Coffee Global Hero - Graham
IMF Global Hero: Joseph Stiglitz
Global Hero - Graham
When Graham decided to sign up for a Global Studies class offered at his high school, he never imagined that the course would take him into the highlands of Guatemala. But that's what happened after Graham's teacher made contact with an organization that offered work brigades in Central America.
Graham's Global Studies class spent fifteen days in a Mayan village. They lived on a Fair Trade coffee co-operative where they helped to repair a building that the community uses for meetings and classes.
"Going to Guatemala last year really brought life to subjects I'd mostly just read about in books," Graham says. "I think experiences like this are really important."
Since graduating from high school Graham has moved to Vancouver where he is studying art. He works with various student organizations to educate people about fair trade coffee.
Take a look at the photos below. They show what you would see if you were to follow the path of a Fair Trade coffee bean.
IMF Global Hero - Joseph Stiglitz
When Joseph Stiglitz was in his third year of studies at a U.S. college, his economics professors held a private meeting and agreed that they had nothing left to teach him. They arranged for him to study at M.I.T., a leading school of economics. When Stiglitz was just twenty-six, another group of professors had a meeting to discuss him-this time it was the faculty of Yale University, who voted to make the young Stiglitz a full-time professor. This was the start of a career that would lead Stiglitz to many prestigious positions.
Stiglitz took the job of Chief Economist at the World Bank in 1997. He became responsible for analysing how global economic policies affect the world's poor. Stiglitz noticed that the quality of life in many poor countries was not improving. In some cases he saw that the policies of financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank were actually having a negative effect on poor people.
Stiglitz no longer works for the World Bank. He was let go after three years-presumably because his ideas were too radical. But he continues his campaign to make the global economy work better for poor countries. He's just written a book, Globalization and Its Discontents, which calls for significant reforms in how the IMF and the World Bank go about their work. "I have written this book because while I was at the World Bank, I saw firsthand the devastating effect that globalization can have on developing countries, and especially the poor within those countries," Stiglitz says.
Stiglitz is not against globalization, but he says it has to be managed differently. "I believe that globalization… can be a force for good and that it has the potential to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor," he says. But Stiglitz says that for this to happen, institutions like the IMF have to change the way they operate.
In 2001 Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. He is respected and admired throughout Latin America, particularily in Argentina, where his book reached number two on the bestseller list.
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