By SYD BAUMEL

We live in politically paradoxical times. When in 1991 the Soviet Union "tore down that wall," pundits proclaimed "the end of history" and the dawn of a free and democratic new world order. And indeed, today roughly 60 percent of the world’s citizens can vote in general elections, and a majority of the world’s nearly 200 countries are democracies. With virtually all the world’s developed nations governed democratically, in theory most of the planet’s wealth and power is now firmly in the hands of "we the people."

So why doesn’t it feel that way?

Freedom and democracy may be overrunning the planet, yet ordinary citizens grow more politically alienated and disenfranchised by the day.

The problem, analysts generally agree, is that democratization and the spread of greater individual freedom has been a fig leaf for economic globalization – an elitist, undemocratic process that has given priority to the freedom of multinational corporations and investors to maximize profits in the global marketplace. The will of the people has taken a back seat. Dollar democracy has supplanted true democracy.

Farmers – whether family farmers in North America or "peasant" farmers in Africa – have been particularly hard hit by the global rise of corporate clout over democratic governments and multinational economic institutions. Corporate industrial agriculture has flourished while family-scale farming has floundered. A case in point is the spread of mega hog barns. Embraced by most democratic governments, whether politically right or left, these industrial food production facilities are, yet, detested by most farmers and informed citizens. In Manitoba, after the Council of the RM of Strathclair approved a 2,500-sow farrowing operation south of Riding Mountain National Park, local beekeeper Roger Desilets told Western Producer: "It really erodes your confidence in the democratic process. . . .Almost everyone that lives near the proposed barns was against the idea but council approved it anyway."

In fact, the government supported movement away from traditional, family-based farming to corporate agribusiness has occurred without the consent of the electorate and despite increasing opposition by informed consumers. If citizens could vote for the kind of agriculture they want, polls and other indicators suggest they would not vote for a system that:

• Puts family farmers out of business (or forces them to become venture capitalists).

• Irresponsibly degrades or destroys land, air and water.

• Threatens public health in multiple ways, including rural air and water pollution, pesticide contamination of the food supply, antibiotic resistance and the creation of new or more virulent infectious diseases such as BSE and variant Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, E. Coli 0157:147 ("hamburger disease") and avian flu.

• Destroys the traditionally respectful relationship of farmers to farm animals, turning the latter into mere production units subject to ever increasing confinement, deprivation and cruel treatment to protect shrinking profit margins.

• Replaces the farming way of life with low-end jobs that, among other things, expose workers to health risks from polluted air in intensive livestock operations and to an exceptional rate of injury in high line-speed meatpacking plants.

Increasingly, consumers are voting against this "value-subtracted" agricultural model with their pocketbooks. But in a global economy marked by corporate-biased trade regulations, consumers have little recourse to vote this way at the ballot box itself. Mainstream political parties, whether left or right, shrink from making strict corporate accountability an election issue.

Why is this so?

Imagine for a moment that Canadians did make agricultural reform an election issue and elected a government to match. Imagine a Canada that is an island of small-is-beautiful, sustainable farming in a world dominated by agribusiness. Canadian consumers would probably be happier for it, despite the possibly higher prices. I say "possibly," because if externalized costs to the environment, communities and public health were paid at the cash register instead of the tax return, the net cost to consumers would probably be less. But how would this enlightened agricultural order affect our foreign trade? Current WTO practices are biased against distinguishing between the qualitatively different processes that can go into the making of like products. In the global marketplace, it’s therefore hard if not impossible to charge for the value added of ethically and sustainably produced goods or to subsidize producers. Similarly, it’s perilous for a nation to try and restrict the import or dumping of cheap versions of the "same" goods produced at great cost to communities, animals and the environment.

Agriculturally, Canada would therefore risk becoming a "rogue state," shunned by the global market. And the same would apply to any other sector of our economy where we might wish to advance human values, not just corporate values.

We are not alone in this predicament. All countries are being bled of their moral autonomy by amoral, free market pressures. For lack of democratic governance, economic globalization has tended to pit the free market – that is, transnational corporate profit and its trickle down benefits to the working class – against everything that might stand in its way: social and environmental sustainability, small business survival, labour rights, human rights, food security, public health – the democratic process itself.

We have become a company world.

Enter the Simultaneous Policy (SP), a global strategy that would empower we the people to take back that world, peacefully and democratically. SP’s mission is to address the problems (such as corporate dominance of the economy) that no nation can surmount alone (and live to tell the tale). These include war, tyranny, terrorism and weapons proliferation; global warming and climate change; world hunger and disease; and environmental destruction.

SP was conceived of in 1998 by British businessman John Bunzl, now Founder and Director of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation. Central to SP is the act of "adopting" the Simultaneous Policy. As of this writing, roughly 1200 persons in twenty countries on five continents have made this minor, but pivotal leap of faith. By doing so, they have agreed to vote in future national elections for any political candidate (within reason) who also adopts SP or to lobby their preferred candidate to adopt SP if he or she hasn’t.

Adopting SP is like voting for democracy, only democracy among nations, not just within. (Ironically, because of the erosion of national self-determination [democracy] by the "rogue" influence of global economic forces, SP would also revive democracy in countries like our own.) When citizens, politicians and political parties adopt SP they join in a collaborative, democratic process of global policymaking. It’s not unlike international treatymaking, except SP’s policies spring from citizens and civil society, not power elites, and are to be enacted as laws, not agreements, simultaneously in every nation or in enough nations for them to work.

The exact content of SP is, by design, "unfixed" at this early stage. However, we expect that because SP will – and must – represent the values of the majority of the world’s people, it will endow humanity with a body of powerful laws to advance global peace, justice, prosperity and sustainability. This is, after all, what everybody wants, no matter what their religion, nationality or culture. And it’s why we hope more and more people will adopt SP, recognizing it as a unique political tool with which to shape a new world order founded on our most common values.

As SP evolves from an ambitious vision to a formidable voting bloc capable of swinging the outcome of national elections, more and more politicians will adopt SP, if only to stay competitive. As John Bunzl tartly observes, "with citizens all around our ‘company world’ having been forced to stay economically competitive for so long, isn't it about time we turned the tables on our politicians and gave them a dose of their own competition medicine?"

And so, as more and more politicians who have competed for the SP vote are elected, national governments – entire countries – will be bound to adopt SP too. And finally, when sufficient nations have adopted SP, they will begin to simultaneously legislate these policies, creating a level global playing field where the highest common denominator of public good increasingly holds sway. Among these simultaneous policies, we fully expect, will be ones that make moral and sustainable agriculture the global norm. We haven’t written those policies yet, and you can help us do it. Visit our website at simpol.org, adopt SP and join the most ambitious democratic experiment the world has ever seen.