ARTICLES BEFORE NOVEMBER ARE IN THE ARCHIVES
Multinationals Take Aim at Protesters, By Bill Berkowitz ~ December 25
If We Want To Defeat The FTAA, We Have To Beat Fast Track First, Michael Dolan ~ Dec. 19
Latin America Is Priority on Bush Trade Agenda, By Anthony DePalma ~ Dec. 18
Ogden Corp. Quits Indian Dam Citing Economic Concerns, By Patrick McCully ~ December 14
Study Finds Dangerous Rise in Corporate Power, By Tamara Straus ~ December 7
Police Use Tear Gas as Trouble Flares in Nice, Reuters ~ Dec. 10
Play It Again Sam: The IMF And World Bank Are At It Again, Robin Hahnel, ZNet Commentary ~ Dec. 9
SAMWU Condemns Global Privatisation Summit Starting Monday in Capetown, By Anna Weekes ~ Dec. 6
Protesters Demand Buffalo State Cut Ties to Private Prison Industry, By Karen Brady ~ Dec. 5
Seattle WTO Activists Accuse Mayor Schell of Obstructing WTO Teach-In, By Mark Taylor ~ Dec 2
Glaxo Stops Africans Buying Cheap Aids Drugs, By Sarah Boseley ~ December 2
ALERT: Zambia Debt Fiasco - Letters Needed by Dec. 7 ~ Dec. 1
Police Attack Peaceful March Against Third World Debt, By Paul Lavery ~ Nov. 26
Invisible Government: Cincinnati Protesters Shine Spotlight on Influential CEO Group, By Daniel Zoll ~ Nov. 2000
The World's Poor Gather in New York City - Poverty Outlaws, Lenora Todaro, Village Voice ~ Nov 22-28
Many Summer Protesters Cleared, By Debbie Goldberg ~ Nov. 30
People's Caravan 2000 Culminates in Massive Protest Against TNCs and Imperialist Globalisation, People's Caravan ~ Nov. 24
Stop Oil/Gas Development in Kirthar National Park in Pakistan, The Citizens Committee on Kirthar ~ Dec. 1
On First Anniversary of Seattle, Student Movement Is Alive, By Bhumika Muchhala ~ Nov. 25
Demand World Bank Assume Responsibility For Sardar Sarovar Project, Susanne Wong ~ Nov. 25
Placing Blame For Genocide: Guatemalan Massacre Survivors Seek Damages From Dam Financiers, Karen Levy ~ November 16
The People's Caravan In Bangladesh - November 18-24, The People's Caravan 2000 - Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ Nov. 24
Biotech Firm Buys Tonga's Gene Pool, Vanessa Williams in Melbourne ~ Nov. 22
Successful Demonstration In Uruguay Against GMOs, Vivianne García ~ Nov. 23
Japan Adds its Voice to the People's Caravan, Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ Nov. 21
Canadian Aid Agency Pays World's Third Largest Engineering Firm to Justify Dam Construction in Belize, Probe International ~ Nov. 21
Under The Gun of Free Trade, Arthur Sandborn ~ Nov. 5
The Real Green Revolution Has Begun: Indian Farmers On The War Path, Dr. Vandana Shiva ~ Nov. 19
Indonesia Adds Its Voice To The People's Caravan, The People's Caravan 2000 ~ Nov. 18
The People's Caravan Mobilises Farmers For Food Rights, The People's Caravan 2000 ~ Nov. 17
Corporate Saboteurs, By Robert Lenzner and Tomas Kellner ~ Nov. 17
Power Without Firebombs, By Tomas Kellner ~ Nov. 17
Damned If You Do, By Michael Maiello ~ Nov. 17
A Coalition Organized in Steven's Point is Calling for Action: Who Has Control at OUR Universities? ~ November 17
World Bank President Compelled to Meet Over 2500 'Civil Society' Representatives, By Sanjay Sangvai ~ Nov. 15
Thousands Confront the World Bank President in Delhi, By Narmada Bachao Andolan ~ Nov. 13
The TransAtlantic Business Dialogue, By Mike Dolan ~ Nov. 12
MF, World Bank Reforms Leave Poor Behind, Bank Economist Finds, By Mark Drajem ~ Nov. 7
Asia's Poor Farmers Demand Genuine Agrarian Land Reform, Jennifer Mourin ~ November 8
Farmers Protest on PhilRice Anniversary -- Demand Land and Food Without Poisons ~ Peasant Movement of the Philippines ~ November 7
Canadian Group Wants More Dams Dismantled, Neville Judd ~ Nov. 7
Don't Let The WTO Get Hold Of Our Water! By Ruth Caplan ~ Nov. 7
Biwater Seeks to Suppress Public Debate and Grassroots Organizing Over the Internet ~ November 6
Indonesian House Commission Works on GMO Rules, Jakarta Post ~ November 6
Asia's Rural Poor Denounces Next Round of APEC Meetings, PAN AP ~ November 7
The World Social Forum To Provide Space for Economic Alternatives, World Social Forum ~ November 6
Quebec 2001: A Carnival Against Capitalism, la C.L.A.C. ~ November 2
Asian NGOs and Farmers Groups Oppose Genetically Engineered Rice, The People's Caravan 2000 ~ November 3
U.S. Congress Gives Governors Authority Over Future Water Sales, By Katherine Rizzo, Associated Press ~ November 3
For Whom The Bell Tolls, Devaki Jain ~ November 2
US Sign-on Letter To Stop Sardar Sarovar Dam, International Rivers Network ~ November 2
ARTICLES BEFORE NOVEMBER ARE IN THE ARCHIVES
Multinationals Take Aim at Protesters
By Bill Berkowitz, In These Times ~ December 25
In response to the anti-globalization movement's numbers and vigilance, multinational companies and right-wing think tanks are beginning to take aim at the protesters. According to a document obtained by the newsletter Inside EPA, the Sony Corporation has been preparing an "action plan for counteracting the efforts of several domestic and international environmental groups-including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition" that are involved in a campaign to hold electronics manufacturers responsible for their toxic waste.
Last summer in Brussels, Belgium, Sony representatives presented a paper called "NGO Strategy" to the European Information and Communications Technology Industry Association's conference on environmental policy. Sony's strategic suggestions included "pre-funding intervention" to reduce the financial support that liberal foundations give to environmental organizations; a recommendation that companies ratchet up their capability to quickly respond to environmental critics and pre-empt future legislation; and the development of a "detailed monitoring and contact network" to keep tabs on these organizations.
Inside EPA suggests that this monitoring might be carried out by "one of the dozens of new Internet 'intelligence' agencies-such as the London-based Infonics PLC-that monitor chat rooms, e-mail lists, electronic bulletin boards, online news services, newsgroups and other sources of public information for specific data requested by a company or industry group." Sony executives have acknowledged that the company is monitoring environmental groups. "We are obviously concerned about our image," Mark Small, Sony's vice president of environmental and health and safety issues, told the InterPress news service. "If Greenpeace is pushing something, we want to be on top if it."
Sony's interest in "pre-funding intervention" dovetails with the publication of "Who Props Up the Protesters," an extensive report from Truth About Trade, a new organization that purports to "tell the truth" about the organizations active in the Seattle demonstrations and the foundations that fund them. Truth About Trade is a Des Moines, Iowa-based agriculture industry group headed by Dean Kleckner, former president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, a leading agribusiness lobby. Kleckner says that Truth About Trade's mission is "to stand up for farm exports and advancements in biotechnology based on sound science," and to prevent environmental extremists and radical protesters from limiting America's economic and technological potential.
Truth About Trade's report (http://www.truthabouttrade.com) provides "an outline of the history, goals, financial strength and level of activism for ... organizations involved in the anti-trade protests in Seattle." "Who Props Up the Protesters" contains profiles of more than 50 "environmental groups actively opposing trade, "including the Ruckus Society, Direct Action Network, Earth Island Institute, Friends of the Earth, Global Exchange and the National Wildlife Federation, and details how these groups participated in the Seattle protests. [*]
For just one example, in its profile of the Berkeley, California-based Ruckus Society, Truth About Trade asserts that Ruckus uses its training on nonviolent civil disobedience as a cover for its real agenda: "violent lawbreaking" by "leaders [who] are no stranger to violence themselves, [and who] might actually have expected the vandalism by the anarchist members of their protest." One of Truth about Trade's most significant contributions to intelligence gathering is documentation that the fair-trade network is bankrolled by "grantmakers [who] are funneling large sums of money to environmental groups." Among the major foundations highlighted are the Bullitt Foundation, HKH Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, Turner Foundation, W. Alton Jones Foundation and C.S. Mott Foundation.
There are several other conservative institutions focusing on the foundations who are providing the financial lifeblood for the environmental movement. The Washington-based Capital Research Center is one of the rising stars in the crowded universe of right-wing think tanks ("http://www.capitalresearch.org") <"http://www.capitalresearch.org")> . Established in 1984, the Capital Research Center analyzes how "those organizations with tax-exempt, tax-deductible-and sometimes tax dollars-mix advocacy and 'direct action' to promote their own vision of the public interest." It also looks at how closely individuals in the corporate and foundation sectors are sticking to the "donor intent" of the founders of these corporations and foundations.
Conservatives become apoplectic when they discover that a significant amount of money earmarked for environmental groups comes from foundations established by free-market entrepreneurs who accumulated enormous wealth based on decidedly anti-environmental activities. "The source of wealth for the Pew Trusts comes from energy exploration and development," the Capital Research Center's President Robert Huberty told the House Resource Committee at a May hearing. Complaining about Pew support for a forest protection campaign, he said that the original intent of the founders of the foundation was to "acquaint the American people [with] the evils of bureaucracy, the values of a free market and the paralyzing effects of government controls on the lives and activities of people."
Frustrated, Huberty asked, "How do the Pew Trusts honor the intentions of their donor by supporting a campaign to permanently end logging in a large portion of the national forests?" Anti-globalization activities clearly are becoming a direct threat to global corporate power. Surveillance, propaganda and counter-intelligence efforts mounted by the rich and powerful are just beginning to reveal themselves, but they surely are a harbinger of things to come.
Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering the religious right and related conservative movements. Contact him by e-mail at wkbbronx@aol.com
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If We Want To Defeat The FTAA, We Have To Beat Fast Track First
Michael Dolan, Trade Watch ~ Dec. 19, 2000
The new Administration needs Fast Track in order to expand NAFTA throughout the hemisphere (see NYT story below). The transnational corporate 'free trade' lobby will make Fast Track its highest legislative priority in the new Congress. Our challenge is to repeat the victories of '97 and '98 when we frustrated the Clinton White House, Big Business and the Republican congressional leadership by defeating Fast Track in the House of Representatives.
We can meet this challenge only by organizing at the grassroots level, targeting undecided congress-members, especially Democrats, starting immediately.
U.S. based activists: please activate your Fair Trade networks now, while the Congress is still in recess, and make your opposition to FTAA and Fast Track loud and visible.
For more information about FTAA and Fast Track, please don't hesitate to access our web-site, www.tradewatch.org.
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Latin America Is Priority on Bush Trade Agenda
By Anthony DePalma, New York Times ~ December 18, 2000
He may not be comfortable discussing unrest in East Timor, or pronouncing the name of the leaders of Turkmenistan, but President-elect George W. Bush considers the rest of the Western Hemisphere "our backyard" and will have several opportunities in his first year in office to make Latin America a trade and foreign policy priority.
During the campaign, Mr. Bush said he would kickstart the stalled process of getting a free trade agreement of the Americas signed by 2005. The agreement would build on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect in 1994, and would unite 34 of the countries in North, Central and South America into what President Clinton once said would be "the world's largest market."
The first order of business would be a bruising battle in a divided Congress over fast-track authority, the legislative tool that Mr. Bush will need to negotiate a comprehensive trade deal. Under fast track, trade deals are brought to Congress for approval only when complete. Congress then votes on the agreement without having the chance to add amendments that suit the needs and wishes of individual members.
"I'd expect that within the first 100 days in office he'll propose approval of fast-track authority," said Sidney Weintraub, an economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international finance and development.
Even though Republicans narrowly control the House of Representatives, Mr. Bush will need to reach across the aisle to Democrats for help in getting fast-track authority approved. Mr. Weintraub expects that the need for bipartisan cooperation will provide Democrats an opportunity to attach environmental and labor standards to the bill, although Mr. Bush has made it clear that he does not support such standards if they are too rigidly drawn.
In negotiating a trade deal, Mr. Bush would also have to heed strongly voiced opposition to such side agreements from some Latin American nations, led by Brazil, that fear that labor and environmental standards attached to a trade deal could be used as protectionist shields by American businesses that feel threatened by Latin American competition.
In a campaign speech in Miami in August, Mr. Bush said the Clinton administration dropped the ball on Latin America after losing the legislative battle to win fast-track authority. In the speech, he said that by the time the third Summit of the Americas meets, a fast-track bill will already have been introduced in Congress.
"When the next president sits at the Americas Summit in Quebec next April, other nations must know that fast-track authority is on the way," he said during the campaign.
Although Mr. Bush criticized President Clinton for stalling the drive for a free trade agreement of the Americas, the process has actually been chugging along, though largely out of sight. Negotiating teams have continued to work on technical details, and when trade officials gather in Quebec, a substantial framework for the trade negotiations leading to a 2005 deal will be in place.
"The 2005 date was set at the first Americas Summit in Miami in 1994 and reconfirmed at the second in Santiago," said Richard E. Feinberg, a former senior director of the National Security Council's Office of Inter-American Affairs under President Clinton and now a professor at the graduate school of international relations at the University of California in San Diego. "All the major players remain committed to the 2005 date."
During the campaign, Mr. Bush talked about developing a "special relationship" with Mexico, which is one of the few foreign countries he has ever visited. Referring more broadly to all of Latin America, he said he would "look south, not as an afterthought but as a fundamental commitment of my presidency."
As governor of a border state, Mr. Bush has had a front-row seat on the expansion of international trade, and the effect on Texas has been substantial. According to a recent study by the Council of the Americas, Texas exports to Mexico have more than doubled since Nafta came into force in 1994.
Mr. Bush will not have to worry about union opposition to new international trade deals as much as Vice President Al Gore would have, but there is a segment of the Republican Party that has become increasingly protectionist and could complicate any trade deal. That could force Mr. Bush to take a page from Mr. Clinton's playbook and cast increased trade in political and strategic terms, as Mr. Clinton did in winning a trade vote on China.
Mr. Bush had promised to meet with Mexico's president, Vicente Fox Quesada, even before Mr. Fox was inaugurated on Dec. 1, a signal that the administrations of both countries, starting at roughly the same time, would work in tandem to resolve common problems like illegal immigration, illicit drugs and environmental pollution. Because of the extraordinary delays in the American election, the meeting never took place, but Mr. Bush sent a congratulatory message to Mr. Fox on the day of his inauguration.
Mr. Fox has already taken a pre-emptive lead on some of these areas. During the summer he visited Mr. Clinton and both presidential candidates, and talked freely about his ideas for deepening Nafta and taking measures to reduce barriers that prevent Mexican workers from entering the United States to find work.
Mr. Fox's ideas were not warmly embraced by either Democrats or Republicans, and a close relationship with him and Mexico could put Mr. Bush into a difficult position with members of his own party.
"He will, as he said, have a `special relationship' with Mexico, but the question now is what kind of relationship will it be," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, who supported Mr. Gore. "Here is where a Bush presidency might run into real trouble."
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Ogden Corp. Quits Indian Dam Citing Economic Concerns
By Patrick McCully, International Rivers Network ~ December 14
New York-based Ogden Corporation have ended their involvement in the controversial Maheshwar Dam on India's Narmada River. Mr Kent Burton, Ogden's Vice President for Policy and Communications, told IRN today that the company had decided to quit the dam due to "growing concerns on project economics". "IRN welcomes Ogden's decision to pull out of the Maheshwar dam," says Patrick McCully, IRN Campaigns Director. "This is yet more evidence of the non-viability of this project and of big hydro projects in general. Its now time for Siemens and other foreign companies involved in this disastrous project to follow Ogden's lead," McCully added.
"Ogden's prudent decision should serve as yet another warning to Indian and foreign investors to stay away from this economically unviable and destructive project," says Chittaroopa Palit, Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA - Save the Narmada Movement) activist. "We call on the Indian government to scrap the dam and implement viable alternatives to meet the energy needs of the people of India", says Palit.
Ogden signed a Memorandum of Intent to take a 49 percent equity share in the Maheshwar dam in March, 2000. Since thenthe NBA, IRN and other human rights and environmental organizations have repeatedly drawn Ogden's attention to the poor economics and disastrous human rights and environmental impacts of the project. Ogden is the latest in a series of foreign companies to have dropped out of Maheshwar. In 1998, Pacgen, a subsidiary of Oregon power utility Pacificorp, withdrew their commitment to take a 49% share in the project. Pacgen's stake was then taken up by German power utilities Bayernwerk and VEW Energie, who then in turn withdrew in 1999.
In June 2000, after a highly critical report on the project was published by the country's development ministry, the German Hypovereinsbank cancelled its planned investment in Maheshwar. Several foreign companies remain involved in the dam, most notably engineering company Siemens of Germany. The German Development Ministry's report on the dam, however, was a serious blow to Siemens and forced them to withdraw their application for an export credit guarantee from the German government. Siemens plans to sell generating equipment and take an equity share in Maheshwar. Others involved in the project are ABB Portugal, which is set to sell equipment to the dam and UK engineers W.S. Atkins who are preparing - in total secrecy - an environmental assessment of the project.
The Maheshwar Dam, located in Madhya Pradesh state in central India, would affect around 40,000 farmers, wage laborers, fishers and crafts people in 61 villages and submerge about 1,100 hectares of rich agricultural land. Many of these people would lose part or all of their lands, while others would lose their source of livelihood. Local people, led by the Narmada Bachao Andolan which has campaigned for more than a decade to stop dams on the Narmada River, are fiercely opposed to the project and determined that it will never be completed.
Project promoter S. Kumars, an Indian textile firm with no prior experience in dam building, is currently seeking financial backing from Indian public financial institutions, such as the Power Finance Corporation, Industrial Finance Corporation of India, and the Housing and Urban Development Corporation. Preliminary construction work has been done on the dam. The recent report of the World Commission on Dams has highlighted the poor economic performance of large dams. The World Bank-sponsored commission found that the average cost overrun for the 81 projects it reviewed was a massive 56% and that hydro projects produced on average less energy that claimed in project documents.
for more information Patrick McCully - 510 848 1155 Chitaroopa Palit, Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA - Save the Narmada Movement)
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Study Finds Dangerous Rise in Corporate Power
By Tamara Straus, AlterNet ~ December 7
Not since the Gilded Age when John D. Rockefeller dominated the oil industry and J. P. Morgan served as America's unofficial central banker has there been so much talk about how big corporations threaten democracy. Al Gore got on the bandwagon this summer; wherever the vice president went he talked about the powerful -- "big tobacco, big oil, big polluters" -- versus the powerless of the people. And of course corporate power and its discontents were at the center of Ralph Nader's run for the presidency.
A critic of corporate power will probably not occupy the White House in January. But whoever the 43rd president of the United States is, it is doubtful he will see the issue go away. According to a September 2000 Business Week/Harris Poll, between 72 and 82 percent of Americans believe that "business has gained too much power over too many aspects of American life" and 74 to 82 percent believe that big companies have too much influence over "government policy, politicians, and policy-makers in Washington." Now, to add to this growing consensus is a new study, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington, DC. "Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power" argues that the leading economic story of the last five years is one of rapid growth of the world's top 200 corporations and diminishment of government and citizen control.
Perhaps the most important finding of IPS's study is that of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations, whereas 49 are countries. In other words, General Motors has greater economic power than the majority of the world's nation-states, as does Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil. The report also provides statistical evidence that combined sales of the top 200 corporations are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10, and that such sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (or 24 percent of the world population) living in "severe" poverty. "Growing private power has enormous economic consequences," concludes the study. "However, the greatest impact may be political, as corporations transform economic clout into political power."
To learn more about IPS' study, AlterNet spoke with Sarah Anderson, co-author of "Top 200" and director of the Global Economy Project of Institute for Policy Studies.
AlterNet: How does the 2000 report on global corporate power differ from the one IPS published in 1996?
Anderson: One disturbing change is evident in the largest employers on the top 200 list. In 1995, General Motors was the biggest, with 709,000 workers. By 1999, GM's employment had dropped to only 388,000, largely because of outsourcing. The firm that took GM's place as the No. 1 employer is Wal-Mart, with a staggering 1,140,000 employees, up from 648,500 in 1995. Whereas a good share of GM's jobs were unionized and decently paid, Wal-Mart is a notorious union-buster that employs armies of workers on a part-time basis to avoid paying benefits. These changes reflect the overall trend towards fewer and fewer union manufacturing jobs and the rise in poorly paid, non-union service-sector work.
Another dramatic development over the past five years is the surge in economic power of U.S. firms over those in other countries. Largely because of economic stagnation in Japan and mega-mergers among U.S. firms, the United States dominates the top 200. U.S. corporations hold 82 slots, followed by Japan, with only 41. In 1995, these countries were virtually tied, with 59 and 58 firms in the top 200, respectively.
AlterNet: What do you consider to be the most surprising results of your research?
Anderson: What surprises most people is not that these firms have tremendous power, but that their power is so out of whack with the contributions they make in terms of jobs and taxes. When I tell people that their sales are the equivalent of more than a quarter of world economic activity, they assume that they must provide somewhere near an equal amount of the world's jobs or taxes. The reality is that they employ less than 1 percent of the world's workforce and many of the top corporations don't pay any U.S. federal taxes at all.
Many people also ask whether the clout of global corporations is really new. How is this different from the power of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds in the last century? What the report shows is that the concentration of power among the top 200 firms has been steadily increasing in relation to world economic activity in general. Between 1983 and 1999, the top 200s' sales grew from the equivalent of 25 percent to 27.5 percent of world GDP. Yes, we've had mammoth firms for a long time, but we haven't had this level of concentration of economic clout on a global scale.
AlterNet: What has the feedback on the report been so far? Have conservative think tanks, for example, contested your research?
Anderson: USA Today quoted two people who were critical of the study. The first was Murray Weidenbaum, former economic adviser to President Reagan, who pointed out that a large share of corporate revenue goes to pay for worker compensation. My response to that is yes, many workers do depend on wages from these firms, but they are hardly getting their fair share of the dramatic profit growth we've seen over the past decade. In the United States alone, CEO pay grew 535 percent during the past decade while average worker pay grew only 32.3 percent. And of course many of these firms are shifting production to low-wage countries, making the global gap even wider. The other person they quoted was Michael Santoro, of the Rutgers Business School. He stated that these corporations create products that consumers want and that they are "in general using the resources of the world in a positive way."
Our study doesn't deny that these firms influence our lives in ways other than by providing jobs and taxes. Nevertheless, I thought Santoro's statement was a rather sweeping one to make about a group that includes tobacco-peddler Philip Morris, major polluters like Exxon Mobil, companies with questionable environmental and human rights records like Royal Dutch/Shell and Chevron, and controversial genetic engineer Novartis.
AlterNet: Given that 51 of the largest 100 economies in the world are corporations, what conclusions can be drawn about the state of economic democracy?
Anderson: I think once you understand the extent of their economic power, it should be no surprise that most governments in the world have been pursuing policies that are in the interest of these large corporations. Through the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and also regional trade agreements, large corporations are getting more and more powers and privileges to operate as they like around the world. Meanwhile, workers and communities are not getting any new powers to fight for their fair share of the benefits of the globalized economy or to prevent these corporations from destroying the environment to make a profit. It's a dismal scenario, but what I always try to remember is that while they might have the economic power, we have the people. And as we've seen in Seattle and Prague and many other places around the world, a new peoples' movement against corporate globalization is beginning to take off.
AlterNet: In your opinion, what can be done to restore greater economic egalitarianism?
Anderson: One reason corporations have so much power around the world is because so many countries are so desperate for foreign investment and export revenues to pay off their external debts that they are willing to look the other way when global corporations behave in socially irresponsible ways. So full debt relief for the poorest countries is a first step. The bigger challenge, though, is to rewrite the rules of the road to globalization. Right now, the rules set by the WTO, World Bank, IMF and other trade and investment agreements are designed to benefit large corporations. We need new rules that will put the goals of environmental sustainability, reduced inequality and human rights at the forefront. To create a political climate in which these types of radical changes would be possible, we also need to get big money out of politics and to regain the spirit of monopoly-busting that has been subverted by the goal of global competitiveness.
Full Text of Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power.
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Police Use Tear Gas as Trouble Flares in Nice
(Reuters) ~ Dec. 10
French police fired tear gas to disperse bottle-throwing protesters Wednesday after a peaceful march by tens of thousands of demonstrators on the eve of the European Union summit in Nice.Witnesses said 200 to 300 militants, many of them Italians, had confronted police at the French Riviera resort's railway station to protest that fellow activists from Italy had been stopped from entering France to join the day's demonstrations.
Two ambulances were seen leaving the scene, but there were no reliable reports of injuries or arrests. Squads of police in full riot gear later sealed off the station area. Earlier, over 60,000 trades unionists and anti-globalization activists had marched through Nice in rain to protest against perceived inadequacies in a Charter of Fundamental Rights that EU leaders plan to endorse on the first day of their summit. The document is intended to enshrine social rights across the 15-member Union. The summit will focus primarily on difficult talks on reforms to the way the EU works ahead of its planned expansion into former communist eastern and central Europe.
