Multinational corporations

I can bet that a trip into the depths of the financial heartland of the UK is not on most people’s plans this weekend. Come Saturday morning the square mile is eerily deserted, void of the men in suits shuffling between mysterious glistening buildings. This murky establishment has dominated the capital for hundreds of years, yet the actions and history of the City of London remain largely unearthed in the public consciousness. But with the coalition’s cuts biting into yet another chunk of welfare spending, the link between this institution and the financial crisis is becoming more and more important to explain. This Saturday 6 April, you have the perfect opportunity to find out more!

Outside Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London. Photo courtesy of http://www.MaxColson.com

In a highly commended venture of popular education, a group of ordinary people have set up an educational walking tour in an attempt to open up this secret institution to the full glare of the public. The tour’s main purpose is teach people more about the City of London’s links to the financial crisis in 2008, but also to...

When the Independent referred to FTSE 100 company Vedanta Resources as the world’s most hated company, it wasn’t joking. Two and half years and later, the mining company is still sparking protests on several continents over its human rights abuses and environmentally destructive operations.

Vedanta's mine would destroy the home of the Dongria Kondh. © Lewis Davids/Survival

Most infamously, Vedanta wants to mine for bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills in the Indian state of Odisha, despite the determined resistance of the Dongria Kondh indigenous people who live in the hills. The Dongria, for whom Niyamgiri is sacred, say the mine would destroy their forests and rivers and their way of life.

Vedanta has already built a bauxite refinery at the foot of the Niyamgiri Hills, causing pollution and disease, and taking away the homes of more than one hundred families.

Last week saw anti-Vedanta protests by indigenous people and farmers in Odisha mirrored by demonstrations...

If you overdid it a bit on sweet treats over the festive period, you might have decided to go easy on them for a while. But campaigners in Cambodia are calling for more decisive action as land grabbing for industrial sugarcane plantations has been robbing communities of their land, homes and livelihoods.

Two million hectares - 12 per cent of the country’s landmass – have now been granted to private companies for industrial agriculture, with sugarcane one of the leading crops. At least 75,000 hectares of land have granted to private companies for industrial sugarcane production, with over 12,000 people estimated to have been affected by human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by the companies involved.

When the companies involved have arrived, local people’s homes and harvests have been burned down. The majority of people affected have land-based livelihoods, so the loss of land has pushed families into poverty, leaving them unable to afford school costs or hospital births for their children. The land that has...

Last week, WDM climate campaigner Sarah Reader donned a Nick Clegg mask and interrupted the deputy prime minister’s speech to the ‘natural capital summit’ on the sidelines of Rio+20.

Clegg was there to support to the ‘natural capital declaration’, a document drawn up by 37 big financial sector companies to call for the financial valuation of nature and the internalisation of environmental ‘externalities’ (i.e. bringing them into the market).

It seems that Sarah has raised some hackles at the World Bank. On Thursday, the World Bank’s vice president for sustainable development, Rachel Kyte, posted a blog criticising WDM for ‘missing the point’ about valuing nature:

The event had its share of unexpected excitement when a protester, wearing a Clegg mask, interrupted the UK deputy prime minister. She was from World Development Movement. Reading their blog later, I think they are missing the point. We are not talking about "pricing" nature but "valuing" it. By valuing it, you are enabling better economic decisions. For example, if you're a water-scarce country and you...

As I write, things inside Rio Centro, where the Rio+20 talks are taking place look bleak. Last Friday, after three long days of ‘preparatory committee’ meetings countries were unable to agree little more than a third of the draft outcome text. The decision was made for the UN to hand responsibility for drafting of a new version of the text to Brazil, as the host country, in the hope of finding a common pathway forward.

On Saturday night, just before midnight, a new Brazilian text was circulated. In an attempt to break the stalemate in the negotiations, and close the gulf between developed countries and the G77 group of 130 developing countries, this text had been dramatically weakened.

Pledges on increasing access to water end energy were watered down, and across the text, any meaningful language had been removed. Words such as “commit” has been largely stripped away and replaced with terms like “voluntary” and “as appropriate” – essentially enabling the statement to sound positive whilst in reality, amounting to little obligation for countries to do anything in terms of real action.

