Challenges for 21st century

Hi Royston do you know the 18th is Saturday?

do you mean 16th May Thursday

Rob
----- Original Message -----
From: Royston
To: Helen Cunningham
Cc: robert.phillips
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 5:55 PM
Subject: Re: Preparing for the 21st century

Hi Helen and Rob

Draft notification of meeting. - Do you have concerns or views about the way the world is progressing and how we need to prepare and tackle the growing demand on resources, the impact on migration, the environment and global economies.
The Abertillery and DIstrict Labour Party are discussing this at the Corner Club on May 18th at 7pm. This will be an overview of the possible outcomes that should lead to further discussions on specific topics at future meetings.
This meeting is open to all Blaenau Gwent CLP members who can also bring along friends who are interested in the complex task of preparing for the next century.

If this is OK I will book the venue and we can circulate by Facebook or EMail together to try and reach a wider audience and ask friends to forward on.

Sent from my iPad

On 22 Apr 2013, at 22:31, Helen Cunningham <hucunningham@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Hi Royston

This is great, definitely lots of content to get a debate going. I think it's a good one to start with as its around the forces and nature of global capitalism - the very thing that makes us socialists in the first place.

Could we put it out on facebook do you think, would be a great one for prospective members?

I think the meetings should be the presentation of the topic and then throw it open to debate. Perhaps asking people to think of any questions they have as its introduced which can be debated by everyone later on as a way to stimulate debate so people don't feel on the spot to comment once the intro of the topic is finished.

Looking forward to the next meeting

Helen


From: Royston <roystonwelch61@gmail.com>
To: "robert.phillips41@btinternet.com" <robert.phillips41@btinternet.com>; "hucunningham@yahoo.co.uk" <hucunningham@yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Saturday, 20 April 2013, 12:03
Subject: Fwd: Preparing for the 21st century

Hi Rob and Helen. When you have a spare ten minutes could you read through this presentation to kick off the specific topic agendas for the town party meetings, let me know your views on this and how we should conduct these meetings.


Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: Royston Welch <roystonwelch61@gmail.com>
Date: 6 April 2013 10:02:52 BST
To: Royston Welch <roystonwelch61@gmail.com>
Subject: Preparing for the 21st century
Preparing For The Twenty First Century

According to the middle range of estimates the earth will contain 8.5 billion people by 2050, with the World Bank suggesting it will stabilize in the the second half of the 21st century somewhere between 10 billion and 11 billion. If the sights in the poorest nations are now pitiful, how will they look when these regions possess three times as many people. In developing countries, the labour force will rise to more than 3.1 billion by 2025, implying a need for about 38 to 40 million new jobs every year.

A few of the developing country's have achieved considerable economic growth, well above the global average in recent decades, so is this the solution to the problem?

The environmental costs from erosion of forests,demand for food and raw materials, and CO2 emissions are significant now. This though would be colossal if China reached the same per capita consumption of the USA or Japan.

Optimist's believe that many resources are created through human inventiveness, labour and technology which has an infinite capacity. If they are correct the world will simply contain many more prosperous people, if they are wrong the entire human race will suffer from a careless pursuit of economic growth rather than modifying it's habits.

Developed regions with their better healthcare,low mortality rates and lower fertility rates pose an obstacle to International understanding. As prosperous societies grapple with the problem of allocating more resources to the elderly, the rest of the globe begs for help to meet the demands from the boom in young children. This creates practical and physical problems and also deep-rooted cultural and racial anxieties, with the assumption of a Darwinian struggle that the faster growing species will encroach upon and overwhelm a population with a static or declining numbers.

In view of the imbalances between 'have' and 'have not' societies it is unlikely that there will not be great waves of migration in the 21st century due to the expected growth rates in developing countries compared to developed countries. Enhanced efforts to control migration are unlikely to succeed in the face of the momentous tilt in the global demographic balances.

Since 1945 there has been an uneven surge in global prosperity and an emergence of large multinational companies less attached to the values of their original country. This has created uneven bargaining power between communities and the globalist company creating mostly low- paid, casual, unprotected jobs, requiring few skills and offering few opportunities. The daily volume of foreign exchange trading is several times larger than the value of the goods traded, as investors speculate on currencies. As standards of living fall, the wealth gap between the upper one fifth and lower four fifths increases and financial controls being tested, people may one day cease to believe in the capatilist system.
For developing countries the effect of globalization is even more sobering. These nations need enormous investment in family planning, environmental protection,health care, education and infrastructure which free market multinationals are unlikely to be interested in.