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Play It Again Sam: The IMF And World Bank Are At It Again
Robin Hahnel, ZNet Commentary ~ Dec. 9
Just in case anyone thought the IMF and the World Bank had gotten the message in Seattle, Washington DC, and Prague, all he or she has to do is read the December 5 edition of the Washington Post to find out otherwise. Looming disasters in Chad and Turkey are proof positive that nothing besides a tactical adjustment of rhetoric has changed at the Bank and the Fund. Anyone who thought the World Bank had finally learned that helping multinational companies and banks accelerate the extraction of third world natural resources does not benefit the third world poor, much less the environment, needs to check out what is happening in Chad. And anyone whothought managers at the Fund had learned from the East Asian crisis that capital liberalization puts third world economies dangerously at risk, and conditionality agreements only compound the crises that result, needs to watch the Fund repeat every mistake they made in East Asia, Russia, and Brazil all over again in Turkey.
Douglas Farah and David Ottaway inform us: "In June, when the World Bank agreed to back a controversial, 650-mile oil pipeline from this impoverished desert nation [where more than two-thirds of the population lives on an average of less than $250 a year] to Africa's Atlantic coast, it declaredthat it had found a way to prevent corrupt officials from stealing the country's new wealth. Criticized for years over projects in developing nations that failed to return benefits to their populations, bank officials knew that the $3.7 billion pipeline -- the most expensive infrastructure project now underway in Africa -- would be closely scrutinized. So they imposed strict accounting standards and insisted on guarantees from the Chadian government to ensure that its oil profits would be spent to improve public health, education and vital infrastructure here, rather than disappearing into secret bank accounts or funding weapons purchases by those in power. World Bank officials said that their 'Chadian model' would prove they could overcome the African nation's endemic corruption and that it might be applied to other corruption-prone oil-producing lands. In a press release after it approved the project, the bank called the agreement with the Chad government an 'unprecedented framework to transform oil wealth into direct benefits for the poor, the vulnerable and the environment.' So when Chadian President Idriss Deby, a general who seized power in a 1990 coup,declared last week that he had used $4.5 million of the government's first oil receipts to buy weapons instead of bolstering social programs, saying 'it is patently obvious that without security there can be no development programs,' he sent a jolt through the bank."
The demonstrators in Seattle, Washington DC, and Prague were not the only ones who warned the World Bank that this is exactly what would happen. Human rights activists in Chad fought the project for years, claiming it would "only escalate armed power struggles and be diverted by authoritarian rulers to buy guns or to fatten their bank accounts." Delphine K. Djiraibe, president of the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights was quick to point out after the story broke: "The arms purchases should be a warning to show that when the oil money flows, the World Bank won't have any way to know what Deby will do with it."
But the diversion of profits to purchase arms is only one problem. The main objections critics have voiced to this and similar World Bank projects elsewhere are that too much of the profits go to foreign companies and banks, leaving too little to make a significant dent in unpayableinternational debts that should be forgiven. Chad is only projected to receive $2 to $3 billion over 25 years from the pipeline, the rest going to the consortium of international oil companies led by Exxon Mobil Corp., to the international banks financing the project, and to the World Bank itselffor brokering the deal and putting up 3 percent of the initial financing.
Meanwhile, another IMF "success story" is in crisis and about to receive the usual IMF ministrations -- the twenty-first century version of blood letting with leeches. In the same edition of the Washington Post, Molly Moore informs us from Istanbul that "Turkey's stock market plunged today and some interest rates soared to more than 1,200 percent in a financial crisis that analysts fear could spread to Russia and other struggling economies. Turkish officials began emergency talks with the International Monetary Fund in Ankara, the capital, urgently asking for a $5 billion loan to help counter a rush to sell Turkish lira that threatens to undermine the country's precarious economy. Officials fear that if it is not contained, the financial crisis could send Turkey's economy into a downward spiral of unemployment and company closures. Investors, both foreign and Turkish, are moving their money out of markets here as they lose confidence in the country's future and worry about the effect a devaluation of the lira could have on their holdings. Turkey's stock market has lost nearly 40 percent of its value in the last two weeks, including today's plunge of 8 percent.
"How is this possible? Reporting from Washington in the same story Steven Pearlstein tells us: "The first 10 months of this year marked one of the most stable economic periods in recent Turkish history." And: "In the past year, Turkey has won praise from the IMF and international financialanalysts for streamlining its financial policies, reining in government spending and making other economic policy changes suggested by the IMF." In other words, Turkey was a paragon of neoliberal economic virtue according to the IMF, and therefore one would think the last place a crisis should break out. But of course that was what the IMF and World Bank had said about the East Asian economies only a year before their crises. In that case as well, East Asian economies who succumbed to pressure from the US Treasury Department and the IMF to open themselves completely to international financial investment, including short-run, speculative capital flows, were praised by the US and the Fund as neoliberal success stories. But as soon as the hot money took fright and fled, as soon as the IMF imposed its draconian conditionality agreements -- calculated to protect international investors -- in exchange for a bail out, and as soon as all this left the East Asian economies in ruins, Fund managers hastened to tell us the East Asian governments had been less virtuous than heretofore presumed. And just as Fund managers hastened to point the finger of blame elsewhere for the disaster they were responsible for orchestrating in East Asia, with the help of the mainstream Western media they are already positioning themselves to blame the victim in Turkey.
Once again we will be told the Turkish fall from grace is due to their "crony capitalism," "lack of transparency," and "insufficient prudential regulation." We are already being told "the crisis was set off by almost daily disclosures of banking scandals and related criminal investigations" - as if this were not what triggers most financial crises. The real question is why disclosure of some bad loans triggered a crisis in this situation whereas it usually does not. The reason we are not reminded of the real question is the answer points straight to the magnitude and conditions under which international speculative capital poured into Turkey over the past few years, i.e., the "financial streamlining" orchestrated and praised by the IMF. We are also told "astronomically high interest rates have taken hold in loans between banks because lending banks fear that borrowing banks may default" - small wonder! The real question is who decided to subordinate the interest of financing productive Turkish investments, which will be brought to a standstill by astronomical interest rates, to the interests of international wealth management in the first place? Again, international investment banks taking part in an IMF sponsored program in Turkey come to mind. Moore informs us: "Banks in Germany--which have invested heavily in Turkey's efforts to sell off state-owned companies and in its economy in general -- have suffered drops in their own share prices because of the Turkish crisis." Finally, we are also being warned that Turkish government reluctance to shut down troubled banks and assume their liabilities may deepen the crisis. "The government has already placed 10 troubled banks in receivership. According to sources familiar with the talks, the IMF is pressing officials in Ankara to take over and close more of the country's 81 banks, a politically difficult step that would cause powerful owners to lose their investments. In return, the government would guarantee all or most of the depositors' funds." Notice whose cronyism is subject to criticism and whose is not. For the Turkish government to worry about Turkish business loses is irresponsible cronyism. But when the IMF urges the government of a developing country to guarantee the funds of wealthy international depositors -- in this case German banks financing the IMF privatization program in Turkey! -- it is only sound crisis management.
One question is whether the IMF bailout will work in Turkey in even the most narrow terms. We are informed: "The flow of investment funds out of the country has led the central bank to spend at least $6 billion of its $18 billion foreign exchange reserves in the last two weeks shoring up the lira -- buying the currency to offset the downward pressure on its value caused by investors selling it to buy dollars and leave the country. Analysts fear that if the IMF does not quickly give Turkey its requested $5 billion emergency loan, the government could soon run out of foreign reserves and be unable to support the lira. In that case, the currency's value would likely plummet." Whereas the IMF pulled off a successful bailout in Mexico in 1995, they failed to do so in East Asia in 1997 where it was predominantly Japanese banks and multinational companies who stood to lose, as opposed to US banks and companies in Mexico. Technical "success" in Mexico was due to the speed and size of the bailout package. In Asia the IMF was slow and cheap, concentrating instead on forcing internal "reforms" in the stricken economies. The US Treasury Department even dispatched then deputy secretary Larry Summers to tell the Japanese in no uncertain terms that their offer to put up $100 billion for bailouts without conditions was unacceptable. Turkey has already spent a third of its foreign exchange reserves in just two weeks to prop up the lira. Whether $5 billion from the IMF will prove enough, and arrive quickly enough to ward off the speculative attack on the Turkish lira remains to be seen. I have no doubt what the German government will be lobbying the new German managing director of the IMF to do! Whether Larry Summers proves more interested in using the crisis to force further debilitating "reforms" on Turkey, or more interested in staving off an international financial crisis and any possible contagion, remains to be seen.
But whether the IMF bail out is a technical success, as it was in Mexico, or a failure, as it was in East Asia, is not the most important issue. Technical success means international investors will not suffer and the stricken economy will recover more quickly. Technical failure means greater investor loses, extending to taxpayers, contagion effects in other emerging markets, and a much deeper and longer depression in the afflicted economy. But in either case IMF policies are detrimental to the interests of developing economies as they tie them ever more tightly to the torture rack of highly leveraged international wealth management. At a minimum, the crisis in Turkey proves once again that playing the IMF game -- reducing government spending, privatizing public services, opening completely to international investment, and accumulating what used to be more than sufficient foreign exchange reserves to adequately protect your currency ($18 billion in the case of Turkey!) - is no protection at all from economic ruin in the brave new world of unchecked neoliberalism.
Update: Financial crisis are fast breaking stories. On December 7, 2000 Molly Moore wrote: "The International Monetary Fund today announced a $10 billion credit package for Turkey in an effort to stem a financial crisis that has seriously undermined the nation's economy and threatened to spreadto other emerging markets." What are we supposed to think when the Turkish government asks for a $5 billion bailout one day and is delivered a $10 billion bailout the next! Could it be that somebody at the Fund is just a little concerned? But obviously Fund concern is not limiting its demands, aswe also read that the Turkish government has caved to Fund pressure to assume responsibility for bank deposits and speed up privatization: "IMF officials were concerned that Turkey had not responded sufficiently to the banking scandal that has left 11 of the nation's 81 banks in receivership. Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said today that the government would make bolder efforts to insure deposits in the nation's troubled banks and will move to begin privatization of the state-owned telephone company, Turk Telecom, Turkish Airlines and the power and electricity sector by the end of next week." Obviously what managers at the Fund have learned from a year of escalating protests and public concern is to rev neoliberalism up to warp speed.
END
SAMWU Condemns Global Privatisation Summit starting Monday in Capetown
By Anna Weekes, SAMWU ~ Dec. 6
SAMWU condemns the Global Summit on Public-Private Partnerships and Private Finance Initiatives, which starts in Cape Town on Monday. The Summit is hosted by Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and Minister of Local Government Sydney Mufamadi at the Cape Sun Hotel. In attendance are privatisation ministers from 14 countries, as well as international financiers that only give money to local government when it promises to privatise, such as Bank of America, European Investment Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
The Development Bank of Southern Africa, a public finance institution which refused to lend Nelspruit TLC money to upgrade its water infrastructure but then lent a British multinational R150 million to privatise the water is attending the conference, and has clearly taken on the role of a private bank. SAMWU objects strongly to this. SAMWU is disgusted that international consultants which only advise municipalities to privatise, such as Price Waterhouse Coopers, KPMG and Investec, are speakers. Consultants have already milked our municipalities of well over R200 million in the last two years - money which is desperately needed for service delivery.
The union believes that the concept of Private Finance Initiative (PFI), which was introduced in Britain in the early 90's by the Conservative government, has no relevance at all to South Africa and the developing world. It has already been rejected by one million public sector workers in England. Under PFI, private companies take over services for as long as 60 years. Instead of the municipality borrowing money to finance services,they are forced under the PFI to pay a hefty annual fee to the private company.
Under PFI, the future provision of public services is determined by what the private consortium wants rather than what the public needs. The lengthy contracts mean that elected councillors lose control completely of any influence they have over service delivery. Entire councils can be replaced yet service delivery remains tied into a contract. International experience shows that PFI projects profit from paying lower wages than municipal employers and by cutting back on health and safety standards.
There are many examples of PFI contracts failing, such as the British pass port office where the private company failed to provide a computer system that worked, leading to huge delays in processing passports, huge queues at passport offices and more expensive passports. The cost of PFI arises from the "buy now pay later" financing of projects. The long term costs of PFI are much higher than in publicly financed projects because of the high setting up costs of a PFI contract. Costs escalate further with high interest that the company pays private banks on loans, lengthy negotiations involving solicitors and consultants, and the profit margin that must be built into the cost of the service - PFI consortia demand an excessive rate of return of over 20% on their investment.
It is a mark of disrespect that Ministers of Finance and Local Government are hosting a conference to effectively determine the future of services in South Africa during elections, when ordinary people are voting for councillors who are supposed to be the ones deciding with the community on service delivery. "The PFI mechanism also seriously undermines delivery of free basic services," said SAMWU General Secretary Roger Ronnie.
For all the above, we need e-mails of solidarity. Please send to all these addresses: samwu@sn.apc.org; gendero@samwu.org.za; interno@samwu.org.za
We need letters of protest to Council bosses. These are the names in Joburg:
EXCO Chair Kenny Fihla afihla@gjtmc.org.za
Co-ordinator in office of the Mayor pmoloka@gjtmc.org.za
Acting CEO Mavela Dlamini mdlamini@mj.org.za
Graeme Reid, Inner City Manager greid@mj.org.za
Ketso Gordhan, City Manager kgordhan@mj.org.za
Makgane Thobejane, Labour Relations mthobeja@mj.org.za (former General Secretary of Public Sector Union NEHAWU)
Roland Hunter, Chief Financial Officer rhunter@mj.org.za
Pascal Moloi, Transformation Project Manager pmoloi@gjtmc.org.za
Phindile Nzimande, Legal Adviser pnzimand@mj.org.za
Anthony Still, Transition Manager of Water Utility astill@mj.org.za
Rest of the councillors: pandrade@gjtmc.org.za; busnet@mweb.co.za; mmokoena@gjtmc.org.za; imogase@gjtmc.org.za; jbriggs@gjtmc.org.za; pbuthele@mj.org.za; jbriggs@hixnet.co.za; fkendall@global.co.za; iisaacs@gjtmc.org.za; cfortuin@gjtmc.org.za; mm44@pixie.co.za; pdewet@gjtmc.org.za; rdubazan@gjtmc.org.za; donaldforbes@yahoo.com; mmoriarty@gjtmc.org.za; smgidlana@gjtmc.org.za; ymakda@gjtmc.org.za; smabuza@gjtmc.org.za; emabe@gjtmc.org.za; panda@mweb.co.za; mlombard@gjtmc.org.za; alewis@gjtmc.org.za
We also need letters to the South African Press. Here are their e-mail addresses:
alive@safm.co.za; xundux@tml.co.za; phumzile@kaya-fm.co.za; raborokj@sowetan.co.za; editor@kaya-fm.co.za; belnews@wn.apc.org; israel@sapa.org.za; sapa@iafrica.com; mahap@woza.co.za; lungile@yfm.co.za; haffajeef@bdfm.co.za; alackay@beeld.com; tcelean@tml.co.za; bramdawn@tml.co.za
Please send letters to the Editor on the situation to these newspapers:
The Sowetan mangaa@sowetan.co.za
Mail and Guardian editor@mg.co.za
The Star newspaper sma@star.co.za
Business Day busday@bdfm.co.za
Sunday Times suntimes@tml.co.za
Please send copies to the SAMWU addresse (samwu@sn.apc.org) so that we can upload to our website.Yours in the struggle against privatisation, Anna Weekes, SAMWU Media Officer
END
Protesters Demand Buffalo State Cut Ties to Private Prison Industry
By Karen Brady, News Staff Reporter ~ Dec. 5
A peaceful protest against the private prison industry turned not-so-peaceful Monday as more than 40 local college students and community activists attempted to force their way into the administration offices at Buffalo State College."We wanted to see the president," Buffalo State senior Edward T. Ellis said of college President Muriel A. Howard. The students and others, Ellis explained, wanted to present Howard a petition, with more than 1,300 signatures, against Buffalo State food service provider Sodexho Marriott's ties to the prison industry. "We wanted to demand that the college not renew its contract with the food provider," Ellis said.
He and other protesters entered the administration building, Cleveland Hall, after a mid-day rally by more than 150 opponents of the private prison industry and Sodexho Marriott's link to it. The link is through Sodexho Alliance, a shareholder in the private Corrections Corporation of America. "There were guards (Public Safety) at every entrance, but I found a back door that was open, and we all ran in before they could close it," said Ellis, who then tried to climb the stairs of Cleveland Hall with the other protesters to the fifth-floor administration offices. "We were making a lot of noise, and they locked us out of the floor, so we just stayed in the stairwell," Ellis said.
The small band stayed in the stairwell for about two hours, chanting, "The student voice must be heard," and, "Brick by brick, wall by wall, we're taking back Cleveland Hall." Dean of Students Phillip Santa Maria told the group that Howard was not on campus and they would have to leave, Ellis said. "He told us we could not disrupt business as usual." The students stayed until Vice President for Student Affairs Hal D. Payne "showed up on the stairwell," Ellis said. "He addressed some of our issues but did not tell us the college would not renew the Sodexho Marriott contract - so there is still more work to be done. The fight is not over."
Sodexho Marriott, which has dining hall contracts with more than 400 colleges and universities in the United States, has said it is not in the prison business and has no control over the investments and business dealings of its subsidiaries, including Sodexho Alliance. The food provider's 11/2-year contract with Buffalo State runs through May, and the college is in the bid process for a new, 10-year food service contract. Buffalo State spokeswoman Nanette Tramont said that the college could not comment on the situation because of the bid process.
Monday's protesters were not let into Cleveland Hall, she added, because "we didn't want our service of our students to be disrupted, so we didn't permit the protesters to do that."
"Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
-Clarence Darrow
END
Seattle WTO Activists Accuse Mayor Schell of Obstructing WTO Teach-In
By Mark Taylor ~ Dec 2
Jeremy Simer, of the Roundtable on Environmental and Economic Justice, told a crowd at Saturday's WTO Anniversary Teach-in at Seattle Central Community College that pressure had been put on SCCC President Dr. Mitchell to disassociate the college from the teach-in on corporate globalization.. He said, "Funding for this event has been pulled by Mitchell as a result of phone calls from the city."
Sponsors of the teach-in included the King County Labor Council AFL-CIO, Jubilee 2000, the Roundtable on Environmental and Economic Justice, the American Friends Service Committe, SCCC Anthropology Department, the Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office, Washington State Jobs With Justice, St. Mark's Cathedral, Teamsters Local 174, and the National Lawyers Guild.
Representatives from various groups expressed outrage and resentment that the Mayor's Office would interfere with the event. Activist Mark Taylor-Canfield said, "Business interests were concerned that SCCC was hosting an event which might give the impression that there is community support for the WTO Anniversary protests." He suspects that they pushed Schell to put pressure on Mitchell to cancel the event.
Mitchell angered students last year when he supported an economics instructor who was accused by 5 witnesses of assaulting a student during a political rally. Several days ago he forced teach-in organizers to change the name of the event from a "community forum" to a "teach-in" to avoid criticism from those in the city government who did not want to see SCCC hosting a community event in support of the WTO protest anniversary.
Although the teach-in was created as an educational event only, organizers were forced to appoint "peace keepers" to satisfy Mitchell. When the funding assistance was pulled by Mitchell after pressure from the city (even though three SCCC student groups were co-sponsoring) organizers fumed and swore to unseat the mayor in the next election. A Seattle Central Community College anthropology student named Bambi referred to the November 30, 2000 arrests of 140 people and the mayor's meddling when she complained, "Now that we know we have a mayor and a police chief who both condone mass arrests (including journalists and labor leaders) and interfering with free speech, I think we can safely say that a petty dictatorship has been established in our city. I feel sorry for their small little minds that are so afraid of the truth. It would be better for them to go to Singapore or China where political dissent is eliminated by brute force - they'd really enjoy that."
Utilizing technicalities in the reservation process, Mitchell forced organizers to end the teach-in 2 and 1/2 hours early. People arriving after 4 PM to attend a closing plenary session with world famous author and economist David Korten found that the doors of the college had been chained and locked.
Information: Mark Taylor-Canfield, Roundtable on Environmental and Economic Justice Committee For Local Government Accountability
END
Glaxo Stops Africans Buying Cheap Aids Drugs
By Sarah Boseley, The Guardian ~ December 2
The arguments over affordable life-saving medicines for the developing world intensified yesterday when it was revealed that the multinational pharmaceutical company Glaxo-Wellcome has blocked imports of cheap copies of one of its Aids drugs into Ghana. The revelation came as South Africa announced it had done a deal with a second company, Pfizer, over supplies of the drug Fluconazole to treat infections such as meningitis that often kill people whose immune systems are wrecked by the Aids virus HIV. Under pressure from campaigners, who began bringing a cheaper version of the patent-protected branded drug into South Africa which massively undercut the usual Pfizer price, the company has agreed to supply Fluconazole free.
But although aid organisations such as the charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hailed the deal as an example of what can be achieved if countries show a willingness to turn their back on the pharmaceutical giants and buy copies, Britain made it clear yesterday that it was not in favour of such tactics. Trade minister Richard Caborn told activists from the London-based organisation Action for Southern Africa (Actsa) that such measures "are not the answer here".
Campaigners insist that developing countries must use every possible means to get hold of affordable drugs that can stop people dying. But western governments say the companies have a right to protection for the drugs they sell at high prices in order, the companies argue, to recoup research and development costs. The west says the right approach is for countries to negotiate discounts with the companies. But African nations say they cannot afford the drugs even at the discount prices offered in May this year by five multinationals. Only Senegal has so far taken up the invitation to negotiate a deal.
The giants take very seriously the threat of competition. Glaxo-Wellcome has blocked the import into Ghana of a version of its Aids therapy Combivir made in India by Cipla. It is argued by campaigners that impoverished countries faced with a health emergency have a right under international trade legislation to buy generic drugs. The African Regional Industrial Property Organisation was quoted yesterday as saying that if Glaxo went to court, it believed it would lose. But poor countries fear confrontation will upset relations with the west. Glaxo's spokesman said the company had offered Ghana its own drugs under its "preferential pricing" scheme.
The price for the generic version of Combivir has not been revealed, but generics sell for a fraction of the branded price. MSF has gathered data showing that Cipla sells Fluconazole for $0.64 (45p) in India, compared with Pfizer's price in South Africa of $8.25 and in Kenya of $10.56. MSF pointed out yesterday that AZT and 3TC, the two drugs in Combivir, are both old and that they were developed with the help of public funds in the United States. Glaxo Wellcome has already made many millions out of them. "It cannot argue it needs to recoup its investment," said a spokesman.
Actsa says that the threat of generic competition made Pfizer lift restrictions it wanted to impose on the Fluconazole it is donating to South Africa. "At first it was going to be only for meningitis and not for thrush, which affects more people. The company was dictating how the drug was to be used," said a spokesman. The Pfizer deal was announced the day after South Africa's medicines control council said it would allow generic Fluconazole to be used in the country.
END
ALERT: Zambia Debt Fiasco - Letters Needed by Dec. 7
50 Years Is Enough Network ~ Dec. 1
We have just learned that the IMF and World Bank boards will be considering the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) debt relief package for Zambia on Thursday, December 7. Outrageously enough, this package would actually have Zambia pay MORE debt servicing for the next several years than they have been paying. For people in the U.S., please send the following letter or one like it to the following people (in other countries, please contact your Finance Ministry). We are providing fax numbers and/or email addresses (faxes are preferable). Following the letter are some facts on Zambia provided by Jubilee 2000/USA, and a statement on the Zambian case issued by a debt activists' conference in Helsinki.
Mr. Larry Summers - Secretary of the Treasury - 202/622-0073
Mr. Timothy Geithner - Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs - 202/622-0417
Ms. Karin Lissakers - U.S. Executive Director to the IMF - e-mail: klissakers@imf.org or phone: 202/623-4661
Ms. Jan Piercy - U.S. Executive Director to the World Bank - e-mail: jpiercy@worldbank.org or phone: 202/477-2967
Dear _______,
I have learned that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank will be deciding on Zambia's eligibility for their debt relief program ("HIPC") on December 7. I understand that it appears that Zambia will actually have to pay more in debt servicing once it is approved to receive debt relief. Can there be any more pointed example of the bankruptcy of the IMF/World Bank debt program than this? What sort of cruel accounting joke would subject the people of a country to a debt relief scheme that increases annual debt servicing from $150 million to $235 million by 2002? I understand that the IMF has suggested that its "relief" could be "frontloaded," meaning that reductions which would normally be scheduled for five years from now could be moved up. Even under this arrangement there would still be no reduction in Zambia's debt payments. The IMF's suggestion -- which may not be taken up by its Board at any rate -- would still deprive Zambia of any new funds for poverty-targeted programs.
This situation would be outrageous in any country where the IMF operates. But with 80% of Zambia's population living on less than one dollar a day, and almost 10% of the people known to be HIV positive, this parody of "debt relief" is particularly cruel. Zambia cannot sustain more loans to spread out the scheduled spike in debt payments. The only logical or just solution is comprehensive cancellation of Zambia's debt. Given that the major source of Zambia's debt crisis is loans made by the IMF itself in 1995 (which were intended to pay off previous loans), and given the absurd penalties involved in getting "debt relief" under the HIPC program, how can the supporters of HIPC argue with the position of some in the U.S. Congress that HIPC is nothing more than a way for the institutions to bail themselves out with money contributed by taxpayers in countries like the U.S.? Why should citizens of the U.S. and other wealthy countries continue to support a program that does no good for people in Southern countries and just contributes money to keep the institution that makes these absurd debt arrangements afloat? I urge you to use your influence at the IMF and World Bank to advocate for 100% cancellation of Zambia debts.
