Anti-Davos protestor creates 'heat' inside conference room
Dr. Noreena Hertz, associate director of the Centre of International Business at the University of Cambridge, was an anti-Davos campaigner in 2000 before she became a panelist in the World Economic Forum this year. She spoke to The Jakarta Post's Harry Bhaskara on the fringe of the conference in Davos, Switzerland, held from Jan. 25 to 30.
Noreena seems so young that you could take her as a student panelist in this gathering of international senior business captains and yet when she spoke she exuded complete confidence. Her arguments were strong and explanations cogent, a reflection of her solid academic training and activist background. Hertz was once a convert to free market theory before becoming a prominent critic of globalization.
Like other former anti-Davos activists invited to Davos, Hertz, has an impressive track record. Her book The Silent Take Over, published in 2001, catapulted her into the ranks of world leading young thinkers. Her new book Debt Threat has just been released. In 2002 she was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. She has also worked on the Middle East peace process with the Palestinian Authority and governments of Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
Hertz was one of the activists invited to Davos conference this year which hosted some 2,200 participants, mostly businesspeople.
Question: What is the nature of your activism?
Answer: I am a passionate campaigner for the cancellation of debt and increase in aid for developing countries. However, if they are told that in order to get the debt relief and new aid, they have to privatize all their industries, open up all their markets and slash public expenditure, then these conditions take away almost all the gains they would receive. In some cases they make the situation much worse because when a very poor country has to slash public expenditure that means it has to compromise on the environment. In really poor country there is no money to invest in water or infrastructure and sanitation.
With an impact on people?
Yes, all the data shows that those who are harmed the most are women and children. Like in Congo, where women have to walk 15 miles to get water, little girls have to pee at night in the bushes because there is no toilet facilities, where they risk being raped.
Could you elaborate on privatization?
Privatization is a condition demanded by the World Bank and IMF. They ask you to privatize your harbors, railways, water and electricity plants. In rich countries, if they privatize utilities or infrastructure, lots of investors come in. The government can get a good price, demand lots of conditions and maintain a certain price for water or demand to manage the roads although they are not very profitable.
In many developing countries, there aren't a lot of investors ready to come in. Prices at which governments end up having to sell out are like bankruptcy sales. They are not able to put demands on the companies or to protect the public interest. So it becomes a very distorted situation. It is not that privatization is always bad, but it is bad if the conditions are wrong or not in anyone's interests. Without a strong regulatory regime to keep big corporations in control, privatization just creates masses of problems and a lot of public unrest. Uruguay, just in the last couple of weeks voted, in parliament, against water privatization.
Can't we detach those conditions from the World Bank and the IMF?
Developing countries are not adequately represented within these organizations. Eighty four percent of the world's population lives in the developing world but only 40 percent of the voting rights in these institutions come from the developing world. The United States is the only country with an effective veto vote in the World Bank and the IMF, which is disproportionate.
So, part of the problem is democratizing these institutions, but also, part of it is that these institutions themselves are responsible for pushing ideologies which have proven to be inequitable.
Could you show an example?
When Latin America took on board the whole of the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment program in the 1980s, its growth rate fell by half, if you compare it between 1960 and 1980 and 1980 and 2000 in sub-Saharan Africa these policies are making the income of the poorest 20 percent, fall by 3 percent a year. You can imagine how badly it has impacted on women and children. These are the main issues about inequitable globalization that need to be resolved.
Having been invited to attend the World Economic Forum, what topics of discussion did you think were missing?
Looking at the World Bank and the IMF and how we need to detach and decouple those unfortunate conditions attached by the institutions (to developing countries) is an absolutely huge story that wasn't here at all this week.
The organizers decided the topics, didn't they?
Yes, they have people to consult with, presumably, in the developed and the developing world. This year, there have been many more development issues on the agenda than ever before. The fact of Africa -- people just standing in the huge congress room working for Africa -- was something you didn't find four years ago but still they don't really get it. There are two things. They don't recognize it explicitly -- I am so glad that I have been speaking on panels here -- the complicity of the West in the woes of globalization. They also don't sufficiently acknowledge these systemic problems. But that can change.
What did you think when Sharon Stone stood up to donate $10,000 for Africa in a session, and how she raised US$1 million thereafter?
It is like a festival... the $10,000 people pledged in the room is like nothing (for them), they will get the company to pay and secondly it is like appeasing their guilt because it is the systemic changes that we need to look at, whether it is internal issues like abuse of power or corruption or the external issues. Otherwise it is like putting a little bandage on a huge gaping wound.
What are the most crucial issues in globalization?
The problems are clear, children die every day, young women are still working in sweatshops, there are a lack of healthy protections for employees, no freedoms to form unions, these realities are all very far away from equitable globalization.
What are the priorities?
It's hard to decide, of course there are health crises in many developing countries which are necessarily inequitable because health levels and life expectancy differences clearly correlate with economic indicators.
We are linked with the opening up of markets too, for example Western tobacco companies marketing to developing countries with much higher incidence of smoking-related deaths.
We see the increase of marketing of processed food companies in the developing world being correlated with the increase of diabetes in these countries.
What about education?