On the positive side, this new text has the potential to prevent a massive backtrack on some of the more positive principals of Rio that were agreed twenty years ago. Yet...

Ahead of the Rio+20 summit, Asian social movements have put together this statement on the fake Green Economy being pushed at the talks. It also outlines what they will be calling for at the summit.

Fight for Our Future! No Price on Nature!
 
We are movements and organizations from Asia, waging struggles on various fronts and arenas to defend our rights, resist policies and projects that cause harm and destruction, and to fight for immediate priorities and demands, as well as profound transformation of our societies.
 
We envision a social and economic system:

• that is aimed at providing for the needs of people and aspirations for a humane, empowering and liberating life in a manner that respects the earth’s capacity to regenerate, and to sustain life based on the integrity of natural systems;

• that is based on and promotes equity, parity, solidarity and mutual respect among people and nations regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, capabilities and class;

• that promotes sharing of land, water, forests, atmosphere, eco-systems and territories  based on the principles of stewardship and not private ownership, and the rights of all people to equitable and responsible...

Author Tim Gee will be speaking at our Scottish campaigner convention on the 19th May. Here he talks to WDM Scotland about his new book on the history of social movements across the globe - Counterpower: Making Change Happen - and how history has shaped his own global justice campaigning.

WDM: Your book ‘Counterpower’ looks at how social justice movements across the world and across history have won change using ‘people power’. As global justice campaigners, what can we learn from history?

TG: I find history most useful for myth-busting. Specifically it shows us that policy-making is not a process whereby wise elites find the best solution for the most people. On the whole government policy is a reflection of the balance of power in society. From that we can learn that simply designing good ideas and communicating them to those in power isn’t enough. Real transformational change comes when the interests of elites are challenged, and when the movement has the capability to remove the power of regimes altogether.

WDM: What are the...

Whilst rich countries are responsible for most of the emissions pumped into the atmosphere it is the poorest communities in the world that are being hit the hardest by climate change. But rather than providing compensation for causing climate change rich countries are using it to trap the world’s poor into new and dangerous climate debt. WDM is campaigning for climate justice for developing countries.

The Tax Justice Network has launched a new 15 minute monthly podcast service with the latest news, research and analysis of events in tax evasion, tax avoidance and the shadow banking system. TAXCAST producer Naomi Fowler explains why it's so important.

Despite plain evidence to the contrary, there's a disturbing consensus among our politicians that austerity is the only way to go. And that 'austerity-or-broke' agenda has been comprehensively absorbed and regurgitated by the mainstream media, with a few honourable exceptions. Since opposition to this 'Austerity Age' comes largely from outside the Westminster bubble, it gets the occasional brief mention and it's framed as quirky, naive and purely anti-capitalist in nature.

I'm pretty sure research would show that the BBC rarely uses the words 'Occupy movement' without prefacing it with 'anti-capitalist.' Some in Occupy are indeed anti-capitalist but there's also a strong body of opinion within Occupy that wants to reform a financial system that's clearly broken and clearly corrupt. As the recent Occupy Economics Working Group article in the Financial Times shows,...

Yesterday David Cameron took the stage in Davos yesterday to push his outdated agenda of deregulation, liberalisation and slashing of workers right as the solution to the world’s problems, to the applause of the gathered representatives of the world’s 1 per cent. Meanwhile, the Transnational Institute published a set of infographics that tell a completely different story. 

They show extreme wealth and income disparities with 0.001% of the world’s population, or just 10.9 million individuals, controlling two-thirds of the worlds GDP, while 2.5 billion people survive on less than $2 a day. The wealth they control, $47.2 trillion, could pay for climate change adaptation costs for the next 190 years or clean water for the world’s people for the next 1,423 years. 

They show the close ties between the corporate and political elites, with the architects of neoliberal globalisation like Alan Greenspan, Tony Blair, Dick Cheney and Larry Summers sitting on the boards of giant corporations such as JP Morgan, Deutshe Bank and Haliburton. And they show that tax evasion costs 145 countries $3.1 trillion annually, enough to fund full immunisations for 120 million children. 