Sincerely,
From Jubilee 2000/USA Additional Facts on Zambia (figures derived from the IPRSP document on IMF website):
-- More than 70% of population is poor, living on less than $1 a day
-- Life expectancy = 44 years
-- All development indicators are below the average for Sub Saharan Africa and have worsened over the last 10 years - Only 1/2 of the population has access to safe water
-- 53% of children under 5 are chronically undernourished.
-- School enrolment rate (primary school): Has declined substantially since early 80s. Now at 68%. One explanation: children staying home to care for sick relatives
-- Problems Zambia has faced: several droughts; drop in price of copper (since 1995); drop in copper production; recent oil price increase; ripple effect of Asian currency crisis; debt burden Zambia's debt:
-- At end of 1999 the debt was $6.3 billion in nominal terms 43% of the debt is multilateral: 19% of the debt is owed to the IMF 58% of the debt is bilateral, owed to Japan and other countries
Since 1990 Zambia has paid $4.437 billion in debt payments (interest and principle), an average of $443.7 million per year. For the past three years the payments have taken about 1/4 of the government's revenue (national budget). During the years 1990-1996 the average payment was equal to 85.9 % of the country's revenue. The increase of Zambia's payment obligations, despite HIPC debt relief, is due to IMF loans coming due starting in 2001. These loans were taken on in a massive effort to clear out "arrears", or overdue payments, on other loans.
(note that the date of the meeting on Zambia's HIPC plan changed shortly after the issuance of this declaration)
Zambia
A Declaration from the Eurodad Tenth Anniversary Conference, Helsinki, Finland November 15-17, 2000
This Conference notes that:
* Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average life expectancy of 44 years and falling because of the impact of HIV/AIDS, has been presented with an agreement under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative whereby actual debt payments will increase, not decrease, after the agreement is implemented. Under this agreement, annual debt payments will increase from $150 million to $235 million by 2002.
* The IMF's proposed 'solution' to this problem is to change the timing of its relief, taking assistance from later years in order to reduce payments in the first few years. This does not provide any net benefit to Zambia and means that payments will still not fall after the HIPC initiative, allowing no extra funds for poverty reduction - one of the stated aims of the HIPC initiative.
* Even with the IMF's solution, Zambia is likely to pay around $150 million on debt service in 2001, almost one-third of its entire budget. This is more than the entire $123 million health budget in a country where HIV/AIDS has left nearly 13 per cent of children orphaned - the highest rate in the world.
* The problem at the root of this issue was caused by lending by the IMF in 1995 which was intended in large part merely to provide the funds to pay off earlier debts, and the solution proposed merely repeats that same bad practice of the IMF in its failure to recognise debts that are unpayable.
* The case of Zambia highlights the inadequacy and inflexibility of the HIPC initiative to meet its own stated goals of providing a sustainable exit from the debt crisis and releasing new funds for poverty reduction.
* The Board of the IMF will be discussing Zambia's case on November 27th, when it is expected that Zambia will reach the 'Decision Point' of the HIPC Initiative (the point at which the amount of debt to be cancelled is determined, and where 'interim debt relief' begins).
This Conference therefore:
* Welcomes the call by the Zambian government and civil society for the complete cancellation of its debts, so that these resources can be used in the fight against poverty.
* Rejects the HIPC agreement offered to Zambia and the inadequate solution proposed by the IMF.
* Calls on the Managing Director, Governors and Executive Directors of the IMF to go beyond the terms of the HIPC initiative and agree the immediate cancellation of 100 per cent of the debts owed by Zambia to the IMF, as the only genuine and sustainable way to solve Zambia's IMF debt problem - a problem largely of the IMF's own making.
The above Declaration was agreed by a range of representatives from civil society organisations from around the world, including the following:
50 years is Enough Network - USA
Broederlijk Delen - Belgium
Christian Aid - UK
Debt and Development Coalition/Jubilee Ireland
Erlassjahr 2000 - Austria
Eurodad Secretariat - Belgium
Friends of the Earth (FOE) - USA
Ibis - North/South Coalition - Denmark
Jesuits for Debt Relief and Development (JCTR) - Ireland
Jesuits for Debt Relief and Development (JCTR) - Zambia
KEPA (Service Centre for Development Co-operation - Finland
KOO - Austria
Norwegian Campaign for Cancellation of Third World Debt/Jubilee 2000
(SLUG) - Norway
Oxfam International
Swiss Coalition of Development Organizations - Berne
WEED - Germany
WEMOS - Netherlands
END
Police Attack Peaceful March Against Third World Debt
By Paul Lavery ~ Nov. 26
It was a beautiful sunny morning. My friend Marco, a law lecturer at a Barcelona University, popped around for a cup of coffee. He wanted to bring around a little present for my son Lucas who was born two and half months ago. He told me he was heading for a demonstration that was about to take place in the centre of Madrid against third world debt. The march was due to start in Plaza Cibeles, head down past the Prado Art gallery and finish at Atocha train station some 10 minutes walk from where I live. I decided to join him and asked my partner if I should bring Lucas out with me for some fresh air. Marco thought there wouldn't be too many on the demonstration and it was likely to be mild and good humoured. As Lucas is still being breast fed we made a quick calculation of when he would need his next maternal fix and decided that he would be screaming for his lunch before I could get back. I decided not to bring Lucas and headed off with Marco.
On the way over to Plaza Cibeles he told me about the Citizens Network for Cancellation of Third World Debt. It sounded a very main stream broad coalition and similar to Jubilee 2000 back in Britain. They organised their own very imaginative public consultation to coincide with the general elections last march. They set up ad hoc voting urns and asked those voting in the elections to cast their vote for or against abolition of third world debt. Over a million voted, with Catalunya being the best organised with 500,000 votes. Predictably, 95% plus voted in favour of cancelling the debt and organisers seemed delighted with grass root organisers ability to highlight the fact that debt repayments dwarf budgets of health and education combined in many developing countries where infant mortality is a major killer.
On arriving in the plaza by pure coincidence I stood next to an older group of religious activists and one nun, cross round her neck, from Extremadura in the south West of Spain. To the other side were a bunch of mostly young people in their early twenties from Barcelona who were singing and dancing as they waited for the march to start. I saw a woman who was about 7 months pregnant and it made me think of Lucas. A mere half hour late and the march shuffled off. It was a very modest number, perhaps around two thousand. It was very good natured, with the usual chants, songs, and array of posters against third world debt.
Along each side of the march were the "policia antidisturbios" which literally means "anti-disturbance police". These were all big burly officers who were obviously in good shape. I was fascinated by their dark blue uniforms which appeared like a tight version of workers overalls except they have reinforced padding around legs and body for extra protection. Among their various gadgets they all carried handguns in a holster and heafty batons some three foot long. Several carried riffles which appeared to have a strange fat muzzle at one end. I found out later these were for firing hard rubber balls about the same size as a snooker ball. They also had helmets with plastic visors. The distance from Cibiles to Atocha is some one and half kilometres. Halfway down this beautiful tree lined street which also boasts the world famous Thyssen museum and Prado Art gallery is a stunning round-about with a statue of Neptune in the middle. Some 100 yards west of Neptune is the Parliament building. (Congress of Deputies.)
As the march slowly reached the roundabout there was a sudden burst of action. About three hundred and fifty of the marchers sprinted between the police and charged up the street towards the Congress of Deputies building. The police pulled out their batons and whacked a few as they ran past and then chased them up the street. The majority stayed behind by NeptuneÌs monument. I ran up too. The marchers ran to the steps of the Parliament building and sat down. By the time I arrived the steps were fully occupied by approximately one hundred and fifty protesters. I joined the other two hundred or so who sat on the street in front of the steps.
The protesters huddled together and started chanting "Cancel the debt". There was now little or no movement from the protesters, but dozens of police vans came screeching around a corner. More riot police arrived and fitted their helmets. Approximately twenty five police made their way to the top of the steps and formed a line between the marchers and the building. At no point did the marchers try to enter the building or break that line. In fact, they were all sitting on the steps with their back to the front door and therefore with their backs to the police who were standing above them.
As the chant "Cancel the debt" rang out I saw the entire row of police, almost as one, start to kick the protesters in the back. Then to my left, without any warning whatsoever, five police started laying into the seated protesters with their batons. They hit them as hard as they could. I was some 15 to 20 metres from them and had a clear view. Since the protesters were seated at their feet, with their backs to them, most of the blows rained down on their heads and shoulders. Then the other police joined in and started beating the rest of the protesters, both on the steps, and those seated in front on the road.
Some of the protesters were grabbed and pulled from the group. But to my genuine amazement the majority of these young people curled up and remained on the steps as the police continued to beat them. Those in front of the steps too were being hit but not to the same extent as those on the steps. Those that were dragged from the steps sat down again on the street. I saw one young girl, perhaps 17 or 18, who appeared less than 100 lbs, being beaten and dragged from the steps. She got back up again and sat on the same spot. A police raised a baton to whack her but laid it down again in total frustration.
Among the chaos something remarkable happened. As the outside lines bore the brunt of the blows, those lucky enough to be in the middle and not on the receiving end started chanting "Sin verguenza!" "Sin verguenza!" Literally, "Without shame" which then built up to a crescendo of "We are pacifists....we are pacifists...we are pacifists...we are human beings, we are human beings...." and the protesters held up their bare hands.
Then something even more remarkable happened. Gradually the police stopped beating the protesters and there was shouts for silence. Most of the protesters now sat on the road in front of the steps. As the silence grew I could see and hear the police, who now surrounded the sitting protesters, try to catch their breath. One was panting from his exertions, pulled up the visor from his face, and wiped the sweat running down his cheeks. Some of the protesters were moaning or crying from the blows they had received.
One of the organisers, a man in his late forties, started negotiating with what I can only assume was the policeman in charge. There were more calls for silence and the organiser, who had an ugly gash on his head from a blow and whose hands were splattered with blood, started speaking to the still seated protesters. He called for a vote on the following options. They could read aloud their statement about the third world debt crisis and then be allowed to join the rest of the marchers still waiting by the Neptune round-about, or they could continue with their act of civil disobedience and "suffer the consequences". Those by me understood that meant they might or might not be arrested, but all understood they would certainly be beaten up. Given the fact that they were surrounded by police, with batons drawn, and who were ready to go into action again there was no possibility of other options being discussed. He asked for a show of hands.
Not surprisingly, given the beating many had received, a clear majority of 90% against 10% voted to read their statement and then join the rest of the march in the designated route. In silence, and in front of two TV cameras, the organiser read out their declaration which amounted to a summary of their reasons for supporting cancellation of the debt. There was around of applause and people stood up to leave. Suddenly some four yards from where I was standing the police grabbed a man in his thirties. He was well built but quite short. Instead of leading him away in an ordinary arrest he was grabbed from behind by the throat and forced to skip along on his tiptoes as the two arresting policeman were much taller and stronger.
Since this man seemed to be picked out at random, and arrested in such an unnecessary violent manner, everyone sat down again. The chant went up, "If you arrest one, you arrest us all". Again there was a stalemate. After a couple of minutes the police seemed to back off. A gap appeared in their lines and they stepped back to the sides. Muffled sounds came from a police magaphone in the distance, but it was impossible to make out the words. Several beside me shouted "Can't hear you". Then I saw two policeman step forward with the riffles with the fat muzzles. At first I wondered if they were going to fire tear gas shells. One seemed to fire in the air. The other held the gun at waist height and shot into the heart of the now seated group from about 25 to 30 meters. Panic then ensued as the protesters realised they were firing rubber balls. The police charged again hitting people with their batons. They chased the splinter group of protesters down again towards the main body of marchers still waiting by Neptune.
The rest of the march continued without incident till they reached Atocha station. Organisers got together, and via mobile phones they managed to locate the whereabouts of friends who had either been brought to health centres or hospitals for treatment or arrested. I donÌt know how many were arrested though it seemed to me they were more interested in beating protesters than arresting them. I met my friend Marco. He was sitting on the front row when the police opened fire with the rubber balls. The young woman he was sitting beside and talking to was hit on the side of the face with the rubber ball and had to be carried off by friends for treatment. Marco told me, "We were sitting down and facing the police. Luckily she turned round to speak to me, otherwise the ball would have hit her full in the face". I don't know if she was badly hurt or not. It is not surprising she was hit in the head given the fact I saw the police man hold his gun horizontally at waist height and fire it in to a crowd who were sitting.
At Atocha the mood was very subdued. I met the nun again with some of her friends. "Now you know what kind of Government we have here." I wondered around the demonstrators and listened to them speak. I saw many lift their jackets and shirts to let friends examine their backs and shoulders. I saw at least six with ugly baton marks. Several had a cuts and bumps on their heads. I saw dozens and dozens being struck repeatedly. Did I see any violence by the demonstrators? I saw one big demonstrator who was being attacked by two policeman with batons. He started kicking back as blows rained down on him. He was grabbed by three friends and pulled into the middle of the group where he was held by his palls till he calmed down.
Apart from that I did not see one single violent incident by a protester. I didn't see one single item being thrown. I didn't see one single act of vandalism to property. For the record, I was truly surprised at their restraint given the level of violence against them. But more than that, I was amazed at their physical courage. What I did see was planned and systematic violence by the police against pacifist demonstrators who organised civil disobedience on the steps to the Parliament building which I assume to be out of bounds and therefore illegal.
Something really caught my attention. There were several cameras filming the entire incident. It did not inhibit the police at all. The evidence is there for all to see, if there is any interest in making the "anti-disturbance police" accountable for their actions, but more importantly, those that give them orders.
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Invisible Government: Cincinnati Protesters Shine Spotlight on Influential CEO Group
By Daniel Zoll ~ Nov. 2000
It's Getting so you can't even organize a meeting of global power brokers anymore without calling in the National Guard. A year after historic protests derailed the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle, followed by actions in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Prague, demonstrators descended on Cincinnati Nov. 16 to expose an obscure but influential CEO group called the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue. Fifty-three activists were arrested at the Cincinnati protests, during three days of mostly peaceful rallies, teach-ins, and marches that attracted more than 1,000 people. Why target the TABD? In the words of one of its boosters, deputy treasury secretary Stuart Eizenstat, "The TABD has become deeply enmeshed and embedded into the U.S. government decision-making process on a whole range of regulatory, trade, and commercial issues. The TABD has had a truly remarkable impact in our country."
The trouble, critics say, is that the group's "remarkable impact" comes at the expense of health, environmental, and consumer protection, not to mention the democratic process. About 130 corporate chieftains from Europe and the United States, representing multinationals such as America Online, Bayer, and United Technologies, gathered in Cincinnati's Omni Netherland Hotel for the three-day meeting. Topping the list of the TABD's Cincinnati recommendations is a policy it calls "approved once, accepted everywhere." In other words, the TABD wants uniform procedures for product approvals. This process, which it refers to as "harmonization," sounds harmless enough, but the details are troubling.
When countries have conflicting regulations and standards, critics say, the TABD typically lobbies to push the more stringent standards downward. "Their so-called harmonization goal is to gut the best laws in Europe and the U.S. and replace them with the worst laws in Europe and the U.S.," said Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "Whether it's privacy-in-banking laws or tire-safety standards or food-safety standards, their goal is to harmonize at the floor rather than at the ceiling of existing laws. And that's a serious problem."
According to the TABD's 2000 Mid-Year Report, the group is seeking uniformity in dozens of areas, including drugs, medical devices, auto safety, aviation safety, biotechnology and genetically modified foods, cosmetics, cellular phones, dietary supplements, and chemicals. Mary Bottari of Washington, D.C.-based Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch says the TABD's goals are nicely summed up in one sentence in TABD's midyear report: "The new obstacles to trade are now domestic regulations."These domestic regulations, Bottari says, are "exactly the consumer protections, the environmental protections, and the animal-welfare protections that we've all been fighting for for years. Those are the 'barriers to trade' that TABD wants to take out."
One way the TABD is targeting domestic regulations is by aggressively pushing a new round of WTO trade talks and an expansion of the trade organization's already sweeping authority. The TABD has even figured out how to fend off regulations before they see the light of day. The group has convinced the United States and the European Union to adopt what it calls an "early warning" system, which alerts corporations to regulations that may be "barriers to trade." Domestic regulations on the TABD early-warning hit list include a European computer waste recycling law, another E.U. measure regulating animal testing of cosmetics, an Italian ban on genetically modified organisms, and U.S. cell-phone radiation standards.
TABD deputy director Jeffrey Werner denies that his group favors the lowest common denominator when it comes to consumer and environmental protections. "We just encourage wherever possible to work internationally and supranationally to try to avoid the complications you have in a globalized world," he said. "People who are involved in business know that the minute you start alienating consumers is the minute you go out of business."
Werner downplayed the influence of the TABD, saying that it is just one of four forums created by the United States and the European Union to coordinate transatlantic issues. The other three "dialogues" - dealing with consumer, environment, and small-business issues - all have the same level of access to policy makers, he said. But USPIRG's Mierzwinski, also a member of the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue, says it is absurd for the TABD to equate its influence with that of the other TransAtlantic groups. For one thing, while luminaries such as U.S. vice president Al Gore and E.U. trade commissioner Pascal Lamy regularly attend TABD conferences, the governments send midlevel bureaucrats to address the consumer group. The most glaring evidence of disparity, however, is that the Clinton administration has essentially adopted the TABD's agenda of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation as its own trade policy. None of the other groups can say that.
Gore confirmed as much when addressing the TABD in November 1998. "I know that you are proud of the fact that of the 129 recommendations TABD has made in the past three years, over 50 percent have been implemented into law," he said. The vice president wasn't exaggerating. The TABD is so confident in its position that it even sets deadlines for government compliance. For example, on the subject of outstanding WTO disputes between the United States and the European Union, the TABD urges the governments to come to a solution "no later than the TABD conference in Cincinnati." This could be dismissed as mere grandstanding if the governments didn't often meet such deadlines.
Below the radar
The TABD is more effective, and insidious, than other corporate trade groups, critics say, because it was actually initiated by corporate allies within government. It was launched in 1995 at the suggestion of then-U.S. commerce secretary Ron Brown and E.U. trade commissioner Leon Brittan as a way to speed up transatlantic trade liberalization. Part of the TABD's strategy seems to be to operate below the radar. The elusive group has no permanent office; operations are headquartered at a different corporation each year. In fact, officials say, it is not really an organization at all but an "informal process."
Here's how the process works: The dialogue consists of more than 40 issue groups covering different sectors, such as medical devices and telecommunication services, and topics, such as customs regulations, climate change, and intellectual property. Each issue group, led by two business executives, one from the United States and one from the European Union, makes joint trade recommendations and tracks their implementation. The TABD officially presents its demands or "deliverables" to government officials at E.U.-U.S. summits, held twice a year.
The TABD quietly pursues its agenda in several ways. One of these is shaping free-trade treaties and aggressively pushing the expansion of the WTO. Another, lower-profile tactic is to promote "mutual recognition agreements." Under these reciprocal deals, one nation agrees to recognize another nation's safety inspection and approval system in sectors such as medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications. Critics say this is a backdoor way to relax standards: for example, the fine print of the agreement on medical devices, which has not yet been fully implemented, calls for farming out quality inspections to private third parties hired by the manufacturers, rather than federal regulators.
The TABD also is out to bar governments from applying a principle that serves as the basis for many public-health and environmental regulations, particularly in Europe. Known as the "precautionary principle," it holds that when an activity or substance raises potential threats to human health or the environment, government should step in and regulate. When there is scientific uncertainty, the industry - not the public - should bear the burden of proof. In other words, better safe than sorry.
That's the approach many European countries are taking on the genetically modified food issue, which is why TABD members and biotech giants such as Monsanto and Unilever are so keen on killing the precautionary principle. Monsanto and its allies favor foisting unproved technologies on the public, arguing that regulations should wait until they can be based on "sound science." In a related case, the TABD is trying to stifle an E.U. proposal, based on the precautionary principle, to regulate pharmaceuticals containing beef-derived ingredients that could carry traces of mad cow disease.
On behalf of its members in the electronics industry, the TABD is trying to eliminate a new E.U. initiative aimed at reducing computer trash. The increase in the use of PCs and other high-tech equipment in recent years has created a huge increase in hazardous waste. Electronic trash contains many dangerous substances, such as lead, mercury, and cadmium To address this, the European Union drafted the Directive on Computer Waste, a law that would require electronic equipment manufacturers to replace those toxic heavy metals with less harmful substances by 2008. The directive also would require manufacturers to begin retrieving and recycling old electronic equipment by 2006. The TABD and its high-tech industry members have mobilized to kill the proposal and have already succeeded in watering it down significantly.
Also on the TABD's early-warning list is the European Union's decision to speed up the phaseout of ozone-depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbons, which contribute to global warming. The United States is supporting the TABD's attempts to stifle the European Union's efforts, which it calls a "trade barrier." Though many of the environmental and consumer laws under attack are European, hundreds of U.S. laws are also in danger of being softened. For example, the TABD considers the entire U.S. product-liability system to be a "serious impediment" to global trade.
Sister Alice Gerdeman of the Cincinnati-based Coalition for a Humane Economy says it is this blurring of the lines between corporations and government that motivated her group to organize teach-ins, rallies, and demonstrations at the TABD CEO conference last week. "We are very concerned about limiting the power to make decisions about the economy to a very small group of people, people who have a lot of economic clout," Gerdeman said. "We don't have a problem with them having a voice; we just don't think their voice should be more powerful than any other group."
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The World's Poor Gather in New York City - Poverty Outlaws, Lenora Todaro
The Village Voice ~ Nov 22-28
The Kensington Welfare Rights Union, headquartered in the badlands of north Philadelphia, is ground zero in this country for organizing against poverty. In KWRU's blighted neighborhood, like many throughout the world where the poor are forgotten and virtually erased, except as statistics, the "disappeared" are reappearing with a vengeance. The group seized the national spotlight in August, during the Republican Convention, when its 2000-strong (illegal) homeless people's march challenged the pageant of political inclusiveness the Republicans put on stage. Last week at Riverside Church in New York City, KWRU hosted a four-day conference, the first-ever Poor People's World Summit to End Poverty.
While global finance leaders have gathered this past calendar year in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Prague to chatter about their long-term goal of cutting poverty rates in half, KWRU refuses to wait. "We're burying people," says Cheri Honkala, a formerly homeless mother who is now director of KWRU. She and other activists prefer to build their own "worldwide movement to end poverty led by the poor."
Relying on individual donations, maxed-out credit cards, and other "creative" financing, some 400 participants - all poor people - came to New York from 50 American states and 37 countries. Inside Riverside Church's Gothic sanctuary, where the daily opening plenary sessions were held, they gathered: injured workers, mothers with their children, working poor who'd come on hard times, radical poverty fighters from Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil.
KWRU fed its participants bag lunches and spaghetti dinners, housed them at the International Hostel on 103rd Street (for which the group had scrounged up a rumored $50,000), and even offered freebie cultural events, courtesy of its own in-house hip-hoppers. But even getting people to New York proved complicated. The U.S. immigration office denied visas to most African invitees. And there were daily scrambles to make airport pickups for those who made it through the red tape, but couldn't afford the fares into the city.
Many of the poor who attended live in "takeovers" (abandoned houses), in tent cities, or on reclaimed land (usually owned by government and left to waste). Speaking from his wheelchair, alternating between Spanish and English, Miquel Amaro talked of being unable to support his family after being wounded in the Gulf War. He moved back to Puerto Rico, where he had heard about Las Acerolas - poor people who, in the wake of Hurricane Hugo, had been claiming abandoned government land and rebuilding their lives. His parents helped him clear a lot in back of an agriculture school in Toa Alta, in the north of P.R. Homesteaders cleared roads with picks and shovels, broke into the main water line, and rigged their own electricity. Three hundred and fifteen residents live in Amaro's community, but Las Acerolas has helped more than 8000 families take over land. After a protracted struggle with the government, Amaro says, they have finally won. In October, the authorities promised that the land would be deeded to the homesteaders.
Las Acerolas takes some of its inspiration from Movimento Sem Terra (MST), Brazil's landless workers' movement. Since 1979, says Soriaria Soriano, an educator with MST, the organization has seized arable (but unfarmed) land for 200,000 families and created 80 agricultural cooperatives.
In 1995, two-thirds of the very poor lived in rural areas, where the richest 1 percent of the landowners own 44 percent of the arable land. This inequality is at the root of the takeovers. Farmers move from their roadside encampments onto empty farms, breaking the padlocks to enter and praying they're not greeted with bullets. "Our dream is to organize free territories," says Soriano, "where people are free to lead themselves."
As participants talked, they chipped away at their sense of isolation and exhaustion. "For me and people like me," says Honkala, "this is fuel." Curious about what poverty is like in New York City, some took a "reality tour," a two-hour bus trip through parts of Harlem and the South Bronx. As the bus passed the CCNY campus at 138th street, Maureen Lane, an organizer with the Hunter College-based Welfare Rights Initiative, stood up and explained that 21,000 students had been forced to leave school since 1995, when changes in welfare policy forced recipients to work full time in menial jobs for meager benefits.
At St. Nicholas Park and 135th Street, participants heard from Tyletha Samuels of Community Voices Heard (CVH), an organization of low-income people based in New York. The park, she said, is beautiful because of labor by poor people in the Work Experience Program (WEP), New York's version of workfare, who are "treated like dogs while doing the work of displaced union workers for a lot less money."