Health issues are a serious indicator of inequitable globalization. Education is another key problem in inequitable globalization, especially when we look at it through a gender perspective. In many countries, when you have to charge school fees, parents have to choose between sending a boy or a girl to schools. You have inequitable globalization in the form of gender.
When it comes to sweatshop labor, it is disproportionately full of women. Surely, people will say, it is better to have a job than no job but this presents a false kind of framework in the way we look at it. As if we could ever legitimize working in unsafe conditions where people are not being paid a fair wage. We need to change the environment in which women are making choices. They don't have to choose something which is exploitative.
How was your session this year as an activist?
This year, a lot of activists were sitting in the room. That has been fantastic. It wasn't necessarily the organizers' purpose but it has been great to network with fellow activists. Afterwards, so many CEOs said it was so important, will you come and speak to the board of my company, will you explain because we don't know about these things. Isn't it amazing that people don't know?
Yes, it is
A lot of people who are running big businesses are very caught up in their day-to-day lives. How do I make sure that I can sell another packet of rice crispy corn flakes this week? And surprisingly they don't step back and look at the big picture. Because ultimately, we live in a world of two extremes, a world of ghetto communities next to other well-off communities, which in the long term is untenable.
People in the rich world, the beneficiaries of globalization, on the whole, or the elites within the developing countries who have benefited from globalization will not be able to continue to hide away. The disadvantaged people will become angrier as they see more clearly the differences; see more clearly the kind of injustices in the world.
It needs a rethink, doesn't it?
Yes, we in the developed world can't think about things like, well, if a country is destroying its rain forests, cutting them all down, not looking at environmental protection because there are either insufficient resources to deal with this issue domestically or a lack of political prioritizing, that it is not just the problem of that country. It is collectively our problem, we collectively are seeing the damage created by global warming, climate change, we collectively are experiencing things like floods, hurricanes, tsunamis; natural incidences that we haven't see before.
We stand side by side in this new global world. To ignore it is really at our peril, this is the kind of thing that some times people in the room have not thought about. If you communicate it to them effectively they start wanting to think about it more. In many cases it is the beginning of dialog, a conversation where everyone in this room is powerful because everyone has got a huge network of their own. If you can engage some of them to fight our fight, to fight the good fight, the right fights, they are actually mobilizing each of their constituencies themselves.
Can you describe what kind of people are in your audience?
There are probably people in the room who will never see the world the way I see it. They will always believe that their world, the world of privilege, the world of money, the world of luxury, is the only world. All you have to do is work hard, trust in the market and you will certainly get a piece of this fantastic world. I can't change them, but there are a lot of people here who are like the swing voters, they are on the fence, they are not really sure what they believe about all of this. That constituency can be won over. Each time I speak, they are the ones I am hoping to reach.
Being an activist speaking in Davos, don't you think that you are being coopted?
That of course is the charge that you are going to deal with. I don't feel at all coopted by the institutions or by the organizations. There is absolutely nothing I would not say in this room that I wouldn't say to activists. I sat in this room and talked about a need to regulate companies; I talk about the inequities of globalization, I talk about everyone's responsibility to do something and I raise the hard issues.
I just felt that this was a fantastic place to do some activism. Where else as an activist you come face-to-face to confront Bill Gates in an issue, face-to-face with a government minister or a prime minister or a president about "show me the money, talk is cheap .. we need action". Both in terms of being able to confront but also in term of to be able to have a dialog in that combination, it is really worth grabbing if you are an activist. And, also it has been fantastic to set up a network with all the activists from all over the world, from Africa, Latin America, Asia.
When was the first time you came to Davos?
I came here in Davos for the first time in 2000 with the protesters outside. When they asked me to come in, I had to ask myself whether that was the right thing to do. Then I thought about the Filipino saying: When you make rice cake you need heat at the top and at the bottom. I need to come here because I need to create the heat inside the room.
I feel personally more useful to be here in Davos than going to Brazil (where the World Social Forum was held). To be able to challenge dominant ideologies in this room and meet with political and business leaders is really a good use of my time. In 2001 when I came in, they didn't give me a panel. In every meeting I went to, I spoke from the floor. I would sit strategically, in a place where I thought people who would ask questions would see me. I would wear bright colored clothes so that I would be noticed and I would get up from the floor and raise issues and challenge things.
Are you coming back next year?
If they will allow me to come. I am critical about a lot of aspects about this place. I don't know how much negative publicity they want, but let's see, hopefully they will invite me back, hopefully they will give me more panels so that I can continue what I am doing here.
When you came here in 2000, what group of activists were you in?
It was a collection of activists from various NGOs and individuals. The Swiss Police were very brutal, you see how cold it was here, it was a peaceful protest, and they let out the water canon, it was freezing, it was bad -- it was really bad.
Was there an anti-Davos meeting outside the conference room this year?
Yes, the anti-Davos meeting outside the conference gave awards to Nestle and Shell this year. A lot of companies, nowadays, paint themselves as great socially responsible companies. But when you look below the surface of the publicity reports and press releases you really don't see things that are that substantial. I guess why they hold these awards ceremonies are to remind us of the ultimate impossibility of the free market to regulate big national corporations and of the need for some regulations that ensure that basic labor, environmental standards and human rights are met.