Protecting Endangered Cultures from Harms of Globalization: Where Current Public Action and Private Product Certification Systems Fail

Today, at roughly a price 1 to 2 percent higher than other products, most of us can buy certified organic coffee or "fair trade" handicrafts that help the environment and improve labor standards for workers in certain industries. Yet, we may be committing genocide (in the form of cultural destruction and disintegration) at the same time. The "organic" product may be cashcropped on land stolen from vulnerable peoples or produced by workers coerced into working as laborers for a foreign export product of little or no local or foreign benefit in ways that are destroying a culture. The "handicraft" may actually be a foreign design and produced in a local factory, or in villages where toxic runoff has made the water unfit to drink, in ways that irreparably transform, if not poison, a community.