By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Oct 17 2003 (IPS)

A no-holds-barred fight against unregulated globalisation and the environmental devastation was announced Friday as the 17th Consumers International World Congress came to an end.

For the 600 delegates from 115 countries that are part of Consumers International (CI), "another power is possible", one based on what the organisation’s outgoing president Louise Sylvan described as actively fighting the dominant powers that shape our lives.

In an ideal world, says Sylvan, each country would have a strong, credible and experienced consumer protection movement, but she admitted that it is a difficult goal to achieve.

Participants in the congress, coming from around the world, engaged in debates throughout the week, and agreed that their principal shared enemies are globalisation without ethics and extreme neo-liberal economics, both of which entail harm to the environment.

The new CI president, Brazilian Marinella Lazzarini, said it will be necessary to institute some changes in the organisation, "such as decentralising the major campaigns," given that there are regional differences as far as what needs to be tackled in defence of the consumer.

She cited the examples of food security, potable water for all, public services, sustainable consumption and genetically modified organisms. The magnitude and seriousness of these matters varies from region to region, country to country, said Lazzarini.

Samuel Ochieng, of Kenya, said that globalisation has led to the emergence of very vulnerable consumers; a phenomenon he says is a big problem in Africa.

Activists from Europe commented that neo-liberal economic policies have created bigger rich-poor gaps within the industrialised countries themselves.

These concerns were taken up in the plenary session led by Mario Soares, former president of Portugal (1986-1996) and long-time leader of social democrats, and special guest at the congress held this week in Lisbon.

Globalisation in itself "is a good thing, resulting in a world that has become a ‘common house’… for all human beings," but the vision of the world as a market has only favoured the richer countries, said the Portuguese politician.

"This is not a universal vision," given that the developing world continues living with "its routines, its limitations, its own timeframe," and the consumers movement "should assume the effective contradiction existing today between rich and poor countries, which has grown more acute with economic globalisation," Soares said.

Globalisation "is in a perverse phase, of financial and speculative capitalism, without a face, with no one directly responsible, and which has as its only objective profit for the sake of profit."

"It is a depredatory globalisation, an instrument of domination of the empire of capital, or even the ‘Americanisation’ of the global economy," although the European Union also has its own heavy share of responsibility, said Soares.

When the United States began talking about the "new economy", it was thought that globalisation would reduce the rich-poor gap between countries, regions, and peoples, said the former Portuguese president.

"But that’s not what happened. Instead there has been a vertiginous concentration of capital in the big multinationals, which have budgets much larger than most countries," he said.

Soares concluded by saying that this was the origin of the "intensification of social conflicts and the incomprehension of the different ethnic and religious communities in relation to the West, as well as the indifference to the serious ecological aggressions to which our planet is subjected."

After his address to the congress, Soares spoke with IPS, saying, "Commerce isn’t everything." He mentioned as an example that potable water, "essential for life, cannot be considered mere merchandise," nor can the oceans and their vast biological wealth, or the world’s forested areas or the health of all citizens.

He criticised the big multinationals also for taking over communications, which are increasingly concentrated among just a handful of economic groups, undermining fundamental democratic rules.

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