…[Economic growth] has been the agenda for decades, and the result is that the corporations have grown very powerful. Today just 500 corporations control 70% of world trade, and of the biggest one hundred economies, half are businesses. With their financial power it's impossible to exaggerate their political influence…

Sixty years ago world leaders met to lay out their development plans for the [so called] third world. At the time there was unanimous agreement that in economic growth and world trade lay the answers to poverty. Since then there's been a five-fold increase in world economic growth and a nineteen-fold increase in world trade. But over the same period, poverty has vastly increased, and the environment is close to ruin…

If the global economy is rendering millions destitute, if it is exhausting the planet itself, then we have to ask ourselves if it can be made less brutal. My view is that it can't. There are lots of reasons why that is so. Here are three:

First, the conditions that suit the corporations are incompatible with those that suit everyone else. In the annual report, the head of Campbell Soup Company wrote: "As I look to the future I shiver with business excitement. That's because Campbell Soup Company is engaged in a Global Consumer Crusade…The aim is to convert millions of new customers to Campbell brands every year. We are moving across the oceans and into new nation-states and blocs. The joy of it is that we can't be fined for speeding…"

Multinationals cannot cope with diversity. Diversity in the real sense is their greatest obstacle. How could Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland control 80% of world grain within the context of a diverse local food infrastructure? Multinationals need a single mass of identical consumers, each dependent on the same products and services that they alone provide. Diversity is the basis of healthy environments, economies and communities. It is the antithesis of the corporate monoculture.

Second, the global economy depends fundamentally on vulnerability. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, said that his biggest criticism of the International Monetary Fund was that it applied the same development criteria to every country, regardless of geography, culture or conditions. In the south, those criteria look something like this: countries are advised to take loans to build the infrastructure they need to be part of the global economy. They're told to service new debts by selling off their natural assets, like minerals and forests. And to generate revenue they're told to do away with their domestic food base and specialise for export.

The whole process hinges on a number of major assumptions: that these nations will always be able to rely on the global distribution of food; that the land will always accommodate intensive agriculture for export; and that they'll always be able to afford the imports they need to survive. If any of these assumptions were flawed, the result would be disastrous. Well, they are all flawed. Countries are going bankrupt. Previously self-sufficient countries are now dependent for their survival on food aid. Industrial agriculture is exhausting the land and poisoning people. The effects have already proven devastating. Breadbaskets the world over are becoming deserts, and tellingly 80% of all the world's malnourished children live in countries whose economies have already been oriented towards export. Take Ghana, for example - the World Bank's favourite African disciple - where forests have given way to desserts and national debt has reached a staggering $7.2 billion.

And when a country has already sold its natural assets, presided over the collapse of its rural economy, been made dependent completely on a volatile global economy, what does it do? Lower its standards still more and hope to attract the big boys…just like everyone else.

Third, even if you believe economic globalisation is desirable, it is nevertheless impossible. It's been calculated that were everybody to consume as Americans do we would need [several] identical planets - estimates range from three to twelve. Lester Brown of World watch estimates that if every family in China were to increase its egg consumption by just one egg per week, that would exhaust the entire grain supply of Australia…