These facts...

Alongside the UN climate talks that took place earlier this month, Durban’s KZN university hosted a ‘people’s space’: an alternative space where people could come together to talk about the struggle for climate justice. Bringing together activists from across the world, the space saw some fascinating exchanges, where people shared what climate justice means in the context of their own lives, and the complicated web of systemic issues that need to be tackled on the pathway for climate justice.

Whilst the mantra for many concerned citizens in the UK is to reduce energy consumption, a key demand for activists is for their right to energy access to
be met. This was one of the key issues under discussion at the people's space.

In South Africa, and across the continent, energy access is a
vital part of the struggle for climate justice. The statistics remain shocking: in Durban, nearly three-quarters of the population have no access to energy. In rural Africa, that figure is a phenomenal ninety-four percent of people who have no access to the energy they need to drill for water, power hospitals, and cook food. Yet, in a twisted misfortune of geography, Africa is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and its people are already experiencing more crop...

Kirsty Wright, Climate justice campaigner writes from Durban

Alongside the UN climate talks, over the past two weeks, Durban’ KZN university has hosted a ‘people’s space’, an alternative space where people could come together to talk about the struggle for climate justice. Bringing together activists from across the world, the space has seen some fascinating exchanges, where people have shared what climate justice means in the context of their own lives, and to take on the complicated web of systemic issues that need to be tackled on the pathway for climate justice.

Whilst the mantra for many concerned citizens in the UK is to reduce energy consumption, a key demand for activists is for their right to energy access to be met. Here in South Africa, and across the continent, energy access is a vital part of struggle for climate justice. The statistics remain shocking: in urban Africa nearly three-quarters of the population have no access to energy. In rural Africa, that figure is a phenomenal ninety-four percent of people who have no access to the energy they need to drill for water, power hospitals, and cook food. Yet, in a twisted misfortune of geography, Africa is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and its people are already experiencing...

Guest post by Innocent Sithole, used to be web intern

Our new report, Power to the people? reveals how the World Bank is diverting climate funds from communities to multinational corporations. Instead of giving energy poor people access to much needed electricity in Mexico, the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund (CTF) is powering big business and potentially adding to the country’s energy inequalities.

The CTF’s flagship project in Mexico, the La Mata and La Ventosa Wind Park in the state of Oaxaca, is set to produce 67.5 MW per year, enough to power 160,000 homes in a state where around 7 per cent of the population lack access to electricity. But in an arrangement that exposes the project’s unfair focus on big business rather than poor people, none of this electricity will power homes of local people. Instead it will be sold at a discounted rate to Walmart, the world’s largest corporation.

The wind park is 99 per cent controlled by a subsidiary of the French energy giant EDF. However, by owning a tiny stake in the wind park, Walmart has been able to circumvent Mexico’s energy laws and officially claim that it has produced the...

As campaigners focusing on climate justice, we tend to think wind energy is a good thing. And so it can be – but not when it robs indigenous people of their land. 

Last year, the World Development Movement’s climate campaigner Kirsty Wright went to the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, and met indigenous activist Bettina Cruz Velazquez. Bettina told Kirsty how wind farms run by multinational corporations are being built without the consent of the indigenous people who own the land.

In October, Bettina and others were attacked and received death threats during a protest against one of the wind farms. Amnesty is concerned that the death of a man in unclear circumstances during the protest is being used to ‘unfairly prosecute protestors and to deter future protests,’ and it is asking people to write to the Mexican authorities expressing their concern.

Incredibly, one of the other wind farms in the area, also being opposed by local people, is being part financed from the UK’s overseas aid budget. It produces enough electricity to power 160,000 homes. So at the very least, it must be providing energy for the people of Oaxaca, seven...

It is the eve of the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Two years on from the catastrophic talks that took place in Copenhagen; there has been little progress on a global deal on climate change. In fact, as the science demands ever stronger action, with people’s lives becoming increasingly impacted by extreme weather events, disease, failing crops and reduced water supplies as a result of climate change, the same rich industrialised countries that grew wealthy by causing the crisis have only lowered ambition.
 
