This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘G’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
It’s impossible to summarize such a broad philosophy in a paragraph, but… Corporations are regulated and taxed at the nation state level. With its root in Western economic imperialism, and neoliberal economic models which encourage countries to specialize in just a few global commodities to produce more cheaply, globalization seeks to push the economic process across many states that offer the best terms for business – not only taking advantage of cheaper labour in poorer states, but also shifting the basis of tax and business liabilities to states with the most liberal business policies. Through instruments such as tax and trade treaties, and secretive world trade courts operating under the World Trade Organization, globalization exploits trade rules to not only increase profits, but to protect those profits from disclosure and taxation through tax havens and free ports. Through complex networks of ownership, subcontracting, and the licensing of property rights, this system has allowed a narrow global minority to create oligopolies which control key sectors – such as agriculture, mining, or mass manufacturing.
Though there are various definitions, ‘Global North’ tends to centre around states which are part of the world’s major global economic blocks – such as the G20, the OECD, or the International Energy Agency – who largely define the terms and inequalities of global trade and economic exploitation. This small number of states (less than forty) represent the large majority of world trade, and world material consumption, despite having less than 20% of the world’s population. Though the ‘Global North’ is often represented as the Western or Anglophone states, in fact pockets of extreme wealth reflecting the economic situation of those in the ‘Global North’ are present in countries across the world; just as situations which relatively reflect the poverty conditions of the ‘Global South’ are now often found in cities across the ‘Global North’ – and therefore membership of this group is best ascribed to extant economic circumstances rather than simple geographical location.
At its simplest, the opposite of ‘Global North’ – the poorest states who do not form part of the world’s major economic blocks. The Global South form the ‘neo-colonial’ base of the world’s raw material and commodity chain: The move away from formal colonialism in the mid-Twentieth Century feacilitating instead an equally problematic exploitation of these nations’ mineral and agricultural wealth under the guise of ‘free trade’; yet just as under colonialism, the wealth of this chain acrrues mainly at its end in the ‘Global North’. As a result, instability in these nations is often the result not simply of poverty, but of the ‘resource curse’ – the value of natural resources creating instability from the outside as different interests compete for the economic control of the resources.
Often attributed to the work of plant scientist Norman Borlaug in the 1950s and 1960s, essentially the Green Revolution boosted agricultural production by adding large quantities of fossil fuels to human food production: Firstly, through the use of far greater and more specialized machinery, primarily powered by petrol and diesel; the use of far more chemicals, largely sourced from the by-products of oil and gas refining; and more significantly, the application of large quantities of nitrogen fertilizer produced from natural gas. This greater technological specialization was also based upon intellectual property rights, using the new international treaties on property rights, to create the system of global agribusiness and biotech corporations which dominate the food sector today. This close link between fossil fuels and food production creates problems not only because fossil fuels are beginning to deplete, and cause climate change, but also because as the price of fossil fuels rise so the costs of food production rise also. The Green Revolution also gave rise to the massive crop monocultures, across continents, which have both destroyed biodiversity, caused soil loss, and through the pollution caused, degraded freshwater habitats as well as the oceans off of the worlds major river deltas.
‘Greenwashing’ is the practise of framing certain technological or policy changes as providing ‘green’ or ‘ecological’ benefits when objectively they do not represent a net improvement on existing actions, or fail to scale to match the problem it is designed to address. Greenwashing is a measure usually enacted by lobbyists and public relations agencies, on behalf of industrial or private interests, designed to address certain political or public relations problems; it forestalls the need for radical change by giving the public impression that change is taking place – when in fact the actions taken simply perpetute ‘Business as Usual’, protecting the profits of private interests while socializing the risks of industrial or economic practices.