Fifteen minutes later, the bus stopped in the South Bronx at a waste-transfer station. Here, Julie Carlson of the Urban Justice Center explained how environmental racism works in New York City: six of eight air-polluting municipal bus depots are in Harlem, 25 official waste-transfer stations and an estimated 40 unlicensed ones are in the Bronx; the medical-waste incinerator next to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital had more than 500 violations and was finally torn down last year. From the back of the bus, a few whistles of disbelief.
Back in Harlem, cruising down 126th Street, someone interrupted a woman speaking about tenant organizing. "Wait! wait! There's a tent city, stop the bus." The bus pulled over to a jumbled lot, fenced-in and ringed with hand-painted posters about the revitalization of Harlem. Tarps flap, dogs bark. It's the promise, perhaps, of the familiar, the desire to make a connection, that makes the guests imagine that a tent city in Mexico might be matched by one in Harlem. As it turns out, it's just a junkyard. Two men, recovering addicts from Florida, wonder where skid row is: "They should've taken us to see the real deal." A man from the Pratt Area Community Council reminds them that although the brownstones they've been seeing look nice outside, "inside you see the third world. Holes in the walls, huge rats."
That appearances may be deceiving is only mildly surprising to this group, who are used to being stereotyped as lazy, or looked upon with disgust or pity ("that benign form of hatred," one participant said). Efforts to climb out from beneath a crushing system are often disregarded in countries like the U.S., where tax breaks favor the rich, the media crow about an economic boom without asking, "For whom?" and society ignores the yawning gulf between rich and poor.
What's important to recognize is that the poor people's summit, while it has traditional trappings - workshops, stump speeches, networking, communal luncheons - stands apart from other global gatherings about poverty because it is poor people working on behalf of poor people.
KWRU and other grassroots poor people's groups plan to build on this first summit by organizing three days of global action in 2001 (visit kwru.org for updates and details), including a worldwide march for economic human rights. Poverty, the advocates insist, is a violation of human rights. And somebody has to do more than just talk about it.
"We thought it important that we bring together people that are actually living in poverty," says Honkala, "not because we think it's a nice thing to do, but because we think there's a strategic importance." History, she says, has shown that change comes for people when they take an active role in a movement themselves.
Tell us what you think e-mail: editor@villagevoice.com.
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Many Summer Protesters Cleared
By Debbie Goldberg, The Washington Post ~ Nov. 30
When John Sellers was yanked off a Center City street and arrested on Aug. 2 while the Republican National Convention was meeting here, police painted him as a protest ringleader and presented a laundry list of 14 misdemeanor charges against him, and then the district attorney's office got him slapped with $1 million bail. But when Sellers walked into court on Nov. 14 to defend himself against the charges, prosecutors said they didn't have the evidence to make their case. All charges against him were dismissed. On Monday, misdemeanor charges against another 38 protesters were dismissed by Municipal Court Judge James M. DeLeon for lack of evidence. They were arrested on Aug. 1 at the Center City intersection of Broad and Spruce streets.
The red, white and blue GOP banners are long gone, but cases involving hundreds of protesters arrested during the Republican convention are just starting to wind their way through the courts. And some civil rights attorneys say Philadelphia may end up paying a high price for what they contend was an illegal strategy to clean the streets of protesters while the Republican delegates, thousands of journalists and other visitors were in town. "The pattern here is that a number of people were arrested with absolutely no basis, and it is abundantly clear, when they come to court, there's no evidence," said Bradley Bridge, a lawyer with the city's public defender association, who is representing many of the protesters.
Already, a civil rights lawsuit against the city and its police department has been filed by seven paramedics who participated in an umbrella group of protesters called the R2K medical collective. The paramedics claim they were stopped and searched, and that their supplies and personal items were confiscated by police in several incidents during the convention. None of them was arrested. Now that his case has been dropped, Sellers, 34, a career activist, is also considering suing the city and its police department for what he claims was a false arrest and an unreasonable bail.
"I feel vindicated, and it's vindication for hundreds of others arrested, who were taken off the streets in an unconstitutional, preemptive, illegal strike by the Philadelphia Police Department to silence dissenting opinions," said Sellers, director of the Berkeley, Calif.-based Ruckus Society. He spent six days in a Philadelphia jail before his bail was reduced and he was released. Referring to the Sellers case, Cathie Abookire, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn M. Abraham, said: "I can only tell you after we reviewed the case, interviewed people and looked at many, many hours of videotape, the evidence was not there to bring forth the case, so we withdrew the charges."
Responding to questions about the arrests of protesters, Officer Carmen Torres, a police spokeswoman, said: "At this time, we are not offering any interviews or any information due to the fact there are several issues in litigation." In all, 404 protesters were arrested in Philadelphia during and immediately after the July 31 through Aug. 4 convention, Torres said. Of those, she said, 35 protesters were charged with felonies, 339 with misdemeanors and 30 with summary offenses, which are akin to getting a ticket.
Of those charged with misdemeanors, nearly 100 protesters have accepted a pretrial offer from the district attorney's office to clear their records if they stay out of trouble for six months, said Shawn Nolan, a lawyer with the public defenders association, who is tracking the cases. The misdemeanor cases typically involve such alleged offenses as disorderly conduct, obstructing a highway and resisting arrest. Of those charged with felonies, some have seen their cases dismissed or reduced to misdemeanors, leaving about 18 protesters who have felony charges pending, most of them for alleged assaults on police officers, Nolan said.
During the most active day of the protests, large bands of protesters roamed Center City, stalling traffic, overturning trash bins and damaging police cars. Several protesters got into a scuffle with Police Commissioner John Timoney, and a police officer accompanying him was hospitalized with a head injury. About a dozen other police officers were injured during the week. After the Republicans left town, city officials, particularly Timoney, received widespread kudos for their handling of the convention and the protests, especially in light of the chaos and mass arrests that had occurred during protests in Seattle and the District in the months preceding the Republican convention.
But critics assail what they claim was a strategy by city officials to sweep the streets of protesters, particularly those they perceived to be leaders, to charge them with more serious offenses than would be typical in civil disobedience cases, and to seek huge bail amounts to keep protesters in jail until the Republican visitors' departure. The result of that strategy was to "deprive protesters of what we in America think of as our most fundamental value--liberty," said Stefan Presser, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. "There's no question the city is going to have to pay enormous recompense for what was done by the Philadelphia police."
In particular, the bail amounts set for those described by police as protest leaders, including Sellers and Terrence McGuckin, were "unprecedented," said civil rights attorney David Rudovsky, who represents some of the protesters. "You don't get that for murder in this city. It was pure preventive detention for political purposes." McGuckin, 19, spent eight days in jail on $500,000 bail. He was convicted on Nov. 14 of several misdemeanor charges by a municipal court judge and sentenced to three months probation, but is appealing that ruling, Rudovsky said.
The next closely watched trial will involve 75 people arrested during an Aug. 1 police raid at a West Philadelphia warehouse where the defendants say they were making--with help from four undercover state troopers--large puppets that were to be used as props. "Most of them, the trial will show, were simply making puppets, not . . . planning illegal activities," Rudovsky said. In municipal court, where many of the protest cases are being heard, several dozen activists filled the courtroom on Tuesday. Elisabeth Weaver, 20, who was arrested the day after the warehouse raid when she and two other protesters attempted to retrieve some of the puppets, had a sign pinned to her shirt that said: "Puppetry is Not a Crime." Weaver, a college student from Lancaster, Pa., was cleared of misdemeanor charges yesterday.
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People's Caravan 2000 Culminates in Massive Protest Against TNCs and Imperialist Globalisation
The People's Caravan 2000 - Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ Nov. 24
Thousands of farmers belonging to the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) and 20 foreign participants are building to a climax of the "People's Caravan 2000 - Land and Food Without Poisons" today. After the successful activities in India and Bangladesh, the international Caravan ends todaywith a massive protest rally against globalisation and for genuine agrarian reform to achieve food security, social justice, and land and food without poisons. The last day of the Caravan brings the participants from the Department of Agriculture, where they held a vigil, to the office of Monsanto in Makati.
According to the Caravan participants, the company deserves a notice of eviction, as it is one of the biggest transnational corporations (TNCs) that have become notorious for pushing harmful pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Simultaneous protest actions are being held in front of the Monsanto office in General Santos City in Mindanao. The culminating activity is a rally in front of the US embassy to commemorate "One Year since Seattle" and to condemn US domination on Asian agriculture. "Marginalised communities all over Asia are making a stand against globalisation and TNC control of their lives, including increased pesticide use, the onslaught of genetic engineering, increased landlessness, and the erosion of food security," said Ms. Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PANAP). She added: "Now the people are fighting back."
Mr. Ganarai Dorairaj Xavier of the Society for Rural Education and Development (SRED) of India joined the Caravan from the very start on November 13. He said that the People's Caravan is an expression of the frustration of millions of peasants, fisherfolk and indigenous people with the exploitation by landlords and TNCs of their lands and food, and ultimately their lives. Bangladeshi Mr. Rafiqul Haque of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives) advised Philippine farmers to junk the seeds and pesticides of the TNCs altogether. Habibur Rahman, a farmer from Nayakrishi Andolon (New Agriculture Movement), added: "the Bangladeshi farmers reject genetically engineered rice and I was pleased to learn about the strong resistance here in the Philippines."
"The People's Caravan is an important development in the increasing solidarity among Asian farmers against imperialist globalization," KMP chair Rafael Mariano said. "We have forged an International Alliance against Agrochemical TNCs in order to continue this struggle," he added. Mariano explained that it is through the impositions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) that farmers are driven from their lands and become virtual slaves of the poison industry. "One year ago, the WTO sparked massive protest in Seattle," he said, "and we will continue to oppose liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation as long as they are wreaking havoc on the peasantry."
The People's Caravan 2000 is organized by PAN AP; the Tamil Nadu Women's Forum and SRED from India; UBINIG and the Nayakrishi Andolon of Bangladesh;and KMP in collaboration with SHISUK (Bangladesh); CIKS and PREPARE(India); Gita Pertiwi (Indonesia); NESSFE (Japan); CACPK (Korea); and Food First (USA). For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific) Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh, Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 6570271/6560381. Fax: (604) 6577445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my or visit the People's Caravan Web site: http://www.poptel.org.uk/panap/caravan.htm
KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines) E-mail: kmp@quickweb.com.ph,
People's Caravan 2000 P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia. Tel: (604) 657 0271/656 0381 Fax: (604) 657 7445 E-mail: pcaravan@tm.net.my or panap@panap.po.my
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Stop Oil/Gas Development in Kirthar National Park in Pakistan
The Citizens Committee on Kirthar, Dec. 1
(Statement in response to Shell-Premier claims that they will use "clean" extraction technologies in Kirthar National Park): "We don't know what technologies they are going to use. They could use magic wands for all we care, but the goal remains illegal and morally unacceptable." -- Aly Ercelawn, Citizens Committee on Kirthar
Kirthar National Park is Pakistan's first and largest of five national parks. Located 180 kms northeast of Karachi in Sindh province, Kirthar is the center of a complex of protected areas of great scenic beauty and ecological importance. It includes archaeological sites dating back to 3500 BC. The park is also home to 20,000 tribal people who depend on its resources for their survival. The Kirthar watershed provides the people of Karachi and Hyderabad with water for drinking, agriculture and industry. All of Kirthar's precious natural and historical resources now stand threatened by an illegal contract for oil and gas development.
Illegal Concession
In 1997, in violation of Sindh provincial laws, the Directorate General of Petroleum Concessions, of the Federal Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, granted a concession for oil and gas development to Premier Oil Group, which later formed a joint-venture company with Shell Oil Group, now known as Shell-Premier. The Shell-Premier concession for the Dumbar Block covers more than 90% of Kirthar National Park. Environmental and other citizens' organizations quickly pronounced the deal illegal, citing the Sindh Wildlife Protection Ordinance of 1973, which prohibits "clearing or breaking up any land for cultivation, mining or for any other purpose in the national parks of Sindh." A 1992 Sindh Wildlife Amendment Act and a 1997 Sindh Govt. Notification further restrict development activities within the park.
Public outcry successfully stopped construction of a road through Kirthar National Park in the early 1990s; Pakistani organizations have now formed a coalition called the Citizens Committee on Kirthar to protect the park once again. The government accuses the coalition of being "anti-development," saying that people living near the park stand to prosper from oil and gas development. But the Committee points to Sui, a city where Pakistan's largest natural gas reserves have been developed for many years, yet local people are still struggling to get cooking gas connections in their homes.
Broken Promises
The Citizens Committee on Kirthar charges the government and Shell-Premier with betraying agreements they signed with environmental groups in January 2000. The January agreement called for completion of a baseline study of Kirthar's biodiversity and development of a park management plan, prior to any consideration of oil/gas development. The citizen participation mechanisms built into the January agreement have been ignored (citizen groups have been systematically excluded from meetings), and Shell-Premier is already conducting its own Environmental Impact Assessment, a clear step toward oil development and therefore illegal.
Requested Action
Environmental organizations are now petitioning the High Court of Sindh Province to declare the Shell-Premier concession illegal. They ask Global Response members to join their campaign by writing letters to Pakistan's Federal Minister of Petroleum and Natural Resources and to the CEO of Shell-Premier.
Background Information:
Kirthar National Park
The rolling valleys and contorted rugged lines of the Kirthar hills form a natural haven for rare urial sheep, ibex and chinkara gazelle. Jungle cats, desert cats and even the occasional leopard or desert wolf also prowl the park. Lizards, chameleons and snakes, including the Sindh cobra and Rock python, thrive in the arid subtropical climate. The Kirthar baseline biodiversity study, currently being conducted by the University of Melbourne, Australia, has already identified almost 300 plant species previously unrecorded in the area. "The species list will grow, and these sites will probably require special management if they're going to conserve all of those rare species," says Melbourne team leader Dr. Neal Enright. Kirthar Park is part of a large protected areas complex, bordering on two wildlife sanctuaries and a game reserve.
The World of Shell
Royal Dutch Shell Group has more than 2,000 companies operating in more than 100 countries. It has the highest daily refining capacity in the world. The Earth Day 2001 campaign will protest human rights and environmental abuses associated with fossil fuel extraction projects, including Shell's murderous collaboration with Nigeria's military. More than 2,000 Nigerian people, including famed Ogoni martyr Ken Saro-Wiwa, have been killed for opposing Shell's projects. See: http://www.amnestyusa.org/justearth/countries/nigeria.html
Requested Action: Please send polite letters to the Pakistani government and Shell-Premier. Ask them to immediately halt the ongoing Shell-Premier Environmental Impact Assessment and cancel all plans for oil and gas exploration and development in Kirthar National Park because:
Oil and gas development are clearly illegal within Kirthar National Park, according to provisions of the Sindh Wildlife Protection Ordinance 1973, the Sindh Wildlife Amendment Act 1993, and a Sindh Govt. Notification 1997. The unique biodiversity of Kirthar National Park merits continued scientific study and strict preservation. Affected communities within the park and civil society must participate fully in all discussions and decisions regarding the future of Kirthar National Park. Write to:
1) Usman Aminuddin, Federal Ministern, Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Resources, Government of Pakistan Room # 305, Pak Secretariat, A Block, Islamabad, Pakistan Fax # Int'l code + 92-51-9206416 Email: info@mpnr.gov.pk
2) Peter Cockroft, General Manager & CEO Premier & Shell Pakistan B.V., 4th Floor, West Half, Jang Building Fazal-e-Haq Road, Blue Area Islamabad Pakistan Fax # Int'l code + 92-51-821785 Email: pcockroft@premier-oil.com
The Citizens Committee on Kirthar and Shehri-Citizens for a Better Environment. For more information, please see these websites: http://www.savekirthar.org, http://www.oilwatch.org.ec/tegantai/, http://www.shell.com/royal-en/
END
On First Anniversary of Seattle, Student Movement Is Alive
By Bhumika Muchhala, IPS ~ Nov. 25
Nov. 30 is the first anniversary of the "Battle of Seattle." As thousands of students joined with trade unionists, environmentalists and others to demonstrate against the World Trade Organization, a new era of protest was dawning.
Many in the media have tended to portray the student protesters as thrill-seekers with little understanding of the issues and a questionable level of long-term commitment. Interviews I've conducted with nearly 50 student activists from national and campus organizations suggest a different picture.
Over the past year, these new young leaders have remained committed to their causes and have begun a process of addressing some difficult challenges, such as the lack of racial inclusion in the protests and the absence of a unifying vision.
"What we've got going thrives on a diversity of visions," says Dale Weaver, a graduate student organizer with United Students Against Sweatshops at San Jose State University. "Having one vision could exclude potential allies."
Student groups that organize around sweatshops, the environment and corporate accountability are often stereotyped as "privileged white kids." Many students are acutely aware of this criticism and are making constructive efforts to be more inclusive, such as approaching national African-American organizations and giving informational talks at meetings of ethnic organizations on campus.
"At the protest against the World Bank and IMF, I was talking to two black deputy officers who said that if we were marching in the streets for urban poverty, they would be happy to march with us," says Jesse Dickerman, co-founder of Rice Students for Global Justice at Rice University. "For the movement to be inclusive, organizing on the community level needs to be done by the same people who show up at the protests."
What will the students who were protesting the World Trade Organization in Seattle do once they graduate? Cynics expect that their activist ideals will slip away as they grab the first job that offers stock options. By contrast, 36 out of 40 students I interviewed said they plan to join social justice, labor or environmental-rights organizations in the United States and abroad.
William Winters, a member of the Student Environmental Action Coalition at Louisiana State University, says, "Through organizing in minority communities my contribution will be getting people from different cultural, racial, and economic backgrounds involved in the movement."
Rachel Grad, a writer for Ruckus, a social-justice magazine at the University of Washington, says, "Through progressive journalism, I want to enable everybody to have an audible voice."
During the past year, these young veterans of the "Battle of Seattle" have demonstrated staying power and sophistication. They and the movement against corporate globalization are not going away anytime soon.
Bhumika Muchhala is a research assistant at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She has interviewed nearly 50 student activists from across the country for a written documentary on their experiences and thoughts about the movement that they have helped create. For a full copy of the written documentary, visit www.ips-dc.org, e-mail pmproj@progressive.org or call 202-234-9382.
(c) 2000, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
END
Demand World Bank Assume Responsibility For Sardar Sarovar Project
Susanne Wong, International Rivers Network ~ Nov. 25
URGENT! Sign-on Letter to World Bank on Sardar Sarovar
Endorsements Needed by Friday - December 1, 2000!
We urge you to endorse the letter below demanding that the World Bank assume responsibility for its role in the destructive Sardar Sarovar Project in India. This project will displace at least 320,000 people and destroy the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands more. On October 18, the Indian Supreme Court authorized renewed construction on the project despite the fact that there is no land available for resettlement and no resettlement plans or comprehensive environmental impact assessments have been completed.
Although the World Bank withdrew from the project in 1993, the Bank is still legally obligated to make sure the Indian government complies with the conditions of the original loan agreements. These conditions require that a proper resettlement plan and environmental impact assessment are carried out. The Bank approved the project in 1985 despite glaring violations of its own guidelines and dispersed $280 million before cancelling its loan.
Please send your endorsement **BY FRIDAY, DEC. 1** to swong@irn.org. We encourage you to circulate this letter to your friends and colleagues for their endorsement.
Best wishes,
Susanne Wong
International Rivers Network
Letter Calling On World Bank To Assume Responsibility For Sardar Sarovar Project
November 20, 2000
Mr. James Wolfensohn, President
The World Bank
1818 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20433
Subject: World Bank's Responsibility for Sardar Sarovar Project
Dear Mr. Wolfensohn,
We, the undersigned organizations, are writing to point out the continuing plight of people affected by the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) and to call on the Bank to assume its responsibility to the people of the Narmada valley. The World Bank has failed to ensure that the Indian government has met its obligations under its loan agreement for SSP. Therefore, we demand that the Bank suspend all further disbursements and approvals for new loans for the Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra state governments until the Bank has ensured that the conditions of the loan have been met. As a first step, we urge the Bank to initiate consultations with the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), as promised in your meeting with people from the Narmada Valley in Delhi on November 13.
As you are aware, the Indian Supreme Court recently authorized continued construction of SSP despite major unresolved issues on resettlement, the environment and the project's costs and benefits.
The Government of India is still legally obligated to meet the terms and conditions in its loan and credit agreements with the Bank on SSP despite the Bank's withdrawal from the project in 1993 (refer to Memo from Ibrahim F.I. Shihata to D.J. Wood, March 30, 1993). These obligations were reiterated in India Country Director Edwin R. Lim's November 19, 1999 letter to Both Ends and International Rivers Network where he stated that "the Bank has in the past and will continue to urge the Government of India to meet its obligations regarding the people affected by the Sardar Sarovar Project."
The problems that plagued the project before the cancellation of the Bank's loan remain unresolved. The Bank approved its $450 million loan for the project in 1985 despite glaring violations of its own guidelines concerning resettlement and the environment. According to the Bank-sponsored Morse Report, "In 1985, when the credit and loan agreement were signed, no basis for designing, implementing, and assessing resettlement and rehabilitation was in place." The Bank approved the loan without knowing how many people would be displaced or consulting affected people. Even to this day, no credible resettlement plan exists and no survey has been completed for villages affected by the reservoir's backwaters.
To make matters worse, government officials, including the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, have stated that there is no land available for resettlement in Madhya Pradesh or Maharashtra. Villages that have been resettled have been scattered among different resettlement sites in blatant violation of the 1979 Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award and the Bank's loan and credit agreements.
The rights of people affected by the project for reasons other than submergence continue to be violated and ignored by project authorities. People who will lose land or livelihood due to the project's irrigation canal, compensatory afforestation, wildlife sanctuary, construction colony and other dam-related infrastructure are not currently entitled to rehabilitation. People affected by the construction colony have yet to be resettled even though the need to resettle them was recognized in the Bank's 1985 Staff Appraisal Report. Canal-affected people have not received proper compensation packages as stipulated in Bank conditions issued after the Morse report was published.
Furthermore, no environmental impact assessment has ever been produced for SSP. The Bank approved its credit and loan for SSP despite the lack of a comprehensive environmental assessment and the fact that the environmental clearance required under Indian law had not been granted.
Further construction of the Sardar Sarovar Project will have grave consequences. The Bank has already accepted its responsibility to ensure that its loan agreements are complied with. We call on the World Bank to turn its words into action and ensure that the Government of India meets its obligations to the people affected by the Sardar Sarovar Project. The Bank should begin this process by immediately initiating consultations with the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Until these conditions have been met, the Bank should suspend all further disbursements and approvals of new loans for Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Sincerely,
NAME, GROUP, COUNTRY
END
Placing Blame For Genocide: Guatemalan Massacre Survivors Seek Damages From Dam Financiers
By Karen Levy, SF Chronicle ~ November 16
Cristobal Osorio vividly remembers the day his wife and infant child were murdered.
It happened March 13, 1982, two hours after Osorio had left his riverside village of Rio Negro to walk to a nearby town.
Ten army soldiers and 25 civilian militia members killed 177 women and children, including Osorio's wife and newborn child, who was slashed in half with a machete. It was one of four massacres committed over an eight-month period in the Baja Verapaz province village that claimed the lives of a total of 440 Maya-Achi residents.
Today, many villagers attribute the atrocities to their opposition to displacement by the construction of the 300-megawatt Chixoy hydroelectric dam.
"They killed us just for claiming our rights to our land," said Osorio, who lost 22 members of his family. "We said we didn't want to leave, and that is why so many people died."
The plight of Rio Negro survivors has been studied closely by the World Commission on Dams, an independent body sponsored by the World Bank to review the performance of large dams and make recommendations for future planning of such projects. Today, the 12-member commission is to announce a comprehensive study in London presented by former South African President Nelson Mandela and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.
"The egregious social injustices that (Rio Negro residents and other displaced communities) have suffered formed an important part of our deliberations around the impact of large dams," said Deborah Moore, a member of the dam commission panel. "Reparations will form part of the commission's recommendations."
It is the first time that an international body has called for reparations as a general policy for people displaced by dam construction.
The Rio Negro conflict began after the community refused to move to cramped houses and poor land at the resettlement site provided by Guatemala's power utility, the National Electrification Institute. In 1980, a police officer drowned after being chased away by villagers. The army then accused them of murder and of being supporters of the leftist guerrilla movement.
Now, 18 years after surviving what a U.N. Truth Commission has described as genocide, Osorio presides over a committee of 150 Rio Negro families who lost their ancestral lands to the dam. The committee is based in Pacux, the "model village" where survivors were relocated by the government. Rio Negro, which is an eight-hour walk away, is now underwater.
Several U.S. and European human rights organizations have aided the committee, arguing that international human rights treaties support reparation claims of compensation for lost land, lives and culture. They hope to file a lawsuit, first in Guatemala and then with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.
And there are precedents.
In the past, compensation has been awarded for human rights abuses to victims of the Holocaust, the dictatorship of Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet and Argentina's military 1976-'83 junta, the apartheid government of South Africa and California internment camps during World War II.
The Rio Negro survivors say they will be the first victims moved by a large dam project to file for reparations under international human rights treaties. In recent years, 30 million to 60 million people worldwide have been displaced by dams, according to Patrick McCully, author of "Silenced Rivers: The Politics and Ecology of Large Dams."
The survivors, however, believe they should also receive compensation from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, two of the world's largest financial institutions.
They fault the lending institutions for financing the construction of the 360-foot-high Chixoy Dam during the nation's brutal 36-year civil war, which killed about 200,000 people. The war began in earnest in the late 1970s after Marxist guerrillas started organizing among the poor Mayan communities.