Inside the talks, the picture looks bleak. Rich industrialised countries are doing their best to destroy the only legally binding framework on emissions reductions that exists, aiming instead to replace it with a voluntary ‘pledge and review’ system which current figures suggest would lead to disastrous global temperature rises of over five degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Furthermore, there is a strong push to do away with any notion of historical responsibility for the big polluters, now reluctant to either reduce their emissions or pay compensation, as they agreed when the signed up to the UN convention on climate change....

WDM campaigned to clean up the bailed-out banks between 2009 and 2011.

Background

Following the financial crisis of 2008, the UK government used a staggering £45.5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money – the GDP of Kenya and Tanzania combined – to prop up the Royal Bank of Scotland.

RBS used that public money to finance projects and companies that threaten the climate and human rights, such as tar sands extraction in Madagascar and Canada.

Gordon Peters, WDM Edinburgh group

Sustainability has become a rather slippery term. In fact looking at donor aid agency agendas it seems as if sustainability is the nice, ecologically well-meaning dressing up of policies which continue to accelerate market penetration of southern livelihoods. They spend more underscoring the capacities of big corporate entities, from Cargill to Cadbury Schweppes and Monsanto, to dictate basic necessities of life from land use and seed provision to indebtedness and consumption. WDM has indeed had some success in trying to get at least one donor - DFID - to think again on water privatisation, but the determination to commodify the very sources of life across the globe, to take away common rights to land, water and even air keeps rolling on.

In the past two to three years I have been in two very different countries, about both of which one hears very little in the discourses of development. One is Paraguay, now governed by a reformist, 'liberation theologist' president, Lugo, whose adminstration is seeking to establish land reform and the means of self-sustainability for the peasant and landless population while the oligarchy which has always [since the Spanish conquest]...

Adebisi Alimi has been involved in LGBT advocacy in Nigeria for over a decade and started 'The Independent Project', now the strongest gay group in Nigeria. He had to flee his home in Nigeria after a BBC World Service interview meant his life was threatened and now works with Naz project in London as the African MSM sexual health worker.

Horace G. Campbell is professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University where he directs the Africa Initiative. Concerned with issues of conflict resolution, he has been an activist and a scholar for over forty years. His most recent book is Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA.

Jali Fily Cissokho, vocalist and kora player, is regarded as one of the great Senegal griots. His UK appearances have included WOMAD, Glastonbury and Larmer Tree and he has recently worked with A R Rahman, composer of the score for ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.

Deborah Doane is director of the World Development Movement an organisation campaigning UK-wide for global justice. She’s on the board of the Fairtrade Foundation and has a long history of campaigning for corporate accountability.

Dele Fatunla...

‘It’s very hard,’ Holly Rakotondralambo told me before the start of last night’s public meeting in London about tar sands mining in Madagascar and Canada. ‘We only have seven people in our organisation. We are like a family.’

Holly and her little ‘family’ have their work cut out. They’re trying to stop French oil company Total destroying the land and stealing the water supplies of hundreds of thousands of people in Melaky, one of the poorest regions of Madagascar.

As she told the audience last night, Total is already test mining in the area. Yet neither Total nor the government of Madagascar have consulted the local people on whose land the company wants to mine.

Total is receiving corporate finance from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

Holly will carry home to Madagascar the words of Sue Deranger, from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Canada, who also spoke at last night’s event. Sue’s community is 252 kilometres downstream from the tar sands mine in Alberta – the largest industrial project on earth. Her people have been devastated by pollution from the tar sands far...

Since we launched our campaign against food speculation nearly a year ago – then virtually an unknown issue – momentum has been steadily building towards regulation. We’ve had wide-ranging support, including from the British mainstream media, leading academics, former hedge fund managers, the UN special rapporteur on the right of food and the head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. In January over 3,000 people made submissions to a European Commission consultation on the issue. Food speculation and the impact...

