Globalization and the Group of 77: Three Interviews
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Globalization is always double-edged, offering countries opportunities and exposing them to risks such as those that sent the global credit system into a fit of catatonia a few weeks ago. Among the most quietly influential organizations that have sought to capitalize on the opportunities and manage the risks of globalization is the Group of 77 and China (G77), a UN-based bloc of 130 countries. The group includes nations great and small, from every continent. Its overriding goal is to level the global economic playing field in order to raise living standards in developing countries. In its pursuit of this goal during the last decade or so, the group has sought to revise the so-called “Washington Consensus” on the proper path to development—a path that, under that consensus, usually passes through the slashing of tariffs and other sea walls built around small and vulnerable economies. In the offing as a replacement for the Washington Consensus is a still-evolving “Monterrey Consensus” that would balance free trade with acknowledgements of the fact that some economies are better able to both take advantage of the favorable trade winds and ride out the sudden typhoons that globalization creates. One concrete effect of the Washington Consensus, discussed in the first of the following interviews, has arguably been the intensity of the food crisis that began in 2007, set off food riots in a couple of dozen countries, and may yet, as the UN Food and Agriculture director Jacques Diouf has said, worsen as the current global financial crisis strains the budgets of developed nations and strains their willingness to provide food-related assistance to poorer countries. According to the UN News Service, Diouf noted that in 2007 the global food crisis pushed an extra 75 million people “into hunger and poverty”: “Last year it was the pan,” Diouf said. “Next year could be the fire.” Keeping their citizens out of both the pan and the fire has been the stated goal of the G77 since its establishment in 1964. [End Page 1290]
Michael Collins, a native of Jamaica, is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, College Station. His poems, interviews, and critical essays have appeared in such periodicals as The New Leader, Michigan Quarterly Review, Parnassus, Salamander, and PMLA. His “Six Sketches: When a Soul Breaks” was published in The Best American Poetry 2003. He is an associate editor of Callaloo.
