Speech by Sheila McKechnie

Sheila McKechnie
Director, UK Consumer Organization, London

Thursday, February 10
at the
TRANSATLANTIC CONSUMER DIALOGUE


THE FUTURE OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization is not a single strand of thought or one activity. It is a multi-faceted concept, difficult but not impossible to unravel, but certainly not possible in the time I have this evening.

My aim tonight is more modest. It is to argue that consumer organizations should have a seat at the table when these global issues are discussed. It is not acceptable that the U.S. and E.U. governments give privileged access to business and exclude or marginalize consumers.

Too often our governments seem to regard consumer organizations as bad tempered children who don't understand the real world or simply as obstacles to what they regard as progress. If they have that view, then Seattle will only have reinforced it.

We in the consumer movement see it very differently. Seattle was a failure of governments and global institutions on a number of levels. It was at one level a failure of political judgement and leadership. At another level, we see it as a rejection of a process of globalization that is only defined by economic imperatives.

It ignored the cultural, ethical, and social values that constitute our basic humanity. We do not live by bread alone.

But Seattle changed nothing. We woke up the next morning and looked out at a world that makes us dizzy with the speed of change: where new genetic, information, and communication technologies are changing our world as we speak and impacting on our lives in ways that we feel unable to control.

Trade, financial, and investment liberalization combined with the primacy of markets haven't gone away because we made our points on the streets of Seattle.

As I, like some of you, am just an old sixties radical, I learned the hard way that protest can slow change or block governments, but it cannot provide solutions. Only dialogue, participation, and inclusion can build consensus and secure progress.

But progress for whom? We in this room tonight from the EU and USA represent about 13% of the world's population. Some of the richest consumers in the world. We need to remind ourselves of our responsibilities and understand how much we have gained and others have lost in recent centuries. In 1800 the ratio of average income of the richest countries to the poorest was 3 to 1, in 1900 it was 10 to 1, and in 2000 it was 60 to 1.

Consumer organizations represented here tonight who are members of Consumers International do not take kindly to being lectured as we were this morning about our global responsibilities. To tell us that we are blocking the development of a technology that would feed the world (GM crops) is just not true. Our consumer organizations in India saw organizations like Monsanto as threatening to privatize agriculture and further impoverish the rural poor.

If governments in the developed world had put proportionately as much of their income into helping the developing countries as we have in the consumer organizations, the differences in wealth between countries would be much less.

Nor do we need to be lectured by governments about the complexities of the issues. We deal with markets every day. We are not single issue organizations. We have members who are not homogeneous. We have like governments to balance different viewpoints and we have to compromise to achieve the desired outcomes. To work together in this transatlantic consumer dialogue we have had to learn to respect differences, to understand our differing priorities, and to reach consensus where possible.

Our governments seem to be saying to us, particularly in e-commerce, that it is up to us to sort out consumer protection issues with corporations in the market place. We say to you, what are governments for if they cannot protect their citizens as consumers. Have governments really become mere fronts for big global business?

If you vacate your role, yes we will move into the vacuum. Yes we will sort out some of our badly behaved corporate citizens and remind them of the responsibilities of doing business. We will use new technology to ensure that bad behavior anywhere in the world does not stay hidden. And if business does not believe this, let what has happened to Monsanto stand as a warning.

But we are not anti-business. Global trade has brought many advantages to consumers in all our countries.

However, the crisis in political leadership cannot be solved by business or consumer organizations. The role of government is to hold the ring to balance interests for the general good. It has to engage and confront the difficult, intractable "wicked" issues.

Governments cannot hide behind science in the field of new food technologies. At present, there is no scientific answer to the question, "Is GM food safe?" Absence of evidence cannot be considered as evidence of absence. To pretend otherwise is to be profoundly unscientific.

Governments got it wrong. The debates about GM were not about safety. They were about policies, interests, and public values as much as expert opinion.

Governments must work to reform our global institutions: the WTO, the IMF, the OECD. In their current from they are creations of the cold war past. Their modus operandi is diplomatic, not judicial. In their current form they are well past their sell by date. But they are what we have and we must build on them. To move to a new judicial form, they need better organization, but above all, legitimacy with the citizens of the world.

Consumer organizations too have to change. To deserve our seat at the table we must do more than criticize. We must come up with solutions. We need to negotiate, to compromise to get the best deal we can for our consumers.

We need to guard against being sucked into processes with poor outcomes or falling for tactics that just suck our energy and our resources. We will not legitimize agendas that are against the consumer interest.

We understand government's problems, but we do not understand or accept the lack of courage that seems to afflict our politicians. It feels to us that if you are about to be swamped by a huge wave, you turn the boat straight into it. If you don't, you will capsize. We can wish our vessels were more sturdy, but we must make do with what we have.

Finally, to put it another way, however daunting it may seem, there really are no new questions for all of us. It is still at its simplest level, what kind of societies do we want to live in and how do we aim to get there. The answers may be more complex, but running away from the problems is not an options.

Thank you.