Press release, 19th April 2011

• Canadian First Nations representatives to voice opposition in person at RBS AGM
• New research shows that, since public bail-out in 2008, RBS has raised more than £5.6 billion for companies involved in controversial Canadian tar sands projects, £2.2 billion of which was in the last twelve months

Representatives from some of Canada’s First Nations are today preparing to demand in person that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) stops financing the controversial tar sands industry in Alberta, Canada, at the bank’s AGM today. [1]

The protest comes as new research, published by a coalition of UK and North American NGOs, shows that since being bailed out with public money in 2008, RBS has raised £5.6 billion in corporate financing to companies involved in Alberta’s tar sands extraction and pipeline development, £2.2 billion of which was in the last twelve months. [2]

The First Nations representatives are expected to arrive at the AGM at RBS’s global head quarters in Gogarburn, Edinburgh, at 1pm. They will take into the AGM a photo petition and motions from UK taxpayers angry that the bank is investing their money in tar sands extraction and use the meeting to call on the board to cease financing tar sands...

Hilary Aked

Why did WDM join the demonstration opposing the government’s sweeping cuts last Saturday? Why should a group which campaigns against global poverty be concerned with the domestic economy, especially when the oversees aid budget has supposedly been ring-fenced?

The fact that the current government is channelling the 0.7% GDP that goes towards oversees aid into counter-terrorism initiatives in only a handful of countries, rather than supporting those most in need might be cause enough to take to the streets.

But the main reason is that we really are ‘all in this together’ – though not in the way Cameron and Osborne mean. Across the world people are fighting against the same economic policies advocated by global elites everywhere, and have been doing so for a long time. It’s vital to make the links between the neoliberal agenda currently being pushed in this country, and the free-market policies which have been forced on the global south for decades.

The same austerity measures which will decimate UK public services in the name of ‘efficiency’ have devastated the lives of the poorest sectors of society in countries around the world. Meanwhile huge multinationals make massive profits as a result of privatisation, deregulation and the...

On the front page of the Sunday Times this morning you will see the headline ‘Euro MPs exposed in ‘cash-for-laws’ scandal’ (£). Journalists from the respected Insight investigative team have posed as financial lobbyists and have approached MEPs offering them large sums of money in return for watering down banking reform legislation.

Three MEPs took the bait and were employed by the fake lobbying company on a yearly salary of €100,000. One of those was 56 year old former Romanian deputy prime minister, Adrian Severin, who apparently emailed the journalists posing as lobbyists writing “Just to let you know that the amendment desired by you has been tabled in due time”. He then sent an invoice for €12,000.

The other two MEPs caught up in the scandal were Slovenian foreign minister Zoran Thaler, and former Austrian interior minister Ernst Strasser. It is said that Ernst additionally boasted about serving at least five commercial clients who each paid him €100,000 per year.

These are pretty shocking revelations. But the most telling quote in the Sunday Times expose comes from Adrian Severin, “I didn’t do anything that was, let’s say, illegal or against any normal...

Sharon Jordan

Tony Benn and Michael Moore in one day! What a treat (well for me anyway), and what better way to celebrate my birthday!

It was the screening of Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: a love story' with a discussion led by Tony Benn afterwards. I'm sure we're all familiar with Moore's message about the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans as democratic processes are sidelined. As we are always told, Britain is about 10 years behind America so it was sobering to watch the effects of America's equivalent of the ‘Big Society' in full bloom as we see, what comparatively look like the first buds appearing in the UK as the government pushes through its cuts agenda. Even more sobering to think how much more of an impact the neo-liberal agenda driving the cuts has on people when the west forces it on poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The fact that since that film was made there has been a change in government is remarkable considering the stranglehold the old boys network has over the US. Yes there are still problems, but to have a president in power that talks about fighting, rather than going to bed with the banks shows just how far things have changed from just a few years ago when Goldman Sachs...

Eddy Richards, Global Connect Project Officer

In an online debate in July last year a respected economist, Mr Homi Kharas, rebuts claims that because most small farmers in the developing world are net buyers of food they will lose from higher prices. "That is a static argument. It does not incorporate the supply response that would surely follow."

Now I don't propose to look at this particular issue, interesting and important as it is. What I am concerned about is the underlying attitude economists often seem to display in this type of debate. They look at the (theoretical ) economic response - in this case that growing more food is incentivised - as if that is the be all and end all, without apparently considering what happens in between times. Maybe an analogy would help.

