NEWSWEEK: How has the legacy of Seattle, where antiglobalization demonstrators upset the World Trade Organization meeting, altered the dynamics of your job? MALLOCH BROWN: Seattle has proved a surprising corrective to the international system. Initially, the protesters were dismissed as northern nongovernment organizations (NGOs) with no real constituencies. But in meetings with southern governments since then, it has become clear that those NGOs had tapped into a much wider sentiment of unease about the direction of globalization.
So the issue is fairness? The north and south accept two propositions: that integration of trade, finance and communications is going to continue, and that the technological breakthroughs in information technology, food and medicine have incredibly important applications in the south. Everybody favors these processes. The difficulties start with how you manage them politically, to make sure that they [evolve] in a fair way and the south can [share] the benefits. [The concern is with] the terms of globalization, rather than globalization yes or no.
How have G8 leaders responded? [With] a lot of soul-searching–and not just political leaders, but business leaders too. At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a real reflective, self-questioning mood. There’s a recognition that if you just press on with a market-led vision that promotes the strong and crushes the weak, there will be a high political price. Everybody is anxious to show greater sensitivity.
What issues are you pressing? The issues of particular concern are debt, the spread of HIV-AIDS and the crisis of inadequate resources for education and health care. On top of that is the challenge of information technology, which is seen as both an enormously important opportunity and an expensive distraction from solving the basic problems of debt and disease.
Has G8 awareness translated into action? For G8 leaders, the distance from soul-searching to action can often be quite significant. The south wants more than greater sensitivity. They want more debt relief, more help for education and health care, the opening of the north’s markets and a reduction of agricultural subsidies. They’ve got a whole agenda to shift the global terms of trade. That’s the challenge. A year ago the G8 leaders adopted a fairly broad and ambitious debt-relief program. Today its implementation is well behind track. It’s not good enough for the G8 to say, “We feel your pain.” There’s a set of actions, some of them quite expensive, which they need to get going with to really demonstrate that they’re changing direction.
What’s bogging down debt relief? There are three problems. First, it’s expensive. Second, in Africa, there are a lot of wars involving debtor countries, which has not helped move the process forward. The third issue is that Nigeria, with one of the biggest debt problems in Africa, is not even on the list of countries that was approved [for debt relief] last year. Why? They’re not poor enough to meet the criteria of a highly indebted country. But the fact is, a series of wasteful military governments has essentially mortgaged the country’s oil to run up a level of debt which is as high as anywhere. Strengthening Nigeria’s fragile new democracy is a wager the West must make.
What should G8 countries do to further the global IT revolution? At the moment things could go one of two ways. We could either have an IT market of 2 billion people–the citizens of developed countries plus the developing world’s urban elite–or a universal market of 6 billion. First, the role of the G8 and institutions like mine is to keep pressing corporations to take the second road. Even more critically, there’s a need to get national public policies right to encourage foreign and domestic investment.
What must developing nations do? They have to protect international copyrights, cut communications tariffs and broaden the structure of corporate ownership in their own economies. They’ve got to liberalize in the face of a technology which may undermine their culture and ultimately their political power. The key challenge is the reverse of what many people expected. Even now, the conversation is about which technology is affordable, or how long it will take [for the IT revolution] to reach everybody. There is still a debate about technology, when really the debate should be about culture and mentality. There are 900 million adults in the world today who are illiterate. How are they going to confront this new technology?
