Sunday, November 26, 2006

Care for some Conscientious Consumerism, Comrades?

In case anyone is wondering, the film festival on globalisation at the Alliance Française did this to me!
It was an eye-opener in many ways. We had always read about jeans and shoe manufacturers exploiting their workers in the Third World and enjoying immunity from any legal action by tactfully sub-contracting their operations. However, to see visuals of over a thousand women in Europe who had lost their jobs and of women in Turkey and Indonesia to whom the jobs had gone working in uncongenial conditions for a pittance was compelling. At least I now know which brands of clothes and footwear I am definitely going to avoid.
There were also several ecological issues that were raised. A documentary by the title Le Cauchemar de Darwin (Darwin's Nightmare) showed how a variety of fish that is a predator, was introduced in the biggest lake in Tanzania as part of a scientific experiment in the 1980s. This predator went on to completely destroy 210 species of other fish in the lake in a span of a few years. The predator was bred because there is a demand for that variety of fish in the European market. By the time when the documentary was shot (around 1998-99) the entire economy of the neighbouring villages and towns depended on catching this variety of fish and exporting the same to European countries. The irony is that the fish is too expensive to be purchased by Tanzanian nationals and even as the country was exporting over 500 tonnes of fish a day, it was on the brink of a famine. There's more to the story. The cargo planes that carried fish from Tanzanian ports allegedly brought with them arms to support the civil war in adjoining countries (Liberia, Sierra Leone to name a few). I found this particular story extremely perturbing as we were also shown shots portraying the extent of poverty and civil strife in the region.
These documentaries are somewhat dated but it would not be unreasonable to assume that things have not changed much towards the better considering the stories we read in the newspapers even today.
It is very likely that this is just the bouregois bohemian in me speaking. I say that because the fact that I support the causes projected in some of the documentaries that were screened does not mean that I am against all that globalisation stands for. Clearly, I am a beneficiary of the phenomenon what with a job in a multinational corporation that I am happy with. Nonetheless, I would certainly not like to cast my economic vote in favour of corporations that flout norms of corporate ethics. Neither would a lot of people I know. It probably takes concerned organisations and individuals such as those that made the documentaries I watched to care enough to highlight the injustice being inflicted.
The way I see it, all it takes is better information to avert a lot of such misdeeds being committed in future. We only need to be informed correctly about the ramifications of our economic decisions so that as economic agents, the choices we make do not end up as the cause for somebody else's woes.