Caroline Lucas - Alternatives To Globalisation - Saturday 2pm
	You can tell that Caroline Lucas is a well-practised public speaker. She structures her lecture like an essay; backs up salient points with evidence and quotes reputable sources. She has to be good. As a Green Party MEP Caroline is famous for joining anti-globalisation protestors in displays of public disapproval. She has also made it her personal mission to embarrass the European Trade Commissioner over trade liberalisation. It is a small but keenly attentive crowd who gather to hear Caroline first outline the case against globalisation and then offer an alternative. "The current economic system is skewed in favour of trans-national corporations (TNCs).
The mechanisms of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) oversee the processes by which governments give away the rights of their citizens for the benefit of TNCs". We live in a world where governments can no longer demand that imports are non-GM or not produced by child labour as such demands would breach WTO process and production laws, we are informed. "Governments have chosen to give up powers on trade standards and corporate behaviour". Key misnomers of globalisation are challenged. The idea that it is irrevocable is dismissed. "It is a construct that people have made. It can be unmade". On the purported benefits she is relentless. She quotes startling statistics on the decline of developing economies in the last two decades. "Globalisation is a zero sum game. It must have winners and losers in order to function". We are left in no doubt as to whom those losers might be. "In 2000 the US took India to the WTO over restrictions of trade and won. Since that ruling Indian coconut and coffee prices have collapsed under pressure from a flood of cheap imports". Caroline's alternative is redolent of E.F. Schumacher's classic thesis, 'Small Is Beautiful". She outlines a vision of localised trade, environmental taxation, controls on capital flows and the necessity for companies that profit from a national economy to be based in that country. It is indicative of the entrenched position we are in that views such as the need to clear international debt to reduce the need for foreign exchange still sound radical. "This is heresy right now - but it's not impossible". Words: Jamie Walters Picture: From www.carolinelucasmep.org.uk ( permission pending )