Beyond Globalization to Local Regeneration |
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International meetings often highlight, but eventually fail to address in concrete terms, the problems that they set out to tackle. One of the problems is that these are often almost "chance" meetings between people who have a great deal of competence and experience in their respective fields but who do not form part of a real process of collaboration and partnership building.
In a sense, the international workshop held recently in Malta to discuss "Building Partnership for a Sustainable Future in the Mediterranean" faced this problem squarely. Workshop mentor Eric van Monckhoven made it amply clear that the real success of the meeting could only be gauged when the participants returned home and started to forge real partnerships and to work on real projects that go beyond globalization towards local regeneration in the Mediterranean.
One of the objectives of this international workshop was to link the experience of NGOs, fair trade networks, local authorities, environmental groups, and international agencies through concrete working partnership for the local regeneration of the environment in the Mediterranean. The participants highlighted the need to promote local social and environmental regeneration and reduce people dependency from transnational corporate powers.
More specifically, the participants decided to strengthen their cooperation along the lines of Agenda 21 and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). They agreed that their initiatives should include crosscultural understanding, primary environmental care, fair trade and ethical funding.
"Crosscultural understanding" seeks to create new social harmony in the light of the diverse traditions of culture, knowledge and wisdom that exist among the various peoples living on the shores of the Mediterranean. "Primary environmental care” (PEC) is a community-based approach designed to meet basic needs through the empowerment of local communities, while ensuring the protection of optimal utilization of natural resources within the community and integrating traditional and local knowledge;
The international “fair trade” movement promotes international trade which is socially and environmentally sustainable, benefiting the local economies and communities of marginalized producers and workers in the South and connecting them with consumer groups in the North. On the other hand, “ethical funding” makes it possible for microfinance to fulfill its role in alleviating poverty by giving relatively small loans to people threatened by a globalized economy and by reducing dependency from transnational corporate powers.
The participants stressed that "priority should be given to the most vulnerable groups who depend directly on natural resources, like land, water, and biodiversity, for their survival." These groups are increasingly threatened by problems such as war, drought, water scarcity, land degradation, and urbanization.
Combating Desertification
According to Paola Antolini, who represented the water programme of Unesco (Paris) at the workshop, although desertification is "one the most severe environmental emergencies" in the Mediterranean, it must be seen in the general context of the marginalization of this region. "Contradictions, threats and tensions of our age are concentrated in the limited space of the Mediterranean, with large-scale pollution and erosion of the environment, civil wars and armed conflicts, extreme nationalism, racism, religious fundamentalism, the denial of identity, ethnocentricity, arms dealing and nuclear proliferation, exclusion, economic dependence, the poverty trap, the destitution of street children, demography and migratory flows that are out of control." The Mediterranean is also "a distillation of cultural nostalgia, still marginalized in comparison with the large regional groups which are officially recognized by States and Intergovernmental Organizations.
"We are living in a world,"’ said Antolini, "in which the gap between the 'have' and the 'have not' is widening. A workshop like this one is an excellent and fresh initiative, because it can serve as a catalyst, as a powerful instrument in fighting unethical behaviour and exclusion, reminding us to treat the environment with more respect, creating more solidarity and social responsibility."
In this context, Edward Mallia's presentation on (un)sustainability in Malta is a revealing case in point. "The functioning of the local ecosystem is currently very far from sustainability, as is the case for most developed economies." The two main factors he examined were land and energy use. "With a high population density and a strong dependence on mass tourism, we now have close to 21% of the national territory covered by building and roads. Concurrently, we have suffered a precipitous decrease in arable land, a huge loss from an already-thin tree cover, and serious inroads into the very limited areas of 'wilderness'.
On the other hand, "Energy use per unit GDP is higher than for most countries in western Europe, as is the production of carbon dioxide per capita. Principal causes for this situation are thought to lie in the major production of potable water by sea water desalination, in an excessive use of personal transport, and in an almost total absence of energy efficiency and conservation in buildings as well as insignificant use of renewable energy."
Fair trade and ethical funding tackle these problems of unsustainable development at source because they provide disadvantaged people with the means to better their economic and social situation without causing irreparable damage to the environment in which they live. Ethical funding provide the small-scale, marginalized producer with the necessary credit to start a business or invest in a particular trade and fair trade markets the product in the richer North.
A Real Alternative: Fair Trade
Because of its holistic approach and its ability to provide answers to economic, environmental, and cultural problems, fair trade is one way to ensure a sustainable future in any region is fair trade. Unlike the market economy, where people and the relationships that exist between them are considered less important than the work they do and what they produce, in the Third Sector, people and relationships are more important than functions and products.
Stefano Magnoni, vice-president of one of Europe's largest fair-trade organizations, Italy's CTM-Altromercato, focused on fair-trade networks in Europe as initiatives that bring together consumers and producers for socially and environmentally responsible changes. The participants discussed possible partnerships between CTM-Altromercato and different NGO's and associations in the Mediterranean area to open fair trade shops (known as "world shops") and to facilitate and increase the flow of fair-trade and other goods of high ethical value between the various partners. Fair trade is yet to make its mark on the Mediterranean region, Italy, France, Spain and Malta being the only countries on the shores of this Sea where one can find world shops. In concrete terms, this international workshop is being seen as the first in a series of initiatives to promote fair trade in the Mediterranean, with Malta as the point of reference.
