An open letter to North American business ethicists

Abstract

It is an extremely sobering experience to review the outpourings of the business ethics literature over the past two years and find no meaningful reference whatsoever to Third World poverty. The horrific consequences of such poverty affect millions and are contributed to directly by Western economic thought and action. It is estimated that each and every day 35 000 people perish needlessly from preventable hunger in countries that are underdeveloped and kept that way by the business policies of the wealthy and powerful industrial nations. It is at this level of analysis, the big picture if you like, that the ethics of business reveal themselves most clearly as cruel, heartless, short-sighted and relentlessly avaricious. At this level the connections between business and politics can no longer be ignored as they typically seem to be in the literature. On a global level political forces in the developed industrialised nations serve to prise open opportunities for big business in the worlds poorest nations. These opportunities are based upon double standards, power and greed. Trans-national organisations have a stranglehold on international trade (some 500 TNCs control over 70% of world trade, 80% of foreign investment and 30% of global GDP) and consolidate their positions through riding on the coattails of the IMF, World Bank and GATT -political organisations with an agenda clearly based upon aiding not the poverty-struck of the Third World but the already prosperous First World elite. In particular through the operation of strategic adjustment loans, Third World nations in order to receive 'aid' are required to encourage urban migration (into already desperately overcrowded urban slums), dislocate traditional societies and destroy local industries (in an attempt to ~ump-start' modern economies), slash domestic spending on such basics as education, health-care and food subsidies (in those countries most marked by illiteracy and hunger) and open their markets to First World producers (while running the gauntlet of decreasing commodity prices and increasing trade barriers on the export of manufactured goods to the developed world). The dynamics of this are well known and well documented. The end result in case after case is political destabilisation, debt bondage and the increasing degradation of the Third World poor subjected to such programs. For the wealthy nations and the transnationals who enter under such circumstances in order to exploit cheap resources, power and labour, low taxes, lax pollution laws and so forth, the end result is an increasing level of exportable profit. This is a glaring case of injustice but the dynamics are not only con-veniently ignored by the businesses and governments involved but perhaps most culpably also by the vast majority of those academics supposedly concerned with the ethics of business activity. The results of such business strategies do not end there either. As if the above were not enough to merit elevating discussion of these issues into the heart of the fields debate, the