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The Battle in Seattle: A Misguided Mob Blinded by Arrogance "Americans preaching to Asians and Latin Americans about such things as child labor is simply unpardonable" To someone who marched on Washington and joined the Peace Corps in the '60s, as I did, there is a vestigal pull to identify with the Seattle protestors venting their anger at the WTO. But I realize that it is nothing more than a faux nostalgia for the form -- not the substance -- of protest.
One of the worst aspects of the Battle in Seattle veterans was their lack of irony. Here were tens of thousands of people marching against globalization, yet organized totally by the tools of globalization. Palm Pilots, laptops, cell phones -- all the accoutrements of an integrated world -- were used to bring together the hundreds of groups in Seattle to protest that integration. Last year at the annual gathering of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, European antiglobalists used the Net to bring German, French, and Italian protestors to the tiny Swiss mountain town. That communications technology makes global integration easy, useful, and perhaps inevitable seemed totally lost on those in Seattle. But it is the arrogance of the protestors that is most upsetting. To anyone who has lived overseas, who has seen on-the-edge-of-death poverty up close, Americans preaching to Asians and Latin Americans about such things as child labor is simply unpardonable. Families send their children to work to survive in the Philippines and elsewhere, not because they are callous or ignorant of education. SANCTIMONIOUS. I worked in a Manila slum called Tondo (where The Year of Living Dangerously, with Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson was filmed), and I remember how everyone in a family did something for money. Often, one child was selected to go to school while others worked, selling gum by the stick in traffic, or scavanging garbage dumps for things to barter or sell. A job in a Japanese or U.S. factory was coveted by everyone in the slum (much as a job in the Post Office is coveted in small-town America). The wages -- abysmally low by First World standards -- were incredibly high by Tondo standards. Two such jobs in one family could actually bring in enough money to move up and out. That, of course was the dream everyone talked about -- getting out of Tondo. Does this mean Nike and other U.S. corporations shouldn't be pressured to pay their overseas employees decent wages? Of course not. But it does mean that what is seen as exploitation in the West is really something very different in the developing world. Turn the argument around for a moment. Imagine the reaction if Japan took the U.S. to task in the WTO for allowing teenagers to work, when they should be doing homework. Of course, teenage Japanese children, by and large, don't work. They study. But being sanctimonious and preachy, one of America's least attractive traits, was on display in Seattle. MIRACLE RICE. Then there were the anti-WTO placards protesting genetically modified "frankenfood" the U.S. is exporting around the world, somehow threatening everyone's safety (even though 270 million Americans have been eating it for several years now). Remember starvation? We haven't heard much about starvation since the early '60s. Then it largely ended. I was there, actually, when it happened. I did work on the miracle rice project in Los Banos, south of Manila, where the Ford Foundation developed higher yielding rice. Genetic bioengineering didn't exist then, but scientists shifted genes around nonetheless to get the best results. Then, as now, the big agricultural and chemical companies bankrolled much of the work, because the new hybrids required much more fertilizer and herbicides, and they liked that. With the development of the miracle varieties of rice and corn, using man-made combinations of genes, world starvation ended. So, should this latest batch of genetically modified crops continue to be tested for safety? Yes, of course. But let's have some context, please. Bioengineering is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is a continuation of a very long process of manipulating plants and animals to make them food for hungry people. Indeed, the whole process of globalization is evolutionary. Over the course of centuries, regions joined together to form nations (sometimes, as in the U.S. Civil War, with force). People resented giving up their local culture but usually did because the economic benefits of integration proved overwhelming. NAFTA, the European Union, and Mercosur are bigger, transnational forms of integration. Globalization, integrating nearly all nations within a worldwide economy, is but the latest iteration. Nussbaum is the editorial page editor of Business Week
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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