Blood Oil, Pandemics and the Helping Developing Nations

It is oil is that makes globalization possible. It powers all the forces of globalization: transportation, trade, communication technologies and media. Without it we wouldn’t be where we are today. Blood oil is not caused by the transnational companies that buy the oil. It’s caused by the governments of where the oil is extracted from. It was the Nigerian government who executed the nine activists so that they could sell oil to the transnationals. The transnationals goal was to buy the oil for refineries at the most economical price possible. It was not to buy oil from Nigeria. It then became an ethical issue and many companies likely went elsewhere to buy there oil. Thus the government would be left with few companies to sell to. In the end the Nigerian government suffered.

Pandemics can kill a lot of people and medical experts are right to be concerned. As the world is so interconnected today diseases can travel farther more quickly and infect more people. The World Health Organization has a lot of work to do with separating mild diseases from the more dangerous ones. National health organizations should also be credited with this. When you look at the number deaths from the Spanish flu to SARS you see that they are definitely making a difference.

When you compare what Canadians have-technology, clean water, electricity, health care and rights and freedoms-you see that developing nations don’t have widespread access to everything that we do. The extent that a person should try to lend assistance to developing countries depends on the person. There are some people who devote their entire lives to helping these people because they have a vision that they’re trying to make see the light of day. But not everyone is like that. The minimum that a person should do is donate money to organizations with people who have these visions. There is a lot of area between these two points though. People can boycott companies and products that harm developing countries, buy free trade products to encourage companies to sell more of them and they can participate in civil society groups.