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by Clare Overlander
March, 2004
For the majority of our world’s population, corporate globalization is neither free trade nor fair trade. It is not free because most of the governments of the two-thirds world, in accepting World Bank loans to improve their economies, have incurred enormous debt amounting to tens of thousands of dollars for every man, woman and child. Thus, much of the return on the sale of a country’s products must go to pay interest on these loans.
But that assumes that much of the population of these countries might, absent the debt payments, be able to sell their own native products such as corn from Mexico, coffee from El Salvador, or cotton, copper and gold from African nations. However, along with the loans and their huge interest burdens come programs in which the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and trade agreements direct the types of products sold and the local government’s relationship to its workers concerning social security, health insurance, workers compensation and the like. Thus, globalization does not result in fair trade.
We don’t have to go far from home to see how this works. In El Salvador, where campesinos had worked the land for hundreds of years, including the small subsistence plots kept to feed their own families, this land has been confiscated in direct and indirect ways. The government has discouraged campesino-initiated cooperatives and slowly taken huge portions of the land to grow cash crops, such as table flowers sold here in Massachusetts. The same has happened in Kenya where northern out-of-season crops are grown for the European market. These huge farms are controlled by multinational agri-businesses that pay their farm workers (most of whom are women) about $2.10 for a 46 hour week, and provide them with poor quality, if not downright dangerous, housing.
In Mexico, the city of Nogales which is on the U.S. border opposite Nogales, Arizona, hasn’t changed its infrastructure in 40 years, even though the free-trade zone has caused the population to swell to 10 times its former size.
These “maquilas” are the places where multinational textile and electrical manufacturers have relocated their plants to lower the costs of production by paying less than subsistence wages and few taxes. Workers are paid about $4-$8 per day, and the World Bank is pressuring the Mexican government to eliminate their social security coverage.
These are a tiny handful of statistics that begin to paint the picture of how our U.S. American lifestyle is dependent on and supports unjust economic and social structures. For most of us, however, it is the experience of recognizing the women, men and children trapped into these downward spirals, and seeing them as our brothers and sisters, that will motivate us to action: the goal of the globalization conference.