share of its resources.

It is the responsibility of international law, an aspect of globalization long contested in respect to fishing rights, for example, and now in the essential process of establishing an international criminal court. For globalization posits the most difficult secular morality possible: a moral authority above all those individual ones of component countries.

It is the responsibility of nongovernmental and civic organizations, both in building human capability and in ensuring that projects are not imposed upon people according to others’ ideas of their needs. Let the remnants of the age of social engineering be deeply buried in the 20th century, not with a backward glance but a shudder.

If we are realistic, we have to see that on the doorstep of the new century there is a new threat to globalization with a human face: 35% of our world is in recession. On the continent of Africa, almost a dozen countries are in strife--more millions, driven homeless and starving, to swell the globe’s 3 billion poor. The people of Iraq join them as victims of their own leader’s megalomanic tyranny and a tangle of oil market rivalries outside. In Russia, winter freezes over impoverished people in their disillusion with international openness in trade and investment.

We know what we must not do is allow the shadow of a world economic recession that fell upon 1998 to be an excuse to postpone the responsibility of the developed world to pursue the eradication, rather than Band-Aid amelioration, of poverty that exists alongside economic globalization. Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls--when it sounds in one stock exchange, its notes reverberate throughout the world, shaking the haves as well as casting down even further the have-nots.

Global free markets mean nothing in the end if there is no one coming to buy. Even the most complacent acceptors of the division of the world’s resources between rich and poor must come to realize that the billions of fellow men and women in abject poverty are in co-existence with them, not safely quarantined in isolation.

Financier George Soros said, “There are collective interests that don’t find expression in market values.” Perhaps the members of the U.N. Security Council--Britain, China, France, Russia, the U.S.--who enrich their national economies by selling arms for the globe’s conflicts and wars, will hear when Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Laureate in economics, said of production of arms, “Human benefits that flow by redirecting these forces can be remarkably large,” and when the U.N.’s Kofi Annan said, “No development without peace; no peace without development.”

Without these, there will be no globalization with a human face.