When you get into a bath the water level will rise, depending on your mass and volume. However, if you lower yourself in gradually the change is slow and smooth; whereas if you leap in, the water splashes around, your rubber ducks are...

Several civil society organizations focused on climate justice have compiled a set of briefing papers to help government delegates, advocates, journalists and members of the public understand various topics being discussed at the climate change negotiations and their real world impacts.

The goal of the briefs is to connect some of the ideas and energy of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia (April 2010) with issues on the table at the UN climate talks. Please feel free to use these as a resource and to distribute them further. We hope you find them useful.

Links to the briefing papers follow, please note that these materials have been produced by a number of different organisations listed in full on each brief, but the content of each is not endorsed by all the contributors

A wealthy minority of the world’s countries and corporations are the principal cause of climate change; its adverse effects fall first and foremost on the majority that is poor. This basic and undeniable truth forms the foundation of the global climate justice movement.

As an anti-cuts campaigner in the UK fighting rises in tuition fees or corporate tax dodging or the closure of a local library or redundancies at a city council or (hopefully) all of the above, it wouldn’t be surprising if you have been so busy over the last few weeks that events in Tunisia have passed you by. And now that media coverage of the protests is more prominent, it still may fail to immediately resonate as your fight too.

The historical and political context of the series of protests over food prices and unemployment in Algeria, Sudan, Jordan, and the overthrow of the Tunisian president on Friday, is vastly different to the UK. But the fight to resist the dominance of neoliberalism and its iniquitous effects is a thread that ties together protests over library closures in Liverpool and rising food prices and unemployment in Jordan.

In Tunisia, protests were triggered by unrest in Algeria, food prices, unemployment and Mohammad Bouazizi, a 26 year old unemployed graduate, who set himself on fire in December after the police stopped him from making a living by selling vegetables because he didn’t have a permit.

The military responded by beating, torturing...

Martin Bowman, campaigns and policy intern

2010 is surely the year of the octopus, if controversially. The death threats that were sent to Paul the psychic octopus have shown the capacity of our bulbous eight-legged friends to galvanize public opinion. If harmless football score predictions fuelled such anger, let us hope that Paul was just a warm-up act for this next aquatic provocateur. Enter: the Giant Vampire Squid.

Being compared to a Giant Vampire Squid is not particularly desirable, but it’s probably another insult to add to the pile for investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The name was first given to them by the journalist Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, saying that investment banks are like: “a giant vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity”. The new economics foundation (nef), backed by a variety of groups including Compass and the Post Bank campaign, have picked up this neat little metaphor, and made it the basis of their fantastic new video, which I urge you to watch and shout / facebook / tweet to the hills:

...

We sit in anticipation of the full extent of the cuts today. Of course, they’re only the headlines, and one can only guess at how they’ll play out over time. People (on the right) tell us not to worry: they’ll be painful, but necessary.

We’re also told to stop whinging: Look, international development spending is being protected, they say! Aside from the fact that this isn’t really accurate – there’s no new money for climate change for developing countries, for example, and DFID’s budget will be focussed on areas where there is a “security” threat for the UK, meaning its budget will now subsidise cuts in other areas such as defence – it’s the wider trends that leave a very bitter aftertaste.

Globally, we are actually very prosperous – the financial crisis doesn’t really mean that there is less money in the world to spend – it means that we have chosen to prioritise profit for the few over human well-being for the many. Banks are currently preparing £7 billion bonus packages, thirteen times the grants expenditure of Comic Relief, the Disasters Emergency Committee, Oxfam, the British Heart Foundation and MacMillan Cancer Relief put together. Or the total UK aid budget.

The austerity measures being pushed today, and elsewhere in Europe – Ireland,...

Caroline Griffin, Fundraising and communications officer

In July, I went to Kenya to find out how speculation on basic food commodities has affected people’s lives. I've put together a photo gallery which tells the story of gambling on food from the people's perspective.

