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A New Concept of Business
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J. Maresca is president of the Business-Humanitarian Forum Association,
based in Geneva. He is a former U.S. ambassador and business executive.
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The demonstrations at the December World Trade Organization (WTO)
meeting in Seattle focused press and public attention on the many "new"
international business issues. They include a range of ethical considerations,
including environmental effects, human rights, corruption, and the differences
between labor standards and wages of industrialized and developing countries.
These are matters that are affected by business behavior, but have often
been overlooked or deliberately obscured as businesses have concentrated
their attention exclusively on profit margins and as governments have
protected their own national advantages. As public consciousness has
consolidated and activists have emerged as major policy-shaping voices,
the profile of these issues has been raised.
The effort to block the WTO meeting from even taking place reflected
the absence of constructive dialogue on these issues and the frustrations
en-gendered by a perceived inability to affect the policies, laws, and
regulations
which relate to them. Never mind that the views on these issues are sharply
different among industrialized and developing countries. Never mind that
the WTO is actually supposed to be the negotiating forum where governments
come together to find some common ground among very different national
positions. The very complexity of trying to find this common ground seems
to have contributed to the frustration felt by the demonstrators. The
fact is that these issues have neither easy solutions nor a world forum
dedicated to resolving them. That is why organizations such as the Business-Humanitarian
Forum have recently been created: dialogue between businesses
and activists is needed.
Download the full article, available
in Adobe Acrobat [.pdf] format.
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