by Earth Island Institute and 40 other NGOs
The Siena Declaration was prepared at a meeting held in Siena, Italy, in September 1998 by the board of directors of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), an alliance of leading scholars, activists, economists, researchers, and writers representing over 40 organizations in 20 countries. Earth Island Institute is one of those signatories. The following is excerpted from the declaration.
The undersigned have long predicted that corporate-led economic globalization, as expressed and encouraged by the rules of global trade and investment, would lead to extreme volatility in global financial markets and great vulnerability for all nations and people. This volatility is bringing massive economic breakdown in some nations, insecurity in all nations, unprecedented hardships for millions of people, growing unemployment and dislocation in all regions, direct assaults on environmental and labor conditions, loss of wilderness and biodiversity, massive population shifts, increased ethnic and racial tensions, and other disastrous results. Such dire outcomes are now becoming manifest throughout the world, and are increasing daily.
The experts who now propose solutions to the financial meltdown are the very ones who, only months ago, were celebrating Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea and other "Asian Tigers" as poster-children for the success of their designs. They later stated that the Asian crisis was fully contained. These experts have been wrong in nearly every predicted outcome of their policies.
Now these "leaders" advocate that we solve the problem by further opening markets, further opening and liberalizing the rules of investment (as they promote such draconian formulas as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and expanded IMF powers), further suppressing the options of nation-states and communities to regulate commerce for the good of their own people and environment, further discouragement of such models as "import substitution" that have the chance to enable nations to feed and care for themselves, and further centralization of control within the same governing bodies.
As for the tens of millions of people who now suffer from this experiment, the expert solutions include no bailouts. Many of these people, formerly self-sufficient in food, are now dependent on the absentee-ownership system of the global economy. Land which formerly grew food has been converted to corporate production of luxury commodities - e.g. coffee, beef, flowers, prawns - to be exported to the wealthy nations. Poverty, hunger, landlessness, homelessness, and migration are the immediate outcome of this. Insecure food supplies, lower food quality, and contaminated foods are secondary outcomes. The situation is unsustainable.
No system that depends for its success on a never-ending expansion of markets, resources and consumers, or that fails to achieve social equity and meaningful livelihood for all people on the planet, can hope to survive for very long. Social unrest, economic and ecological breakdown are the true inevitabilities of such a system.
Economic globalization in its present form was deliberately designed by economists, bankers, and corporate leaders. It is an invented, experimental system; there is nothing inevitable about it.
Rather than leading to economic benefits for all people, it has brought the planet to the brink of environmental catastrophe, unprecedented social unrest, an increase in poverty, hunger, landlessness, migration and social dislocation. The experiment may now be called a failure.
With the crisis now obvious in Asia, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and soon, predictably, in other places including western industrial nations, many have begun to recognize that the globalization experiment is doomed to fail. They have begun to specifically ask if globalization - especially free trade in financial flows - is in the best interest of their own nation, or any nation. Nations that have put controls on capital have demonstrated a higher degree of stability, and are better able to act successfully in the interests of their own resource and economic bases and in the interests of their own populations.
We applaud such actions and urge more nations to investigate and adopt currency and investment controls.
All people of the world have been made tragically dependent upon the arbitrary, experimental acts of giant self-interested corporations, bankers and speculators. This is the result of global rules that remove real economic power from nations, communities and citizen democracies, while giving new powers to corporate and financial speculators that act only in their own interests; and that suppress the abilities of local economies, regions and nations to protect resources, public health and human rights; This has left the peoples of the world in a uniquely isolated, vulnerable condition, dependent upon the whims of great, distant powers. This too is an unsustainable condition.
Any truly effective solution to the current financial crisis, and the larger crises of economic globalization, must include the following ingredients, among others:
- Convening of a new Bretton Woods-type international conference which would bring to the table representatives of nation-states, bankers and industry and citizen organizations to design economic models that re-empower communities and nation-states, place human, social and ecological values above corporate profit, encourage national self-sufficiency (wherever possible) including "import substitution," and operate in a democratic and transparent manner.
- Efforts to build on the experiences of Chile, Malaysia, India and the other countries that have placed controls on capital investment and currency speculation. Reverse present policies that expand the freedoms of finance capital and transnational corporations, while suppressing the freedom of individuals, communities, and nation-states to act on their own behalf.
- Immediately cancel all efforts toward completion of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), or the expansion of the International Monetary Fund to include ingredients of the MAI that give added freedom to finance capital to operate free of national controls.
[T]he undersigned… are not opposed to international trade and investment, or to international rules that regulate this trade and investment, so long as it complements economic activity that nation-states can achieve for themselves, and so long as the environment, human rights, labor rights, democracy, national sovereignty and social equity are given primacy.
- Earth Island Institute and 40 organizations from 20 countries
The Siena Declaration on the Crisis of Economic Globalization