Good morning everyone! At the outset, I wish to thank the organizers of this forum for the opportunity to present my views on this very important subject matter.

In 1994-1995 we, the opponents of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its unequal rules on global trade were being branded in Asia as parochial, conservative and even anti-progress. When we warned that the Mexican tequila crisis might repeat itself in the Philippines and other Asian countries, we were called myopic and narrow-minded. Accordingly, Mexico’s crisis was not due to economic liberalization and globalization but to a simple lack of transparency in governance.

Today we know a lot better about the nature of the globalization process taking place under the so-called rules of the WTO. The tequila crisis of 1997 became the Asian economic contagion of 1997-1998, which devastated whole economies and which spread as far as Russia and Brazil. The Asian crisis laid bare what we saw in Mexico earlier: the financial and real estate bubbles created by speculative capital tend to hide the narrow and unequal growth being fostered by transnational corporations (TNCs) in search of cheap labor and raw materials. Growth in some exclusive economic zones or maquiladoras could not and cannot make up for the collapse of local and indigenous industry and agriculture.

Moreover, the Asian crisis exposed the rapacious activities of transnational speculators who took advantage of the opening up of capital and stock markets of Asia in the name of the free market. In the process, currencies tumbled down, industries crumbled, millions lost their jobs and mass poverty swelled. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) with its standard stand-by and structural adjustment loan packages exacerbated the crisis further by insisting on austerity and deflationary policies when the dire Asian economic situation called for economic re-ignition to stave off social disaster as what happened in some Asian countries.

But even without the Asian crisis, growth under WTO-led globalization has been unequal and in many instances, unjust. The 1999 UNDP Human Development Report amply documented the inequities arising from globalization in the 1990s – share of the world’s poorest in the world GDP limited to an abysmal one (1) percent, chronic environmental degradation, deepening marginalization of the poor and small countries, and the widening divide among classes and sectors in various societies. Globalization has indeed caused a massive expansion of the global economy but in the process has created a highly uneven world.

Humanity in the 21^st century deserves a better fate than a WTO-led globalization.

Hence we add our voice to those demanding for a new global, social and economic order. Social development under the global institutional framework provided bu the WTO, IMF and other multilateral institutions based on neo-liberal economic thinking is both unsustainable and unequal.

We demand more than social safety nets for those marginalized by the globalization process. We demand that instead of social safety nets, development agendas in national and international for a should focus on how to insure that:

• broad-based growth across countries and regions is attained;

• peasantry, indigenous peoples and families in the informal sector become active participants and beneficiaries in the development process;

• existing industries are strengthened even if new ones are put in place.

• local knowledge and cultures are preserved.

The above can only be attained through a new global architecture of governance. The social and national dimension of development should be wedded with the rules of global trading.

The blind faith on the efficacy of unregulated market, a clear re-invention of the trickle-down economics, should be abandoned. In favor of a healthy mix of policies focused on institutional and asset reforms and state intervention against the unwarranted flow of speculative capital and monopolistic trade invasions. Privatization may be encouraged to promote competition and a level-playing field for the small economic actors. However, there should be no privatization of essential public services, no privatization that leads only to the creation of private monopolies and no privatization that transforms a nation into an economic vassal of a few transnational corporations.

The structures, rules and management of the WTO, IMF, World Bank and other similar bodies should be reviewed in the light of the foregoing development parameters. Or better still, these international economic and financial bodies should be replaced by new ones which promote the global consensus for a financial and economic architecture based on social justice and equitable growth rather than on the so-called Washington Consensus of a few transnationalists and neo-liberal globalists.