The National Electrification Institute built the dam between 1976 and 1983 with a total of $116 million in loans from the World Bank and $175 million from the Inter-American Development Bank. The dam currently supplies 26 percent of Guatemala's electricity.
"It is the nation's most important plant for the quantity of energy it produces," said institute engineer Virgilio Adolfo Paredes.
The dam opened near the end of the fiercest stage of the army's bloody campaign to stifle indigenous support for leftist guerrillas. At that time, hundreds of Mayan villages were wiped out, forcing about 50,000 residents to flee to refugee camps in Mexico.
Annie Bird, an activist for Rights Action, a human rights organization in Washington, D.C., is working with the Pacux community to help them gain compensation.
To date, her group has financed a workshop to help the community define its compensation goals and to send Pacux leaders on speaking tours in Europe, the United States and South America.
Bird argues that because the World Bank has traditionally played an active role in the planning and implementation of projects it finances, it should assume its share of the social costs.
"The project continued to be funded even in the midst of the violence, which points to either gross negligence or collusion by the banks," she said.
In 1996, the World Bank sent a mission to Guatemala to investigate.
Afterward, World Bank president James Wolfensohn described the resettlement of Rio Negro residents as "totally inadequate by our new World Bank standards," but he said the bank had no knowledge of the violence that paved the way for the dam's construction.
Bank critics, however, scoff at such claims. They say the massacre was well- known in Guatemala and that World Bank personnel spent three months a year supervising the project.
"With people on site in Guatemala, it would be hard not to know," said Harold Naiser, a member of the U.N. truth commission that investigated human rights abuses committed during the conflict.
Moreover, these same critics say the bank shares responsibility since its resettlement policy for projects it funds promises the displaced that they will enjoy at minimum their former living standards.
Before the dam, Rio Negro residents were subsistence farmers who cultivated corn, beans, squash, sorghum and chiles along the fertile riverbank. They also ate fruit, and fish were plentiful. "The river was the base of life for the community," said Osorio.
At Pacux, the government provided housing, electricity, a school, a church, a health clinic and roads. All promises were made orally and no legal written agreement exists with the community.
"Everything that INDE promised has been given," said Paredes. "Everything is completed."
But villagers say the National Electrification Institute provided the minimum compensation for lost crops and livestock the soldiers and militiamen had carried off. Moreover, some of the institute-built houses are falling apart and the health clinic is currently closed because of a lack of funds to pay a doctor or buy medicine.
In addition to the lives lost, the community lost 3,556 acres of cropland to the Chixoy dam. At Pacux, villagers were awarded 316 acres of unarable land located in steep ravines. Last year, they were finally given an additional 790 acres of fertile land located eight hours away by bus. But only a few residents can afford to go there bimonthly or furnish seed money to begin planting.
The land situation has forced many to make seasonal migrations to work on coffee and sugar plantations for several months each year. There, they are subject to low wages, poor working conditions and health problems.
"INDE told us, 'Don't worry, we are going to improve life,' " said Osorio. "All they did is make us poor."
World Bank social development specialist Mario Marroquin, who is based in Guatemala City, admits that the bank did not properly supervise the National Electrification Institute's resettlement policy. "We perhaps were not rigorous with our own policies," he said.
Nevertheless, he believes further reparations will be detrimental: "Whereas my fellow NGO (nongovernmental organizations) counterparts are stressing a culture of dependency and victimization, we should be supporting normalization for Pacux."
Marroquin says that the bank made every effort to ensure that the Guatemalan government fulfilled its commitments to the Rio Negro community and that the bank is not liable for its failures. "The government is the main party responsible for compensating the affected communities," he said.
Naiser, however, says the villagers have little chance of winning a legal judgment against the government in today's court system. "Until the power of the military has effectively ended, the idea of justice is a vain hope," he said. "There is barely a legal system."
In the meantime, the Rio Negro community hopes that its international lobbying for compensation from the World Bank and the recommendation by the World Commission on Dams will eventually pay off.
For communities affected by dams, "it is difficult to narrow it down to compensation, because what we are talking about is the loss of a way of life," said the commission's Moore.
END
The People's Caravan In Bangladesh - November 18-24
The People's Caravan 2000 - Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ 24 November
Kicking off in India on November 13, the People's Caravan - "Citizen's on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons!" - moved to Bangladesh on November 18-24 and will culminate in the Philippines between November 26-30, with activities on November 30 commemorating "One Year Since Seattle".
The Caravan, comprised of thousands of farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, anti-pesticide and anti-genetic engineering advocates, is firmly opposed to globalisation and its potentially devastating effects upon the Asia Pacific region.
The Caravan targets the immoral practices of transnational corporations (TNCs) in their push for corporate dominance and control of local and regional food and agricultural production systems. The Caravan seeks an end to globalisation; and instead advocates genuine agrarian reform to achieve food security, social justice, and land and food without poisons.
Travelling more than 1400 kilometers, delegates from UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives) Dhaka; Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP); Dr. Michael Hansen, an expert on genetic engineering of the Consumers Union in the United States; Indian farmers Mr Kollapuri Murugan and Ms Santi Gangadharan;belonging to the Rural Women's Liberation Movement and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural Labourers Movement; and Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser spread the message of the People's Caravan to the people and farmers of Bangladesh.
Sarojeni V. Rengam, Executive Director, PAN AP, spoke of the ongoing ill effects of pesticides and pesticide poisoning. Of particular concern were the long term effects of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) and their impacts on the human hormone and reproductive systems and child growth and development.
This long, culturally vibrant and important move across Bangladesh kicked off in Dhaka on November 17 with a cultural event of Bangladeshi traditional popular movement songs at the Narigrantha Prabartana (Feminist Book Store).
From here it moved through farmers' communities - in the areas of Comilla, Cox's Bazaar, Tangail, and Pabna - finishing with a press conference today in Dhaka.
Shahid Hussain Shamim, Director of UBINIG, says the People's Caravan is an important event for supporting and mobilising resistence by farmers, consumers and the community to the threats posed by the dominance and control of transnational corporations (TNCs) of our land, food and livelihoods.
Percy Schmeiser is here "To share my views of how my field was contaminated with genetically altered Roundup Ready canola against my knowledge and wishes. This has destroyed my seeds which I have been developing for over fifty years. What I want to say to farmers all over Asia is that they should never ever sign any contract that takes away their right to use their own seeds. If they give up this right they are basically losing their freedom. Anyone who controls the seed supply will also control the food supply. This amounts to controlling a Nation. This is why it is so important that farmers always maintain their right to use their own seeds."
Schmeiser, a canola farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan, Canada, is currently counter suing Monsanto over allegations that he illegally planted their variety of genetically engineered canola.
Over 500 farmers, fisherfolk, students, teachers and government officials were in Chakaria at the public meeting in front of the Purba Boro Behula school ground on November 20 to here the message of the caravan.
Jahanara Begum, a women farmer from the area, summed up the event by rousing the crowd. "We should stop using pesticides. We don't want these companies seeds and their poisons. We can use our own traditional seed. Tell your friends, your neighbours, tell everybody!"
So strong was the concern over pesticides and genetically engineered seeds that Nazir Hussein, a village elder and farmer who works 6 acres of land--and was previously elected to the village union council--made a public committment to stop using pesticides on his farm and would not ever buy genetically engineered seeds.
Farmers and citizens from the Elliotganj, Comilla flocked to another public meeting on November 21 held within the Pankuri fishing community. As Sakiul Millat Morshed, Executive Director of SHISUK (Shikkha Shastha Unnayan Karzakram), organisers of the event, explains, the project is a model of sustainable agriculture integrating fish rearing and rice farming.
Morshed said the event was held here to show farmers that "communities can resist globalisation by harnessing their own resources. The strategy also keeps the people out of the 'TNC dependent mentality' and keeps them out of debt. The project has resulted in reduced pesticide use, and a reduction in fertiliser use that has resulted in an increase in the natural fertility of the land. This farming system can help implement integrated pest management (IPM)."
On November 22 the caravan stopped over in Bishnupur, Pathrail, Tangail for a half day seminar. Farmers in the crowd, upon hearing the experience of Schmeiser with the multinational agro chemical giant Monsanto, chanted "down with Monsanto, down with Monsanto". They became even more vocal upon hearing the terrible threats to farmers livelihoods if they plant genetically engineered crops from Dr Hansen.
The "teach-in" and public seminar in Pabna on November 23 drew a mixed crowd from local farmers, citizens, agricultural bank managers, local government representatives and people who sell pesticides. The crowd listened intently to the message of the caravan and gobbled up literature and other materials.
Teenkori Lal Das, a mango and rice farmer from the Nawabganj district, north-west Bangladesh summed up the message of the caravan saying: "The farmers of Bangladesh should reject the seeds and pesticides pushed by these giant companies. We have our own local varieties of crops that we need to protect. The seeds should be in the hands of the farmers. Doing it our own way is the way to resist these companies!"
For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific)
Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh, Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/ 656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my or visit the People's Caravan Web site: www.poptel.org.uk/panap/caravan.htm
UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives), and Nayakrishi Andolon E-mail: nkrishi@bracbd.net
P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia.
Tel: (604) 657 0271/656 0381 Fax: (604) 657 7445
E-mail: pcaravan@tm.net.my or panap@panap.po.my
END
Biotech Firm Buys Tonga's Gene Pool
By Vanessa Williams in Melbourne ~ November 22
AN AUSTRALIAN biotech company headed by Melbourne Football Club president Joseph Gutnick has secured exclusive rights to the entire gene pool of the people of Tonga. Autogen Limited will use the genetically unique DNA of Tongans in its hunt for drugs to treat diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, cancers and ulcers. The research, based on finding links between diseases and particular genes, could make the company hundreds of millions of dollars if it led to drugs being commercialised.
The collaboration is the second of its kind in the world, following the licensing of the genes of Iceland's population to an international consortium including German pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche.
Autogen is also negotiating the same deal with other Pacific nations in a move that could make it the only company allowed to perform genetic studies on the entire Polynesian race.
But it is claimed the Tongans, who number 110,000, have not been told of the deal which was signed last week. Mr Gutnick is Autogen's chairman and managing director.The company's director of research and development, Professor Greg Collier, said yesterday the deal would bring jobs and a better-funded health system to Tongans.
A research laboratory on Tonga's main island would be built next to the country's only hospital, which was government-owned. Patients at the hospital would be requested to donate blood to Autogen, Professor Collier said. The blood would be used to extract DNA from which to form genetic pedigrees of family members in the hunt for disease-causing genes. Professor Collier denied the company was practising "bio-piracy" and said that it had followed ethical guidelines set down by the World Health Organisation."The Tongan Government will get royalties if anything comes of it, there will be more jobs and the population will get any drugs that come of the research for free," he said. Patients would be asked for their full, informed consent before samples were taken.
Autogen will begin collecting DNA samples from Tonga late this year or early 2001. The DNA of Tonga and other Polynesian nations are valuable to biotech companies because they are more genetically isolated than other populations, where families are made up of people of different ethnic backgrounds. "Tonga has a lot of history in their family groupings; they know who is related to whom," Professor Collier said. But like most Polynesians, as they became more exposed to the Western culture and diet, Tongans began to die of Western diseases.
(C) 2000 Advertiser Newspapers Limited.
sent by: Gill Lacroix
Biotechnology Coordinator, Friends of the Earth Europe T. 32-2-542.0182, F. 32-2-537.5596
END
Successful Demonstration In Uruguay Against GMOs
Vivianne García, Cono Sur Libre de Transgénicos/GMO-free Southern Cone ~ November 23
For life, for diversity, for the people. Against GMO, transnational's globalization and the commercialization of life - was the motto of the demonstration organized last November 20, in front of the Conrad Hotel in Punta del Este, a luxury seaside resort in Uruguay, which hosted the XVII Pan American Seed Seminar, and the International Forum on Biotechnology and Marketing of Seed, November 20-22, 2000. The event was organized by FELAS (Latin American Seed Federation) and congregated the big corporations involved in genetic engineering applied to agriculture.
Several Uruguayan trade unions, students, organic farmers, NGOs, consumers and others gathered to voice their opposition to transgenic food and crops and denounce the pressure on the large majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries to accept them.
They see with great concern that Uruguay hosts this kind of meeting while a public debate on the convenience of the use of GMOs and their risks -either to health and the environment- is still missing at the national level. Uruguay could also loose the opportunity of selling itself as a "natural country", which still has a livestock production with very low levels of agrochemicals. The organizing and supporting groups also denounce the alleged positive impact on productivity of GMOs and offered evidence to the contrary.
The demonstration was organized by REDES-Friends of the Earth, Uruguay, GRAIN (Genetic Resources Action International), RAP-AL (Pesticides Action Network-Latin American) and UITA (International Food Worker's Trade Union), and supported by national and Argentinean, Bolivian, Brazilian, Colombian, Costa Rican, Equatorial, Spanish, Honduran and Paraguayan organizations.
The Uruguayan Committee of Risk Evaluation from the Ministry of Agriculture has already authorized the use and sale of Monsanto Round up Ready soya, without fully considering the potential environmental, health and social impact for the country and producers, as well as the potential economical setback due to the growth of markets demanding GMO-free products.
A street theater group, with colorful disguises and music gave a cheerful tone to the activity and dramatized the opposition to genetic engineering as a way of creating or modifying living beings.
For further information or to receive photographs of the November 20 demonstration in Punta del Este, please contact:
Vivianne García
Cono Sur Libre de Transgénicos/GMO-free Southern Cone
Defensa 1684
Tel. (5982)402 87 99
Montevideo 11200 Uruguay
E-mail: conosur@redes.org.uy
END
Japan Adds its Voice to the People's Caravan
Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ 21 November
Over 500 farmers and consumers marched today on the streets of Tokyo protesting the eminent planting of genetically engineered Roundup Ready Rice for commercial sale in Japan.
The National Rally against genetically engineered rice, principally organised by the Network for Safe and Secure Food and the Environment (NESSFE) is part the week long activities organised in Japan, linked to the People's Caravan - "Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons!" - activities travelling across India, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
The "National Rally Against Genetically Engineered Rice" is a part of the "No to Genetic Engineering Food Campaign" launched on September 20 by NESSFE.
Mika Iba, Coordinator of NESSFE, said the Agrochemical TNC, Monsanto, had invested a lot of time and money in co-opting farmers into planting genetically engineered rice.
She said Japan is often looked at as a model for economic growth and development by other Asian Nations. At the same time the consumer movement in Japan has become strong.
If Monsanto is allowed to get a stronghold in the Japanese rice market, through farmer and consumer acceptance, this could set a precedence for the wide-scale planting of genetically engineered rice in the region. The concern is also over possible increase in the pesticide used. "We have to stop them!" Iba said.
The Monsanto product, glyphosate, is the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide (weed killer) used to control weeds. Monsanto claims that herbicide use on its Roundup Ready soyabeans most prominently grown in the United States (U.S), "is between 10% and 40% less than the amount presently used in conventional varieties."
However, according to research undertaken by the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), statistics from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) show that expanded plantings of Roundup Ready soybeans in the U.S. in 1997 resulted in the use of glyphosate on soybeans increasing by some 72% to 14.9 million pounds or 6,759 tons. Furthermore, according to a survey from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, the increased usage of several other high-volume herbicides contributed to a 29% increase in overall herbicide usage on soybeans.
The effect on human health and the environment from increased pesticide use, ultimately resulting in crop resistance to glyphosate, in turn producing harder to kill weeds, thereby encouraging the use of more pesticides, has never been adequately addressed by Monsanto or the biotech industry in general.
The concerns held by NESSFE reflect the groundswell of voices across Asia - from non- governmental organisations, small farmers, landless peasants, farm workers and anti-pesticide and genetic engineering advocates - strongly opposing the introduction of genetically engineered rice and the increasing corporate control of rice research and seed systems through out the region.
The People's Caravan - "Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons is currently on the move in Bangladesh, started in India on November 13, and culminates in the Philippines between November 26 - 30, with activities on November 30 commemorating "One Year Since Seattle".
In Bangladesh, the major thrust of the Caravan is to launch a farmers campaign against genetically engineered rice.
Farida Akhter, Executive Director of UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives) says many Asian countries like Bangladesh are rice producing countries with many rice varieties produced by the farmers themselves. "They do not need any company to intervene into their thousand year old production practice."
She said, "UBINIG urges all farmers in the rice producing and rice consuming countries of Asia to resist planting genetically engineered rice as it will mean an aggression on their sovereign rights to produce their own staple food. GE rice is harmful socially, economically, environmentally and also an attack on farmers sovereignty."
"Bangladeshi farmers will resist it by any means, we want farmers of all Asian countries to take a united position against genetically engineered rice," she said.
For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific)
Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh, Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/ 656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my or visit the People's Caravan Web site: www.poptel.org.uk/panap/caravan.htm
Japan: NESSFE E-mail: mika@mb.kcom.ne.jp
END
Canadian Aid Agency Pays World's Third Largest Engineering Firm to Justify Dam Construction in Belize
Probe International ~ November 21, 2000
The Canadian International Development Agency is paying a Toronto-based engineering firm to justify construction of the Chalillo hydro dam in Belize, according to documents obtained by Probe International using Canada's Access to Information Act.
On June 12, 2000, CIDA agreed to pay Agra Inc. almost $250,000 to produce a "project justification report" and additional reports, aimed at identifying ways to mitigate threats to wildlife and other environmental damages caused by the proposed dam in central Belize.
Belize conservation groups are opposed to the $30-million dam because it would flood a remote river valley in the central Mayan mountains which provides habitat for rare and endangered species, including the Central American river otter, Morelet's crocodile, the Central American spider monkey, the tapir, jaguar, and Scarlet Macaw.
The Chalillo scheme has been on hold since late last year after Belize's environmental department rejected the proponents' environmental impact assessment and feasibility study as inadequate - reports that were conducted by Agra subsidiary, Agra CI Power, for Belize Electricity Limited, which is majority-owned by Fortis Inc., a multi-billion-dollar corporation based in Newfoundland.
According to the CIDA-Agra contract, the final report is expected to summarize Agra's feasibility study for "comprehension" by financiers such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. It is also expected to come up with recommendations for mitigating the dam's negative impacts on wildlife.
But, a major new study by the World Commission on Dams - an independent body financed by CIDA to review the global experience regarding large dams - concludes that "it is not possible to mitigate many of the impacts of reservoir creation on terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity." Large dams, it says, have led to "significant and irreversible loss of species and ecosystems."
"No matter how hard CIDA and Agra try to justify this dam there is no disguising the fact that it's a rotten deal for the people and economy of Belize," says Gráinne Ryder of Probe International. "Belize has far better, cheaper generating options than a $30-million dam that won't work half the year and will destroy wildlife habitat forever."
The Macal River and its tributaries are the only known nesting sites for the largest kind of Scarlet Macaw, and also boasts part of Central America's best remaining jaguar habitat. Many of the species threatened by Chalillo are already extinct in other parts of Central America where logging and other development has decimated tropical river ecosystems.
Critics also point out that Belize Electricity Limited could buy cheaper gas-fired power from neighbouring countries, or encourage private investment in high-efficiency cogeneration plants.
AGRA CI Power provides engineering and management services to dam operators mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Agra Inc. merged with Britain's Amec earlier this year to become the world's third largest engineering, construction, and environmental services company.
Probe International is a Toronto-based citizens' group investigating the economic and environmental impact of Canadian aid and companies overseas.
CONTACT:
Grainne Ryder, Policy Director
225 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2M6 Canada
tel: 1 (416) 964-9223 (ext 228), fax: (416) 964-8239
E-mail: grainneryder@nextcity.com
END
Arthur Sandborn, The Gazette ~ Nov. 5
Now that the federal election campaign has started, a major theme is sure to be neglected: free trade and globalization. Too big, too far away, too inevitable and especially too dangerous for politicians to provoke any debate on the issue. Politicians from all parties remember the problems that Brian Mulroney had selling the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the important electoral debates that accompanied the signing of that treaty.
The next free-trade deal will be debated, (and probably adopted) in April 2001, in Quebec City. The free-trade zone of the Americas, covering all of North and South America, has been the subject of intense, highly secretive negotiations for several years. Canada is a major player in this debate, and I believe that Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, Pierre Pettigrew and Co. have good reasons to want the election well behind them when the fur begins to fly.
Polls show that public health and education are the two most important issues for Canadians in this election. We want these key public programs not only to be maintained but improved. How would the Liberals explain to Canadians that the priority in current free-trade negotiations is the privatization of our education system?
In fact, privatizing education, turning it into a business, was chosen as the No. 1 priority for these negotiations at the first meeting of political leaders from all corners of the Americas in Santiago, Chile. This process seeks to end what the World Trade Organization calls the "public monopoly" in education. Students, professors, text books, you name it - anything involved in education - are seen as merchandise, which must be traded equitably. That means that trade barriers must be eliminated, including low Canadian tuition fees, state support for CEGEPs and universities and many more aspects of our public system. It's of little surprise that many demonstrators against globalization are students.
These negotiations will also affect our public health system and many other programs. So-called unfair trade barriers include public health programs at least the part that exceeds the level offered in other countries. In Canada, about 68 per cent of our health bill is covered by public programs. In the good old United States, only 51 per cent of health expenditures are public. The rest of the bill is largely footed by private insurance, a cost usually picked up by employees' collective insurance plans, paid for by their employers.
This costs a lot for U.S.business, thus lowering its edge over Canadian competition.
Before NAFTA was signed, 85 per cent of our health bill was picked up by government (that is, through taxes). Our governments have been pulling out progressively, through massive budget cuts and hospital closings. The next free-trade deal will inevitably increase pressure in this direction.
Public pension plans are also seen as creating unfair advantages for business competitors. Argentina, Mexico and even Canada have been working on this problem, which led to the aborted attempt by the Liberal government to demolish our Canadian pension program. Although public pressure led to a temporary withdrawal of this plan the issue will surely crop up again, shortly after this election. (However, nothing will be said about it during the campaign.)
One major public-assistance program that has fallen under the cannon fire of globalization is unemployment insurance. Four successive Conservative and Liberal reforms reduced the program drastically, to the average level of our American cousins. The last Liberal reform, which reduced once more the protection of seasonal workers, had nothing to do with fighting the deficit. Jean Chretien and Paul Martin know this all too well.
The real incentive for EI reduction was an American study on the price of lobsters. The study concluded that EI benefits given to seasonal Nova Scotia fishermen created an "unfair commercial advantage." Apparently, they were able to sell their lobsters for less because of better EI protection in Canada. To avoid a complaint under NAFTA rules, the Canadian government acted swiftly and cut EI benefits to all seasonal workers.
In fact, all of our social safety net is under the gun of free trade. I think the free-trade negotiations next spring are one of the most important reasons for the Liberals calling the election now. Of course, they'll deny this, as they will refuse to reveal details of the sell-out they are negotiating in the free-trade treaty for the Americas.
For the Quebec 2001 meeting, Public Security Minister Serge Menard has announced he will empty Orsainville prison to make room for all the demonstrators that police are already preparing to arrest. This is police-state stuff: no right to demonstrate in front of the summit meetings, and planned massive repression of demonstrators
In my books, the Liberals called an early election knowing exactly what they are planning to give away in these negotiations, and they should be forced to tell Canadians now. Otherwise, they must leave the negotiations as they will have no mandate from citizens who are being called to an early vote.
The Gazette Board of Contributors: Arthur Sandborn is president of the Conseil Central du Montreal Metropolitain of the Confederation of National Trade Unions. The views of contributors are not necessarily those of The Gazette.
END
The Real Green Revolution Has Begun: Indian Farmers On The War Path
Dr. Vandana Shiva, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology ~ November 19
Thousands of farmers gathered in Delhi to demand that the government stop implementing WTO policies and agriculture be taken out of the World Trade Organisation (W.T.O.). A rally was organsied by Mr. Sunilam of the Kisan Sangharsh Samiti on 19th November 2000 at Villabhbhai Patel House. A similar farmers meeting was also held at the JNU City Centre in New Delhi which was called by the Community Party of India (M-L).
From across the country stories of farmers distress and suicides are pouring in related to rising cost of production and collapsing prices of farm commodities.
Cost of production are rising as a result of the liberalisation of agriculture and the entry of seeds and chemical multinationals who are hooking poor Indian peasants into the costly treadmill of hybrid seeds and pesticides. The withdrawal of farm subsidies, the increase in prices of power and water under the pressure of World Bank driven privatisation polices are adding to the cost and debt burden of farmers.
The withdrawal of Minimum Support Prices (MSP) is making the situation even worse. The farm prices are also collapsing as result of removal of Quantitative Restrictions on imports under WTO pressure, leading to highly subsidised imports of edible oil, coconut, milk, rubber, pepper, coffee, tea, wheat which are destabilising domestic prices and domestic market, pushing farmers to organise and demand the reversal of deregulation of imports.
While farmers are receiving less than their cost of production, the poor are going hungry due to rising prices of food as food subsidy are removed, and low cost local options are destroyed by corporate monopolies.
The artificially built up surplus of 42 million tonnes of foodgrain resulting from lower consumption and lower purchase by increasing impoverished Indian consumers, is now being exported as subsidised levels on grounds of accumulating food stock and limited storage capacity. While subsidies to farmers and consumers are being cut, subsidies to corporations for exports are being increased.
The farmers of India have announced, they will not allow their livelihood to be destroyed by the unjust, unfair and distorted trading system put in place by the W.T.O. and World Bank. The poor are starting to organise to defend their right to food.
