GLOBALISATION - (geography Terminale DNL)

The firms sold us globalization

For many years, globalization has made financial exchanges and world trade increase sharply. As well, today world is standardized according to one culture, the American one which is becoming more and more influential on lifestyles all over the world. But how did globalization spread his “spider web”? Is it a good thing for the world, for the societies and for each person?

The cultural and social model which leads the standardization of cultures and lifestyles all around the world is obviously the American one, defending the capitalist system, the private property and some important values like freedom and individualism. This model has been brought on every continent by film industry, by TV, by progress in term of communication means. That’s what allowed American dream to be exported by the firms, selling their products all over the world. For example, Apple products can be founded both in Asia and Europe, and even in the Southern countries. The consequences of these exportations are a uniformity of the consumption all around the world because of the hegemony of a few brands on all the markets. We can find American brands such as Mac Donald's or Coca cola in the entire world, even in the Arabic countries, because these firms are able to fit onto different cultures (in some regions of the world, it’s hard to find water but you’ll find people selling bottles of Coca Cola)

Consequently, the American society became the symbol of freedom and development in the world: that is what we called the “American dream”. This image of the USA is used by the firms to sell their products and to export their ideology, so as to make the whole world become a possible market. So, as we see, the firms export the American dream but also use it as publicity when they sell their products. Indeed, the American model of development is a guarantee that the American products are good values. And multinational firms permitted a development that led to the creation of a lot of jobs, whose effects was to improve the economic situation in a lot of countries: these countries are called the developing countries.

But these firms are predominantly led by profit. They did create jobs in developing countries but the other face of this idyllic globalization is a very important negligence of the individual: many people lose their job because of massive relocations in countries where workforce is cheaper and less unionized. And this workforce is totally exploited: people work hard for almost nothing, sometimes even children work in factories… Another bad point of globalization is the increase of use of GMO in developing countries: these plants are shown as the solution to feed the whole population of the entire world, but indeed small farmers who fall into the spiral quickly accumulate debts because they have to rebuy every year new plants, and a consequence is that one day they have no more to eat for themselves… So firms like Monsanto, contribute to upset situations that already are precarious, just following their interests, without paying attention to consequences their products may have on people and on the Earth.

We can conclude saying that globalization is a controversial machine : one the one hand it seems to be a prime mover for development in the world, but on the other hand it creates inequalities prejudicing to the

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