Who is My Neighbor? International Markets and Global Solidarity
Year Delivered or Published: 2007
Author: Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services
Author's Faith: Christianity
Date Submitted to Inspiration and Issues: June 11, 2007
Topic: Religion and Leadership
An address to the graduates of the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business
Today I am going to speak a bit about our world and your place in it as grads. Most of you have signed with a corporation or have been with a company that has helped you get through this wonderful school. You’ll be working for highly respected and successful corporations like Citigroup, UBS, General Electric, Whirlpool, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM and Hewlett Packard. Some of your classmates will ply their trade at nonprofits like the Christo Rey High School for disadvantaged youth in Washington D.C., the Global Education Program at a school in Toledo, Ohio and the Southold Dance Theater here in South Bend.
Many of your current, or soon to be, employers have operations around the world. Many of your companies are supplied by vendors in other countries or, you outsource to facilities in economically poorer nations. I am going to talk for a few minutes about what that might mean for you. And, I’m going to speak to you about how my own agency, with operations in 98 of the world’s poorest countries, sees the interplay of globalization and poverty.
This morning, I’d like to introduce you to a world that may be different than the one you have been thinking about during your time here at Notre Dame. A world that needs your intellect, focus and attention. You are going to be leaders in your companies. You are going to be the individuals whose decisions will impact thousands. You will make judgments that impact shareholder value, profits, and key processes in whatever enterprise you engage. And your actions will have an impact far beyond what you might imagine.
I don’t have to explain the phenomenon of globalization to you. It has transformed the way we do business. Globalization is placing every dimension of our lives in a broader context. Easier travel and enhanced communications are connecting us with people and cultures that previous generations never thought about or encountered. The modern phenomenon of globalization is also forcing us to think anew about ancient truths. Take that simple question Jesus asked his disciples: Who is my neighbor? Is it the person closest to me? The person living next to me, or working with me? Are my neighbors the people I encounter every day?
Globalization turns all this on its head. Could it be that my neighbor is someone who lives far from me, who I never personally encountered? Someone who is very different from me in education, in income level and way of life Yet, is it someone whose life is affected by actions that I take, or don’t take, either personally or professionally? The answer is a profound YES.
In my nearly 40 years in international humanitarian work, I’ve come to know my neighbor around the world. I have met and made personal connections with folks living in circumstances almost unimaginable to us. I have lived and worked with folks from the mountains of Mindanao, to villages in the Afram Plains in Ghana, to peasant soldiers in El Salvador with whom have more in common than I realized.
We are one human family. That fact has implications for how we live our lives in this globalized world. That means that we have to think about how globalization impacts people, ordinary people next door or in the next hemisphere. Some people are threatened by the very idea of globalization. But it doesn’t have to be threatening. Global markets are offering real opportunities for countries in the developing world to pull themselves out of generations of poverty. But I must also caution you that these opportunities can have some harmful effects, often at the same time as they generate great wealth. Let me give you an example.
Catholic Relief Services does about half of our work in Africa. We have a long history there. We are deeply interested in what goes on in its villages, communities and countries. And over the years we have learned that decisions made in boardrooms here, can have a profound effect on a goat herder in Sudan or a small farmer in Madagascar.
Millions of people in Africa live in extreme poverty. At the same time the continent is actually rich in mineral resources. But it is a fact that most ordinary Africans gain little or no benefit from the oil, diamonds, gold and other precious metals extracted from their land. Instead, these precious resources, from the oil fields of Nigeria, Sudan and Angola to the diamond fields of Sierra Leone and the Congo have contributed to conflict, corruption and continued poverty and environmental degradation throughout the continent.
In the mid 90’s, in a strategic planning process at CRS, a group of us were debating what were the major threats and obstacles facing Africans. We were seeking the best set of strategies that we could put into place to help Africans.
One striking statistic was introduced into our deliberations. Investment by large corporate groups in oil and natural gas extraction over the course of the 90’s and out to 2010, would dwarf all of the foreign assistance provided by all of the governments and multilateral institutions. Unfortunately, we saw that few of the benefits flowed to the poorest people in those countries. In fact, there appeared to be a negative correlation between investments in extractive industry and reduction in poverty.
