Jean Ziegler on “a murderous world-order”

In a newspaper article, the Swiss sociologist and correspondent for the UN-human rights-commission Jean Ziegler (picture) calls the present world order “murderous” (*). I like to repeat his points here:
Ziegler calls Ceuta and Melilla the “two last European colonies in Africa”. And he asks for the reasons why so many people from far-away- regions like Congo flee to the Mediterranean sea. Why do poor villagers save all the little money they have, get it together and give it to one, two or three of their young people who will try their best to make it to Europe?

Everyday (!) die a 100000 people on hunger. The World Food report of the FAO says that last year 856 million people were permanently undernourished, while today´s world-agriculture could nourish 12 billion people without any problem (and at the moment we are “only” 6.2 billion people in the world). That is the reason why Ziegler calls the actual world order “murderous” and “absurd”. Most of the undernourished people live in Asia, but regarded proportionally, Africa has the greatest problem: 34 % of the African people are undernourished. What are the reasons?

As the most important of a number of “complex” reasons, Ziegler names the “absurd agriculture- and dumping-politics of the industrialised countries” who spent more than 349 billion dollars for subsidies in 2004. He gives an concrete example for the results. If you visit the market in Dakar (Senegal), the biggest market in West Africa, you will find that European vegetables and fruits will cost averagely only one third of the local products – a fact that means the destruction of the African agricultures. The USA pay each year 5 billion dollars to their own cotton industry that led to a breakdown of the world-prices for cotton in 2003. So, hundred thousands of African families lost their income.

But is corruption in the “third-world”-countries not the real problem? Yes, certainly corruption is a problem, but it occurs because these countries are very instable and that is a result of the exploitation by colonialism and capitalism. Now the debts of the 122 “developing countries” (around 4.8 billion people) are around 2100 billion dollars. With such a high amount of debts these countries do not have many possibilities for social investments.

Since the breakdown of the Soviet-Union in 1991, world trade increased three times higher than before. But wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of few. In 2004, the largest 500 transcontinental groups of companies controlled more than 52 % of the world´s gross international product. The power and influence of these companies, Ziegler calls bigger than any king or pope had in the past. This process of “a feudalisation of the world” takes place in a time when (at first time in history) we already possess the material instruments to guarantee every person in the world a certain standard of living.


(*) in die tageszeitung; Oct./21/2005; p. 11.