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LOCAL AUTONOMY AND SELF-GOVERNANCE ARE KEY TO SUSTAINABLE QUALITY OF LIFE
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- GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS ARE EFFECTIVE
LOCAL AUTONOMY AND SELF-GOVERNANCE ARE KEY TO SUSTAINABLE QUALITY OF LIFE1. GLOBAL FORCES PUSH ‘SOCIAL MAJORITIES’ INTO MODERN WASTELANDS Gustavo Esteva, Academic/Activist, 1998 GRASSROOTS POSTMODERNISM, 4 So‑called "neoliberal" policies, the free trade catechisms, the proliferation of "transnational" investments and communication networks, and all the other elements that are used to describe the new era of "globalization," are pushing the "social majorities" even further into the wastelands of the modern world. Relegated to its margins, they are "human surpluses": making too many babies ‑ an "overpopulation"; increasingly disposable and redundant for the dominant actors on the "global" scene. They cannot be "competitive" in the world of the "social minorities," where "competitiveness" is the key to survival and domination. The dismantlement of the welfare state designed and conceived to protect the "benefits," dignity, income and personal security of the world's "social minorities" means little to the "social majorities." As "marginals," they have never had any real access to the "benefits" enjoyed by the nonmarginals, the ones occupying the centers of the modern world. While some "marginals" are still striving to join the ranks of those minorities struggling to retain their jobs, their social security or their education, many more are not entering the trap of modern expectations: to count upon the market or the state.
Gustavo Esteva, Academic/Activist, 1998 GRASSROOTS POSTMODERNISM, 37 Local autonomy is the only available antidote for the "Global Project." just as locally autonomous persons started bringing down the Berlin Wall brick by brick, similarly locally autonomous communities can exert their powers to say "No" to all global agendas that destroy their natural and cultural spaces. The current struggle for autonomy in Mexico17 mainly looks for recognition and respect for what Indian peoples already have. Autonomy is not something that we need to ask of someone or somebody can give us, observed an Indian leader. We occupy a territory, in which we exercise self‑governance and justice in our own ways, he clarified, noting furthermore that his peoples have capacities for self-defense. We now claim recognition and respect for what we have already conquered, he stated firmly. 3. GLOBAL EFFORTS ONLY LEGITIMATE GLOBAL FORCES Gustavo Esteva, Academic/Activist, 1998 GRASSROOTS POSTMODERNISM, 30 Failing to take paths like Gandhi's in their own liberation, those resisting recolonization today through GATT and other "global forces" are not overcoming the real threats these pose for the "social majorities" across the world, including millions of farmers in India. By concentrating their attacks on the institution, on the emblem of those arrangements, they render even more opaque the technological system that maintains the myth of global power. This opacity hides the nakedness of the Emperor. In this darkness, it is easy to maintain the pretence that the Emperor is clothed. All the energy used for the massive demonstrations organized by the prestigious activists of India has not only proved to be sterile; it has further added bureaucrats to the heavy structure of GATT, reinforcing the feeling of powerlessness "the people" experience before such Goliaths. GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS ARE EFFECTIVE1. FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS SUSTAIN POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC PROGRESS Dan Griswold, (associate director) Center for Trade Policy, 2002 FREE TRADE BULLETIN, http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/FTBs/FTB-001.html For the United States, NAFTA was more about foreign policy than about the domestic economy. Its biggest payoff for the United States has been to institutionalize our southern neighbor’s turn away from centralized protectionism and toward decentralized, democratic capitalism. By that measure, NAFTA has been a spectacular success. In the decade since signing NAFTA, Mexico has continued along the road of economic and political reform. It has successfully decoupled its economy from the old boom-and-bust, high-inflation, debt-ridden model that characterized it and much of Latin America up until the debt crisis of the 1980s. In 2000, Mexico avoided an election-cycle economic crisis for the first time since the 1970s. Today Mexico and Chile are the two most stable and dynamic economies in Latin America—and the two that have reformed most aggressively. Just as important, the economic competition and decentralization embodied in NAFTA encouraged more political competition in Mexico. It broke the economic grip in which the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held the country for most of the last century. It is no coincidence that, within seven years of NAFTA’s implementation, Vicente Fox became the first opposition-party candidate elected president after 71 years of the PRI’s one-party rule.
Aaron Lukas, (policy analyst) Center for Trade Policy, 2000 WTO REPORT CARD III, http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-010.pdf Developing countries embrace globalization for a variety of reasons. The removal of trade barriers immediately expands the range of choices for consumers and places downward pressure on prices, thus raising the real value of workers’ earnings. Foreign investment provides more jobs, new production technologies, infrastructure improvements, and a source of capital for local entrepreneurs. Domestic businesses gain access to both cheaper inputs and vastly larger markets for their products. But for most people, the many and varied benefits of a liberal trade and investment regime can be boiled down to one very attractive proposition: globalization spurs economic growth, and growth raises living standards. Empirical research supports the link between the freedom to conduct international transactions and economic growth. A wellknown paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner of Harvard University, for example, found that developing countries with open economies grew by an average of 4.5 percent per year in the 1970s and 1980s while those with closed economies grew by only 0.7 percent. 3. GLOBALIZATION FACILITIATES COMPETIVENESS WITH US MARKETS, INCREASES WAGES AND BENEFITS FOR WORKERS Aaron Lukas, (policy analyst) Center for Trade Policy, 2000 WTO REPORT CARD III, http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-010.pdf Both trade and investment affect the longterm production trend in developing economies, which also reinforces the gains to workers. Specifically, poor countries tend to move away from labor-intensive production as they scale the ladder of economic development. The share of textiles and apparel in South Korea’s exports, for example, grew from 8 percent in 1960 to 40 percent in 1980 but then shrank to 19 percent by 1993. Today South Korea is known more for its exports of automobiles and electronics than its clothing, and average wages have increased dramatically. The benefits of creating a dynamic, export-oriented manufacturing sector are even more apparent when wages are compared with those in Western countries. In 1960 the average manufacturing job in a developing country paid just over 10 percent of manufacturing wages received by workers in the United States. By 1992 wages in those countries had risen to nearly 30 percent of U.S. manufacturing wages.26 In other words, as manufactured exports of developing countries have grown, so have wages in those countries—even in relation to U.S. wages, which also have risen.
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