This is an excerpt from a paper that Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy published as a "Backgrounder" in spring 2000. It was co-authored by Walden Bello, executive director of Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, and Anuradha Mittal, co-director of Food First. For more information about Food First’s work on just and sustainable economic practices, visit its website at www.foodfirst.org. Clicking on "links" on the home page will get you to other groups working on international development and globalization.

"Progressives should be developing a position on global economic relations [that aims at] tighter regulation, if not replacement, of the model of corporate-led free market development that seeks to do away with social and state restrictions on the mobility of capital at the expense of labor. In its place must be established a system of genuine international cooperation and looser global economic integration, allowing countries to follow paths of national and regional development that make the domestic and regional markets rather than the global market the engine of growth, development, and job creation.

"This means support for measure of asset and income redistribution to create the purchasing power that will make domestic markets viable. It means support for trade measures and capital controls that will give countries more control over their trade and finance so that commodity and capital flows become less disruptive and destabilizing. It means support for regional integration or regional economic union among the developing countries as an alternative to indiscriminate globalization.

"A key element in this campaign is the abolition of the international Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO, and their replacement with a pluralistic system of institutions that complement but at the same time check and balance one another, thus giving the developing countries the space to pursue their own paths to development.

"Another key thrust by civil society groups in the North and the South should be to pressure the U.S., China, and all other governments to implement all conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and give the ILO more effective authority to monitor, supervise, and adjudicate implementation of these conventions. This campaign must be part of a broader effort to support the evolution of stronger and more independent labor unions in China, the American South, and elsewhere, in a spirit of real workers’ solidarity.

"This social and economic program must be tied to a strategy for protecting the global environment that eschews trade sanctions as an approach, and puts the emphasis on promoting sustainable development models in place of the export-led, high-consumption developmental model. We must push the adoption of environmental codes that put the onus on transnational corporations search for zero cost environmental regimes—and not pitting one country against another.

"This approach must stress changing the production and consumption behavior and levels in the North that are by far the biggest source of environmental destabilization."