Rising Above The Restrictions Of National Ego

[Guest guest]

In his thoughts on President Abdul Kalam's address to the Global Dharma Conference last weekend, Pradeep Mon called for India to join the World community by rising above the restrictions of National ego. He says that National Governments of 'so-called developed countries' who cannot think 'Global' must count themselves 'Third World' if their thought processes are narrow and they cannot look beyond their own artificial boundaries that they call 'Nation'.

 

As one who has learned to appreciate the great treasure of India's spiritual heritage I ask why India should want such a dubious achievement of being on par with the industrialized or so-called developed nations. Rather, some of us would suggest that India take her place in the ranking of nations-even leading them into the future-based on her inherent and unparalleled national treasure, I mean to say, her spiritual wisdom.

 

While the desire to not be seen as third-world in the eyes of the world is certainly appreciated, just how parity is to be achieved, and what the yardstick of parity should be, is another thing altogether. Pradeep asks Who is the problem? Where is the problem? What is the solution? -certainly those are reasonable questions. I believe that we will find clues to the answers by examining the assumptions of the desirability in being a world economic player. Often those who succumb to the propaganda that globalization is a desirable end have little experience with the practical results of that reality. In that regard I would like to offer the following comments on just what is meant in achieving said global economic status, and why this is actually against the interest of the Indian people.

 

Discussions regarding the nature of the global society have been raised since the term was coined, with many arguing both for it and against it. Those in favor generally speak from the podiums of universities and government sponsored forums, while the dissenter's soapbox is less well placed. They are made to appear as social misfits and malcontents-Luddites who resist progress by clinging to a nostalgic past that was in reality more tribulation than pleasure. However, the discussions reached a new level of concern with the advance of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and its counterpart the Asean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) all driven by the World Trade Organization (WTO). These agreements (between who exactly?) are world trade treaties that frequently threaten the judicial sovereignty of nations and the well-being of their citizens. Persons who become educated in th e affairs of these global organizers have protested by the hundreds-of-thousands wherever the WTO meets.

 

What's the reasoning here? Well, it could be the fact that under WTO rules, certain objectives are forbidden to all domestic legislatures, including the US Congress, the state legislatures, and county and city officials. These forbidden objectives include providing any significant subsidies to promote energy conservation, sustainable farming practices, or environmentally sensitive technologies. Laws with mixed goals, such as provisions of the US Clean Air Act that implement the international ozone agreement conflict with the WTO's requirements. In those cases, and others, the WTO rescinds provisions in pre-existing international agreements, including environmental treaties that conflict with trade rules.[1]

 

In The Case Against the Global Economy, editors Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith have collected a number of articles that put faces and places on the otherwise impersonal quest of economic globalization. One of those articles is by India's stellar scientist and activist Vandana Shiva, wherein she rails against the biopiracy of India's neem tree and its genetic material (see related article). It seems as if the industrial giant W. R. Grace & Co. has discovered the pesticide properties of neem and patented them, and now expects royalties from India's subsistence farmers who have be utilizing neem for that purpose freely as God's gift for centuries. Moreover, in their efforts to supply a global market Grace has been purchasing most of the available neem seed on the open market, driving up the price more than ten-fold in 20 years time, leaving little for India's far mers who are then forced to take loans to buy contaminating pesticides such as DDT or Round-up.

 

Vandana Shiva has been a relentless voice speaking against entering into this kind of global market. She says unequivocally the WTO is about forced trade, and we live it every day. . . . the rules of WTO keep ruling against people and the environment and always ruling for corporations and for commerce . . . We were forced to open our seed supply to the global seed business, the global seed merchants. They're not seed producers-they make the farmers produce seed. They just package it and patent it. And in five years we have seen Indian peasants, the most resilient of people in the world, pushed into suicides because of debts caused by purchasing hybrid seeds every year, the pesticides that are linked to them, and credit that comes from the same companies that sell the seeds and the pesticides.[2]

 

Her criticism of the WTO is founded in the ridiculously foolish claims of the multinational's. At the Seattle International Forum on Globalization Teach-In on November 26, 1999 she offered this amazing testimony:

 

It's also often said that the WTO is about "competitiveness." [Listener far away from the podium bursts out with laughter.] We can laugh even louder. Because it seems to be a strange kind of competition in which the biggest corporations of the world want to compete-out the smallest peasant, every butterfly and every bee and every element of biodiversity. And I'm not joking about this. In 1992, when we had protests against the entry of Cargill in India, John Hamilton who used to head Cargill-India said, "These Indians are foolish. They don't understand. We are preventing the bees from usurping the pollen."