The rally was also attended by three former Prime Ministers, Mr. V. P. Singh, Mr. Deve Gowda, and Mr. Chandra Shekher as well as by Mr. Rabi Ray, Mr. Madhu Dandvate, Mr. Sitaram Yachuri, Mr. S. P. Shukla and many others. Former Prime Minister Mr. V. P. Singh, who came from the hospital and addressed the rally from the stretcher, called on the people to take the food from the FCI godowns and distribute it to those who are hungry.
According to Mr. Singh "the rule of money and profit and the brutal power of corporations and corrupt governments will be resisted by the rule of humanity and dignity and the right to survival".
As Dr. Vandana Shiva, Director of the Delhi based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology said "the real 'Green Revolution' has begun" while addressing the farmers rally.
For more information please contact:
Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology
A - 60, Hauz Khas, New Delhi - 110 016, INDIA
Tel: 0091 - 11 - 696 8077, 685 3772 Fax: 0091 - 11 - 685 6795
END
Indonesia Adds Its Voice To The People's Caravan,
The People's Caravan 2000 - Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ Nov. 18
Over 150 farmers, academics, government officials, university students and members of the press attended an all day seminar today held by Gita Pertiwi -- a non governmental organisation collaborating with over 7,000 farmers working towards sustainable agriculture in Indonesia-- as a part of the People's Caravan-- - "Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons!"
The seminar-"Strengthening Farmers and Systems of Sustainable Agriculture in the Free Market Era in Indonesia"-was organised to inform participants of the agricultural policy of the Indonesian government within the context globalisation and trade liberalisation. The impacts of globalisation on Indonesian agriculture, particularly on women agricultural workers, was outlined. The need to build and strengthen the people's and the farmer's movement against hazardous pesticides and chemical agricultural inputs was emphasized as was the important role played by women in sustainable agriculture.
In many countries, including Indonesia, small farmers who constitute the majority of the world's population, are being ravaged by the process of globalisation.
In his seminary speech Mr. Tony Tujan, Chairperson of the Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), said: "Traditional and safe farming systems which are mainly subsistence in character are being pitted against a corporate agricultural system that is run mainly as a business. In the equation, subsistence agriculture is considered 'backward' and 'unproductive' compared to so called 'advanced' industrial agriculture underpinned by the use of chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, and now the use of genetically modified crops."
According to Tujan, globalisation-promoted by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-gives license to Transnational Corporations (TNCs) to aggressively exploit the markets of developing countries.
The neoliberal programs of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation have had disastrous consequences on national and regional food security. The WTO legitimizes the protectionist tactics of developed countries while penalising developing countries for being protectionist. Developing countries are drowning in subsidised imports from developed countries rendering small farmers bankrupt. In the process developing countries become dependent on the products of developed countries, he added.
"The WTO is about corporations profiting through unfair advantages.It is really a system of imperalist control that combines governments, corporations and multilateral organisations and instruments, all at the service of monopoly capital," commented Tujan.
Agus Dody Sugiartoto, Executive Director of Gita Pertiwi, said NGOs in Indonesia would like to see a fundamental shift in government policy on agriculture away from the corporatised industrial model towards support for sustainable agriculture.
The People's Caravan - "Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons is currently on the move in India, starts in Bangladesh on November 19, and culminates in the Philippines between November 26 - 30, with activities on November 30 commemorating "One Year Since Seattle".
For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific)
Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh,
Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/
656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my
P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia.
Tel: (604) 657 0271/656 0381 Fax: (604) 657 7445
E-mail: pcaravan@tm.net.my or panap@panap.po.my
END
The People's Caravan Mobilises Farmers For Food Rights
The People's Caravan 2000 -- Land and Food Without Poisons! ~ Nov. 17
Covering a distance of 1000 kilometres and moving through 11 towns and villages in eight provinces in Tamil Nadu, the People's Caravan, on it's last stop in India, halted at Arakkanom to celebrate seed, food and cultural diversity. A food festival with traditional/ local delicacies and other favorites brought together over 500 farmers and landless workers from the surrounding area.
The People's Caravan starting in Chennai on November 13, passed through Madakuppam, a fishing village affected by intensive aquaculture. Speaking on behalf of the villagers, a woman village counsellor said, "Our lands have been taken over by the TNCs and the land, food and water have been contaminated by these companies. Fish and other resources from the sea have been depleted leaving us and our children a bleak future."
The cultural troupe of the People's Caravan performed catchy songs and dances criticising the process of globalisation and the domination of agro chemical TNCs of our food and agricultural production systems at various places, especially bus stations, attracting large crowds.
Dr. Romy Quijano of PAN Philippines explained the ill effects of pesticide use by drawing on the examples of Kamukhaan, a village in the Philippines severely effected by pesticide poisoning.
Ganapathi, a sustainable agriculture practitioner from the village of Pudukottai who was part of the People's Caravan, uses an integrated system of crops and animals in his farm to control pests and fertilise his soils. He said: "I use the holistic concept of food production and let nature take care of my farm. I let nature do my work and I do not use pesticides and chemical fertilisers."
The People's Caravan also addressed sustainable agriculture in Trichy. Tony Tujan, Chairperson of the Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), said: "The forces of globalisation are taking control of seeds, production, resources and the livelihoods of people not just in India but the rest of the world. As sustainable agriculture practitioners, we have shown the world that we can grow food without poisons. We must all come together to challenge industrialised agriculture and agro chemical TNCs."The father of sustainable agriculture in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Namalvar also stated: " We have already done what has been said to be impossible, to grow food without poisons. We have moved away from hazardous pesticides and fertilisers and made use of available resources to grow our food. I am confident that the whole of Tamil Nadu can produce crops sustainably and profitably. Our aim is to make the villages pesticide free by the end of 2001."
The People's Caravan -- Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons -- aiming to alert thousands of people of the ill effects of pesticides as well as the exploitation of agro chemical TNCs -- will move to Bangladesh on November 19.
Two farmers from India, belonging to the Rural Women's Liberation Movement and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural Labourers Movement, will join the caravan in Bangladesh.
For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific)
Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh,
Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/
656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my
TNWF (Tamil Nadu Women's Forum) and SRED (Society for Rural Education and Development), c/o SRED
E-mail: burnad@md3.vsnl.net.in
People's Caravan 2000, P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia.
Tel: (604) 657 0271/656 0381 Fax: (604) 657 7445
E-mail: pcaravan@tm.net.my or panap@panap.po.my
END
By Robert Lenzner and Tomas Kellner, Forbes Magazine ~ Nov. 17
The New Enemy Of The Free Market Has A Face. A lot like Katika Kühnreich's-freckled and delicate, with red hair pulled back in a ponytail. This 19-year-old student of martial arts from Cologne, Germany came to the Czech Republic recently-one of perhaps 10,000 like-minded comrades-to cause havoc in its beautiful capital, Prague. More specifically, to break up the latest meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. "The root of profit is in the exploitation of the working class," says Kühnreich, her jacket sleeves rolled down to reveal her mantra in black block letters, Kapitalism Kills, Kill Kapitalism.
Half a world away, in Bombay, India, the biggest threat to capitalism isn't an anarchist. It's a 64-year-old entrepreneur named Yusuf Hamied, who is undermining the pharmaceutical industry by selling knockoffs of patented drugs for one-tenth the price or less. There is palpable rage on the streets of Montpelier, Vt. Not from kids with dreadlocks and eyebrow rings-but from retirees who are so fed up with the high cost of prescription drugs that they're boarding buses to Canada, where they can buy their medicines more cheaply. The same act of fiscal disobedience is repeated by elderly Arizonans, who spend three hours on buses to Mexico, where they can save hundreds of dollars on their monthly prescription bills. What's going on here?
Anticapitalist demonstrations have always been a part of life in this country. But, until recently, they've been pretty much confined to college campuses, where such protests are a perennial rite of passage. These days, though, resentment against U.S. corporations, and the drug industry in particular, has boiled over into the American mainstream. The drug industry's prices are high, its profit margins are fat. Those profits are at risk.We're not talking about fringe politicians or Naderites as the enemies of profits. We're talking about Republicans. Two hundred and ten of them voted for H.R. 4461 or its Senate counterpart, S. 2520. This is the bill that will, over the dead bodies of the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, allow wholesalers to import drugs from abroad, so that American consumers can get the benefit of discounted prices charged elsewhere.
The bill was signed in early November by President Clinton. It will turn the pricing structure of the drug industry on its head. Right now pharmaceutical houses recoup their billion-dollar research outlays from U.S. customers, while letting customers elsewhere in the world pay a much smaller margin over manufacturing costs. It is extremely hard for a U.S. politician on either side of the aisle to explain this price discrimination as good for his constituents.
The importation bill, although somewhat limited in its scope, is probably just the opening wedge. It costs $100 a month in this country for a lifesaving dose of cancer-fighting tamoxifen, $1,200 a month for AIDS drugs, $329 for the world's most popular drug, Prilosec, which treats ulcers. Social Security pays an average $804 a month. The U.S. drug industry has made $26.5 billion in profit over the past 12 months. Add it up: The drug companies are inevitable prey for anticapitalist legislation.
Why now? At first the timing seems implausible. Employment is high, half the country owns stocks and capitalists are still savoring their triumph over communism. But if the past two decades have witnessed a surge in prosperity for corporations, they have also set the stage for the inevitable backlash. If profits are high, then we can afford to take corporations down a peg or two, is the implicit logic of the populist movement. It's time-just as it was nearly 100 years ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt went after the nation's biggest monopolies.
Think of what has happened in the past half-dozen years. Tobacco companies have gone from victory in the courtroom to a $246 billion settlement. Antitrust prosecutors on both sides of the Atlantic are treated as heroes. Oil drillers, perennial targets of protesters (see "Damned If You Do"), look like bad guys again, with their prices tripling in two years. The agricultural biotech industry went from smugness for its scientific accomplishments to a rout in the field of public opinion.
A few years ago biotech companies dismissed their enemies as Greenpeacers and Luddites. Not any more. Now there's a widely supported moratorium on new imports of genetically modified foods in Europe and a very similar sentiment running through the middle of America. Protesters certainly caught Monsanto flatfooted, lopping $8.6 billion off its market value, so weakening the company it was forced into a shotgun marriage with Pharmacia. The attack on Monsanto's seeds, coupled with the recent store-shelf panic over unapproved corn, probably set back crop biotechnology a decade.
Today, Monsanto; tomorrow, Merck. "Your heydays are over, that's what I tell the drug companies," says Uwe Reinhardt, a medical economist at Princeton University. "I think their 18% rate of return on assets will be pushed to a more normal level. Just watch the slaughter." Some of that slaughter, paradoxically, will be self-inflicted. Drug companies face an excruciating dilemma, where doing the right thing may result in doing themselves irremediable harm. Price discrimination makes economic sense for a product that has a huge fixed cost (namely, the R&D that found it) and a small marginal cost (the cost of pillmaking). You charge full price to a base of prosperous customers large enough to cover the R&D (40% of whose budgets are paid for by the National Institutes of Health, tax-payer funded), then get whatever you can from poorer customers. It's also good public relations, if only for a while. If AIDS-fighting proteases cost $14,000 a year in the U.S. but something close to manufacturing costs-$2,000 a year-in Africa, that could be seen as a humanitarian gesture.
But at some point uninsured, unprosperous patients in the U.S. want to receive the humanitarian rate. Once you start making lifesaving drugs available at lower cost to the world's poorest people-or to 65-year-olds in the U.S.-you have to explain why you cannot deliver the product at a uniformly low price to everyone. Here come price controls. There goes the R&D budget. The ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. have had collective sales of $179 billion over the past 12 months and collective gross profit (excess of sales over manufacturing costs) of $121 billion. It's that $121 billion in gross profit that is in play if the industry becomes subject to price controls, threatening marketing budgets, as well as R&D (a collective $20.5 billion) and pretax income ($40 billion).
The popular revolt against the pharmaceutical companies began with protesters. One was Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a group that wants affordable treatment in the U.S. and to make AIDS drugs available at a fraction of that price to Africans. Next was Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology, a five-year-old organization that has lobbied the NIH to release U.S. government-supported medical inventions to the World Health Organization so that they can be made available to the Third World.
Then came Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), a humanitarian organization that wants drugs widely available to the poor at little or no cost. MSF is not a radical organization. Its American chapter gets $17 million a year in funding from U.S. donors, and it won the 1999 Nobel Peace prize for helping out victims of human and natural catastrophes, as well as for documenting massacres in places like Rwanda and Bosnia. Why shouldn't it get cheap drugs if that's what it takes to save lives? "We have 2,000 volunteer doctors in the field," says Joelle Tanguy, executive director of MSF. "But they don't have sufficient supplies of the drugs required."
Big pharma can't move fast enough to defend itself in the court of public opinion. Bristol-Myers made a $100 million gift for clinics and research to help stop the spread of AIDS in southern Africa. Pfizer has offered to provide Diflucan-which treats a deadly form of meningitis that often attacks AIDS victims and costs $10 a pill in the U.S.-free to South Africans for two years. Selective discounting isn't a death blow to a pharmaceutical company. Glaxo Wellcome's Combivir, a patented AZT combination that lists at $8 a pill (a day's supply) in the U.S., is being offered for between 70 cents and 90 cents in the Third World. That open-end commitment is a "sustainable" price, says James Cochrane, Glaxo executive director, and shouldn't shave too much off the $1.5 billion a year the company gets from AIDS drugs.
But what happens when Americans aren't willing to pay $8? You get a drug reimportation bill, known as the Medicine Equity & Drug Safety Act of 2000. The high cost of prescription drugs so dominated the election season that politicos from both sides were tripping over each other to appear more solicitous to the elderly. "I'm not waiting for the drug companies to come to the table before acting," says Republican Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who pushed the bill through the Senate. And even House Majority Leader Dick Armey, once immovably opposed to undermining the drug industry's price structure, decided he couldn't hold back the populist tide and collected support for the bill.
Drug companies hate the reimportation bill-which amounts to price controls. The pharmaceuticals argue, among other things, that consumers won't really save that much, given the costs of repackaging the pills from blister packs to vials and the extra U.S. health inspectors who will have to examine the imported medicines. The real objection, of course, is the prodigious threat to profits. AstraZeneca, for example, pulled down $573 million last year from tamoxifen, the most widely prescribed breast cancer drug around, which has to be taken for up to five years. A three-month supply (180 pills) costs $298 in the U.S.-but only $26 in Canada. Eli Lilly's antidepressant Prozac throws off $2.6 billion in annual sales, retailing at $115 for 45 capsules in the U.S., and $35 north of the 49th parallel.
How bad a hit to the drug business is anyone's guess at this stage. Constantine L. Clemente, Pfizer's executive vice president for corporate affairs, says that in the worst case, his company could lose 10% to 20% of its U.S. sales, projected at $14 billion next year. "These are uncharted waters," he says. "We could be hurt." Expect another blow to the pharmaceutical industry early next year. In March Congress will hold hearings on whether to reduce the length of monopoly protection from 20 years to maybe 10.
Spearheading the effort in this country will be American consumer groups-and health maintenance organizations, which will insist (true or not) that prescription drugs are a major culprit in driving up health care costs. Financially battered HMOs will band together, says Princeton's Reinhardt, and insist on sharp discounts from listed retail prices. Once again, how can lawmakers of any stripe resist the populist swell? "The drug industry sits in the hand of the government," says Reinhardt. "Ultimately, they will be pushed around by the government."
They may not have long to wait. Their patents are already endangered-by something called compulsory licensing. This allows a foreign government to take away an exclusive product when the health or safety of a nation is at risk.Under compulsory licensing, a generic manufacturer is allowed to produce a drug discovered by a U.S. pharmaceutical in exchange for a licensing fee. Those fees vary from deal to deal. Still, says Francis Palumbo, a pharmacy professor at the University of Maryland, they never compensate for the opportunity costs of being undersold by a generic. Compulsory licensing would have a "drastic impact," says Pfizer's Clemente. "It would make it impossible to develop lifesaving medicines from the human genome system."
But it's already happening-just outside the boundary of patent laws. Indian entrepreneur Yusuf Hamied is trying to revolutionize the drug industry in the Third World. A Ph.D. chemist trained at Cambridge University, Hamied is the chief executive of Cipla, a publicly held, $220 million (sales) company that produces ingredients identical to blockbuster drugs developed by multinationals-but sells them at 5% to 10% of their U.S. market prices. Hamied is personally worth $550 million today because back in 1972 he convinced India's health minister, a family friend, to revoke the nation's patent laws.
Now, he says, he is willing to supply AIDS drugs at a reasonable profit over his cost of production. Like providing d4T (a Bristol-Myers Squibb drug that reduces the viral load in HIV patients and sells for $4.50 a pill) to Nader's Consumer Project on Technology at 10 cents a tablet. Or offering a free year's supply of Nevirapine, Boehringer-Ingelheim's $8-a-pill drug that helps protect newborns from contracting the AIDS virus from their HIV-infected mothers, to the leading AIDS hospitals in Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa. (Boehringer is now offering to give the medicine away for a couple of years.) "My idea of a better ordered world is one in which medical discoveries would be free of patents and there would be no profiteering from life or death," says Hamied, paraphrasing India's late prime minister Indira Gandhi. He is a big advocate of compulsory licensing.
Drug companies can take small comfort in the fact that Hamied might be out of business in five years. As a signatory to the World Trade Organization's Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, India must by 2005 reinstate product patents. But by then it may be too late. The noose around the drug companies-from public interest groups, the elderly, politicians and HMOs-can only draw tighter. One WTO executive puts the issue in blunt but believable terms: "Either the prices give or the patent system will have to give."
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By Tomas Kellner, Forbes Magazine ~ Nov. 17
Kill Kapitalism: The sentiment is spreading from the fringes to the mainstream. Some advocacy groups, Oxfam International among them, would rather duke it out in the conference room than on the streets. The Oxford, England-based organization, with 11 chapters and 45,000 members worldwide, has had a lot of practice sitting down with "the enemy" and finding common ground. "Oxfam's point of view isn't that globalization is bad per se," explains Harm-Jan Fricke, manager of campaigns for Oxfam Great Britain. "We don't want to get rid of the World Bank or the IMF, because if you didn't have them the situation would be a heck of a lot worse."
In fact, Oxfam America set up a Washington, D.C. office in 1995 to lobby the World Bank. It was instrumental in convincing Bank members to authorize $50 billion last year in debt relief to the world's poorest countries. This year Oxfam was invited to contribute to the Bank's report on world development. Oxfam has been around for 58 years, focused mainly on alleviating poverty and aiding education in underdeveloped countries. Last year it spent $334 million on such projects-including $100,000 on microcredit and savings programs for Vietnamese women, $25,000 to build primary schools in China's Sichuan province and $40,000 in Cambodia to shore up village banks.
In Prague Oxfam chiefs met with Bank bureaucrats to talk about debt relief, indigence and illiteracy. Oxfam members also danced in the streets of the city's Old Town carrying placards of impoverished children. But Phil S. Twyford, Oxfam's global advocacy director, was quick to denounce the "brute force" unleashed by radical protesters. Oxfam clearly would rather pitch than fight. Its high-profile backers include Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, and the rock group Pearl Jam, which donated $2 million from the sales of its benefit album. Oxfam America is a particularly deft fundraiser. Last year it separated $24 million from outfits like the Ford and W.K. Kellogg foundations, as well as from J.P. Morgan, the Calvert Group and, yes, even AES Shady Point-a unit of Applied Energy Services that has drawn the ire of environmental groups.
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By Michael Maiello, Forbes Magazine, ~ Nov. 17
The swampland that sits atop Nigeria's 20 billion barrels of oil reserves-the gold-and-red emblem of RoyalDutch/Shell is a sign of the devil. Locals accuse the oil company of ravaging the environment and destroying the hunter-gatherer economies that predominated even 20 years ago. The truth isn't so simple, but perceptions have created real dangers for Shell, its $14.3 billion in assets and its 3,700 Nigerian employees. Also at risk: whatever prosperity oil might bring to this poverty-stricken country.
Small groups have used military-style tactics to shut down Shell. Maxwell Oko, a 28-year-old with a degree in architecture from Nigeria's University of Port Harcourt, leads the 3,000 members of the militant Elimotu Youth Movement. In December 1998 he and nine comrades raided one ofShell's flow stations in Kolo Creek, about an hour outside of Port Harcourt, the hub city of the Delta oil industry. Before dawn, the raiding party entered the control room and disabled the station's computers, which automatically closed the flow station. The three security guards, members of the Nigerian military who were caught flat-footed, didn't rise to the provocation. "If they shoot one or shoot two, well-how many do they want to kill?" says Oko.
Shell could have reactivated the flow station, but waited nine months because it feared reprisals to its workers. There were 22 shutdowns this year. That and other acts of piracy, hostage taking and sabotage have cut Shell's Nigerian oil output by 5%, or 10 million barrels so far this year. Ever since oil was discovered near the village of Otuegwe in 1956, the company has made pacts with various military dictatorships of increasing brutality and corruption. Not least of its concessions is a generous split of the loot. The Nigerian government owns 55% of the Shell Petroleum Development Corp., Shell only 30%, which netted it about $200 million last year.
The problem is that Shell has been caught in the middle of a struggle between 16 million tribesmen in the southeast, where it operates, and the 108 million people living in the rest of Nigeria. The majority are members of the Igbo, Yoruba andHausa-Fulani tribes, which dominate federal politics and control the flow of oil profits. Oil provides 80% of the federal government's budget. The people in the southeast feel shortchanged and blame Shell. Oko believes that tribes like the Ijaw, Ogoni and Ikwerre own the oil beneath the ground and should share in its wealth. He is angry that Shell doesn't employ many young workers from the area, that it has spilled oil among mangroves and has ignited at least 87 gas flares that light up the night sky and can be heard for miles around, disturbing villagers and scaring animals.
Over the years civil disobedience became organized, mainly through environmental and human rights groups. Their most famous champion was Ken Saro-Wiwa, author, playwright and leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. In 1993 he staged massive protests against Shell, forcing it to cease operations in Ogoni. That brought international attention to the region-and caught the attention of General Sani Abacha, who had just seized power in a bloodless coup against an interim president and was looking for a way to wipe out dissidents. He found one in 1994, when five Ogoni chiefs were murdered. Saro-Wiwa was arrested along with eight others, found guilty of trumped-up charges of inciting the violence and sentenced to death in November 1995.
Pleas and threats by world leaders couldn't save Saro-Wiwa. After he was hanged, many Nigerians were furious that Shell didn't put more pressure on Abacha. "We are accused by people who felt we should have been more high-profile," says Emeka Achebe, a Nigerian who advises Shell. "But the collective efforts by all sides didn't stop him from being executed." Still, the backlash was immediate. The Sierra Club urged its 650,000 members to boycott Shell's products, a protest that continues. And relations in Nigeria only got worse. In 1998 Ijaw from 500 villages met in Kaiama to demand that all oil on Ijaw land be declared tribal property, and that the military withdraw from it. Nigerian soldiers attacked, killing more than 200 demonstrators, says Felix Tuodolo, president of the Ijaw Youth Council. Again, Shell was identified with the vicious troops guarding its outposts.
All this has made a hash of Shell's efforts to become a better corporate citizen. "We have learned how important it is to gain acceptance in the minds and hearts of people," said Heinz Rothermund, managing director of Shell EP International, in a recent speech at an oil and gas conference on Nigerian investment. Last year Shell spent $52 million on hospitals, roads and schools in the region; that total will rise to an estimated $60 million in 2000. It has hired Ngozi Amah, a veteran of the Ford Foundation's WestAfrica office and the World Bank-where she worked in community development-to find local organizationsthat are working to better people's lives but don't have an anticapitalist agenda on the side.
Even when Shell is giving money away, it has a hard time finding partners for community development, since many worry about associating withShell. Azibaola Robert, a 31-year-old environmental and human rights attorney, is the president of the Niger Delta Human & Environmental Rescue Organization, which offers free legal counsel to locals and documents oil spills and police brutality. Shell offered him $25,000. "We could use the money and accepting the offer would further our image as a neutral organization," he says. "But a lot of people we work with wouldn't trust us if we did." Public works projects, like Shell's promise to bury its 3,700-mile-long network of aboveground oil pipes, simply bring derision. Pipe corrosion caused 48 of 319 oil spills in 1999. Shell says that 159 spills were due to sabotage. "They don't have to pay for cleanup if it's sabotage," says attorney Robert. "They always claim sabotage. But no one is ever caught or tried for sabotage in the courts."
And then there are the constant reminders of costly old errors-like the oil spill near an Ogoni village called Ejama-Ebubu, home of the late Saro-Wiwa. It was caused, Shell says, by the retreating Biafran rebel army during the 1967-70 civil war. Shell's cleanup efforts, which ended when it left Ogoni land in 1993, reduced the affected area from 2.5 acres to 0.14 acres. In June, nine years after the initial suit, a Nigerian High Court in Port Harcourt ordered Shell to pay $40 million to the village. The company has appealed. Elsewhere in the Delta, Shell is expanding, planning to increase production from 800,000 barrels a day to 2 million by 2005. It will get no peace from advocacy groups like the Ijaw Youth Council. "We are ready to make more sacrifices" to win back the land, says Tuodolo. "We are willing to die."
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A Coalition Organized in Steven's Point is Calling for Action: Who Has Control at OUR Universities?
