Economic Resistance
Critics of globalization believe that international agreements and institutions can destroy small local businesses. Large corporations could use the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO to achieve their goals, but local individuals and businesses could not. For example, many small businesses and individuals could not cross state lines or national borders. They could not extract the natural resources they needed or use the wide variety of labor sources that big corporations and transnational businesses used. In an attempt to combat globalization, some businesses, especially restaurants, have insisted on providing their customers locally grown or made products.
Globalization critics also distrusted the World Bank, an international organization affiliated with the United Nations. The bank’s mission is to improve the economic development of member states. In 1988, about 20,000 people protested meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in West Berlin. Protesters insisted that these agencies favored richer nations over poorer ones. In 2001 and 2002, anti-IMF and anti-World Bank protests took place in 23 countries, including many of the world’s poorest nations. In 2014, the World Bank made reforms to its structure and governance, but critics maintained that the world’s richest nations controlled the bank.
What Measures Do Anti-Globalists Favor? The anti-globalization movement has grown into a social movement as well. Its followers tend to focus on these issues:
• Human rights, which are basic freedoms that every person has, such as freedom from slavery and freedom to express opinions • Fair trade, which is a system that ensures the person who provided the good or service receives a reasonable payment for it
• Sustainable development, which means business ventures that allow people and companies to make a profit without preventing future generations from meeting their own needs
• Debt relief or debt restructuring so that countries that owe huge sums to the IMF do not have to risk economic breakdown