What does economic globalization mean for millions of hungry people and poverty-level farmers? There are both opportunities and dangers, says a recent report from the Bread for the World Institute.
The Institute, whose membership consists mainly of religious organizations such as the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, is plainly nervous about the emergence of a global marketplace dominated by giant corporations. “The global marketplace has replaced the Cold War as the structure dominating international behavior,” says the report, Hunger in a Global Economy. “Global communications and the global economy are manufacturing the largest social change since the industrial revolution.”
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It notes a 1996 United Nations study that found 51 of the world’s top 100 economies were corporations’ internal economies: “A mere 200 corporations, linked together by strategic alliances and interlocking boards, account for 29 percent of world economic activity.”
Meanwhile, a quarter of the human race lives in poverty (less than $1 a day income) and 841 million people, one out of seven, are chronically malnourished. How can an increasingly unregulated, corporate-driven economy address their needs?
The report recognizes that trade liberalization can help developing nations – for example, opening previously closed export markets for their farmers, or ending harm done to farmers through another country’s subsidized food exports.
But it also warns that a more open global marketplace can bring more volatile price swings, even threatening some areas with starvation when crops fail and prices are high.
Even controversial new intellectual property rights, like patents on new types of seed, “will have some good effects for poor farmers,” encouraging more productive technology.
But, again, increased risk will come with those benefits – higher input costs will leave farmers more vulnerable to crop failure.
Rather than urging opposition to such inevitable global trends, the Institute makes a persuasive case that governments should set up a global safety-net system, assembling food and financial resources to aid countries that may become temporary victims of the new global economy.
Other recommendations include adequate funding for global seed banks, to preserve genetics that might be lost in the rush to adopt proprietary new varieties, and for basic agricultural research. Free-enterprise forces can bring many benefits, but governments still have major responsibilities to the world’s food producers and consumers.
