As the unraveling financial crisis has shown this week, for all the walls we may attempt to build, our borders are far more porous than we ever could have imagined. What happens here reverberates far beyond, not only from Wall Street to the proverbial Main Street, but to Italy and Germany and India and Peru.

For the first time, the urban population of the world will outnumber the rural. These events will pass unnoticed by most people, but it will constitute a watershed in human history. Learm more about the forces behind the scenes that are driving this dynamic, and how we must all work to ensure that opportunities luring workers to cities do not end up creating vast slums of unemployed.

Human Trafficking, the current form of modern slavery, has escalated in
the recent decade. According to UN statistics, over 2.4 million persons
are trafficked a year in an illegal industry that reaps from $7 to
$10million dollars annually, third only to the illegal trade in drugs
and in arms. The illegal trade in human beings is both facilitated and
driven by the effects of globalization economic integration and the
continuing dominance of the system of patriarchy throughout the world.
This power point examines the push/pull factors of trafficking and
migration which brings many people into both forced economic labor and
forced sexual labor.

This power point presentation with reference to Catholic Social Teaching critiques globalization through three lens: globalization as a new perception of space relations, as global economic integration and as an economic doctrine. It concludes with alternative directions to pursue to bring about a more just future.

Twenty-six scholars, academics and social justice activists gathered outside Toronto, September 25-28, 2003, to assess the relevance and promise of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) for the globalizing dynamics of today. A general consensus emerged from this group that CST in its present form has much to contribute to the world community, but it clearly cannot claim to be a global ethic, marked as it is by both the strengths and the clear limitations of being culturally western and theologically Catholic-Christian. The challenge is to develop a Catholic ethic for globalization that can be brought into constructive dialogue with the other faiths and cultures gracing the planet. That will put us on the only viable path toward a global ethic–an ethic that will then have to be expressed to the peoples of the world in the rich diversity of cultural forms that constitute the world’s faiths.

Gigi Francisco, a member of IGTN, identifies three crises in the process of globalization:  economic, environmental and social.

Presentation by Mariama Williams to the Enquete Commission of the German Parliament.