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| Sunday, 23 June 2002 |
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Towards a 'people-centred' globalization - Mahinda The State should provide more and more incentives for the private sector to improve productivity of local agriculture and industry, Opposition Leader and SLFP MP Mahinda Rajapakse said last week in a major policy speech. He was speaking at the inauguration of the World Congress on 'The Cause of Independence in the 21st Century' held at the BMICH, Colombo last Wednesday, where he presented a twelve-point policy for a 'people-centred globalisation'. Mr. Rajapakse said that local productivity could be increased through government institutional intervention in research, infrastructure, credit, marketing support and access to factors of production. "What is important to me in the concept of 'self reliance' is that it is the community which is at the centre of all activity. It is the 'community', be it local, district, national or global that mobilizes the other resources such as land, water, technology, finance, skills, raw materials, labour, cultural values and so on and decides what to produce, how to produce, how much to produce, where to produce, how to exchange and with whom to exchange their products and services," he said. "In short, the 'people' living in 'communities' are at the centre of the economic system. This is also our dream for a new world order; a world order in which communities speak and communities decide; a world order in which communities use all the available modern information technologies such as the Internet, the Email and the telephone, and modern travel facilities to communicate, exchange and share with one another across the world while maintaining one's own cultural identity and integrity," he added. Mr. Rajapkse said that "Our dream is for a 'People Centric Process of Globalization' in which people decide and people matter. But the transformation of the world towards People-Centric Globalization will unfortunately have to be slow. And, to be realistic, the transformation will have to be planned not by any single country or region but by the 'Global Community' as a whole, networking through the use of modern information technology." Food security, public health srvices and Education should not be handed over to the private sector, he argued. "While the State promotes open, free markets, it should also intervene in those markets to the extent necessary to prevent market failure, ensure fair competition and ethical conduct, and remove market irregularities and monopolies and to integrate social with economic development," Mr. Rajapakse said. |
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