 

In the many, many years of negotiations that have gone on during the Biosafety Protocol Monsanto put out a document in which it said, "The reason the world needs Roundup-Ready crops is because herbicide tolerance prevents the weeds" - which for us is biodiversity - "from stealing the sunshine." [Are these people mad?]

 

They are building a world in which every diversity of life is a thief from some source of making profit for them. Biodiversity "steals" the sunshine, the bees "usurp" the pollen and the farmers "steal" when they save seed.

 

The testimony of this intrepid activist begins to give us some idea about what economic globalization actually means, and who its beneficiaries are. Of course there is too much more to cover here in any detail but let's hear a bit from another modern sage.

 

David C. Korten is no ordinary person. With a MBA in international business and a PhD in organizational theory from Stanford he already stands head and shoulders above most. Add to that 14 years of experience with the Ford Foundation in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, another 8 years with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other relevant work experience, and we can understand that his is a voice of seasoned experience, and not that of some hippie sentimentalist. Instigated by learning in college that most political revolutions were fueled by poverty he determined to do his part to help right the wrongs of economic injustice. He decided to devote his life to bringing the knowledge of modern business management to those who had not yet benefited from it, i.e., the third-world.

 

But, after all of his training and experience in real world situations he came to an altogether different conclusion about the effect of developmental programs: that conventional development practice espoused by most conservatives, and even liberals, is a leading cause of-not the solution to-a rapidly accelerating and potentially fatal human crisis of global proportions. (emphasis added) His landmark book When Corporations Rule the World is some 400 pages of testimony to that statement.

 

Therein Korten describes the antics of corporations as they seek to minimize their costs and increase profits. He offers the example of Dorka Diaz, a 20 year-old textile worker formerly produced clothing in Honduras for Leslie Fay, a U.S. based transnational corporation. She testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that she worked alongside 12 and 13 year-old girls in a factory where the temperature often hit 100 degrees, with little or no drinking water. For her 54 hour work week she was paid little over US$20. In 1994 she was fired for attempting to organize a union. Similar stories have recently aired about how the Indian silk industry similarly exploits its young girls.

 

Of course India now figures prominently into the global scheme of things because global communications now allow corporations to run their back-offices from there at a discount rate. In the U.S. we now frequently receive telephone solicitations from workers in Bangalore trained to drop their Indian accent. It also seems that many Indian engineers working in America now face the plight of being sent back to India to work, at a comparable Indian salary, or lose their jobs entirely as are many American technologists. This is of course necessary to compete in a global market. Since some companies are cutting expenses to the bone (including employee salaries and benefits), everyone else must as well.

 

Jeremy Brecher, in his article for The Nation entitled Global Village or Global Pillage? [3] writes that the recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a race to the bottom in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desparate. The currency exchange rate established by the British in their colonization of much of the world has rendered a persons labor in India to be now 74 times less than that of a British worker. Forty-six times less than an American's. What a bargain. But we should not think that this bodes well for India. In t he long run it means that economic colonization and exploitation will succeed where political colonization failed.

 

Global Economics have produced other dubious achievements in places such as Sri Lanka where formerly a biodiversity of over 200 indigenous varieties of rice had been grown, has been reduced to the point that over 90% of rice crop is a mere half-dozen varieties produced mainly for export. The tremendous resilience of biodiversity having been lost, Sri Lanka's entire rice crop is now vulnerable to disease with attendant potential for catastrophic consequences.

