Robert Buddan, Contributor
ON APRIL 18, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in the United States about the urgent need for a new global order.
Brown wanted a new kind of World Bank, a bank for development and the environment, because one of the major crises of the modern world is climate change.
He wanted a new International Monetary Fund, one that prevented, not simply reacted to international financial crises because international capital movements need regulation, which is at the root of the Western world's economic crisis. He wanted a new United Nations and stronger regional organisations that involved the new emerging powers - India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa - because these countries were part of a new industrial revolution, where for example, Asia has become the workshop of the world and their exclusion marked a crisis of globalisation.
Brown wanted action against poverty and inequality, because such conditions bred violence and terrorism, which is another major world crisis. The Commonwealth has already agreed to form a task force to begin meeting as of June to get dialogue on change started.
The British prime minister conceived of nothing less than a comprehensive change in the world order, something of the scale of the Westphalia Treaty of the mid-17th century, the Post-Napoleonic settlements of the Congress of Vienna at the start of the 19th century and the world orders inaugurated after the two world wars of the 20th century, the Versailles and Bretton Woods settlements, respectively.
From our standpoint, these settlements either led to colonialism and slavery for the rest of us outside of Europe, or exclusion from the tables that decided what these world orders were to be like. The post-war Third-World Movement had tried to correct the ills of the Bretton Woods/Cold War system with visions of new world orders of its own.
The spokesmen, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India, had established the Non-Aligned Movement of countries in the 1950s and 1960s as a group not aligned to the US or Soviet blocs to promote world peace rather than the Cold War.
The Third World had also offered the New International Economic Order in the 1970s through leaders like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Michael Manley of Jamaica, Indira Gandhi of India and Fidel Castro of Cuba. They, too, called for reforms of trade, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the United Nations.
By 1980, US president Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to represent a neo-conservative counter movement and not even the German chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, or Michael Manley through the Brandt Commission and Socialist International, or Mikhail Gorbachev's new world order could prevail against what we now call neo-liberalism, where everything is opened up to market forces and the profit motive. It is the failure of neo-liberalism, that apparently now prompts Gordon Brown to announce his not-so new global vision. We see the results of that failure today in the crises of food, energy, climate, poverty, and violence.
The crisis of neo-liberalism
The crisis of global warming increases desertification leaving less land on which to grow food. Growing consumption by the expanding middle classes of India and China leave, less food for other countries. Oil-price increases come from growing demand by these rising powers and attract biofuel substitutes. The oil-price increases find their way into increased costs of production, such as for fertilisers and transport, and by putting more land into biofuel substitutes, food becomes relatively scarce and its prices rise.
All of this is leading to worldwide food riots.
But all of this is about the way neo-liberalism works. Agri-business corporations that are wiping out small farmers control world food production. According to the World Bank's 'World Development Report of 2008', the agricultural food business is now the second-most profitable in the world. Just like the oil multinationals which make huge profits from the rising price of oil, the agri-business corporations control the food value chain. The United Nations and many of its member governments on the other hand, are less and less able to respond to food emergencies. The IMF admits that inequality is rising even in the developed countries. Neo-liberalism has left people poorer and the world more unequal.
The agri-business corporations and their governments control prices paid to farmers, the cost of seeds and fertilisers, and control marketing, technology and transport. Independent, small farmers are really very marginal to the whole process.
Sharon Smith explains how this works: "The law of supply and demand has dictated that the new market for biofuels should reduce the production of corn for food by 25 per cent in the US, triggering a man-made shortage and a rise in corn prices. Speculators have been hoarding crops on the expectation that prices will rise further. Meanwhile, investors around the world have been fleeing the falling dollar to buy up commodities such as rice and wheat, adding to the speculative momentum and forcing staple prices higher for the world's poorest people".
In other words, the impersonal laws of supply and demand lead corporations, speculators and investors to create artificial food shortages to induce profitable price rises.
The next world order
Oil and food prices have once again exposed our vulnerability to the world economy and our inability to respond with agricultural, energy, and other policies that can immediately reduce their impact, not just on the poor, but the middle class as well. We are ecologically vulnerable, price-taking small-island dependent states.
Brown has called for globalisation for all, with countries pursuing alternative sources of energy while reducing carbon emissions and the World Bank spending billions to help them to benefit from transfers of finance and technology to these ends. He wants more help for failing states from stronger regional organisations, better conflict prevention and resolution, including more training for police and security to stabilise and reconstruct post-conflict countries. He talks about attacking global poverty by spending more on infrastructure, education, preventable disease and welfare, and somehow making free trade work for developing countries. Brown believes all of this should be underlined by a philosophy of fairness and justice, inter-faith dialogue around our common humanity, and by advancing democracy everywhere and opening up economies under new global rules.
New opportunity
Much of this is not new. It only presents a new opportunity to change the world order. It won't happen soon. Brown made his speech at the Kennedy Library and the Kennedys have endorsed Barack Obama for president. Brown's world order seems to stand the best chance with someone like Obama in office. One of the things Brown has not talked about, though, is how to tame the wild and mad rush for profits by multinationals, the very monster that neo-liberalism unleashed.
Brown must find ways of distributing cheaper oil, food, fertiliser, and drugs that are produced by India, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba and China, which the multinational corporations cruelly oppose. He must pull his troops out of Iraq as he had promised, for as Obama said, the US spends the equivalent of the aid it provided to Latin America last year in about a week in Iraq. There are many things to do but Mr. Brown has proposed dialogue, and we should talk with him.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
