The Competitiveness Report: What WEF & other economic elites have done to the world lately
Posted on October 29 2001 |
STATEMENT OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC MOVEMENT
ON DEBT AND DEVELOPMENT
The opening of the tenth East Asian Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum today is among the first major meetings of the elites of the world economy after the September 11 attack on the United States and the start of the still raging retaliation of the US government and its allies that have found an easy target in Afghanistan.
We, representatives of the Asia-Pacific Movement on Debt and Development (Jubilee South Asia-Pacific), take this occasion to call that people's mourning and shock over the thousands of dead in America and the war on terrorism turning out to be a war against the people of Afghanistan fuel new commitment to building peace based on justice in the world.
We are gathered here in Hong Kong to be in solidarity with the Asian Peoples' Solidarity Forum and to declare that a more peaceful and just world can be built but not on the foundations of the old world.
We denounce the WEF's policy of "integrating Asia into the global economy in all spheres" - a policy that serves the interest of transnational corporations, speculative capital and domestic elites - which is largely responsible for poverty, human insecurity and the terror that now reigns.
It is the terror of having to survive hundreds of years of colonial and neocolonial rule and oppression and now globalization. We have seen the best and brightest of our people shot down, the massacre of men, women and children, and communities burned to the ground to protect the interests of foreign economic powers and corporations.
It is also the terror of living on less than one dollar a day. The terror of billions of peoples living in hunger and starvation. The terror of a not being able to afford education, health services and housing. The terror of violence against women and all kinds of intolerance. The terror of a future with no possibilities.
The round-table discussions WEF holds, the exchanges and the strategies advocated have all been directed at increasing the terrorism. WEF's policy is a policy to increase the take of global capital and to cement the market-oriented policies they enjoy. This direction is the fast lane to poverty, human insecurity and the reign of structural terrorism.
To take the same direction now only increases our peoples' suffering into breaking point. The economic downturn in the United States is only the tip of the iceberg. (We note here how the US has quickly gone back on many years of preaching for the free market to correct instability. This is a direct reversal of its policy when the Asian economies took a disastrous nosedive in 1997.)
The United Nations has forecasted that East and South Asia are to be the greatest sufferers with the world body revising substantially downwards the GDP growth projection in the subregions from 4.1 to 1.3 percent for this year. In West Asia the growth rate is projected to be 1.9 percent rather than the earlier forecast of 2.6 percent.
Hardest hit are apparently the people of West Asia. Afghanistan is in a state of emergency and its neighbors are scrambling to absorb the political and economic repercussions of the war on Afghanistan.
What US President George W. Bush touts as a 'war to protect freedom and civilization' protects only the interest of the economic elites of the US and its allies.
The high-powered corporate executives meeting in Hong Kong today for the WEF know this well. Spare us the rhetoric of working for the betterment of the world. Put this on your Global Competitiveness Report. You are not even improving the lives of the poor peoples of the North much less of the peoples of the South.
The exploitation and control of the resources of the South have resulted in the indebtedness throughout the history of colonization, neocolonization and capitalist globalization. Among the members of the WEF are top honchos of giant corporations that use debt as an instrument for the continued plunder of the South. They actively cultivate the need to borrow and relentlessly push loans to governments and private corporations.
The same giant corporations are also beneficiaries of economic prescriptions imposed on our countries by multilateral agencies that hold debtors hostage to their creditors. The conditionalities, called structural adjustment programs (SAPs), trap south countries into a perpetual cycle of debt dependence and underdevelopment. These constitute economic terrorism and genocide on the peoples of the South.
Let your Competitiveness Report reflect as well that it has come down to a choice between the competitiveness you advocate and the future of the world.
We call on movements in the South and the North therefore to vigorously promote an economic vision that is based on human values that in the first place made it possible for the humans and nature to evolve and live, plurality, cooperativeness, concern for others, equality and the right of communities to exist.
We call for an immediate end to the war on Afghanistan and for the governments in our countries to stop support for this war.
We call further for systemic, structural and policy changes and programs that will promote political and economic democracy.
Terrorism, of all kinds, must be fought in many fronts. It must be fought through building peace based on justice. It must be fought through the empowerment of peoples. Our human security, our world depends on this.
Cooperation,
Not Competition!
Free the People
from Debt and Bondage,
and Terrorism Will End!
Asia-Pacific Movement
on Debt and Development
(THE JUBILEE SOUTH ASIA-PACIFIC)
29 October 2001
Hong Kong
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