Another World is Possible: Freedom from Corporate Globalization

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No one in this emerging movement—absolutely no one—predicts that it will be simple to challenge the immense power of transnational corporations. Their clout far exceeds that of any government. Even the United States has been forced to weaken the Clean Air Act and protections on endangered species like dolphins under pressure from the corporate-dominated World Trade Organization (WTO). Jerry Mander, founder and president of the International Forum on Globalization (see our field guide to the movement in the following pages), predicts that pressure from the WTO will also force us to scale back pesticide protection laws and auto fuel efficiency standards.

Mander, one of the foremost analysts of globalization, outlines in Tikkun magazine (Sept./Oct. 2001) how corporations flex their muscles thanks to a series of little understood international trade deals. The World Trade Organization, created in 1995 as part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty, has the power to impose stiff economic penalties on nations that it believes are imposing unfair restrictions on the flow of international commerce. But in reality, the WTO is a friendly forum for corporations wanting to stifle national laws (usually health, environment, or labor standards) that dampen their profits. Guatemala, Mander notes, enacted a law preventing infant formula and baby food ads from making the medically dubious claim that their products were healthier than breast milk. The United States, on behalf of the giant Gerber Corporation, challenged this law at the WTO as a restraint of trade. Guatemala, fearing that WTO trade sanctions would devastate its economy, rescinded the law even before a verdict was handed down. Thus, the Gerber Corporation, working through intermediaries in the WTO, squashed a promising public health measure enacted by the Guatemalan people’s democratically elected representatives. The same thing happened with a Canadian ban on MMT, a gasoline additive known to cause Parkinson’s Disease–like symptoms.

Vandana Shiva, a physicist and environmental activist from India (one of eight key figures in the movement profiled on the following pages), points out, “Globalization isn’t new; we in the Third World are very familiar with it. We used to call it colonization.” What’s new in the current debate is that traditional patterns of life and livelihood are now being disrupted in places like Indiana and Austria along with Indonesia and the Ivory Coast.

Pro-local activists are often dismissed as isolationists, not only by corporate defenders but even by many liberals who presume that globalization is the best way for everyone to experience the cultural richness of the world: Eastern wisdom, Italian food, African music, Latin American literature. But, in truth, the continuing march of globalization will leave us with a world stripped of diversity and wonder. Corporations working in 140 countries do not want to accommodate themselves to the customs and culture of each place. They want to impose standards so that doing business in the Congo will be much like doing business in Canada. (And, of course, corporations would like to see wages, worker protections, and environmental regulations in the industrialized world closer to the level of poor nations.)

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