INDEPENDENT senator, Professor Trevor Munroe has said the current globalisation thrust is “corporation centred” and riddled with “double standards”.

Munroe, who was addressing a recent meeting of the New Kingston Rotary Club, said the presence of double standards was further compounded by an absence of ethical standards, which had resulted in a type of globalisation with a separate set of rules for the wealthy and powerful and another for the poor and weak.

“It is this double standard that sees the United States government taking measures to protect its steel producers and subsidising its farmers while demanding of countries like Jamaica that it removes subsidies and opens its market. It is this double standard which sees free movement of capital but not of labour, and workers’ rights being embraced in words, yet violated in deeds,” Munroe told the Rotarians.

He added that globalisation was becoming a breeding ground for increased inequality, neglect for human rights and destruction of the environment.

What was needed, Munroe said, was a more people friendly-human globalisation as the current corporation-led approach had encountered massive human protests by hundreds of thousands of people at Seattle in 1999, Washington in 2000 and 2002, Quebec and Genoa in 2001 and more recently in Barcelona in 2001.

He said that without the charges being advocated, further protests were bound to continue, and the ground more fertile for international terrorism, adding that it was imperative that the practice of globalisation be based on the ethics of democracy, equality, transparency and accountability.