China - the Ultimate Bottom Line

China, like Russia, has seen conditions for the majority worsen as both countries have opened up to the market. Should China join the WTO things will worsen both internally and for their Third World Competitors for export markets.� Wages and conditions will remain very low and probably worsen. An estimated 100 million people have already left the land in search for work in towns and cities, thought to be the biggest migration in human history. WTO membership will result in cheap food imports, thus accelerating rural decline and the move to urban centres. In addition it is expected a further 150 million jobs will be lost as 'inefficient' state enterprises are made ready for international competition. Whatever the actual final numbers, this trend will ensure a permanent cheap labour force whose products will undercut workers in other developing countries as well as in the North.

When Canada removed cotton T-shirts from quota restrictions in 1997, China gained 95% of its market - at the expense of Bangladesh. Mohammed Uzair Afzal, chief executive of the Bangladesh garment manufacturers expressed worry having seen the Chinese government's forecasts suggesting that its garment exports will double over the next few years, as the Multi-fibre Agreement is phased out by 2005 and their country joins the WTO.

Those who imagine that wide open markets in the North will help the poor of the South should consider what third worlds exporters options will be should for example China's textile exporters fulfil what they perceived as their potential for producing all the world's textile needs by this 2005 deadline.

To point this out is not to be anti Chinese, but anti the impoverishing effects that Globalization is already having on China. These trends must serve as a wakeup call to highlight the implications for their competitors, and for those who propose an export led route to poverty alleviation for the South in general.

However� both Government and those who call for a fairer world for the poor seem mesmerised by Mrs Thatcher's corrosive legacy of TINA- 'there is no alternative' to globalisation. This leaves them mentally stranded with only the option of weak tinkerings to try and ameliorate this processes excesses.

A New Development Agenda -Trade and Aid for Localism

A far more radical approach is urgently needed. It must not encourage further downward spirals of ruthless competition, but instead facilitate the building up and diversification of local economies globally. This end goal will be major engine for change that will help bring about conditions to meet the needs of the poor majority. But such a major transition requires the grass roots movements and the development lobby to campaign actively for it. Governments at present all subscribe to the 'globalisation is like gravity' school, and so will have to be forced by the politically active to dramatically change to become the initial driving force for such a change.

Today's global trade rules must be replaced by a General Agreement for Sustainable Trade.� Aid, technological transfer and the residual international trade should be geared to the building up of sustainable local economies. The goal should be to foster maximum employment through sustainable regional self reliance.

Not surprisingly such fatalism grips most politicians, concerned as they are with the day to day juggling of the status quo. Less understandable is that far too many concerned citizens and organisations working for a fairer world also seem to have been bamboozled into accepting� globalisation and international competitiveness as inevitable. Yet these are not God given. Indeed the briefest perusal of the Bible's Ten Commandments reveals that there is not a single Commandment saying, 'Thou shalt be internationally competitive'.� It's a modern construct, elevated to a theology.

What is required is for the politically active to undergo a 'mindwrench' away from acquiescence to the new theology of globalisation towards considering the possibility of its replacement with a localism that protects and rebuilds local economies worldwide. This 'mindwrench' requires courage, almost of the order of an economic 'coming out', in order to reject the orthodoxy's ceaseless mantra chant of the need for international competitiveness. It needs to challenge head on this constant reiteration by a self-serving priesthood of mainstream economists, commentators and the new 'masters of the universe'- big business leaders and international financiers.

The clarion call to be internationally competitive has become so powerful that it has infected the thinking of those who should know better. These include trades unionists, small businesspeople, farmers, and those concerned about making commerce more ethical and environmental. All seem duty bound to pepper their public utterances with fervent assurances that were their aims to be achieved, then it will hurry society further down the path to international competitiveness.

The global commandment that every nation must contort its economy to outcompete every other country is an economic, social and environmental nonsense. It is a beggar-your-neighbour act of economic warfare. There have to be losers, because no matter how much a specific market may be growing, if its needs can be supplied by a competing range of outside sources, then large numbers, often the domestic producers, have to lose.

Bringing about the Change in Direction

Localisation-a process which reverses the trend of globalisation by discriminating in favour of the local.