Hollow and speculative?

1,500,000,000,000...one and a half trillion...dollars are exchanged each day around the globe, the number of international telephone calls has doubled in the last four years alone. 44,000 companies are global today-compared to 3,500 in the 1960s. "For some", said Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former President of Costa Rica, "the new economic system meant being able to make investments with a worldly perspective, minimizing labour costs and maximizing profits. For others, it meant facing the end of job security and, at the same time, witnessing the reappearance of sweatshops" The frantic quest for quick riches had created a hollow, speculative economy, unattached to human labour and unaccountable to human need, he continued.

Mr. Arias took issue with the fact that the world's three richest individuals had assets exceeding the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the poorest 48 countries and that 1.3 billion people still lived on incomes of less than a dollar a day. And, although globalization opened up great opportunities to the world' s less developed countries, it is not as inclusive as it should be. The revolution in information technology, led by the Internet, for example, allows poorer countries to leap-frog stages in technology advances. But the access costs are very high. "Reform of the costs of service provision is very important", Kwesi Botchwey, the Director for Africa Research and Programmes, Center for International Development of Harvard University, stressed.

Globalization indeed does not only mean Internet-shopping or new trade records as companies are looking for the lowest production costs. Martha Ojeda, Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras (factories), said free trade came to Mexico in 1994 with a lot of promises, but it turned out to be a failure for many. Workers in maquiladoras were underpaid and exposed to dangerous chemicals and rampant sexual harassment. "International labour agreements required teeth-to-force implementation", she argued, quoting assessments that per capita income has risen 13 per cent in the United States in the last five years, while in Mexico it fell 70 per cent from its 1994 mark. Craig Kielberger, Chairman of Free the Children, said that the true face behind globalization included children as young as nine who lived and worked in garbage dumps (see photograph), trying to find something to help them survive.

"One hundred forty million, one Out of five, between six and eleven were not in school'; he said, adding that his organization worked worldwide not only to free children from child labour, but also to empower them. Global organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank need to do more to address abuses of human rights of children, he noted. Since 1919, more than 14 Conventions had banned child labour, but all those good words had not been implemented.

Global vulnerability to forces outside its control were dramatized when a session of the meeting dealing with environmental issues was cancelled when Hurricane Floyd passed through New York. But there was agreement of a great deal within human capacity to realize. "One of the absolute underpinnings of globalization was a global social welfare system. Basic human services must be available for the world's poor", UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown said. Mr. Arias pointed out that true democracy was not merely the distribution of political power, but also the distribution of economic power.

The most exciting breakthmugh of the next century would not be in technological advancements, but in the expanding concept of what it meant to be human and how "humanness" could be globalized, said Elaine Valdov, Chairperson of the NGO/DPI Executive Committee. And Mark Harrison, representing the United Methodist Church, knows which direction he is going to take after the Conference's last panel: "I think we will keep on doing what we have ever done."

The United Nations Department of Public Information's fifty-second annual "DPI/NGO" Conference brought together 800 non-governmental organizations with officials of the United Nations system, Governments and representatives of civil society in examining the impact of globalization on people around the world. The private sector could not by itself give global markets a human face, nor could it reach the millions of margins, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a message to the Conference held in September, whose theme was "Challenges of a Globalized World. Finding New Directions." Comprehenseive approached were required to the threats to human security posed by marginalization poverty and human rights abuses, Queen Noor al-Hussein of Jordan observed.