We are at the gates of Hong Kong - the venue of the sixth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) - when this goes to print. Ministers and delegates from all WTO member nations will flock to this port city over the next week to try and fashion rules which will guide world trade in the coming years. There will be farmers from Korea, coffee growers from Brazil, industrialists from India and of course there will be the ministers the NGOs and many more. All will descend on that glittering port town to articulate their hopes and fears and possibly come back with a better deal for the constituency they represent. While Indian ministers will pitch for better deals in the negotiations on trade in services, their European counterparts will try hard to continue with the protection given by their countries to farmers. Cautious activists will try and buy time before the opening up of the services sector in developing nations to the winds of global commerce while certain powerful nations will band together pressing the South for better access to their markets for non-agricultural products.
More than ten thousand kilometers from Hong Kong and on a long and chilly night in Montreal, ten days ago, there was excitement of another kind. The labours of that endless night brought about a better deal for the environmental future of the planet. The 11th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came to a close in Montreal this past week with the happy news that countries have agreed to do more (beyond the 2012 commitment period) than they had previously pledged, to try and control the havoc that greenhouse emissions are causing to world climate systems. This was some news for cheer and perhaps all excepting US and Australian negotiators were happy.
In the backdrop of Montreal, Hong Kong does not look promising enough. While more and more countries join the WTO possibly with the hope of a better economic future some simple lessons seem to be passing into collective oblivion. Excepting for conscientious activists rarely do we hear about the pitfalls of a system that is bred on contradictions. The basic premise of gains from trade stands on the assumptions of Ricardian comparative advantage. This in simple terms translates to the cold logic of concentrating in doing what you do best and let the others provide for your other needs. Talking of international trade this means concentrating on export of goods and services in which you have some kind of advantage. The second premise that links trade with development is that of trickle-down, i.e. to say the gains thus accrued will percolate and reach everyone.
Sadly these premises are riddled with practical holes. For example who will guarantee that if I spend the first few years of post-college life cramped in call-centres, working difficult shifts and conversing in a peculiar language over phone, with unknown unseen people thousands of kilometers away, that this will not affect the development of my character as a responsible and balanced citizen? How would we justify the loss of indigenous varieties of crops because of the lure of cash crops for export markets and the strengthening grip of multinational seed companies (hawking genetically modified crops and other poisons) on the farmer? How would we ensure that the export earnings trickling into the bank accounts of businesses in leather, textile and clothing and other industries will be equitably distributed among the labour who toil for these industries? Would the state guarantee that in the race to export and export more and fast we will not turn a blind eye to the pollution caused by tanneries? Such questions in there hundreds bubble up in our minds. And sadly we get few answers.
We hear much about managing growth, but can myopic politicians be truly trusted to manage expertly. Can we trust those whose vision often extend to the next vote, to manage with a clear conscience? Doesn’t such managing actually often boils down to the creation of consent where consent is essential and forgetting the rest?
A farmer in India cultivating a rare indigenous variety of rice suddenly finds the lure of floriculture (which has a good export market) too hard to resist. In the process he gives up his age-old practice and begins to cultivate gladiolus and rose which is sold in Amsterdam flower markets. Then one day the Dutch find that Thai roses or Turkish gladiolus are better and cheaper or perhaps they lose their interest in the rose. Roses go out of fashion. The farmer is now in dire straits. He may die of hunger if he doesn’t migrate to the city into the clutches of urban poverty. With some more following his footsteps the indigenous variety of rice he grew would soon be lost.
Yet the worshipers of the deity of trade tend to ignore how dependent (and hence vulnerable) we (nations and peoples) become on one another when we begin to produce just for the other’s sake. Even with the changing geographies of a globalised production only the contours of those dependencies change. It is also mistakenly believed that human beings can be easily impressed upon to behave in a certain way. The mantra of trade-investment-competition led economic growth profanely assumes that human beings like robots can be turned into machines for producing goods and services, while consumerism will be the fuel that will keep them determined enough to work the next day. That individuals are not only economic entities but also social animals, culturally concerned, lovers of justice and liberty and so on are things they want to ignore and try to mange.
In the world of sleepy villages and choking cities, where men and women feel strongly for more things than just bank accounts and plasma TVs, the common cause of growth for growth’s sake, cannot survive without generation of consent and coercion. Generation of consent can take many forms, like the Hindu demon-king Mahisasura - can hide behind a myriad guises, from the seducing advertisements at metro stations to the spiel of a seasoned politician sold on progress. We give this the name of covert coercion. But coercion covert or overt soon begins to bite and the more sensitive (the underprivileged and the conscientious) are the first victims. Some fall to the lure of covert coercion, some die of disease or hunger, but still some stand up and protest and demand that their rights be upheld. In democracies this pull of opposites (the machinery of consent versus the souls of the conscientious and the affected) gravitates around a shaky equilibrium but in autocracies and dictatorships the situation is far worse. Obviously in democracies the management of consent has to be done in more refined ways than in a banana republic.
All movements of rights that colour the social fabric of nations big and small are protests against this tendency of coerced homogenisation for `greater ends’. Of course this attack is not only from the system that promotes trade and globalisation but from all entities and institutions and ideas which falsely reduces everything to profits and growth, hearts to greenbacks, minds and emotions to cash machines.
This is the system which hires thousands of women workers in sophisticated chip manufacturing and electronics industries - because this is something women excel in and this is a fast growing sector that adds to growth figures - but refuse to give them a stronger role in a nation’s political life. It’s the same amorphous immensely powerful entity which destroyed the lands of Ogoni people in Nigeria and put environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine others to death. It’s the hydra-headed demon at work that killed and maimed thousands in Bhopal because of their least regard for environmental safety or displaced local Sakai people from the forests of Indonesia to clear the forest gardens to feed their paper mills.
Trying to impose a structure where there is none can be dangerous. From Marxism to MTV the macabre dance of structures continue. Many of the problems that dog societies and people and nations around the world flows from this tendency to impose, to homogenise, neutralise and shall we say robotify. But we have to stand up against all such designs and strongly assert our human, cultural, environmental, gender and other rights. This is the least we can do for a better future. So let us clap the gay activists of Kolkata or the small farmers movement in Brazil or the brave soldiers of Narmada Bachao Andolan in India fighting against big dams; let us drop our coins for the Greenpeaces and the Medecins sans Frontières and other innumerable conscientious men and women out to fight for their legitimate rights the world over, out to break free from this gauntlet of homogenisation that seems ever closer each passing day. In this pleasant Calcutta December, with the push and shove of Hong Kong about to unfold before us, I somehow have cold Montreal and the cheery-weepy climate activists on my mind.
(Written by Rajat Chaudhuri and published in Southern Initiatives Journal of Sustainable Development, Vol I/III; Copyright, Southern Initiatives. All rights reserved.)
