Martin Khor: A tower of the global south Rammanohar Reddy

For those of us who started thinking about GATT issues in the late 1980s and then about global environmental changes and sustainable development, Martin Khor was a figure who loomed large. By then he was writing and speaking about these issues and clearing the fog surrounding the major proposals that were on the table both as part of the Uruguay Round and ahead of the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro.

That was also when the “Third World” was still a political bloc fighting multilateral institutions and multinational corporations. And the Third World Network which Martin Khor established along with Mohamed Idris of the Consumer Association of Penang was an important guiding light for researchers, activists and journalists interested in Third World.

I was lucky to be one of those who learnt from him and, more than that, personally benefited from his hand of friendship.

I came to meet Martin and Meena only in the late 1990s at Geneva when I would be covering WTO issues for The Hindu. That was the beginning of a-close-to-25-years of guidance and, I would like to think, friendship, too. Martin’s clear thinking, his hard work and his energy to understand the minutae were amazing, all the while without losing the broad picture.

I was not the only journalist to learn much from him. I would think there were innumerable government officials, NGO activists and even ministers who benefited from his understanding of global economic issues.

As Martin shifted his interest to the environment and climate change, I had the privilege of publishing in the Economic and Political Weekly close to half a dozen of his detailed analytical pieces on climate change issues at UN conferences at Copenhagen, Cancun, Doha, Lima, and elsewhere. Those articles continue to be standout articles even a decade later for the insights they provided.

The word “irreplaceable” is a frequently used cliche. But not vis-a-vis Martin Khor, who is irreplaceable in the Global South.

(Rammanohar Reddy is Editor of India Forum, and formerly Editor of “Economic and Political Weekly” and earlier Deputy Editor, The Hindu ).