Analysis

Details: Written by SMAA, Gerak Lawan, Via Campesina; Created: 06 December 2013

The Bali Package jeopardizes our right to Food Sovereignty;

The Bali package is a total sham for the poor and hungry of the world. Why should humanity beg the WTO for a peace clause to guarantee the right to food? The whole negotiation of the Bali package is nonsense. The right to food, the right to survival of small farmers cannot be subjected to any kind of negotiation in the WTO or in any place.

Details: Written by Devinder Sharma / IPS; Created: 03 December 2013

Not finding anything wrong in legitimate domestic food aid programmes, 30 farm commodity export groups have however expressed concern at the price support programmes, which have more to do with boosting farm incomes and increasing production than feeding the poor.

These U.S. farm commodity export groups, which ironically receive monumental federal support every year, have questioned the need to provide any relaxation in current discipline even on a temporary basis. Accordingly, such an exemption will result in more subsidy outgo and result in further damage to U.S. trade interests.

This response comes in the wake of a representation by 15 of the major farmer unions of India, including the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) and the Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha (KRRS), to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: Forth-seven years after the green revolution was launched, India is being directed at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to dismantle its food procurement system built so assiduously over the past four decades.

Details: Written by Reality of Aid Network - Asia Pacific; Created: 03 December 2013

A few weeks after super typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) wreaked havoc in the Visayas in central Philippines, afflicting some 10 million people across 36 provinces and is feared to have claimed more than 10,000 lives, multilateral development institutions such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank extended financial assistance mostly in the form of loans for relief operations in areas hit by the super typhoon.

The ADB and the World Bank have offered around US$1 billion in total loans to finance the massive rehabilitation and reconstruction requirement following the devastation in affected areas. The Philippine government said it wanted to take advantage of the available cheap financing, which comes mostly in the form of soft loans. It claims that the two creditors offered very low interest rates, which is well below one percent, and maturities of between 20 and 30 years.[i] The government said it might consider borrowing more from multilateral institutions and less from the international capital market to take advantage of the available cheap financing that has become even more accessible following the calamity.

Details: Written by Pablo Solon/Focus on the Global South; Created: 27 November 2013

Since the beginning there was almost no expectations on the 19th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP19) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Warsaw, Poland; held November 11 to 23. Based on previous COPS, from Copenhagen until now, the signs had not been encouraging. Instead of moving forward, the talks have been moving backwards, even dismantling whatever weak climate regime that existed. Moving from “commitments” to only “pledges” for emissions reductions, and softening and shrinking even more the Kyoto Protocol, in COP19 historical emitters like Japan have announced that instead of reducing by 25 percent their emissions they will increase them by three percent by the year 2020 based on their levels of CO2 emissions in 1990. The list of rich countries that have moved out of the Second Commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol now includes Canada, Australia, Russia, and Japan.

Details: Written by Pamela Gomez; Created: 25 November 2013

The term “Washington Consensus” was coined more than two decades ago to describe a set of policy prescriptions that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank promised would be bring economic prosperity to developing countries.

Under the tenure of World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, there is a new “consensus” developing in Washington. But this policy agenda looks remarkably similar to how it did twenty years ago. In fact, it involves revisiting and re-emphasising more of the same – albeit repackaged with the promise of more efficient implementation.

Details: Written by Carl Bliss-The Gleaner/jamaica; Created: 25 November 2013

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has got to be the most overrated financial institution in the world. So many of the world's economies look to it in times of crisis, largely for its money, but certainly not for the conditionalities that usually accompany such funds.

The harsh reality is that the IMF has few, if any, success stories in its long history. But why are we even surprised? The IMF has always been staffed at its highest levels by former politicians (usually finance ministers) from failed or failing economies.

Details: Written by Rami Srour - IPS; Created: 23 November 2013

Twelve-year-old Maruf lives in a shanty in Nayanagar, close to a Dhaka suburb. He works at a nearby car workshop, fixing luxury car engines for about six dollars a month. He shares this meagre income with his family of four.

Growing income inequality will pose a major threat to social stability in countries around the globe, according to a new report by the World Economic Forum.

Based on a worldwide survey of experts from academia, government and the non-profit sector, the report finds that income inequality is the second most important trend in the top 10 that are likely to impact social stability over the next year.

Details: Written by Zoë Carpenter - The Nation; Created: 23 November 2013

With budget negotiations on the horizon (in the US), a buzz is building around Social Security, from Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats calling for an expansion of benefits to The Washington Post’s editorial board arguing that seniors must be sacrificed for the good of the “poor young.”

Two of the biggest players in the debate are largely behind the scenes: Business Roundtable and Fix the Debt, corporate lobbies that use deficit fear-mongering to sell benefit cuts. These groups are made up of CEOs of America’s largest corporations—people with retirement accounts that are more than 1,000 times as large as those of the average Social Security beneficiary.

Details: Written by Claudio Schuftan/PHM; Created: 19 November 2013

1. Aggressions directed towards the human rights (HR) of marginalized individuals or groups utterly disarm them; they devastate the most essential tenets of their dignity.* To effectively counter these aggressions, we all need to get rid of our perennial sense of compassion --the one that only generates feelings of piousness and leads to charity. This is why I am, once again here, making an appeal for all of us to refocus our work away from charity and towards HR in our respective professional lives.

*: This is even reflected in their gazes and expressions: when dignity vanishes, fear creeps in --and fear, together with a sense of powerlessness, risks being transmitted like a legacy from generation to generation.

The alternative I am calling-for is to embrace and offer a political alternative in human rights work.

Details: Written by Koen Roovers; Created: 19 November 2013

Earlier this month, the Financial Transparency Coalition organised the conference ‘Towards Transparency: Making the Global Financial System Work for Development’ in Tanzania. There, African civil society organisations and a coalition of leading international development organisations called on global policymakers to adopt measures to counter the hundreds of billions of euros siphoned out of the continent through money laundering and industrial-scale corporate tax avoidance.