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Industry Into the 1990s

01 October 1989

She was addressing Moral Re-Armament's industrial conference at Caux, Switzerland, entitled 'Shaping the 1990s -a better use of resources'.

The Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade, Yvonne van Rooy, this August reassured American and Japanese businessmen that `there is more to win than to worry about' in the integration of European markets in 1992.

She was addressing Moral Re-Armament's industrial conference at Caux, Switzerland, entitled 'Shaping the 1990s -a better use of resources'. The conference drew 160 industrialists, businessmen and trade unionists from all parts of the world, many with their husbands or wives.

Ms Van Rooy, who has also been a long-standing Euro-MP, said that the European Community, as the world's largest exporting bloc, would only harm itself by adopting protectionist measures after the 1992 integration.

After stressing the EC's commitment to the Uruguay Round of talks in the framework of GATT (which aimed to curb protectionist measures), she said that the integration of European markets would bring `a new breeze of optimism, a new state of mind, a new dynamism in Europe'.

Responding, Australian foreign policy analyst, Allan Griffith appealed to Europe to `address more realistically' the pricing of primary commodities from Third World countries which were at their lowest value since World War II. The mechanisms which Europe put in place to compensate for such losses covered only 10 per cent of them.

Priorities
Chairing the opening session, Olivier Giscard d'Estaing, Vice-President of INSEAD, the management training institute at Fontainbleau, said that there were enough resources in the world for all people to live a life of dignity and relative comfort. The key, he said, was finding the right priorities.

Francis X Stankard, Executive Vice-President of Chase Manhattan Corp, stressed that better stewardship of resources by the `haves' was needed.

Understanding the true costs of what was produced was the first step, he went on. `We must build into the consumer's cost everything from the production value of an item to the cost of disposal, and even its medical or environmental costs.' The real question, he said, was who paid - `because the price will be paid'. He instanced hospitals which had adopted the 'throw-away' approach. Tourism in his area of New Jersey had been hit when used syringes were washed up on the beaches after medical waste had been dumped into the water in New York city. People were staying away, terrified of getting AIDS.
`Hospital costs may have gone down, but disposal costs have soared,' he said.

He described the work of Conservation International, a private organization of which he is a director. Recently they paid off $650,000 of Bolivian debt. In exchange the Bolivian government set up and funded a new biosphere reserve to steward 2 million acres of tropical forest.

Ryuzaburo Kaku, President of the Japanese company Canon, said that friction and disparity of wealth between major trading partners could only be resolved in a global perspective. Industrialists could no longer just mind their own business. He had taken charge of his company immediately after the oil crisis of 1973. Under his leadership sales had risen dramatically. But he then realized that having a successful company or being a socially alert employer was not enough. Canon, he decided, had to be responsible in a global context.

Some spoke of initiatives they were taking themselves. Stanford Ovshinsky, President of Energy Conversion Devices in the USA, described a new battery he had developed. Made from safe substances, it was twice as efficient as nickelcadmium batteries. It was being manufactured by the German company Varta and had potential for Third World development.

Reducing hours
Yasuo Kanesaki, General Secretary of the 63,000-strong Toshiba Workers' Union, said that Japanese unions were starting to take on board criticisms that they work too long. In international forums the Japanese had been accused of this leading to `unfair' competition. The union had even had to campaign for members to take the two weeks' holiday to which they were entitled. Working hours had already come down from 2,200 hours per year to 1,950, and the union was `making efforts' to further reduce them to 1,800. There had been a shift of emphasis in Japanese firms, he said, from long working hours to improving the quality of life.