How will we feed this growing population? One possibility is to increase the efficiency of farmers in poorer countries but there we still face the dilemma of lack of land and climatic issues. It is suggested that there will be a greater reliance upon lab-based rather than natural produce. Farming as we know it is on its way out, but what is much less clear is how the global society can handle the switch to bio-tech farming. What is more clear is that the fate of the developing world looks grim with developed countries either less reliant on developing countries for food supplies or bio-tech being successfully progressed in developing countries putting millions of their jobs at risk.
Let us look very briefly at the present position of a number of regions.
-Japan does not have strong leadership as a key to it's success. It is a social constructed machine that can go by itself. They are worried that its unfavourable demographics and strong nationalist culture could lead to their long term decline.
-China has strong economic growth, but this is being swallowed up by population growth, and birth control causing unfavourable demographics.
-India's economy is growing slower than it's population due to less birth control, with 40% under the age of 15 and half the population living in poverty – over 425 million.
-Muslim states also have population growth and 40% under 15 years of age putting pressure upon food, water and land resources – a classic recipe for unrest.
-The former USSR demonstrates that territorial size and resources alone will not prevent collapse if the system becomes inoperable.
-The European Community appear to be in a good position to respond to global trends but there are difficulties in furthering its unity which is required to tackle the growing unfair distribution of wealth and the threat of migration from 'a border-less world'.
-America suffers from slower rates of growth and its wealth unevenly distributed causing social problems. They face the challenges from growing debt, the balance of their military spending against the economic damage that this is causing from reduced R&D in other sectors, immigration, and their obstructive political system . It is still the largest economy in the world but they may pay an high price if they assume that things can stay the same at home while the world outside changes.

Efforts to harmonize economic and political structures will be complicated. The surge in the earth's population and rising demographic imbalances between rich and poor countries is not a good recipe for stable international order. A population explosion also produces environmental challenges. The improvements in automation industries,bio-tech and technology in agriculture, the intensity in the global financial and communication revolution, have left communities and countries in less and less control of their own destinies.

Traditional powers have no satisfactory answers to the threats from massive currency flows, fertility rates, immigration and redundancy in farming and manufacturing. While optimists forecast ever increasing prosperity there are billions of impoverished and uneducated people in the developing world and tens of millions unskilled unprofessional workers within the developed world whose prospects are poor and getting worse. If both optimists and pessimists are correct the gap between rich and poor will widen leading to social unrest, mass migration and environmental damage from which even the 'winners' might not emerge unscathed.

We should not expect to see uniform responses to these transitional challenges. As some states feverishly seek to improve themselves, others will be either unwilling or unable to do as much.
Given the difficulties of reform, human instinctive avoidance to uncomfortable changes and its preference to make only minor ones is likely to prevail. It is not that solutions to transitional challenges are lacking, but that the public and politicians are equally reluctant to implement changes which cause short term personal costs to secure long term general benefits.

The three key elements to prepare the global society for the 21st century is the role of education, the place of women and the need for political leadership.
Education in the larger sense means more than technically 're-tooling' the workforce but also creating a deep understanding of why our world is changing, how other people and cultures feel about these changes and what we have in common. Enhancing the role of education is inextricably linked to the position of women in both developing and developed countries. Evidence overwhelmingly suggest that when education is widely available to women average family size drop sharply.

The man and woman in the street know and worry that the world is changing and the demand for political responses to the new challenges are large. Such responses are often reactionary. Protectionism, anti immigrant policies, blocking new technologies and finding new enemies to blame. Since most politicians have risen to the top through compromise, making deals and alliances and taking care not to annoy powerful interests they are hardly prepared to endorse controversial policies for benefits 20 years away.

Because we don't know the future, it is impossible to say with certainty whether global trends will lead to terrible disasters or be diverted by astonishing advantages in human adaptation. What is clear is that we face not a 'new world order' but a troubled and fractured planet, whose problems deserve the serious attention of politicians and public’s alike. The pace and complexity of the forces for change are enormous and daunting, yet it may be possible for intelligent men and women to lead their societies through the complex task of preparing for the century ahead. If these challenges are not met, humankind will only have itself to blame for the troubles and disasters that could be lying ahead.