Is Globalization the cause of it all?

Yesterday, I received the second serious response to something I had written in this blog. I loved the effort Selva took to jot down his thoughts on the lecture by Sainath. I have put the first part of his thought for discussion. It seems he doesn't want to be Nero's guest anymore. This is the change we need to see in today's world.

Selva : Ok. Coming to the point. First, the title. Globalizing inequality. As Mr. Sainath points out, globalization indeed makes rich people richer. That is, if they are able to cope up with the changing winds. But we cannot claim that globalization makes poor people poorer. Globalization was neither meant to bring up inequality nor to abolish it. Inequality existed before globalization. It exists now, when there is globalization. It'll exist in the future, whether there is globalization or not. This claim is based on the books I read and on my social, economical and mainly psychological observations.

>> I do not know whether I can confidently say that the poor are not getting any poorer due to globalization. Before I start with this, proponents of globalization - the likes of Thomas Freidman and Jeffrey Sachs - speak of globalization as being a panacea for all world problems (Sachs in his book The End of Poverty, keeps repeating the globalization mantra!) Even if globalization is not making people poorer, it is not in any way improving the conditions of the poor in societies as these people say it will. How much longer can the poor wait? There is this disparity that has crept in. Accumulation of feelings of unfairness and resentment against the rich, which the disparity brings in the poor, may break the dam any time (as it has in many parts of the world).

With the advent of Manmohanics (in the early 90s) the inequality in India has only become larger. It has made the poor poorer, symbolically at least. The policies adopted by the various governments since then have undermined the traditionally strong sectors in India (eg. the agricultural sector). The opening of the markets has done some good to the affluent, but has caused misery to the poor, scaled much more than earlier times(exemplified by the ever increasing number of farmer suicides).. The priorities of the government have changed – not for the good of all. Something that strengthens some sections of the society while undermining the poorer sections can not be a solution in any sense.

Leaving the discussion of one country, and taking the world as a bigger market, we can find evidence that the farm policies of the ‘globalized’ world is pitted against the poor farmers in the developing world, while the subsidies rich farmers in the rich countries are not affected as much. In many countries the food produced by the local farmers are being sold at prices higher than the food being imported from the rich world. Since most of the people living in these countries are farmers themselves, the decrease in food prices (due to imports) does more harm than good. Moreover, when the rich farming corporations mint money when the farmers are suffering, the poor farmers feel they are being stolen from.

The global markets are under the control of a few very powerful people (read as governments, MNCs). They would go any way to twist the arms of the poorer countries for their good. Take the case of the high price of the anti-retroviral drugs being sold in Africa. Diseases like AIDS that are in epidemic proportions in some African nations can be the reason why these countries fail to make it up the economic ladder. When the medication against this disease is not sold cheaply in the poor countries, the realization of this unfairness causes much more than merely making the poor poorer. Many of the world issues revolve around relatively new terms like terrorism, which can be attributed to such feelings of hostility against the few who wield all the power.

Taking the bigger picture, the world is becoming poorer – the poor as well as the rich.