Many of the photographs are of people I met who had gone without food for days or been forced to sell their few possessions to feed their families. The price of maize, the Kenyan staple food doubled or tripled in a matter of days, causing unnecessary hardship for the fifty per cent of the Kenyan population who already live below the poverty line.

Additional problems such as drought, unemployment and underlying health problems meant that many families reached crisis point when food prices shot up. Some of the people I spoke to are still picking up the pieces after the events of 2008.

But thanks to the World Development Movement, economists, journalists and development experts are now pointing to food speculation as the most significant cause of food crises, including the current food...

Today, there are many stories about food price rises - hitting poorer people in Mexico and countries in Africa, but delivering fat profits for the likes of contraversial agribusiness, Cargill, which is the world's largest agricultural commodity trader.

In the Daily Mail, climate change is blamed, stemming from academics studing extreme weather events and the impact on food production - they recommended more investment in agriculture and weather resistant crops.

Over at the BBC, they are asking you why you think Africa is still hungry which will culminate in a phone in on World Service this afternoon, should make interesting listening.

And the FT, they highlight that Cargill has made bumper profits because corn prices are at a two year high, that tortilla riots in Mexico in 2006 were a sign of things to come, and that there is a stampede to buy corn because of a reported drop in supply.

With the exception of the...

The progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals is being discussed at a summit in New York. The goals were set in 2000 with a target of meeting them by 2015. Ten years later, it's clear that progress in many areas is slow, espeicially for countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where over half the population continues to live in abject poverty.

Deborah Doane, director of UK based, anti-poverty campaigners, the World Development Movement explains why:
“With only five years to reach the Millennium Development Goals, leaders of rich countries need to get beyond inspirational speeches, and pledging more aid money that never arrives. Heads of State are delivering rhetoric but little else.
 

"They need to address the root causes of poverty that simply aren’t being mentioned: including an unfair trading system, unjust debt burdens and the biggest elephant in the room: climate change. If governments continue to dodge these thorny issues, then ultimately, MDG project will be doomed to failure.”
 

The World Development Movement believes that the lack of progress can be attributed to three central failures by rich countries which are neglecting people in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, but are also failing to address inequality between...

Sharon Jordan

Over the weekend hundreds of people concerned about human rights abuses and the environment have gathered outside the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh. They’ve set up camp for four days to educate and campaign against the root causes of climate change.

After mobilising and helping stop the proposed third runway at Heathrow and a new coal fired power station at Kingsnorth, this growing mass movement is reclaiming our future from government and profit-hungry corporations.

Since the bank bail-out in 2008, the UK government has used a staggering £45.5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money – the GDP of Kenya and Tanzania combined – to prop up the Royal Bank of Scotland.

And RBS has been using that public money to finance projects and companies that are wrecking the climate and threatening human rights, such as tar sand extraction in Canada.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has been a Scottish institution for nearly 300 years, with its headquarters in Edinburgh. The £45.5 billion bail-out has left more than 80% of RBS owned by the UK taxpayer.

We have the right to demand that the government rein in the power of RBS, and the other bailed-out banks, and force them to keep to the highest environmental and human...

Raj Patel is the author of 'Stuffed and Starved: the hidden battle for the world food system', an excellent analysis of how corporations dominate the world food system to the detriment of ordinary people the world over, and also what we can do about it. The interview below was filmed at the Sydney Writers' Festival, and although 24 minutes long, is a great overview of some of the issues involved in creating democratic and sustainable food systems.

The battle for the world food system: an interview with Raj Patel from Jill Hickson on Vimeo.

I’ve been campaigning for stronger corporate accountability for a fairly long time. So it should come as no surprise to me that I don’t generally see eye to eye with corporate executives. But sometimes, just sometimes, you hope the facts speak for themselves – and that those corporate executives would have a sudden attack of conscience. So when a group of us met with RBS executives in Edinburgh after their AGM, we hoped the facts would speak for themselves.

When we were invited to meet with Sir Philip Hampton, RBS Group Chairman, and several of his team in public affairs and corporate sustainability, we of course thought the meeting had an air of PR spin to it.  But we also thought that perhaps, if only because they had made a serious endeavour to move the meeting and accommodate us (Chairmen don’t generally accommodate), they were prepared to move every so slightly on their position.