 

My previous post describing how the deep wells of a Coca-Cola plant in Varanasi is using all of the ground water leaving little for neighboring farmers is another example.[4] Who do you think will win this contest when it goes before the WTO court?

 

Finally, I ask, who is the ultimate beneficiary of the global economic order? Can it be the people, or is it the few percent at the top who are reaping the rewards at everyone else's expense? If economic development is actually the ticket to, not just world status but happiness, amazing it is then, that a recent study found that the happiest people in the world are not from the technologically advanced countries, nor the economic giants. If personal happiness is the end-game (and I think it safe to say that most would likely place it much higher than other considerations), that distinction has already been achieved by none other than the happy people of Bangladesh.[5] India, by the way places 5th in that study, with the people of the U.S. way down the list at 46. Wh o then should we emulate?

 

That great ambassador or spiritual India, the late A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, founder-acarya of the Hare Krishna Movement, understood the value of her treasure and exported it all around the world. He constantly exhorted his countrymen to also appreciate what they had and take up the task. Speaking in Bombay in 1973 he said to them:

 

India's mission is that janma sarthaka kari': Just make your life successful, and spread this knowledge all over the world. This is India's mission. India's mission is not to imitate technology and work like ass day and night. This is not India's business. Indians are not meant for this purpose. Those who have taken birth in Bharatavarsha [india], they are not ordinary human beings. Naturally, they are Krishna conscious. Unnaturally they are being forced to be otherwise. Therefore it is mis-adjustment. It is not taking place. Even in this age, in this city, big city, as soon as there is some religious meeting, thousands and lakhs of people gather. Why? They are meant for this purpose. Artificially, they are being withdrawn. Don't think of Krishna. Don't think of religion.

 

Our business is different. Caitanya Mahaprabhu says, bharata-bhumite manushya-janma haila yara, janma sarthaka kari'. Here you have got the advantages to fulfill the mission of life. Janma-sarthaka kari'. Here is Bhagavad-gita. Here is Vedas. Here is Srimad Bhagavatam. Here is Krishna. Here is Lord Ramacandra. Here is Vyasadeva. And we are going to learn technology? Our mission should be, first of all, to assimilate all the knowledge given by all the great saintly persons-Krishna and others-and distribute this knowledge all over the world. And the whole world is also expecting like that. The whole world is waiting for India's culture, India's bhakti, India's spiritual knowledge. Look at my own example. These American boys and girls have left their fathers' property, their opulence of country, and they are after me? I am a poor man. But only for this reason they are hankerin g-we are giving them Krishna, the highest spiritual understanding. This business should be done from India's part.[6] (emphasis added)

 

In which direction should India march to find her future? Is Bhaktivedanta Swami simply an anachronism, an advocate of a long lost era, or a harbinger of India's global future? Factually, we find that many Westerners who have been down the long road of globalization and seen the results it promises agree with Bhaktivedanta Swami. Although he doesn't say (or perhaps know) where the guidance will come from, David Korten exhorts us likewise on the direction of our earth-journey together:

 

It seemed evident from our analysis that to reestablish a sustainable relationship to the living earth, we must break free of the illusions of the world of money, rediscover spiritual meaning in our lives, and root our economic institutions in place and community so that they are integrally connected to people and life. Consequently, we concluded that the task of people-centered societies in which the economy is but one of the instruments of good living-not the purpose of human existence. Because our leaders are entrapped in the myths and the reward systems of the institutions they head, the leadership in this creative process of institutional and value re-creation must come from within civil society.

 

I suggest that India is the peerless leader to show such a path into the future of our world society. Not based upon her just-now-coming technological or economic achievements, but upon her already existing spiritual legacy.

 

------ [1] GATT, NAFTA, and the Subversion of the Democratic Process, by Ralph Nader and Lori Wallach

[2] The Global Campaign Against Biopiracy and Changing the Paradigm of Agriculture by Vandana Shiva from http://gos.sbc.edu/s/shiva3.html

[3] December 6, 1993 685-88

[4] see: Link

[5] see: Link

[6] Lecture Bombay, January 7, 1973