SocialASEAN

Wigberto Tañada, Lead Convenor

We, at the Fair Trade Alliance (FairTrade), are pleased to be a co-sponsor of this Inter-University Conference, which seeks a deeper discussion of the social and human dimension of regional integration, a process inextricably linked with globalization. We join our brothers and sisters from the UNI Global Union and other civil societies in their call for a people-centered regional integration. We commend the socially-committed academics and scholars for bringing about a Conference focused on People Solidarity and involving representatives of the working people as direct participants. Together, we can help shape the social and labor rules of regional integration to make the process inclusive, broad-based and pro-people.

Yes, ASEAN or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is fast integrating, in fact, it is hailed as the core of an emerging East Asian economy, which includes China, the new economic dragon of Asia, and Japan, the original Asian dragon, and the tiger economy of South Korea.

And yet, recent reports of the UNDP and the ILO tell us that East Asia, Southeast Asia in particular, has been experiencing deeper inequality and rising unemployment under economic liberalization and globalization. Some countries are even experiencing jobless growth. Thus, the 2006 Asia-Pacific Human Development Report: Trade on Human Terms of the UNDP posed the following:

…the region has embraced free trade, but has free trade embraced the poor?

This development is vividly illustrated by the present food crisis being experienced by the Filipino poor, urban and rural, due to ill-advised World Bank policy of deregulating and liberalizing agriculture, which has been enthroned in the last 25 years or so. Today, the Philippines, from a net rice exporter in the late l970s, has become the number one global importer of rice.

Likewise, the Philippines has been experiencing a pattern of jobless growth, as it has become dependent on a few growth industries such as IT/ICT and electronics while losing all other industries, from shoe and textile production to tire and steel manufacturing.

To a certain extent, this phenomenon of hollowing out of the economy – the shrinking of industry and agriculture — has led to similar patterns of jobless growth and rising unemployment in other ASEAN and Asian countries, with the exception of a few robust economies. As the UNDP and ILO put it, this is the reason reason why some countries in the region have become vendors of global services, meaning providers of migrant labor, those who do the SALEF jobs – shunned by all except by a very few.

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