On the road to Liberty

At an online seminar on globalisation organised by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, in Manila, in March 2007, I looked at the forces affecting globalisation, and held that critics of globalisation have a political agenda to keep the people disempowered by restricting their choices, and preserving the privileges for the elite. Globalisation: Power to the people A lot of the times it seems to me that that debate over globalisation portrays the phenomenon as something new. The communication revolution has drastically changed the speed of information flow, and perhaps many of us have in a sense been disoriented with the pace. So much so that we lost a sense of human history! Globalisation is a phenomenon as old human civilisation. It started when the first man learned to trade, barter, his or her goods. Today, there is hardly a product that has not been impacted by some kind of voluntary exchange of one kind or other. Rice and wheat, which are the staples of most humans on the planet toda...

My IPN press release titled Biosafety Protocol Will Harm Poor Farmers and Undermines WTO was published on International Policy Network on 11 September 2004. 11 September, Cancun – Today, the Biosafety Protocol goes into effect worldwide. The Global Freedom to Trade Campaign, a coalition of pro-globalization NGOs at the Cancun WTO Ministerial, believes that the Biosafety Protocol will harm poor farmers by preventing them from accessing farming technologies which would help them to generate income and escape poverty. Agricultural expert Barun Mitra, Director of the Liberty Institute in New Delhi, India (a member of the SDN), commented: “Farmers everywhere should have the freedom to choose the technologies they use. But the Biosafety Protocol will only aggravate the trade barriers they already face. Poor farmers will be subjected to arbitrary restrictions on trade in agricultural products, especially from the European Union. Thus, it will only prolong poor farmers’ escape from poverty.”...

My article titled "Going Beyond Good Intentions: A look at Amartya Sen" was published in April 1999. In the battle over economics, the victory of the market forces seemed decisive. It had not been easy. Since the days of Adam Smith, the world economy had to cross the turbulent waters of colonialism, mercantilism, socialism, fascism, and communism before liberalisation, globalisation, privatisation, became accepted part of our general vocabulary. But even before the process of consolidation is over, it now seems that free market ideas are faced with insidious threats as never before. Indeed, the popular appeal of socialist ideas was not primarily based on economic principles but on its ethical and political ones - an egalitarian worldview. (Discussions rarely focussed on the morality of the methods that would be necessary to create such a world order.) On the other hand, the advocates of free market rarely went beyond economics and utility, and generally ignored the moral basi...