Problems with Globalisation�

John Bunzl

The following presentation was made to business students of the Said Business School, Oxford, UK recently by John Bunzl,� founder of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation, on the subject "Problems with Globalisation". �

As a businessman, as well as an activist and author, I�m delighted to have this opportunity of talking to business students about the "problems with globalisation".

Although there are many problematic symptoms of corporate globalisation, I suggest there�s really only one underlying causal problem; the problem of destructive competition. "Destructive", because although most business people, economists and politicians instinctively take competition to be exclusively beneficial, it can, in fact, be either constructive or destructive � it has two sides, not just one. Indeed, whether it�s the World Cup or competition in the global economy, competition is only constructive if it occurs within a framework of proper, democratic governance. Without it, it becomes a destructive �free-for-all� with its own negative dynamic which in the long-run will benefit no one. And increasingly that�s the situation we have today under corporate globalisation.

So how does this �destructive competition� manifest itself? Well, since policies which encourage ecological and social sustainability generally cost industry more, governments resist imposing them for fear of capital or corporations moving elsewhere and of the knock-on consequences of capital flight, inflation, unemployment and a loss of votes. Businesses, too, resist the implementation of environmentally responsible technology, not because it cannot be done but because increased costs will reduce their competitiveness. Mergers and acquisitions and their attendant job losses also occur, not so much out of greed, but out of fear for companies to retain competitive advantage and relative safety from themselves becoming the targets of hostile takeovers. And national governments often permit increasing corporate consolidation against the public interest for fear of their own corporations becoming uncompetitive with those of other countries. Governments also pay vast sums of tax-payers money in corporate welfare to compete for inward investment and of course the corporations happily play one government off against another. Net result? Corporations win � and society and the environment loses. Developing countries too, must compete with one another to attract investment from foreign multinationals by submitting to IMF-imposed �structural adjustment� allowing their raw materials to be plundered, their forests clear-cut and their indigenous peoples displaced.

To sum it up therefore, today, the main barrier to solving the problems with globalisation is destructive international competition and the fear it induces in national governments � a fear which prevents them from regulating in the social or environmental interest. The problem, in a nutshell therefore, is that democratic governance today remains essentially national whilst business and markets have already become truly global. Democratic governance

seed-varieties.4

In this way, the world�s future food supply is �more efficiently managed� by corporately engineered mutant food products. Thus Promar International confides to those made anxious by this prospect: �The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded that there�s nothing you can do about it. You sort of surrender.�5

John McMurtry, F.R.S.C.
Professor of Philosophy

University of Guelph

This article is adapted from McMurtry, John (2002). Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy. London: Pluto.

1. The for-profit takeover of public research funding in biological and bio-tech research was initiated by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1981 which authorized profit from patented research for University-corporate �research partnerships.� Once thus positioned, fund-subordinated scientists and directive corporate sponsors selected only for what reduced costs and what increased profits of corporate sponsors as worthy of research funding, with proprietary secrecy and �confidentiality� surrounding the process, its results, and its criteria of funding selection.

2. A striking example of the dangers involved here is reported by Mark Ritchie, �GE Release Could Have Ended Life on Earth,� Third World Resurgence, 129/30, 2001, pp. 2-3.

3. In nearby France, despite a moratorium on all GMOs since 1997, 40% of maize seeds and crops of centuries of generational selection have been contaminated according to the French Agriculture and Food Safety Program (�Precautions Fail to Halt Spread of GM Elements in Food Chain,� Guardian Weekly, August 2-8, 2001, p. 25).

4. Of 75 types of vegetables available at the beginning of the 20th century, 97% of the varieties of each type are now extinct (The New Internationalist, March 1991, p. 3).

5. Surrender of the British people to GMOs has been assured as far as possible by the Blair government in other ways. Lord Sainsbury, former Chair of the Food Chain Group and friend of the US and British GMO lobbies, Montsanto and the Bio-industry Association, with whom he travels, and also founder of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre for genetic engineering, sits in Cabinet as Minister of the Trade and Industry�s Office of Science and Technology and directs government scientific funding to, among others, this very genetic engineering Centre. While the public�s choice for non-genetically engineered organic food outstripped domestic supply by 200% and demand for GMO foods was �approximately zero,� Blair-government funding in 1999 was over 30 times greater for GMO foods than for organic foods, and huge propaganda grants from the public purse were simultaneously given to promote GMOs (Monbiot, George [2001]. Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. London: Macmillan, pp.�272-75).

�from Economic Reform, August 2002