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Economics

Added Value and Human Rights

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Cocoa and the Economics of Global Inequity AbstractThe denial of “added value” lies at the core of global economic inequity and its human rights consequences. While underdeveloped countries supply the raw materials that fuel global industries, developed economies capture the real wealth by processing, branding, and selling finished goods. Cocoa is a striking example: West Africa produces most of the world’s cocoa beans, yet farmers earn poverty wages while multinational chocolate companies reap billions in profits. This inequity sustains child labor, denies the right to education, entrenches poverty, and fuels migration. International human rights law recognizes the rights to work, to an adequate standard of living, and to self-determination over natural resources. Yet global trade practices continue to violate these rights by preventing producing countries from sharing in the added value of their own resources. Fairer trade and production systems that respect human rights are essential to dismantling structural inequities and creating global stability. In economics, “added value” refers to the increase in worth created when a raw material is transformed into a finished product. A commodity such as cocoa beans may be cheap in its raw form, but once it is roasted, blended, packaged, and branded, it becomes part of a global chocolate industry worth over $120 billion annually. The control over who gets to add that value—and thus capture the wealth it generates—largely determines which societies prosper and which remain in poverty. The case of cocoa shows the stark injustice of this arrangement. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana together […]

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Social Systems of Perennial Human Rights Abuses

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Despite historical evidence—and inspired by the values embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)—some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and certain United Nations agencies have set the “eradication of poverty” as an achievable goal. Nearly three-quarters of a century after the world community adopted the UDHR, not only has poverty not been eradicated, but more people have been pushed deeper into conditions below the poverty line. Today, nearly a billion people live in destitution. This category refers to the deplorable conditions in which human beings live every day without secure access to food, water, and shelter. These are individuals who cannot work and depend on aid for survival—the growing population of unhoused, unfed, and often forgotten human beings. This condition represents a state even worse than poverty—where people have jobs and work daily, yet still fail to secure basic needs for themselves and those under their care. These are the working poor. Often, those struggling with poverty are only a month away from falling into full destitution. As inhumane as poverty and destitution are, they are even worse when specific social groups are permanently locked into these conditions due to formal and informal, determinant and contributory systems in their societies. Worse still is when these conditions exist in so-called democratic societies, where doctrines of sovereignty and the rule of law become state instruments to preserve the very systems that create such atrocities. For instance, in the United States—ostensibly the most affluent and powerful nation-state in the world, the leader of […]

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Tariffs and Human Rights

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Generally, nowadays, a tariff is a tax imposed by a government on goods and services imported from other countries. Its primary purpose is to raise the cost of foreign products, making them less competitive compared to locally produced goods. Tariffs are a fundamental instrument in international trade policy and have been used historically both to protect domestic industries and as a political weapon. Originally, the word tariff has an intriguing linguistic lineage—one that bridged the Islamic East with the Christian West. In the context of the modern West, tariff is connected to the Italian word tariffa, meaning “list of prices or taxes.” However, the word originates from the Arabic word ta`ārīf (تعاريف), meaning “notifications” or “definitions” — which itself referred to a list of customs duties. This etymology reflects the deep historical links between trade and taxation in the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia regions, where merchants and empires developed early customs systems to regulate the flow of goods. Initially, tariffs were institutionalized in the emerging Islamic civilization. But one of the earliest formal systems of trade duties can be traced back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who established rules to regulate commerce fairly in accordance with Islamic principles of justice and equity. Under Islamic governance, the caliphate, tariffs applied to state revenues above and beyond the religiously mandated taxes, called zaka and sadaka. These extra, non-religious taxes, ta`rifa, were also known as `ushr (a 10% tax on certain imports for non-Muslims) and khums (a tax of one-fifth on […]

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