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“No Limos, No Cameras, No Headlines: No G7…Only P7”

By Frances Moore Lappé

Editorial published by Guerrilla News Network, December 2002

True, it was a gathering of national leaders last week at the European Parliament in Brussels, but I saw no limousines disembarking men in dark suits, no news cameras flashing. This was clearly not a gathering of the G7, now G8. It was instead the P7, now P8…countries –- including Haiti, Senegal, the Philippines, Mali –- which are among the world’s poorest. Although P7 has gathered annually for five years (this session focusing on food and farming), I’ve yet to meet an American who has heard of it.

These leaders from the world’s poorest countries aren’t preoccupied with the threat of future terrorism, as we are here at home, I quickly realized. They are consumed with the already-present threat they see to their people’s survival. Corporate globalization is one term they use for that threat.

Over three days, the P7, organized by the Greens in the European Parliament, prepared a report card, in effect, on the promise of corporate globalization: the notion that prosperity will follow if only the public’s role gives way to market forces in shaping domestic economic and social development as well as trade.

This unquestioned faith in market outcomes is actually the most threatening form of fundamentalism, warned the honorary president of P7, Indian physicist turned pro-economic-democracy advocate, Dr. Vandana Shiva, as the meeting opened. She described one outcome in her own country: Under the rules of World Trade Organization and IMF-style globalization, the Indian government shrunk its longstanding role in keeping grain prices within reach of the poor. So 50 million Indians now suffer on the brink of starvation, she said, while 60 million tons of grain rot in Indian warehouses.

Arranged in a large-semicircle conference hall, with UN-style desks, each with its own microphone, translators of a half dozen languages in glass boxes looked down on the proceedings. The setting certainly appeared weighty. Yet, international press was virtually absent as, for example, Jayson Cainglet, head of a nongovernmental organization in the Philippines, told participants that “liberalization” under WTO auspices had not only failed to advance agriculture and reduce hunger in his country but had wrought the opposite.

While trade liberalization, with its renewed emphasis on export crops, was supposed to increase the wealth of his country, he reported a 12 percent drop in the value of agricultural exports since 1995, the year WTO was founded. That, along with a doubling of the price of rice since the mid-90s and a loss of over 700,000 agricultural jobs in just two years in the late 90s. The Philippines, which had long been self-sufficient in rice, saw rice imports leap ten-fold in the later part of the 90s, he reported, Rice imports now account for almost a fifth of the country consumption,.

From Mexico, Ana Maria Ruiz Diaz spoke. Head of a network of small farmers using organic practices, she is concerned about the impact of seed patenting. Last year poor farmers had to pay an American patent holder $69 million dollars, she explained, to use a bean variety that had long been part of her culture. She worried, too, about the contamination of ancient Mexican landraces of corn by genetically modified seeds introduced by agribusiness giants Aventis and Novartis. She cited a study released in September by University of California researchers indicating five cases in several states where genetically engineered Bt corn had contaminated ancient varieties.

In Africa, where average household consumption has already fallen by 20 percent in the last quarter century, we heard reports of inland fishing, a vital source of protein for the poor, destroyed by the operations of multinational oil companies and of an export-cotton focus in Chad that is impoverishing the land and the people, as raw commodity prices continue to fall. A group of Senegalese women performed a play in which a mother told of losing loved ones to malaria because the cost of medical treatment had jumped five fold in recent years as her government pulled back to let market forces reign. Debt payments to the wealthy countries, the women said, are bigger than their country’s health and education budgets combined.

For the P7 speakers, the jury is in: Corporate globalization hasn’t reversed but has actually accelerated the historic pattern transferring wealth from the poor to the wealthy. What a contrast with the view of globalization’s champions, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman dubs corporate globalization the “golden straightjacket,” suggesting that while it does restrict government’s and civil society’s choices, it eventually enriches just about everybody. From the P7’s vantage point, however, the meaning of Friedman’s colorful metaphor morphs: The straightjacket gets strapped on poor majorities, they would argue, while the gold flows to the few who already have most of it.

Flying home from Brussels, I was struck by news reports of a declaration by 100 Nobel Laureates upon the 100th anniversary of the prize. “The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years, they said, “will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. ….[A] wider degree of social justice…alone gives hope of peace.”

While the Bush administration focuses us narrowly on battling Islamic fundamentalists' terrorism, our security might be better served by seizing opportunities such as the P7 to hear from the world’s poor majorities about the need to reject market fundamentalism and create this “wider degree of social justice.”

Frances Moore Lappé

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Lappé is co-author with Anna Lappé of the forthcoming Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Tarcher/Putnam 2002).