December 4, 2003	Thursday	Shawwal 8, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, Dec 3: The process of globalization should value environmental and social contributions of communities and peoples’ right to their resources and labour.

Speaking on the second day of the seminar on “Emerging trends in geo-economic world order”, organized by FRIENDS and the Hanns Seidel Foundation, here on Wednesday, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, an environmental lawyer from Bangladesh, said nearly 80 per cent of the world’s natural resources were being consumed by 20 per cent people in the rich countries. She urged governments in the South to gain meaningful bargaining power.

“If pollution and waste migrate to the South under free trade and knowledge while biological diversity and wealth created from it travel to the North through intellectual property rights protection, the inevitable outcome would be environmental injustice,” Ms Hasan maintained.

In all, nine papers were presented on the concluding day, majority of which spotlighted the issues pertaining to the ravages of globalization in its role as the instrument of transnational corporations and the developed world.

Aziz Alkazaz from the Network of European Institutes of Economics and President of Iraqi Community in Germany, reviewed the state of economy in various countries of the Middle East and Pakistan.

He said in spite of being rich in oil resources, 15 million people out of 95 million in Arab countries were unemployed in a situation where intra-Arab trade constituted only 8 per cent of their total imports and exports.

To attract investment, reforms were not enough, he observed. The companies took their investment where they perceived the possibility of profits and minimal risk — tax holiday or no tax holiday.

One of the solutions to poverty reduction in countries like Pakistan, he added, lay in ensuring the access of the poor and marginalized to resources and land reforms.

The problem of unemployment was complicated by the attitude of rich countries to the absorption of surplus labour from developing countries. Strangely, he added, the IMF laid all the emphasis on financial sector reforms but not on the reforms in labour sector.

Globalization could potentially produce positive results for the developed countries only if the rich countries also added the transborder movement of labour in the free trade agenda, said Dr Akhtar Hasan Khan, former secretary planning division.

Niu Qiang, secretary-general Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, Beijing, said globalization had further impoverished and marginalized the poorest countries whose number increased from 41 to 47 in 1998-99.

Terming globalization a double-edged sword, he said while stimulating development in general it had aggravated the polarization between the developed and developing countries as well as among the developing countries.

He said China had become a country with a big economy but not a powerful one, ranking only 31st in the international competitiveness. Among the challenges faced by China was the possibility that multinational companies become a monopolistic force.

Ross Masood Hussain, former chairman Institute of Strategic Studies, said South Asia, home to 21 per cent of world population, had barely 1.5 per cent of world’s GNP and was characterized by poor consumption, malnutrition, pestilence, illiteracy, etc.