Five ideas for a new world order

Global capitalism has entered a fundamental crisis of legitimacy, triggered by a ‘perfect storm’ of the banking meltdown, rising energy costs and a spike in world food prices. Governments in the world’s richest countries are looking on in horror as the debt and fossil-fuelled fantasies on which they have built their political mythologies crumble around them.

Amongst those witnessing the recent self-immolation of the financial system have been the world’s two billion poorest people, for whom the credit crunch is a permanent way of life. As a grim footnote to the main headlines about down-and-out bankers, the UN’s distinctly unglamorous Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) recently announced that rising food prices have plunged an additional 75 million people below the hunger threshold in the past year. This has brought the estimated number of undernourished people to a staggering 923 million worldwide.

This is the real evidence that 30 years of financial deregulation, trade liberalisation and reckless fossil fuel consumption has failed spectacularly to deliver just or sustainable progress. The end of the end of history.

Five ideas for a new approach to tackling problems

So, as all three major UK political parties struggle to offer a compelling vision for mending our broken economy, here are five ideas that together could provide a genuinely new approach to tackling the major problems of the day.

1. Steer globalisation on course for a low-carbon future

Proposals to de-link economic development from increased greenhouse gas emissions have been set out under an approach dubbed the ‘Green New Deal’. The idea evokes Franklin Roosevelt’s policies for helping out-of-work families following the Great Depression, overlaid with green initiatives, such as massive investment in renewable energies, and establishing an oil legacy fund (paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas companies) to help pay for the transition to a low-carbon economy.

2. Get capital to serve the needs of society and the environment 

The quasi-nationalisation of the banking sector creates an opportunity – indeed an imperative – for governments to ensure that these institution serve a wider public interest and environmental sustainability agenda. Another pillar of the Green New Deal is to reign in corporate finance via a clamp down on corporate tax havens and financial reporting, re-regulating domestic financial markets, and requiring banks to make cheap credit available for green energy projects. 

3. Ensure democratic and accountable global financial institutions

The ‘police’ of the global financial system, in particular the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have failed, to the point of complicity, in the current crisis. Pushing poor countries to deregulate their financial markets, the IMF has colluded with the world's big banks to foster a spirit of gung-ho, i.e., risk-free financing, that has destabilised banks and entire nations. The IMF and World Bank must now be restructured to be democratically accountable bodies with independent financing and voting systems free from political bullying and corporate bias.

4. Bring the food system in line with new energy and climate realities

Effectively run as a cartel by a handful of giant corporations, food production and trade has become a speculative activity in the global casino economy, where the losers are millions of hungry people around the world. The future of global food security depends on taking control of land and food production from corporations back to smallholder farmers. Methods of agricultural production must minimise use of oil, conserve soil and water, be climate resilient, and be predicated on a closer and more equitable relationship between producers and consumers.

5. Develop trade deals based on cooperation rather than exploitation

The European Union is aggressively pushing a series of trade deals which will oblige poor countries to open their financial markets to the very same baking institutions that have wantonly abused deregulated markets here at home. These proposals need to be torn up immediately and replaced with trade deals based on mutual cooperation instead of corporate exploitation, and which allow poor countries the flexibility to protect and nurture sensitive and emerging sectors of their economy.

“Kidtronic: wants new world order”

A few years ago, some graffiti caught my eye. “Kidtronic: wants new world order” was the tag demanding attention of the passing public. At a time when international poverty seemed ever-more entrenched, despite the massive increases in global wealth generated by turbo-capitalism, I sympathised greatly with the sentiment. But the problem Kidtronic and I shared was that the political elite in our country had yet to spot the cracks in the façade of the old world order. Now those cracks have opened faster and wider then perhaps anyone had predicted. We must seize the opportunity by pushing those within our political establishment to turn the vision of the new world order we crave into a reality.

- Julian Oram