With the onset of the Euromed partnership programme and the placing of fair trade high on the agenda of the EU, the time seems ripe for initiatives that promote fair trade in the Mediterranean. In January 1994, the European Parliament adopted a report and a resolution promoting fairness and solidarity in North-South trade. The report recommends measures to strengthen and support the fair trade movement and to adopt the fair trade principles in policies of the European Union and its Member States. The European fair trade movement considers this as an important acknowledgement of its almost 30 years of fair trading and campaigning.
As a follow-up of this 1994 resolution another resolution was adopted by the European Parliament in 1998 on Fair Trade, the so called Fassa resolution, and as a follow-up of this resolution the European Commission issued a communication on Fair Trade at the end of 1999. Moreover, Fair Trade is now mentioned as a priority area of funding within the general conditions of DG8 (the directorate general that funds development cooperation within the European Commission).
Ethical Micro-Finance
Elisabetta Bottaro (Etimos, Italy) spoke about the exciting potential of micro-finance in the context of sustainability in the Mediterranean. In many areas of the South, an active and vital system of productive micro-realities of an informal nature already exists, and this guarantees the survival of the greater part of the population.
"This entrepreneurial small-scale cloth, woven in typical local contexts and based on collective values and common rules, often represents something similar to productive districts and can become a factor of economic prosperity for the entire area under consideration."
One of Bottaro’s most important points was that “international developmental aid will have to be viewed less and less as an act of charity and increasingly as a vital economic process.” It is possible to create an alternative economy, with a different kind of market and different type of finance, in which men and women, the elderly and the young, who have been excluded from an unjust economic system, can construct a life worth living.
The concept of Ethical Finance has inspired all the new experiences regarding finance in the last 10-15 years within the area of developmental aid in countries in the South of the world. Ethical Finance is that form of finance that believes in the person and that invests in the attempt to increase as much as possible the opportunities for the active participation of all persons so that there is common access to fundamental goods, services and human relations without which one cannot speak of the dignity of a human being.
In the face of the fact that governments are showing less and less interest in the need to bridge the widening gap between the North and the South, civil society must pluck up the courage not only to become directly involved in existing domestic social problems but also in international ones.
Globalization, that is transnational economy, is definitely present in the Mediterranean which is considered to be a base for the refueling of raw materials and human resources at a good price. Some of the negative effects of globalization, like social conflicts, emigration, ecological disasters resulting from oil industries, and the phenomenon of international organized crime in illegal drug trafficking, have been plagued this region too.
According to Dr. Bottaro, civil society must use the correct mechanisms in order to protect and to favour regional integration. She stressed the importance of territory and specific social conditions as the point of departure in order to determine the lines of development on which to work whilst respecting the traditions of culture and civilization of all the Mediterranean region, the dialogue between these cultures and the exchanges on a human, scientific and technological level.
The active participation of the population in economic growth and the creation and development of specific productive systems for every geographic and social context where the binomial cultivation-culture is protected and valued are two other important ingredients of this alternative economy. Lastly she mentioned the necessity to reconcile economic development with the protection of the environment, to integrate the environmental concerns in all the aspects pertinent to economic politics and to attenuate the negative consequences for the environment that could result from these.
Favouring the development of a peace zone, bringing stability and prosperity to the Mediterranean basin signifies, therefore, the creation of new economic and social mechanisms. Micro-credit is one of these mechanisms.
The advantage of micro-credit it is that it leaves the individual recipient of financing to decide what to do with the money and, therefore, in respecting the culture and the environment it favors a development that places the person at the center of every process, responsible and participant of his or her own future.
It is an instrument characterized by a strong flexibility that responds from time to time to the social requirements that appear, defining the values, the traditions and the cultures of all, and respecting, where present, the central position of the social organization and the structures of material life.
Local Regeneration
The challenge of the Mediterranean 2000 project for a sustainable future in the Mediterranean, of which this international workshop was the first act, is that of making clear proposals and achieving results. Unlike many other meetings, this workshop set itself the task of promoting fair trade in the region and providing the necessary financial facilities for small-scale, disadvantaged producers and workers to work their way out of poverty and social exclusion. The success of the meeting will depend on how much the individual partners around the region will be able to promote “real” initiatives “on the ground” in favour of what Bottaro called “a social and economic development which is sustainable and balanced, aimed at the attainment of a basic objective: to create a zone of shared prosperity that respects human and material resources”.
The international workshop "Mediterranean 2000: Building Partnership for a Sustainable Future in the Mediterranean" was organized by the leading Italian NGO CRIC (Centro regionale d’intervento per la cooperazione) and the local Third World Group with the support of the Maltese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and within the framework of a Development education project coordinated by COSPE and supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Italy).
For more information, contact L-Arka at 306, St. Paul's Street Valletta. (Tel. 244865) or visit the project website at www.geocities.com/mediterran2000
Adrian Grima May 2000 |
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