Canadian First Nations campaigners Eriel Deranger, and Heather Milton Lightning spoke poignantly about what was happening in their communities as a result of the tar sands mining just up river. Human, health and environmental disasters are what the tar sands are all about - an energy resource that’s six-times more carbon intensive than conventional fossil fuels, scarring an...

Kate Blagojevic, used to be press officer

The PR tactic of organising a meeting with your opponents days before a protest or critical report is launched is as old as the hills. But it can still be disarming.

WDM has been working with PLATFORM and People & Planet for a year on the campaign to get RBS to stop investing our money in dirty and unethical companies and projects. During that time, we have repeatedly asked for meetings with high level reps from RBS to explain why they are the target of our campaign so that they will see that we are talking sense. They have always ignored us or offered us a meeting with their head of corporate sustainability, Andrew Cave. With no disrespect to Andrew, a meeting with the head of corporate sustainability of the bank that's got a track record of investing in the most unsustainable fossil fuel projects in the world is as useful as a chocolate teapot. We need to get in higher up, with someone who we can talk about the real issues with, rather than getting the corporate, green-washed brush off.

On Friday with just days to go before nation-wide protests, including outside the conference centre in Edinburgh, RBS has offered us a meeting with Andrew and the Chair of RBS, Sir Philip Hampton. We're happy to have this...

To the 'people of the world' gathered in Cochabamba, its becoming increasingly clear that climate change is not just an environmental issue but a matter of justice. This week, hearing the testimonies of people from across the world where the impacts of climate change are already pervading into daily reality, has been incredibly powerful. But climate justice is not just about the impacts of climate change, but also impacts from the causes of climate change; the deforestation that destroys the way of life for forest peoples, extraction of fossil fuels, all too often being pushed through the neo-liberal policies of institutions like the World Bank, and mined by transnational corporations, with no concern for the impacts of local people. Even many of the solutions being proposed and implemented are pushing people into displacement and deeper poverty. As I heard one African speaker said today, “As long as they keep pushing false solutions, the climate debt continues to increase.”

This morning I saw Naomi Klein...

Tim Gee

It is 12 months since 35,000 people took to the streets, days before the London G20 Summit, for the Put People First march, calling for decent work, an end to global poverty and a safe climate.

The march was a result of an unprecedented civil society alliance, spanning international development NGOs, faith groups, unions and domestic charities, highlighting the negative impact of unregulated markets on a range of issues.

When the summit outcome was released the G20 communiqué did not deliver the break from ‘business as usual’ that the movement called for. In particular, governments did not seize the opportunity to signal the transition to a green economy and concrete plans for increasing the accountability of the IMF were not forthcoming.

However, other announcements clearly showed the impact of the campaign and were cautiously welcomed, including funds for poor countries, and increasing the transparency of tax havens.

Most promisingly though, the summit signalled a sharp change in rhetoric as Gordon Brown proclaimed the Washington Consensus to be ‘dead’.

Campaigning pressure began to have an impact when G20 leaders’ met again in September. There they tasked the IMF to investigate instruments for a Financial Transaction...

Here in the UK, the review of legislation on dangerous dogs has caught media attention – how some dogs are being bred as weapons to intimate others and at times have attacked vulnerable people like children. It’s a strange analogy, and one which I probably would not have made myself, but this morning European campaigners wanted to make a point that EU trade policy is like a dangerous dog - it’s predatory, aggressive and dangerous to the poorest people in the world.
 

The S2B group of campaigners staged a media stunt outside a trade conference on ‘EU trade policy towards developing countries’ hosted by the European trade commission. A five-metre high inflated savage dog, representing EU trade policy, was let off its lead by a giant business official, attacking victims representing small farmers, small businesses, women and indigenous people from the developing world.

The S2B network, which WDM is a member of, criticised the conference as a poor attempt to wrap a dangerous corporate trade agenda in development rhetoric. Current trade policies benefit European multinationals helping them to reap more profits but threaten the livelihoods of small farmers and...