conference notes
South Africa confronts globalisation
Twenty-nine organisations representing workers, women, students, youth, urban and rural communities, disabled people, the churches, health, environmental, culture and media interests, came together to plan this conference. More than 150 people attended the conference, in Edenvale, 12-15 March, coming from eight of South Africa's nine provinces.
The aims of the conference were to: contribute towards a growing understanding and critique of economic issues, to consider a variety of alternatives and to stimulate the building of alliances across organisations of civil society around key issues and campaigns.
The Conference elaborated a declaration of "principled positions" which participants will take back to their organisations and communities to broaden discussion, debate and support for activities and campaigns.
Conference facilitation was largely coordinated by the Campaign Against Neoliberalism in South Africa (Cansa), an alliance of individuals formed to protest the October 1996 visit of the International Monetary Fund's managing director. Main Conference observations
The Conference analysed and criticised the host of conservative economic policies that are weakening progressive governments' ability to address social ills, and are wreaking havoc on workers and communities internationally, and that in South Africa are embodied both in the "Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR)" macroeconomic strategy, and in 32 International Viewpoint #299 various specific policies (especially housing, municipal infrastructure, land, and education).
The Conference considered the recent budget and rejected it on grounds that: a) no progress has been made in addressing the huge apartheid-era debt burden (which takes 20% of state spending); b) vast, unjustifiable amounts still are spent on defence and on policing (which addresses the effects not the causes of crime); and c) not enough has been done to restructure social spending and to reduce hidden forms of benefits to the rich in the budget.
The Conference concluded that what is really at stake is the problem of unbalanced political power between contending social forces. Business and financial interests - amplified through the World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organisation, US government, European Union and the like, with collaboration from Third World elites — exert an overwhelming influence. Their preferred economic policies are, we are witnessing, ineffective on their own terms and are socially unjust. Worse, they have convinced a large section of our society that there is no alternative to orthodox economic policies and globalisation.
The Conference confirmed our rejection of these policies and the attempt to impose helplessness on our society. A variety of alternatives have been presented since 1993 by organisations such as the MacroEconomic Research Group (Making Democracy Work), the Mass Democratic Movement (the Reconstruction and Development Programme), Cosatu (Social Equity and Job Creation), the Community Constituency of Nedlac (Return to the RDP) and the like. Conference confirms that "there must be an alternative"!
The negative impact of globalisation on South Africa has been manifested, through the fiscal squeeze and through market-oriented policies that have stifled economic growth and redistribution, in job losses, crisis in education, closure of hospitals, widening loopholes in the social security net, water cut-offs, the worsening housing shortage, and persistent malnutrition and poverty, in a context of deepening inequality in what is already the second most unequal country in the world.
The Conference agreed on the need to confront these social ills, but also to address the root cause, which Conference concluded lies in large part in economic policies designed in Washington and implemented in Pretoria through the often unthinking actions of — and lack of consultation by — our own government. The way forward
A Globalisation Campaigns Committee will take forward and help co-ordinate several initiatives, including protest against US President Bill Clinton's visit to South Africa, on the following grounds:
• his proposed Africa Trade Bill will recolonise our continent through structural adjustment conditionality;
• his government's refusal to cancel
Third World debt subjugates innocent people to perpetual misery
The Committee will support the activities and campaigns for public sector delivery of water for all led by the South African Municipal Workers Union and community civics.
•a constitutional right to water!
• opposition to World Bank infrastructure and water policies that contradict this right
• opposition to the proposed expansion of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project
(with World Bank funding);
The Committee will participate in the upcoming Poverty Hearings - which are jointly co-ordinated by the SA NGO Coalition - showing the links between globalisation, GEAR and poverty;
Support for the "Cancellation of the Apartheid Debt," initiated by the Alternative Information and Development Centre the SA NGO Coalition and others;
Support for activities around labou rights, trade and investment, co-ordinatec by trade unions, the International Labou Research and Information Group and othe conference participants;
The Committee will assist in severa specific efforts that challenge the Worl
Bank (especially the activities of its Sout
Africa office), Third World debt payments the forthcoming Multilateral Agreemen on Investment, and South Africa-basec multinational corporations;
The Globalisation Campaigns Com mittee includes people from the trad union movement, the women's movement the health sector, the progressive religiou sector, the student movement, researcl and academic institutions, and tho international solidarity movement.