elmira Nazombe of the Women's Division of United Methodist Church's General Board of Global Ministries. Photo: T. Abraham/CWS

Globalization: making adversaries of us all

In January 2004, Church World Service co-convened a consultation on the negative impact of globalization on people, churches and the environment. Church World Service education and advocacy on just trade and its Water for All campaign is built on commitments made by North American ecumenical leaders at the 2004 consultation.

elmira Nazombe provides leadership on racial justice in the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM). Formerly with CWS and the Rutgers Center for Global Women’s Leadership, she looked at globalization for GBGM’s 2006-07 mission study. She discussed some of her findings with Thomas Abraham of Church World Service.

Church World Service: When people thought the earth was flat, they also feared falling off its edge. Who is in danger of falling of the edge of the world that Thomas Friedman says globalization is flattening?

Nazombe: I think there are a lot of people who are disadvantaged by globalization. What I think is really falling away is democracy or the capacity to have an impact on our own lives. People across the broad spectrum, not just poor people or Third World people, are affected.

For example, shrimp fishermen in south Alabama who used to compete with fishermen in Vietnam and China are seeing their whole way of life disappear, especially after Katrina. Ironically, a good number of them are Vietnamese immigrants. Neither the US fishermen nor the Vietnamese shrimpers have much of a say in influencing the situation because corporations and governments are making the decisions. People are being put in adversarial positions. We haven’t got the categories to think of the common good in a global sense. Should 70,000 shrimpers in the US be privileged over 3 million shrimpers in Vietnam? That’s not the equation we should be working with.

Women and women’s roles are also mixed up in this. As people who do most of the so-called flexible work, women have always known they have little control over their work. Others are coming to see this. Among middle class, white collar workers, it’s a dawning insight, because they are realizing they are equally vulnerable.

There are people who are trying to figure out alternatives to this paradigm. People who promote Fair Trade are trying as much as possible to bypass the existing system built on exploitation.

CWS: How does globalization exploit the poverty and racial injustice exposed by Hurricane Katrina?

Nazombe: The globalized response can be seen in the free market strategies for recovery. They have never worked for disadvantaged people. I don’t know whether the nature of the recovery is as disturbing to most people as it is to me: the no-bid contracting, the suspension of Davis Bacon minimum wage laws, the notion that you can transform New Orleans into New Disney World. The psychology is that local governments have no money and want the private sector to do everything. It’s the classic neo-liberal response. Why is it that workers at the bottom, by accepting lower wages, should make it possible for corporations to make so much money?

CWS: Are young people making different choices than their elders about globalization?

Nazombe: Teens all over the world are now hooked into a global youth culture. Child labor makes possible some of the clothes they’re wearing or the games they play. They didn’t make a choice to be inducted into the materialism of their culture, and some young people are taking steps against its manipulations.

I talked to a young woman who worked with the Youth Media Council, part of a media justice movement challenging Clear Channel in the Bay Area. One focus of their protest is that Clear Channel’s audience is mainly Black and Latino, but media images of these populations are very negative. The Council is mobilizing young people to raise these issues, get involved politically, and challenge the FCC licensing of the stations carrying these programs. What blew me away is that these young people see the connections between their world and the global ideology that feeds off it. If young people share their stories with each other, the sky is the limit for new possibilities.