November 17
THE WISCONSIN ECONOMIC SUMMIT
November 29-December 1
2000 Midwest Express Center
Milwaukee, WI
Hosted by none other than: The University of WI System and the Board of Regents in partnership with business leaders, CEO's, the governor, and administration from UW Universities. What is the Economic Summit? It is being held to locate and strategize to help create WI's place in the global economy. Areas of growth interest include: manufacturing, high-tech sectors, and biotechnology. The goals of the summit are:
1. Provide a forum for information sharing that includes all citizens.
- Unfortunately the summit costs 119-149 dollars (which excludes most students, and the poor). The summit is planned during the week (which excludes students, and working people). This lack of access to the summit relates to the lack of access at our Universities caused by rising tuition, increasing requirements to attend school, and unsubsidized loans.
2. Create a feeling of statewide unity and ownership in the development of economic strategies for the future of our state.
- However, increasing collaborative partnerships between the University and corporations has many drawbacks. Some of these include: restricted corporate grants that can only be used for technology which directly effects curricula, corporations get free research done by grad students and faculty and this research only benefits corporations not the University, the University is increasingly turning into a training center not a liberal arts institution.
3. Demonstrate the benefits of a collaborative, partnership approach to action.
- Collaborative? What about labor, workers, and students? This summit is put on by the elite for the elite. This summit is to help foster even closer ties between higher education and corporations. We as students must unify together to collectively show this summit and Wisconsin that we do not tolerate the corporate control of our education and the lack of democracy we have on campus as well as at this summit. Join the protest and organize your campus!! Wednesday November 29 at NOON at the Midwest Express Center in Milwaukee, WI Bring puppets, banners, noisemakers, and your voice!! More info at: http://www.wisoconsin.edu/summit
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World Bank President Compelled to Meet Over 2500 'Civil Society' Representatives
By Sanjay Sangvai, Narmada Bachao Andolan ~ Nov. 15
Govt. Representatives failed to show up at the Public Hearing on Narmada: Afraid of being exposed of their false claims, people alleged. People's organisations, from various parts of the country cautiously take the promises made by the World Bank President, Mr.James Wolfensohn, before a gathering of over 2500 people yesterday (13th Nov.). The President who had to concede to the demand of the people that he should come before them said that the Bank is for alleviation of poverty. While hearing the people for over 45 minutes he also said, "I don't want to be held responsible for problems (of tribals and poor people) for which I have every sympathy". The people, who are the victims of the present lopsided development paradigm, pushed ahead by the Bank and their agents, expressed their determination to fight this paradigm, which push them to deprivation and destitution.
Afraid of being exposed of their false claims about Sardar Sarovar, no ministers or other officials of the Govt. turned up for the Public Hearing organised by Indian People's Tribunal (IPT, Mumbai)), at Parade Ground, Delhi today. Eminent Jury comprising of Jst.(Retd) Tewetia (Retd. Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court), Jst. Jaspal Singh (Retd. Judge, Delhi High Court), Mohini Giri (former Chairperson, National Commission for Women), Haroobhai Mehta (former Member of Parliament and senior Advocate, Gujarat High Court), Prof.U.R.Ananthamoorthy (Janpith Award winner and writer) and Ashih Nandi (Academician) is currently hearing the NBA representatives, who were invited by IPT along with the Govt. Ministries / bodies.
The eminent Jury will hear the people on various issues pertaining to the Narmada Project (Sardar Sarovar). The issues include, Costs and Benefits, Social Impacts, Environmental Impacts, Mirage of Benefits for Gujarat, Alternatives etc. The interim findings will be declared on the 16th. Yesterday, while talking to the people, Mr.Wolfensohn admitted that the Bank has "made some mistakes in the past and want to correct them". People look ahead to see whether the realisation of mistakes will make them withdraw from other destructive projects around the country in particular and world, in general.
The protest rally which started from Rajghat in the morning (13th) passed through major junctions of Delhi for over 4 hours and the rally was converted into a sit-in, when the police stopped from going further, towards the Bank office. People affected by Bank funded projects in Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and other places too have taken part in the protest rally. Contrary to what some of the news papers reported, Mr.Wolfensohn has made it clear that the Bank doesn't have plans to fund any components of the Narmada projects. He admitted that the failure to follow the strictures and norms compelled the Bank to withdraw its earlier loan in 1993. If they get any request for any projects or its components related to Narmada, they will consider it only after a thorough evaluation of the same its social and environmental impacts. The "Rehabilitation issue is a major one" and that cannot be ignored, Mr.Wolfeshom said.
Cutting through Mr.Wolfensohn's perception that the Bank funded Social Forestry in Andhra Pradesh is a good experience, Mr.Chennaih from Chittor (A.P) exposed the veil of Mr.Chandrababu Naidu, who is all out to please Multinational companies at the cost of his own people. Representatives of Ekta Parishad, Kisan Adivasi Sangathan and others have made it clear that the plans to fund the Phase II of Madhya Pradesh Social Forestry will not be taken lightly and will be fought with tooth and nail.
The Long March Call for Justice, which culminated in Delhi from different parts of the valley, is in Delhi since Nov. 11th, holding different programs. In the wake of the Supreme Court judgment, which permits the govt. to build the dam ahead, without taking care of the various conditions which are to be taken care of, including rehabilitation of thousands of oustees, people have no other choice than to appeal to the conscience of the civil society. Various organisations from different parts of the country and others from Delhi, representatives from Maheshwar, Bargi, Man, Veda, Tawa dams (all on Narmada) are also with the Dharna in large numbers.
Joe Athialy & Sanjay Sangvai, Narmada Bachao Andolan B 13 Shivam Flats, Ellora Park, Baroda 390 007 Ph. 0265-382232 E-mail: baroda@narmada.
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Thousands Confront the World Bank President in Delhi
By Narmada Bachao Andolan ~ Nov. 13
Dharna Continues with vigour and individuals from various walks of life from around the country have taken a massive rally from Rajghat [memorial of Mahatma Gandhi] to World Bank office in New Delhi, in protest against the anti people policies, patronized and pushed ahead by the World Bank. Prominent among them were Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, Ekta Parishad, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Adivasi Shramik Sangathan, AIPRF, Kisan Adivasi Sangathan, Jagrut Mahila Sangathan, Samajwadi Jan Parishad, Azadi Bachao Andolan, National Alliance of Peopleís Movements, Dalit Mahila Chalwali, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Aruna Roy, Arundhati Roy, Medha Patkar and others from West Bengal, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamilnadu, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and others.
Thousands of people who were stopped by the police from entering the Bank premises and who are camping at the gates were told by the Bank officials that the President has agreed to meet a delegation. But the people refused that and insisted on the President coming before the people and address their issues. They were determined not to move out from there till this meeting was held. According to message just received the President agreed to come before the people in a short while.
The recent pronouncements of the Bank President, Mr. James Wolfensohn, in respect to various projects around the country has once again made it clear that the Bank has not learned any lessons from past experience of grave human rights violations, environmental degradation, dis-empowering people and pushing people to destitution. In particular, the President has said, in a meeting with the Gujarat Chief Minister, that the World Bank had made a mistake in withdrawing from the Sardar Sarovar Project, and indicated that the Bank may be willing to get involved in the project once again The willingness to put money again into such disastrous projects like Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) after an independent committee (Morse Committee) constituted by Bank themselves (in 1991-ë92) had severely criticized not only the project and the Bankís funding of the same but even the callousness by which the Bank had flouted its own social and environmental guidelines.
Representatives from Madhya Pradesh Forestry Project have, in their speeches have made clear that the 800 crore Phase I of the project that got over in 1999 has devastated the natural resource base of the adivasis and other communities whose life and livelihood is dependent on it. Due to the strong opposition of the people, the Phase II was cancelled. But according to reliable sources the Bank is trying for a covert back door entry in to this project. In an open letter by various organisations from Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh to the President, they have warned that they will not tolerate Bankís trespassing and looting of Indian forests. Corporatisation of natural resources land, river and forest will be the last thing the people will allow to happen.
Bankís approval for $450 million for SSP in 1985 was even when the mandatory clearances were not obtained from the concerned ministries and authorities. The loan has only encouraged the power-holders to further violate the existing laws and take the least care for human right values. Rather it was used to pressurise the Ministries to provide the required sanctions, in the initial stages. According to Bankís own norms, it has a responsibility to monitor the project till the loan is repaid. In the case of SSP, this is not done. Rather than trying to correct the past blunders, by honestly monitoring the Project, the plan to provide more funds is unethical and against all national and international legal - human conditions. The people will oppose this with tooth and nail. To save their land and houses they will go to any non-violent extent.
Dharna at Rajghat
The Dharna [sit-in] since 11th with over 2000 people, who reached Delhi as a culmination of the Long March Call for Action, begun on the 6th November has entered the 3rd day today. Hundreds of people are joining from different parts of the country. Numerous eminent persons, including Admiral Ramdas (Retd. Chief of Navy, Jst.(Retd) Rajendra Sachchar, Jst.(Retd)Ravi Kumar Jain, Rabi Ray (former Speaker Lok Sabha), Jst.(Retd) Ram Bhushan Meharotra have visited the Dharna and extended full support to the protest.
Large number of representatives from Tawa, Man, Veda, Bargi and Maheshwar dam area (all on Narmada), Ekta Parishad, Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, Adivasi Shramik Sangathan, Punarvasan Sangharsh Samiti, Adivasi Kisan Sangathan, Mazdoor Kisan Sakti Sangathan, National Council of Churches India, Progressive Students Union, Jagruti Mahila Sangathan, Dehli & Veerchak project affected and others have joined the Dharna.
The struggle of the people from the Narmada valley has reached a critical stage today with a shocking verdict of the Supreme Court wherein its majority (2:1) judgment allows the Sardar Sarovar dam to go ahead, beyond 88 mts to 90 mts and with approval of the state authorities alone, to the final height of 139 mts. The govt. also have failed to protect the land rights, rehabilitating just 25% of the Project affected in over 20 years, are in a way permitted to go ahead and flood the houses and fields of not less than 3500 families by the coming monsoon, and atleast 30,000 more, of recognized families and an equal number of unrecognized oustee families. The most valuable and exactly opposite minority judgment of Jst. Bharucha, one canít forget, directed immediate stoppage of dam work until a fresh clearance for SSP based on complete impact-assessment and feasible mitigatory plans.
Joe Athialy Shripad Dharmadhikari, Narmada Bachao Andolan, B 13 Shivam Flats, Ellora Park, Baroda 390 007 Ph. 0265-382232 E-mail: baroda@narmada.org
Whatever Your Law Says...... Narmada Valley is Ours....
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The TransAtlantic Business Dialogue
Mike Dolan, Public Citizen ~ Nov. 12
Folks have been wondering about this TABD meeting in Cincinatti this week. We've organized the obligatory rally and teach-in, of course, and a local direct action network is facilitating creative and newsworthy protests. Meanwhile, we want to explore what the TABD really means. Here's some alternative acronyms for the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue and a piece from a Dayton Ohio rag to shed some light. We look forward to seeing [some of] you in Cin'ti.
Mike Dolan, Public Citizen
Truly Appalling Backroom Deals Tarnished Assembly of Business Degenerates Transnationals Allied to Bash Democracy Trans-Atlantic Bargain with the Devil Trying Another Blatant Deception Truly Awful Business Dictators True Authors of Barshefsky's Directives Tyrants Against Basic Decency Typical Assholes Blaming Democracy Tricky Anti-Democratic Boneheaded Deregulators Tricky Antedeluvian BigBiz Deregulators Tempting Anarchists to Burn it Down
Cincinnati to Host International Trade Organization and Numerous Protests
Dayton News ~ Nov. 10
On Nov. 16-18, residents of the tri-state area who are concerned about corporate-led globalization will have the chance to take their voices of opposition to the top. That Thursday, Cincinnati will welcome 200 CEOs from leading U.S. and European corporations and government officials for the annual meeting of the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue (TABD). This organization, founded by late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in 1995, helps set the U.S. and Western European agenda for standards in safety, environmental protection, labor and other trade-related issues.
The TABD membership list reads like a who's who of the corporate world: Ford, Xerox, America Online. European CEOs coming to town include Building materials manufacturer Lafarge, chemical firm Bayer and automaker DaimlerChrysler. The TABD's web site suggests the organization works toward a world where freedom of trade prevails over concerns for labor rights and environmental safety. "The aim of the TABD is to boost transatlantic trade and investment opportunities through the removal of costly inefficiencies caused by excessive regulation in the European Union and U.S. regulatory systems," it reads.
Hosted by the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, the TABD meeting is a win for the city and Gov. Bob Taft. To earn the right to host the event, Cincinnati presented a bid of more than $600,000 in discounts, perks and trips organized for the families of attendees, according to the *Cincinnati Business Courier*. The benefits include is a 20 percent discount at the luxurious Omni Netherlands Hotel at Fifth and Race streets downtown, where the delegates will eat, sleep and work. At the same time, thousands of activists will gather downtown to educate citizens and confront delegates when they step out for parties with the governors of Ohio and Kentucky.
The Cincinnati protests have been dubbed "N16" in the tradition of anti-corporate events in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Los Angeles. In Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Louisville, Lexington and elsewhere, global trade activists have already begun work with unions, students and churches to plan an effective, focused protest. The Coalition for a Humane Economy (CHE), a Cincinnati-based organization comprised largely of faith-based activists, has produced an ambitious calendar of protest events including marches, rallies and teach-ins. Another local group, the Cincinnati Direct Action Coalition (CDAC), plans additional marches and actions. CDAC is also coordinating nonviolence and safety training, legal support, and teams of street medics for the days of action.
Why should one protest the TABD? Some protesters call for an Overthrow of capitalist society, others just want Third World nations, labor unions and environmentalists to have a place at the policy table. But most agree that the TABD meeting, during which cabinet-level trade officials will hear businesses' opinions on trade policy, shuts the people out of the policy making process.
While the protests at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle brought reassuring remarks from Clinton, Gore and others, the officials and corporate leaders who make trade policy haven't responded to protesters' demands. "What has changed about trade policy making?" asked Mary Bottari, director of the Harmonization Project at Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "The TABD is the same old, same old." The Mid-Year Report of the TABD mentions, many times, the TABD's agreement with "the goals of the WTO." Besides pushing hard for a new round of WTO talks to make up time lost.
From the "failed" Seattle meeting, the TABD calls for "harmonization of regulations and standards" between the United States and the European Union(EU). Here's how it works: A company that sells its product in both the EU and the United States currently has to sell two different versions * one that meets safety and pollution regulations in the United States, and one that meets the EU's standards. This company would benefit from the simplicity of a single standard. This idea is a cost-free boon to business and simplifies paperwork, said Rene Thomas of the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. "TABD harmonized the way goods are classified for tariffs," she said. "Now, everyone uses a standard 10-digit number to describe a product."
Ultimately, however, a single set of standards isn't about simplifying paperwork. Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch calls harmonization a "race to the bottom" in which countries will be forced to adopt the lowest standards in use or risk being accused of blocking trade by organizations such as the WTO. The TABD has consistently called for lower standards. It recommends that the EU adopt U.S. standards for the import of genetically modified foods, opposing current EU standards that regulate the labeling and use of such foods. Furthermore, the TABD opposed the recent EU move to phase out the ozone-eating hydrofluorocarbons that are used as cooling agents in some refrigerators.
Those who protest during the TABD meeting won't just be standing around waving signs; the goal is to educate using the most creative, effective means possible. Those methods range from colorful, life-size puppets to nonviolent civil disobedience such as blocking traffic. People coming to Cincinnati for the protest should contact CHE and CDAC; their Web sites are regularly updated and include contact e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
"What people don't realize about (these protests) is the level of planning for months and months that goes into this," Rev. Thomas Saffold of Ann Arbor said during an October organizing meeting at Antioch College. "You can't blindly copy tactics. In D.C., (at the International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting), the protesters used the same tactics as Seattle, which was great to block off a conference center but useless against a large perimeter," Saffold added. There's a challenge in protesting a private organization made up of corporate heads such as TABD: It is more obscure than organizations such as the WTO or World Bank.
That's why the focus must be education. To give locals a heads up, CHE has planned a campaign called "Ask Me About the TABD." And N16's first Protest event will be educational: on Thursday, Nov. 16, activists will distribute [OK -- this article is clipped short, we're not sure why ... came this way over the digital transom .. but you get the picture - ed]
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MF, World Bank Reforms Leave Poor Behind, Bank Economist Finds
By Mark Drajem, Bloomberg ~ Nov. 7
The poor in developing countries are often better off when their governments ignore the policy advice of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, according to a study by a World Bank economist. That conclusion by William Easterly, who in the past has co- written papers with IMF Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, calls into question one of the main objectives of the two global lenders -- fighting poverty.
China, India and other countries that don't follow IMF and World Bank economic programs have seen more of their people lifted out of poverty in times of economic growth than have nations that take the advice of the Washington-based lenders, according to the research, to be presented at an IMF conference later this week. "A lot of the countries that have gotten a lot of lending from the IMF and World Bank are worse off," Easterly said in an interview, citing Zambia and the Philippines. "I don't think the record is real encouraging."
To be certain, when developing nations see their economies shrink, the poor are often cushioned by IMF and bank loans, he found. Advocates for the poor have long complained that IMF and World Bank advice to countries to cut government payrolls, lower trade barriers and raise interest rates benefits rich residents of those countries and foreign investors, while hurting the poor.
Harsh Criticism
That criticism turned increasingly harsh, and even violent, in the last year, with the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington in April and Prague in September disrupted by protesters. That has prompted the lenders to repeatedly underline their concern about poverty, with bank President James Wolfensohn and IMF chief Horst Koehler calling on rich nations to open their markets and forgive developing-country debt.
The bank -- whose Washington headquarters is inscribed with the words "a world free of poverty" -- has also redoubled its efforts to research the effect of its lending on the poor. Easterly's work is part of that effort. "This is not the most convenient finding from the point of view of the World Bank's image," Easterly said. He said the poor don't have the skills to benefit from the new businesses, the cheaper imports and the high-technology jobs that often come with IMF-backed economic overhauls. "The World Bank and IMF affect the modern, formal economy, but the poor are not in the modern, formal sector," Easterly said. "The poor live on the margins."
Conditions Attached
The two lenders often work together in lending to poor and transitional economies such as Kenya, Russia and Indonesia. They have lent to about half the world's nations, attaching conditions such as deficit-reduction targets or the sale of state-owned assets. IMF and World Bank policy-makers say their reforms often generate necessary short-term pain for long-term gain. Selling the state-owned brewery in Tanzania, for example, meant workers lost jobs and citizens complained about foreign ownership of a national landmark. Yet Tanzania Breweries Ltd. now produces export-quality beer -- and has shifted from a drain on the state treasury to the impoverished nation's largest taxpayer.
World Bank economist David Dollar said Easterly overstates the influence of World Bank and IMF conditions, and so finds negative effects where there's really little impact. "I don't think we have that much effect on policy," Dollar said. Still, Dollar said Easterly's findings point to the best way to rework the loans. "Originally, these things were meant for attacking short- term shocks," and that is the way they have been successful, Dollar said. "The proper role for these programs is short-term."
Business Cycle
Easterly's study looked at business cycles of about three years, comparing the numbers of people with incomes of $2 a day in countries that had IMF lending programs with those that did not. During times of economic growth, the poor didn't gain as much in countries in which the IMF lent money as they did those in places with no programs, although they weren't hurt as badly in recessions, according to the study. "Expansion under (IMF, World Bank) adjustment lending is less pro-poor, while contraction under adjustment lending is less anti-poor," Easterly wrote.
Easterly dismissed the charge that he's focusing on the short- term pain in recipient countries that are merely headed for long- term economic gains. He cited countries such as the Philippines and Tanzania that borrow for decades. The Philippines, which has been borrowing from the IMF for almost 40 years, last month withdrew plans to borrow $314 million from after the fund refused to allow the government to raise its budget-deficit target. The next week, Markus Rodlauer, the IMF's chief for the Philippines, said "you can never say never" about a resumption of the program.
The report is at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/staffp/2000/00-00/e.pdf
Neil Watkins, World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign Center for Economic Justice 830 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20009 phone: (202) 299-0020 fax: (202) 299-0021
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Asia's Poor Farmers Demand Genuine Agrarian Land Reform
Jennifer Mourin, People's Caravan Regional Coordinator ~ November 8
Poor farmers in their thousands across Asia remain landless as local landlords and foreign transnational corporations (TNCs) increasingly grab lands to promote export crop production under the impact of globalisation.
So severe is the crisis that in the Philippines, KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines) has advocated the ouster of Pres. Estrada for failure to distribute land to the tillers. Instead, precious agricultural lands are being offered to big foreign agro TNCs and cronies like Eduardo Cojuangco.
The Estrada government is promoting plantations oriented for export crop production instead of land distribution, serving the interest of greedy foreign monopoly capitalists. This is a total abandonment of the principle "land to the tillers", Rafael Mariano, Chairperson of KMP said.
KMP is spearheading the struggle in the Philippines to implement genuine agrarian reform that provides land to landless small farmers and peasants with sufficient support for sustainable rural livelihoods, economies and futures independent of TNCs.
Mariano criticised the Estrada administration's commitment to the World Trade Organisation in promoting the World Bank's imposition of "Market Assisted Land Reform", or private sector land reform. This involves joint venture schemes that allow landlords and foreign capitalists to appropriate land.
"In effect, the schemes reduce the farmers to being farm-workers receiving measly wages not even on a regular basis to augment their daily need for food and sustenance," Mariano said.
Thousands of farmers and their families in the vast countryside are now in dire poverty and hunger as they are forcibly evicted from the lands they have tilled for decades to pave the way for land use conversion, "corporative schemes", or joint venture schemes, KMP said.
For Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), these schemes encourage poor farmers to be dependent on loans to cover costs of production, and increases in the use of pesticides for crop protection.
"This in effect will burden farmers with more debts, threaten food safety and security," Rengam said.
"People across Asia are already suffering from hunger and poverty due to the past massive displacements of peasants from their lands and the ongoing conversion of agricultural lands. Farmers view these current developments with great concern because this threatens food safety, security, health, and livelihoods," Rengam added.
To contest these dire developments, PAN AP, together with KMP, other non-governmental organisations, farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, and anti-pesticide and anti-genetic engineering advocates in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines, is launching a People's Caravan from 13-30 November. "Activities will also be held by farmers in Japan, Korea and Indonesia to support the Caravan", Rengam said.
"The People's Caravan demanding land and food without poisons will be the peasant agenda to whoever will replace Estrada. We will continue to struggle until genuine land reform and agro-chemical TNC's control over our lands is ended," said KMP.
For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific)
Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh, Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my or visit the People's Caravan
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Farmers Protest on PhilRice Anniversary -- Demand Land and Food Without Poisons
Peasant Movement of the Philippines ~ 07 November, 2000
More than 1,000 farmers belonging to the militant Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) on Tuesday staged a protest-vigil during the 15th year-anniversary of the Philippine Rice Research Institute (Phil Rice) in Munoz, Nueva Ecija.
Danilo Ramos, KMP secretary general said the rice research institution acted as an agent of agro-chemical transnational corporations in promoting expensive and poisonous fertilizers and pesticides in the name of "food security and productivity".
"Promising better harvest for farmers, Phil Rice played as an agent by profit-hungry agro-chem TNC's like Monsanto, Cargill, Pioneer Hi-breed, Du Pont and Novartis making Philippine agriculture fully dependent on imported farm inputs that resulted to farmers high-cost of production," Ramos said.
Ramos also stated the "hazardous effects of these chemicals not only to the destruction of the soil's fertility but the ill-effects to the farmers' health."
"The Estrada government's 'agrikulturang makamasa' program is an adjunct of WTO's trade liberalization allowing entry of cheaper foreign agricultural products leaving our local produce rot in the market. The Estrada government is promoting a false sense of "food security" as the Philippines becomes a net importer of rice despite our sufficient grains harvest. On the other hand, we import high-value and expensive chemical based farm inputs. Meanwhile, the Philippines largest consumer - the farmers - does not have the purchasing power because of bankruptcy as a result of Estrada's adherence to WTO conditionalities."" he added.
"Under this program, rampant crops conversion is happening in the country-sides. Vast tract of agricultural lands has been transformed to plantations for export crops production for the benefit of monopoly capitalist countries like the US. This trend in the agricultural landscape perpetuated the monopoly control of agro corporations of our lands and the re-concentration of lands to the hands of big landlords," Ramos stressed.
The peasant group also announced their nationwide "People's Caravan for Land and Food Without Poisons and Resist Agro-chem TNC's" to be held on November 27-30 as the peasant agenda for the next government. "The people's caravan demanding land and food without poisons will be the peasant agenda to whoever will replace Estrada. We will continue to struggle until genuine land reform and agro-chem TNC's control over our lands is ended," the group ended.
For more information contact:
Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP)
Peasant Movement of the Philippines
E-mail: kmp@quickweb.com.ph
P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia.
Tel: (604) 657 0271/656 0381 Fax: (604) 657 7445 E-mail: pcaravan@tm.net.my or panap@panap.po.my
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Canadian Group Wants More Dams Dismantled
By Neville Judd, ENS ~ Nov. 7
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada, November 7, 2000 (ENS) - After persuading authorities to approve Canada's first large dam decommissioning, a west coast recreation group is to review dams around the province in a bid to identify more that could be dismantled.
Mark Angelo has received the National River Conservation Award as Canada's outstanding river conservationist of the past decade and was also the recipient of the 1997 Minister's Environment Award. (Photo courtesy B.C. Ministry of Environment, Land and Parks).
In March, the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia (ORC) persuaded the provincial government to decommission a dam on the Theodosia River, north of the coastal town of Powell River. In 1956, the year the 90 metre (292 foot) dam was built, the river thrived with 100,000 pink salmon, 50,000 chum salmon, and 10,000 coho salmon.
