Notre Dame University

Cotabato City

ECONOMIC AND
CULTURAL
HOMOGENIZATION

Tamon, Humphrey Miles

Upahm, Bai Sittie Hannan
Palma, Charlotte
Decipulo, Angelica
Delos Reyes, Anne
Daud, Nor Hassan

BSA-1C | Contemporary World | October 2019

 Economic and Cultural Homogenization
One of the tenet of Economic Globalization is to integrate and merge the
economic activity of all countries into a homogenous model of development—a
single, centralized supersystem. This constitute situations where we are being
served by the same few global corporations, the same fast-food restaurants, hotel
chains and clothing chains; wear the same jeans and shoes, drive similar cars;
receives the same films, music and television shows; live in the same urban
landscape; and engage in the same kind of agricultural and industrial development
schemes, while carrying the same personal, cultural, and spiritual values. For short
adopting similar tastes, values and lifestyle or simply refers to having a “global
monoculture”.
Activities in line with this model includes orienting all nation economies to
export, lifting barriers to foreign investments, and removing all restraints on the
free flow of speculative money across national borders. This is what we call Export-
oriented Trade and Investment which entails underlying theoretical rationale
which is the comparative advantage. Comparative advantage is a crucial
component of globalization theory, it facilitates the replacement of diverse local or
regional economic systems into large-scale mono-cultural export systems. But will
this model really benefit the poor and the environment? —A critique which is
entitled “Intrinsic Environmental Consequences of Trade-Related Transport” by J.
Mander and S. Retallack was published in relation to the topic. The central feature
of an export-oriented production model is that, it dramatically increases transport
and shipping activity. As global transport increases, it in turn requires massive
increases in global infrastructure development. Many of these are built in areas
with relatively intact wilderness, biodiversity, and coral reefs or they are built in
rural areas. These activities therefore may lead to ecological destruction of that
specific place or region. Increased global trade increases the use of fossil fuel as
well, contributing to global warming. Ocean shipping carries 80% of the world’s
international trade in goods. The fuel commonly used by ships is a mixture of diesel
and low quality oil known as “Bunker C” which is particularly polluting because of
high levels of carbon and sulfur.
The Global conversion of agriculture from diverse, small-scale local farms to
giant, chemical intensive industrial production for export markets has brought
terrible environmental destruction to lands and waters across the planet. The
central point from this is that if you are going to design a system built on the
premise that dramatically increased global trade and transport, you are
guaranteed to bring on these kinds of environmental problems.