20 - Interdependence

One frequently hears it said that nations like Canada should look after their own people and not worry about what is happening in other countries. That way of thinking is, frankly, naïve. Canada does not exist in isolation. We are inextricably linked with all the other nations on this planet. And it is to our detriment to ignore that reality.

There are numerous ways in which the nations of the world are interdependent. Northern Nations are linked medically with Southern Countries, and they are linked environmentally. And, of course, they are linked economically.

Although I have spend the majority of my career in international development working with the Dominican Republic, it had never occurred to me that the people of the small fishing community of Cap Pelé in my home province of New Brunswick would be particularly concerned about the value of the Dominican peso. But in 2003, while developing the 80/20 scripts, I happened to see an item on CBC news about the herring fishery which provided one more example of how extensive global interdependence was.

The herring fishery is an important part of the local economy in Cap Pelé, and the primary market for the herring caught is in the Dominican Republic and Haiti where smoked herring is popular. But in the late spring of 2003, the peso went into rapid decline, falling to a low of 50 pesos to the US dollar. At the same time, the Canadian dollar went up in value. That combination of a high Canadian dollar and a weak Dominican peso made the herring too expensive for Dominicans to purchase, and warehouses in New Brunswick were unable to move their stock.

We live in a global economy. What happens to the Dominican peso affects Canadians; just as what happens to the Indonesian rain forest affects us or (as the SARS outbreak demonstrated) what happens to the Chinese healthcare system affects us. And of course, we all now recognize the ways in which political events in others countries can affect our security here in North America. The events of September 11, 2001, have made us all–Americans and Canadians–realize that we live in a very unstable world.

It wasn’t that the world suddenly became more unstable that September; rather, we who live in North America simply could no longer ignore how unstable things had been for a long while. Again, no doubt many complex factors have contributed to this instability. But one major component brings us back to basic economics. A global economic system has evolved which appears to benefit a minority of the world’s population at the expense of the majority. And that inequity must inevitably result in resentment.

The small portion of the world’s population who live in places like the US, Canada, and Europe own, control, and consume the majority of the world’s annual resources, leaving only a fraction of those resources for the Earth’s majority, even when those resources–such as commodity products like petroleum, strategic minerals, coffee and other food items–originate in developing countries.

And our interventions in the histories of these nations, as I described in an earlier posting, have left long-lasting resentments in many countries, even countries which we currently consider our allies. How much stronger must those resentments be in countries which we cannot consider our allies.