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Walden Bello is Executive Director of the advocacy institute Focus on the Global South and his articles are regularly featured on this site.

The Wall Street meltdown is not only due to greed and to the lack of government regulation of a hyperactive sector. This collapse stems ultimately from the crisis of overproduction that has plagued global capitalism since the mid-1970s - and the worst is not yet over, says Walden Bello.

What Asia, like the rest of the world, needs is a vacation from a messianic United States -  and the aim of civil society mobilization both in Asia and globally should be to encourage a new American isolationism, argues Walden Bello.

Regarded as one of the leading experts on Philippine trade and agriculture issues, Riza Bernabe was interviewed on the latest collapse of the WTO "Doha Round" trade negotiations. By Walden Bello.

The food crisis in Africa had been building up for years, with the World Bank and IMF resident proconsuls reaching into the very innards of the state’s involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up, argues Walden Bello.

After Doha, the WTO is now in a worse position than before, with the prospect that it will evolve like the old League of Nations in the 1930’s: present but powerless, argue Walden Bello and Mary Lou Malig.

The G8 climate communique showed that it is trying hard to avoid the necessary radical controls on growth, consumption, profits, and the market that a viable strategy to stave off the looming climate catastrophe will necessitate, writes Walden Bello.

The food crisis concerns not only biofuels, says Walden Bello, but the structural adjustment of agriculture that has destroyed the self-sufficiency of developing economies.

The following is excerpted from an acceptance speech at the Outstanding Public Scholar Award Panel, International Studies Association, 49th Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, March 27, 2008. Bello was the second recipient of the award, the first being Dr. Susan George in 2007. 

The dilemma of the South: if they follow capitalisms 'stages of growth' like the North, it will bring about ecological Armageddon - so climate change is both a threat and an opportunity to bring about long postponed economic reform

Skyrocketing oil prices, a falling dollar, and collapsing financial markets are the key ingredients in an economic brew that could end up in more than just an ordinary recession. 

The challenge facing activists in the global North and the global South is to bring about those circumstances that will trigger the formation of a global mass movement that will decisively confront the most crucial challenge of our times.

In 1992, Dr. Walden Bello issued a macro-economic warning about the so-called Asian miracle in his book "Dragons in Distress". Six years later, the Asian financial crisis Bello predicted swept the region, throwing millions into poverty. Born in the Philippines in 1945, Dr. Bello is the author of more than 10 books, including "Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty" (1999), "Global Finance: Thinking on regulating speculative capital markets" (2000) and "The Future in the Balance: Essays on globalisation and resistance" (2001). After receiving a Ph.D from Princeton, he is the executive director of Focus on the Global South and a visiting professor in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. He spoke by phone from the Philippines with IPS Canada correspondent Chris Arsenault.

A day after the dramatic ending of the Bali climate talks, many are wondering if the result was indeed the best outcome possible given the circumstances.

An eruption of trade justice and development activists brought a contentious, World Trade Organization ministerial-like atmosphere to the negotiations, which had formerly been marked by a civil if not chummy relationship between government negotiators and climate lobbyists.

13th Nov 07 - Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is very impressive indeed. This is, however, not immediately evident, a sense that is confirmed by Joseph Stiglitz' review of the book. Even before I read it, I was certain that the Nobel laureate would highlight Klein's attempt to make a connection between the electric shock experiments performed by the notorious McGill University psychologist Ewen Cameron who was on contract with the CIA and the economic shock approach developed by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.

What is clear is that in most other places in the South, one cannot depend on the elites and some sections of the middle class to decisively change course. At best, they will procrastinate. The fight against global warming will need to be propelled mainly by an alliance between progressive civil society in the North and mass-based citizens’ movements in the South.

24th Aug 07 - New Internationalist (from 400th issue: Daring to Dream - Inspiration from the Majority World)

Walden Bello is one of globalization’s sharpest critics. And he has a good track record of being ahead of events.

30th July 07, Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus

Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea’s painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries.

The 20th century was a terrible blight on small farmers everywhere. In both wealthy capitalist economies and in socialist countries, farmers paid a heavy price for industrialization. 

14th March 07 - Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus 

At the Seventh World Social Forum (WSF), held in Nairobi, Kenya, in late January, the most controversial topic was not HIV-AIDS, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, or neoliberalism. The topic that generated the most heat was China’s relations with Africa.

At a packed panel discussion organized by a semi-official Chinese NGO, the discussion was candid and angry. “First, Europe and America took over our big businesses. Now China is driving our small and medium entrepreneurs to bankruptcy,” Humphrey Pole-Pole of the Tanzanian Social Forum told the Chinese speakers. “You don’t even contribute to employment because you bring in your own labor.”

Fifteen years after the prophesied borderless, stateless international economy, globalization has in fact reached its high water mark - and is receding.

While economists laud the recently deceased Milton Friedman for being “a champion of freedom whose work transformed economics and changed the world,” as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times put it, people in the South will remember the University of Chicago professor as the eye of a human hurricane that cut a swath of destruction through their economies.  For them, Friedman will long be associated with two things: free-market reform in Chile and “structural adjustment” in the developing world. 

Soon after the coup against the government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, Chilean graduates of Friedman’s economics department, who were soon dubbed the “Chicago Boys,” took over the helm of the economy and launched a program of economic transformation with doctrinal vengeance.   In light of his much-quoted assertion about political freedom going hand-in-hand with free markets, the irony that in Chile a free market paradise was being imposed with the bayonets of one of Latin America’s most bloodstained dictatorships could not have escaped the guru. 

“The world is investing too little,” according to one prominent economist. “The current situation has its roots in a series of crises over the last decade that were caused by excessive investment, such as the Japanese asset bubble, the crises in Emerging Asia and Latin America, and most recently, the IT bubble. Investment has fallen off sharply since, with only very cautious recovery.”

These are not the words of a Marxist economist describing the crisis of overproduction but those of Raghuram Rajan, the new chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). His analysis, now over a year old, continues to be accurate. Global overcapacity has made further investment simply unprofitable, which significantly dampens global economic growth. In Europe, for instance, GDP growth has averaged only 1.45% in the last few years. Global demand has not kept up with global productive capacity. And if countries are not investing in their economic futures, then growth will continue to stagnate and possibly lead to a global recession