We decided to take on two initiatives. First, we began a major study of the impact of oil investments in Africa. We proposed a paradigm for governments, oil companies and civil society to better handle the revenues generated from oil sales. Second, we launched into a new model for handling oil revenues. We decided to develop a prototype in Cameroon and Chad, where the World Bank and IMF were preparing to underwrite the investments from Exxon/Mobil, Petronas of Malaysia, and Chevron in a pipeline from Chad to the coast in Cameroon.
CRS supported the local Church and other partners in Chad and Cameroon. We helped them to design more accurate ways to measure the impact on people who were to lose their homes and property as the pipeline came through. The hope was that the poor farmers who would be affected would receive just and appropriate compensation for their losses. Now, with the local Church we’re attempting to hold the various parties to the promises that have been made about managing the revenue.
This has neither been easy, nor fully successful. After considerable pressure the World Bank conditioned their financing on the Chadian Governments agreement to dedicate 70% of the oil revenues to poverty reduction programs. That was the good news, now here is the bad. Last year as President Deby of Chad was coming under a lot of internal pressure with the threat of violent overthrow looming large, he asked the World Bank to change the formula for this trust. That would give the Deby government greater access to oil revenues for immediate needs. And less would be available for longer term poverty reduction programs.
But the consciousness raised within the oil companies, the World Bank, and the other international financing institutions has shown that there can be a different path.
For example, just in the last month there has been significant attention focused on the Fidelity Fund and Berkshire Hathaway to divest their portfolio of shares of PetroChina, which has significant investments in Sudan’s oil industry.
Why does Catholic Relief Services care about the business practices of corporations and governments? After all, we’re a relief and development agency. Well, that is exactly the point. Yes, we provide relief and assistance to empower individuals to improve their own economic situation. We do those things and we do them well.
We have also come to realize that if we are concerned about reducing or eliminating poverty, we cannot ignore other factors. We must consider forces that have a far more profound impact on the economies of these poor nations. We cannot ignore elements that contribute to corrupt and unaccountable leadership. These are real obstacles to sustainable development. And they make our goal of helping people to lift themselves out of poverty, certainly more difficult if not impossible.
So, there are a couple of caveats I’d like to leave with you on this most auspicious day: that our actions can have unintended consequences and good intentions are not enough. Some of you have quite a bit of experience and others are just embarking on your careers. But all of you will be leaders. And all of you will make countless decisions. Most of them minor and inconsequential. But be aware some of them are going to be major and maybe a few decisions that are monumental. I ask you to consider the wider implications, even the global effects, of the decisions you will make in your professional and personal lives.
As you leave here today, I want to tell you that I have great faith in you and great optimism that you will carry forward what you’ve learned here at Notre Dame. It is clear that you’re already doing this kind of critical thinking and questioning. And the values you’ve be taught by your professors will accompany you throughout your professional careers and family lives. You’ve had many wonderful examples right here on campus. Dean Woo has taught you to think expansively about the possibilities of Peace Through Commerce. The Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business has been a leader in showing how our tradition can be integrated with corporate life. The folks from Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, especially through the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, are training future leaders for the vital task of peacebuilding in the world.
Since 9/11, we’ve come to realize how powerfully forces overseas affect us here in the U.S. At the same time, we can’t overlook the fact that our actions as Americans, individually and collectively, affect our brothers and sisters around the world. As still the largest and most powerful economy in the world we leave a big footprint wherever we step. That means we must watch where we are stepping. We are presented with great opportunities, but also great responsibilities. We are obliged to answer that age-old question: Who is my neighbor? Our responsibility is to act on our answer.
Globalization should be a rallying call to people of good will to take a world made smaller and make it work for the common good. Each of us, doing our small part, can contribute to improving the lot of our one human family around the world.
I’d like to conclude with the words of your own Fr. Hesburgh, who has long been a champion of justice and an advocate for poor people around the world. A few years ago, he said:
“Unless we are people who love our neighbor, which is the basic law of all, we can forget about all the rhetoric, forget about all the laws.”
