Sustainability white paper: The Global South faces a fate worse than debt

Suggestions to repel excessive exploitation of natural resources

The Seven Wise Men publishes its sustainability white paper that demonstrates the ways globalization’s scale, causation, chronology, impact, trajectories and policy outcomes affect the North and the South very differently. While some businesses privilege economic processes and profits above all, others lend some attention to cultural, social, and ideological aspects too.

Transnationals seek to convince their global audiences that the meaning and chief value of life can be found in the limitless accumulation of material possessions. The myth that globalization transcends national borders and ideologies and that it is the sole means to showcase international solidarity, improve living conditions and income distribution, boost international peace has been the brainchild of a partial comprehension of the human psyche. At its core, globalization was and still is about a blind hunt for profit, efficiency and power centralization.

The Covid-19 pandemic has blown away the deceit and ungrounded arguments of globalism. The instant the Corona virus broke out, every state hid behind it national colours. The fight for who gets the vaccine first is on too.

The ecological impacts of globalization are recognized as the most significant and potentially life threatening for the world; these are challenges that cannot be reversed. The effects will be more significant for less developed countries than for rich countries, which do not have the necessary infrastructure or income to adapt to the unavoidable climatic changes. Climate change is not an environmental and scientific issue only. It is a political, economic, cultural, but above all, an ethical matter.

Transnationals and media giants resort to what’s known as strong discourse in order to portray globalization as a force of nature like the weather or gravity to make it easier to convince people in the North and the South that they have to adapt to these norms of the market if they are to survive and prosper.

Sustainability white paper

Fortunately, we note in our sustainability white paper that the public opinion on climate change everywhere in the North and the South is rapidly changing. The roadmap to repel the strong discourse of Big Business:

1. Nurture a strong national sentiment that rallies a population around a fair cause and esprit de corps.
2. Ensure a reliable government that is transparent, accountable and free of corruption.
3. Producers are advised to plan demand for raw materials and natural resources for a specific commodity to maintain a quantity of steady flows over an indefinite period of time.
4. Set quotas to minimize irresponsible resource depletion.
5. Remove bottlenecks that prevent transforming low-priced natural raw materials into high-priced processed goods, on domestic grounds, and move up the value chain.
6. Nurture and form alliances between the South producers.
7. Mitigate the influence of transnational companies’ pressures to safeguard the independence of national decision-making.

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