Two major events took place in Cairo over the last week symbolising the despondency that many now feel over the effects of globalisation on the poor, writes Wael Gamal Cairo witnessed two major events concerning globalisation on 21 December. The first was a two-day seminar on the social impact of globalisation, jointly organised by the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation and the North Africa Office of the International Labour Organisation. The second event was a demonstration called by the Anti-Globalisation Egyptian Group (AGEG) in which 1000 people protested against an expected American attack on Iraq. Launched by the International Labour Organisation in February 2002, the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalisation is an independent body whose aim is to move the globalisation debate from confrontation to dialogue, thereby setting the stage for action. The seminar is one of 15 dialogues that seeks consensus on ways to ensure that the benefits of globalisation reach more people. Orthodox globalisation theory maintains that everyone benefits from recent changes to the world economy and that vigorous growth in the developing world means it is the world's poor who will benefit most. However, this is rarely the case in reality. Among most of the 4.4 billion people living in Africa, Asia and Latin America life has become an increasingly desperate struggle for survival. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 840 million people are malnourished, the great majority of them living in the developing world. More than half of the countries for which statistics are available do not have enough food to provide their population with the minimum daily calorific requirement. Indeed, in some regions hunger has become far more widespread. Across Africa the average household now consumes 25 per cent less than in the early 1970s. There are also staggering inequalities. The wealth of the world's 15 richest people now exceeds the combined GDP of sub- Saharan Africa and the wealth of the richest 84 individuals exceeds the GDP of China, with its 1.2 billion inhabitants. In fact, such tendencies have been evident for years without troubling the partisans of globalisation, not only in the developing world but also in the industrialised countries of Europe and North America. Only the spectre of world recession has caused them to question aspects of the theory. This 'broken consensus' among the elite has been exacerbated by the growth of an anti-globalisation movement that took shape in Seattle in 1999. Therefore, rebuilding consensus among the elite became an urgent task. "Our problem is not with globalisation as a historical process but with the dominating set of values, which is in fact a reproduction of the old hegemony system," says El-Sayed Yassin at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. In a paper entitled, "The perception and values of globalisation," Yassin stressed the need for, "the participation of the 'South' in the decision making processes of the international and financial institutions". Consensus on globalisation is far less apparent when we move away from the elite. "We are against all economic and social policies implied by globalisation, which manifest themselves in Egyptian society by creating poverty and unemployment and making the life of ordinary people worse," said Yehia Fikri, a founding member of AGEG. AGEG, which was established in autumn 2001, organised a meeting protesting against the visit of the World Bank's president in October. "We see ourselves as part of the international movement against globalisation and we support the demands of this movement against the policies of capitalist globalisation," Fikri added. The group does not represent a popular movement but it signals a radicalisation of intellectuals and activists, a phenomenon that mirrors what has happened in Europe and the US. Whether it is based on just objecting to the power structure of globalisation or wholeheartedly rejecting the deep principles it is built upon, opposition to globalisation is deepening to the extent that building consensus is a really tough job.
