Prabhat Kumar, the Director of an independent Centre for Governance in India and former Governor of Jharkand State, said today that ‘there is a palpable crisis of governance in many developing countries’.

Dominique Peccoud, special advisor to the Director General of the International Labour Organization in Geneva yesterday condemned ‘the God of Money and his servant, the God of the ultra-liberal Market which has forgotten its roots’. He warned that if we do not read the sign of the times, ‘we plunge on towards the death of our system which rejects any controls and becomes a globalized capitalistic plutocracy’. He was speaking at the closing session of the 2003 Caux Conference for Business and Industry, on the theme: ‘Globalization . . . as if people really mattered’...

Anant Nadkarni, General Manager, Group Corporate Responsibility, for the TATA Group, one of India’s greatest industrial houses, today gave a presentation of his company’s long-running and successful efforts in corporate social and community responsibility.

The violent anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1998 led Theresa Szeliga, Director of Ethics and Business Conduct at Boeing’s commercial aircraft division in Seattle, on a search that brought her to the Caux business conferences.

‘I have a passionate belief that businesses can do their businesses ethically,’ said Philippa Foster-Back, Director of the UK’s Institute of Business Ethics. ‘It may cost but doing the right thing by others takes courage,’ she told the 30th annual Caux Conference for Business and Industry in Switzerland. She was speaking at a plenary session on ‘Integrity and Accountability’.

Roderick Abbott, the Deputy Director General of the World Trade Organization, today warned that the unequal benefits of globalization were ‘likely to provide the scenario for future conflicts’ between societies and cultures. ‘We must meet that challenge,’ he told the 30th annual Caux Conference for Business and Industry being held in Caux.

José María Figueres, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum and former President of Costa Rica, and Ignacio Ramonet, co-founder of the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, founder of the ATTAC campaign, and director of the Le Monde Diplomatique, this morning searched for common ground in a public dialogue on globalization.

The clock is ticking inexorably towards High Noon before time runs out to resolve the world’s 20 most urgent problems, according to Jean-Francois Rischard, Vice-President for Europe at the World Bank and author of High Noon: 20 global problems; 20 years to solve them.

Procter and Gamble’s corporate tradition is ‘rooted in the principles of personal integrity and respect for the individual’, according to Andrea Cooper, a British manager in the consumer products multinational. The phrase ‘doing what’s right’ is ‘a slogan that is part of the P&G culture’, she said. The company would never knowingly condone illegal or unethical dealings anywhere in the world, she claimed, pointing out that a recent report indicated that one in six shoppers would buy or boycott products because of a brand’s or manufacturer’s reputation.

An executive from the giant American Alcoa aluminium corporation today emphasized the need for community involvement and accountability. The multinational, which has 129,000 employees in 38 countries and annual sales of $23 billion, had gone through a ‘fundamental change over the past 10 years,’ said Don Cowles who till last year was President of Alcoa’s distribution business. Cowles, from Richmond, Virginia, was speaking at the business conference ‘Globalization : from conflict to opportunity’ being held at the Initiatives of Change centre in Caux, Switzerland.