By last year, pinks had disappeared, and only 2,000 to 3,000 chum returned with three dozen coho. Habitat restoration is at the heart of today's launch of the Dam Review Project, ORC chairman Mark Angelo told ENS...
There are 2,167 licensed dams in B.C. and several hundred more smaller, unlicensed dams built several decades ago. Most are owned privately, or by local governments. Angelo estimated 10 percent have outlived their usefulness and should be either decommissioned or dismantled.
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Don't Let The WTO Get Hold Of Our Water!
By Ruth Caplan, Alliance for Democracy ~ Nov. 7
Although activists and developing countries stopped the Millennium Round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, negotiations on services and agriculture are going on right now. The goal of bringing services into the WTO is to pursue "progressive liberalization." This means moving toward privatization of all services, including public services. It also means deregulation of services at the local, state and national levels and subjecting them to the WTO's global rules for the benefit of transnational corporations (TNCs). The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), first adopted in 1994, includes a commitment to negotiate further liberalization starting in 2000.
Now the European negotiators want to include drinking water in the GATS agreement. The Europeans have large TNC's like Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux which is involved in privatizing municipal water services around the world, including the city of Indianapolis, so it is in their interest to havewater be part of the GATS. The United States' negotiators are figuring out how to respond. They know there is controversy in the U.S. about having GATS cover water. U.S. corporations would like limited coverage in areas where they are competitive with the European corporations. Advocates for environment and justice don't want water covered in GATS. The U.S. is looking for a compromise position. They are willing to propose that GATS "carve out," i.e., exclude, transportation of bulk water across international borders by private companies. (Operation of pipelines is a service.) This would be good from the perspective of citizens and organization who believe water is a RIGHT not a need to be supplied by the market for profit.
But the U.S. is considering a more compromised position on water services within a country such as water treatment, distribution, and sewage treatment. They have suggested limiting the application of GATS in the U.S. to commercial applications. It appears that U.S. corporations want to include commercial applications of water because they think they can compete in some specific commercial applications like water purification for a building, but are not so concerned about serving the municipal markets at this time. This reflects the fact that U.S. players are not doing so well with cities like Indianapolis which used the French company Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux when they privatized their water treatment a couple of years ago.
Encouraging global market competition in supplying the commercial sector could lead to less water being available for public uses like public drinking water and wildlife protection. This is already a major problem due to agribusiness and industrial uses of water. The impact on the cost of water is also a concern. If big commercial users get water from private sources, public water supplies will have to carry more of the public infrastructure costs, leading to higher rates. This is a form of cream skimming.
For a crash course on water privatization, read "Blue Gold" by Maude Barlow. Available from International Forum on Globalization 415-229-9350 or e-mail: ifg@ifg.org. A packet of organizing materials on water is available from the Alliance for Democracy. Contact Ruth Caplan 202-244-0561. Also contact Ruth if you want to receive action alerts on water and GATS. For comprehensive information on water rights issues, sign up for IATP's list serve by sending an email to: listserv@iatp.org. In the body of the message type: subscribe waterrights.
Ruth Caplan Alliance for Democracy 202-244-0561 3407 34th Place NW Washington, DC 20016
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Biwater Seeks to Suppress Public Debate and Grassroots Organizing Over the Internet
November 6
Labor activists are charging that Biwater, a privately-owned, British transnational water corporation, is attempting to suppress public debate about utility privatization in South Africa. GreenNet, the Internet service provider for LabourNet, a UK labor news website, and SangoNet, the provider for the South African newspaper, the Weekly Mail and Guardian, have both been threatened with legal action by the global corporation in recent weeks. In response, activists around the world are launching a campaign to ensure that information on the giant company remains on the web as Biwaterbids on its first contract a with a municipal government in South Africa.
In April, Biwater lawyers demanded that LabourNet remove a document that the company charges is defamatory. The offending document is a press release issued by the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU), which is spearheading the fight against utility privatization. The union refers to reports in the Weekly Mail and Guardian, that Biwater participated in British arms for aid scheme in the 1980's. Biwater bolstered its demand by threatening a libel suit against GreenNet, LabourNet's service provider. Soon after, Biwater lawyers also demanded that SangoNet, the South African service provider that hosts the Mail and Guardian's website, remove the article.
Under British libel law the burden is on the defendant to prove that its statements are not defamatory. The defendant is also responsible for the plaintiff's legal fees, in addition to damages, should the defendant lose the case. This legal structure traditionally favors those with deep pockets, and poses a substantial threat to news media and grassroots organizations. By threatening GreenNet with a libel suit, Biwater also threatens to impose the peculiarities of British libel law as a means of chilling speech over the Internet. Both GreenNet and SangoNet have pulled the documents challenged by Biwater.
However, Internet activists are confronting Biwater's attack with an online campaign to spread information about the corporation and SAMWU's struggle against utility privatization as widely as possible. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), to which GreenNet and SangoNet belong, has mirrored LabourNet's Biwater website at various affiliate sites around the world. Public Services International, the global federation of trade unions representing public service workers, has made an extensive report on Biwater available on its website, and similarly encourages its reposting to other websites.
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Indonesian House Commission Works on GMO Rules
Jakarta Post ~ November 6
JAKARTA (JP): Insisting it is taking an impartial stance on transgenic products, or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), House of Representatives Commission VIII for environmental, science and technology affairs is working on a draft law to regulate the controversial products.
"We are neither accepting or rejecting such products. But we think that we have to take precautions over the safety of the products.
"That's why a regulation is needed to handle the matter, especially with the implementation of regional autonomy next year," commission chairman Irwan Prayitno said during a break in a public discussion about transgenic products at the commission's hearing room.
The only existing regulation which touches on the issue, he said, was a 1999 joint ministerial decree issued by the ministers of agriculture, forestry, food and horticulture, and health. This decree is concerned with the safety of foods and natural products.
"But the decree is only valid internally for the four ministries. Therefore, it must be reviewed," Irwan, a legislator from the Justice Party(PK), said.
The issue of GMO products continues to spark debate among the public.
GMO are biologically engineered products in which genes are inserted fromone species into another to produce a new product which has desired and beneficial characteristics.
A researcher from the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, Antonius Suwanto, said the debate was understandable, but stressed that Indonesia already trailed other countries in biotechnology issues.
"Thailand has anticipated biotechnology developments by establishing the National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. Singapore and Malaysia are discussing the technology to detect and determine the criteria of transgenic products,"
Antonius said during the discussion.
The government must determine such issues as biosafety, labeling, the examination system and regulations, prices, laws and the infrastructure to deal with these products, he said.
Tejo Wahyu Jatmiko of the National Consortium for Nature and Forest Conservation said scientists tended to promote only the good side of transgenic products.
"It's similar to the United States, whose Department of Agriculture only allocated 1 percent of its total biotechnology research budget, or around US$1 million to US$2 million, to research the negative impacts of the products," he said during the discussion.
Jakarta Post, 7 November 2000
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Asia's Rural Poor Denounces Next Round of APEC Meetings
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific) ~ November 7
A year after the intense protests mounted against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Seattle, over 150 groups from 18 countries throughout the Asia Pacific region have denounced the next round of APEC meetings as yet another avenue by the 'advanced' countries, especially the US, to disadvantage third world peoples through trade and investment liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation and denationalisation.
With close to 40% of US total trade now conducted with the East Asia and Pacific region, the US has its corporate guns firmly aimed on the region for further exports of pesticides and genetically engineered foods. Smoothing the way is APEC's support to actively participate in WTO negotiations to free up agricultural trade restrictions, which currently help to safeguard nations and the rural poor from the operations of powerful foreign transnational corporations (TNCs).
If not checked, the implications for Asia Pacific regional agricultural and food production systems are profound. More landlessness; increased hunger and malnutrition; increased chemical pollution of groundwater, crops and ecosystems; more control by foreign agrichemical TNCs; and increased threats to people's food security and health is the recipe that APEC would serve up.
When is this volatile agenda being cooked up? On November 15-16, 2000 at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Leaders' Meeting at Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam. Feeding into the process is a round of APEC Ministerial, Senior Officials and Business Advisory meetings during the preceding week.
To highlight the concerns of numerous non-governmental organisations, small farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, and anti-genetic engineering campaign groups, a People's Caravan is marching its cause across the region.
Advocating "Land and Food Without Poisons" the People's Caravan, coordinated by the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), will travel through India, Bangladesh and the Philippines from November 15-30. Simultaneous activities will be held in Japan, Korea and Indonesia.
Central to the Caravan's concerns is the environmentally and socially unethical promotion of pesticides by the US and APEC to bolster national agriculture towards export-crop production for the world market.
This is an alarming trend. As far back as 1990, studies in the World Health Statistic Quarterly, a World Health Organisation (WHO) publication, showed that in the South alone an estimated 25 million workers and farmers suffered from pesticide poisoning. To make matters worse, the annual and growing agrochemical market - worth US$31 billion in 1998 - fuels the increasing environmental crisis, as well as contributing to the depletion of oil which at current rates of consumption is set to run out within 40 years.
Obviously, the intensive agricultural system has too many problems and needs to be phased out. More sophisticated farming systems that work with nature and the people are the real recipe for a sustainable future.
As Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of PANAP comments: "Intensive agriculture and the current move to genetically engineered rice and other crops is corporate friendly, anti-people, anti-environment, and anti-long term sustainable development, and will only serve the short-term interests of profit and greed of an already excessively rich few. It has absolutely no benefit to the majority or to the region. Community and environmentally friendly agriculture has to be the only way forward".
For more information contact:
PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific)
Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh, Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign. Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/ 656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my or visit the People's Caravan Web site: www.poptel.org.uk/panap/caravan.htm
P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia.
Tel: (604) 657 0271/656 0381 Fax: (604) 657 7445
E-mail: pcaravan@tm.net.my
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The World Social Forum To Provide Space for Economic Alternatives
World Social Forum ~ November 6
World Social Forum
January 25 – 30 2001. Porto Alegre, Brazil
The World Social Forum will provide a space for building economic alternatives, for exchanging experiences and for strengthening South-North alliances between NGOs, unions and social movements. It will also be an opportunity to develop concrete projects and instruct the public.
It will take place every year in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, during the same period as the World Economic Forum, which happens in Davos, Switzerland, at the end of January. Since 1971, The World Economic Forum has played a key role in formulating and promoting neoliberal policies throughout the world. It's sponsored by a Swiss organization that serves as a consultant to the United Nations and it's financed by more than one thousand corporations.
The World Social Forum was developed as a consequence of the massive manifestation against the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) in 1998, the great gathering against the meeting of the World Trade Oraganization (WTO) in november 1999, and of the recent protests in Washington against the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
Such movements have put in evidence the emersion of a civic movement beyond national borders. For decades, those institutions have been making decisions that affect the lives of people all over the world, without a clear system for accountability and democratic participation. Now, however, they have come to realize that they must state their decisions and policies to the public opinion.
In the same way, governments must be aware that such vigilance will be exerted more and more rigorously on them. Some governments will no longer be able to allege that disastrous measures were “imposed” on them from above, once we know that they have contributed or approved the elaboration of such measures inside those institutions. They should also account their positions taken in these meetings for the Parliaments and their citizens.
As professor and linguistic Noam Chomsky said, the World Social Forum offers “opportunities of unparalleled importance to bring together popular forces from many and varied constituencies from the richer and poor countries alike, to develop constructive alternatives that will defend the overwhelming majority of the world's population from the attack on fundamental human rights, and to move on to break down illegitimate power concentrations and extend the domains of justice and freedom.”
Confirmed presences
Graça Machel, ex-first lady of Moçambique; Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer; Tabaré Vasquez, president of Frente Ampla del Uruguay ; José Bové , french agriculture; Nora de Cortiñas, president of Mothers of May Park; Sebastião Salgado, brazilian photographer; Kaylash Satyarti, Coordinator of March against Children’s work; Dita Sari, Indonesian Leader of Student’s Movement; François Chesnais, French economist; João Pedro Stédile, Leader of Brazilian Landless Workers; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Honour President of the Workers Party; Marina da Silva, Brazilian Senator; Njoki Njehu, 50 Years is Enough! representant ; Susan George, Vice the president of ATTAC – France; Xochitl Bertha Galvez Ruiz, Mexican entrepreneur ; François Houtart, President of Centro Tri-Continental; Danielle Miterrand, France Libertè’s president; Emir Sader, Brazilian Sociologist; Frei Beto, Brazilian Dominican monk and writer; Kevin Danaher, Global Exchange Director; João Manuel Cardoso de Mello, Unicamp Coordinator; Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer; Ignácio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique Director; Oscar Niemayer, Brazilian architect; Leonardo Boff, Brazilian Teologist; Lucio Gutierrez , Equatorian Colonel; Patrick Viveret, philosopher; Maria Conceição Tavares, Brazilian economist; Milton Santos, Brazilian geographer; Vandana Shiva physicist, ecofeminist, writer, and leader in the international moviments for the preservation of indigenous agricultural and environmental knowledge; João Felício, President of Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT); Eric Toussaint, President of the Committee for the Anulation of the External Debt of Third World Countries; Yoko Kitazawa, President of Jubilee 2000 Japan; Georgina Djeutana, Economist and member of the African campaign Jubilee 2000; Eduardo Suplicy, Brazilian Senator; Boaventura de Souza Santos, Portuguese Sociologist Professor ; Riccardo Petrella, Counsellor of the European Committee and professor of Université Catholique de Louvain; Helena Hirata, Brazilian Sociologist; Kjeld Jakobsen, International Relations Secretary of CUT; Tânia Bacelar, Brazilian Economist; Rayén Quiroga Martínez , Chilean Economist; René Passet , President of ATTAC Scientific Council; Walden Bello, Sociology Professor of University of Filipinas and Co-director of Focus on the Global South; Victor de Gennaro, Central Workers president; Ermínia Maricato, Director of Habitational Laboratory of FAU-USP; Robin Round, Regional Coordinator/Policy Analyst of Halifax Initiative; Bernard Cassen , President of ATTAC France and director of Le Monde Diplomatique; Aloizio Mercadante, Brazilian Federal Deputy; Norman Solomon, Midia critic; Samir Amin, Egyptian Economist; José Ramos Horta, East Timor leader and Peace Nobel Winner; Mark Ritchie, Presidentof the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Minnesota – EUA;
Themes
When proposing and divulging a schedule for the Forum, the organising committee wants to present clearly the aims and the political meaning of the event. In its final version, the document will be opened with the topic “Another World is Possible”. Observation about “The Basis of our Project for Social Transformation” will come next. Finally, there will be the set of conferences and the names of the first invited speakers.
The committee’s intention is that the conferences reinforce the alternatives which have been proposed for the last years, by the ones who have resisted to the logic of the market, money and unequality. As well as opening a space for a real debate on such proposals, the schedule should encourage the world wide organizations to present, in the afternoons, activities about more specific themes. The complete four main themes are available in the web pages:
THEME I
The Production of Wealth and the Social Reproduction
How to construct an equal system of production of goods and services for all?
What kind of International Trade do we want?
What kind of Financial System can ensure equality and development?
How guarantee the multiple functions of the earth?
THEME II
Access to Wealth and Sustainability
Translating Scientific Development into Human Development
Guaranteeing the Public Nature of the Common Resources of Humanity and Prevent their Conversion into Merchandise
Promoting the Distribution of Wealth to Guarantee a Dignified Life for All
Establishing Social Control over the Environment
THEME III
Civil Society and the Public Arena
Strengthening the Capacity for Action of Civil Society and the Development of the Public Arena
Guaranteeing Class, Racial, and other forms of Diversity
Guaranteeing the Right to Information and the Democratization of the Media
Guaranteeing Cultural Identity and Protecting Artistic Creation from Mercantilization
THEME IV
Democracy and Citizen's Power
The Basis for Democracy and for Citizen's Power
Democratizing World Authority
The Future of Nation-States
Mediating Conflicts and Developing Peace
Workshops
The World Social Forum has already received more than 140 workshop proposals for the afternoon period. As everybody knows, these entities and social movements are the ones who are building the agenda for the afternoon period, which is divided in two sections: presentation of concrete alternatives (with exposition of projects and thesis, exchange of experiences and discussions); and articulation of combats (encounter of similar movements; programming of common actions, etc).
Workshop proposals such as AFTA, Tobin Tax, Plan Colombia and Trangenics, for instance, certainly will draw on much interest and adherents. However, a lot of other themes will be discussed as well: work, health, gender, environment, diverse impacts of globalization, violence, susteinable development, cultural identity, education, democracy, universities, social exclusion, torture, racial discrimination, youth, human rights, economic, social and cultural rights, enterprises’ social responsability,volunteer work, drugs, public health, susteinable urbanism, external debt, international cooperation, lodgement, participative budget e varied experiences of social movements.
Formation of National Mobilization Committees
The Brazilian Organizing Committee has encouraged the formation of National Mobilization Committees, intending to get the balance of representation of countries and groups, as well as strenghtening the links between them. So far, we have the following national committees in formation: Bangladesh, Índia, Tailândia, Filipinas, Uruguai, Portugal, Itália, Argentina, Suíça, Camarões, Paraguai, México e África do Sul.
For more information about the committees, please get in touch with Carlos Tibúrcio ou Diego Azzi: fsm2001inter@uol.com.br.
It’s opened the inscriptions for World Social Forum 2001
The World Social Forum that will take place in Porto Alegre has already had the support of 450 NGOs, social movements, unions and networks from 77 different countries all over the continents, so far. This is just the beginning.
The Brazilian Organizing Committee’s intention is to get the balance of representation, so that, Africa, Asia, Pacif and Latin America will be equally represented compared to Europe and North America, therefore wealthy groups ought to be represented as the wealthless ones. We hope to achieve this balance. Important issues such as: workers and social movements, rural and urban ones, religion, women, ethnic all represented by unions, social movements, articulations are expected.
Several organizations have already demonstrated the interest on participating to World Social Forum 2001. In order to formally enrol the list, the NGOs will have to pay:
U$ 50,00 for the first group’s representative U$ 25,00 for the second or more group’s representative each.
Bank account: Banco do Brasil, 1202-5
Account number: 12235-1 - ABONG (Associação Brasileira de ONGs)
Could you please send us the deposit confirmation to:
Secretaria do Fórum Social Mundial
Rua General Jardim, 660 sala 81, CEP 01223-010, São Paulo – Capital – Brasil
or Fax: 55 11 258 8469.
Important: Inscriptions will be accepted until November, 30th , 2000, so that the NGOs, organizations and social movements will be formally enrolled after the payment and we kind ask to send the deposit confirmation to us, please.
We will soon send further informations about accomodation.
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!
Brazilian Organizing Committee:
ABONG - Associação Brasileira de Organizações Não Governamentais
ATTAC - Ação pela Tributação das Transações financeiras em Apoio aos Cidadãos
CBJP - Comissão Brasileira Justiça e Paz, da CNBB
CIVES - Associação Brasileira de Empresários pela Cidadania
CUT - Central Única dos Trabalhadores
IBASE - Instituto Brasileiro de Análises Sociais e Econômicas
JUSTIÇA GLOBAL
MST - Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra
Informações: fsm2001@uol.com.br
Site: www.forumsocialmundial.org.br
Tel: 55-11-2588914 / Fax: 55-11-2588469
END
Quebec 2001: A Carnival Against Capitalism
la C.L.A.C. ~ November 2
Resisting capitalist globalization ...
Mobilizing for Quebec City ...
Creating radical alternatives ...
Next April 20-22, 2001, Quebec City has the dubious honor of hosting the Summit of the Americas, which brings together the 34 heads of state of North, South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean (except Cuba).
Besides the usual scare-mongering about security and terrorism, and empty rhetoric about democracy and human rights, the stated purpose of the Summit will be to put the final touches on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement. The Summit of the Americas meeting will be largest police and security operation in Canadian history, all while the 34 leaders and an entourage of big business elites, technocrats and corporate media enjoy their cocktail parties, gala dinners and public relations spectacles.
The FTAA extends the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) to the entire hemisphere, and is to be implemented by no later than 2005. The FTAA is also an extension of the reach of capitalist globalization, aiming to submit health care, education, as well as environmental and labor standards to the so-called logic of the free-market. Negotiated behind closed doors, and imposed unilaterally, the FTAA process is yet another example of the kind of economic violence that aims to suppress the gains of popular struggles of the past, and reinforce the power of cash and cops over our lives.
The demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle announced to the world the existence of an anti-capitalist resistance movement in Canada and the United States. The same spirit prevailed last April in Washington during the IMF and World Bank meetings, and in Windsor last June during the general assembly of the Organization of American States (which initiated the FTAA process). On each occasion, thousands took to the streets to refuse the free market fundamentalism of governments and business. These demonstrations did not emerge from no where, but were the result of many years of collective struggles against colonialism, poverty, police brutality and injustices of all kinds.
Next April in Quebec City, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (La Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes, or CLAC, in French) will participate in a large-scale grassroots mobilization against the FTAA. The CLAC, which is based in Montreal, is organizing a Carnival Against Capitalism (which will include teach-ins, conferences, workshops, concerts, cabarets, street theatre, direct actions, protests and more) as well as helping to convene a North American conference in conjunction with Peoples' Global Action against "Free" Trade (PGA). We are hoping to facilitate a convergence in Quebec City of a vast array of people who aim to create a world free of oppression.
The CLAC believes it is possible to radically and creatively oppose imperialism and the capitalist system while at the same time maintaining the spirit of openness that is necessary to develop a diverse and pluralistic resistance movement. The mobilization against the Summit of the Americas is being organized within the framework of a long-term struggle, in the North and South, against capitalist globalization. For its part, the CLAC is committed to participating in the globalization of genuine solidarity between peoples, with the goal of collectively resisting the same root causes of exploitation.
For more info:
No matter where you live, there are several ways to get involved with the CLAC as we struggle against the FTAA and mobilize against the Summit of the Americas:
* If you want more information about the CLAC, the FTAA or the Summit of the Americas, get in touch. We can provide you with detailed information. As well, don't hesitate to pass on information about your local struggles, and your perspectives on the FTAA.
* If you want to support the actions and/or principles of the CLAC while mobilizing against the FTAA, get in touch with us as well. We are hoping to help contribute to a worldwide anti-capitalist resistance that is creative, effective and as large as possible. Perhaps we can coordinate actions against the FTAA and the Summit of the Americas throughout the hemisphere.
* If you want to organize an information session on the FTAA or the CLAC, send us your requests. We can help prepare workshops, discussions and debates.
* If you live in Quebec, Ontario, the Maritimes or the northeastern United States, members of the CLAC can visit to help with your local mobilization and awareness raising efforts. The CLAC is currently planning organizing visits to these areas, in conjunction with local grassroots groups.
* If you live in Montreal, or you're planning on visiting sometime this fall, the CLAC organizes regular general assemblies which are open to the public (especially people who are in accord with the CLAC basis of unity). The assemblies (until December) will be on September 6, September 26, October 17, November 1, November 21 and December 13. All the assemblies take place at L'X (182, Ste-Catherine East, metro Berri-UQAM) at 7pm.
Each assembly is preceded at 6pm by an informational session for people who are new to the CLAC.
However you want to be involved, do get in touch. You can contact the
CLAC by phone (514-526-8946 - temporary number) or by post (La CLAC, 2035 St-Laurent Boulevard, 2nd floor, Montreal (Quebec) CANADUH, H2X 2T3).
Basis of Unity
THE ANTI-CAPITALIST CONVERGENCE LA CONVERGENCE DES LUTTES ANTI-CAPITALISTES (CLAC)
Basis of Unity (translation from the French)
1. The Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC in French) is opposed to capitalism. We fundamentally reject a social and economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and exchange. We reject a system driven by an exploitative logic that sees human beings as human capital, ecosystems as natural resources, and culture as simply a commodity. We reject the idea that the world is only valuable in terms of profit, competition and efficiency.
2. The CLAC also rejects the ideology of neo-liberalism, whereby corporations and investors are exempt from all political and social measures that interfere with their so-called "success".
3. The CLAC is anti-imperialist, opposed to patriarchy, and denounces all forms of exploitation and oppression. We assert a worldview based on the respect of our differences and the autonomy of groups, individuals and peoples. Our objective is to globalize our networks of resistance to corporate rule.
4. Respecting a diversity of tactics, the CLAC supports the use of a variety of creative initiatives, ranging between public education campaigns to direct action.
5. The CLAC is autonomous, decentralized and non-hierarchical. We encourage the involvement of anyone who accepts this statement of principles. We also encourage the participation of all individuals in working groups, in accord with their respective political affiliations.
6. With regards to the Summit of the Americas (April 2001) and the negotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the CLAC adopts a confrontational attitude and rejects reformist alternatives such as lobbying which cannot have a major impact on anti-democratic processes.
We intend to shut down the Summit of the Americas and to turn the FTAA negotiations into a non-event.
La Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes (CLAC)
The Anti-Capitalist Convergence
La Convergencia de las luchas anti-capitalistas
A Convergencia das lutas anti-capitalistas
<clac@tao.ca> -- 514-526-8946
END
Asian NGOs and Farmers Groups Oppose Genetically Engineered Rice
The People's Caravan 2000 ~ November 3
Non governmental organisations, small farmers, landless peasants, farm workers and anti-genetic engineering advocates strongly oppose the introduction of genetically engineered rice and the increasing corporate control of rice research and seed systems across Asia.
For millions of people in Asia, rice is not just a daily source of calories, it is a part of their culture and heritage. "If we let the agrochemical industry take over our rice production systems, not only will our food security be at the mercy of profit hungry transnational corporations (TNCs), but also our culture, our land and our livelihoods," says Sarojeni Rengam, Executive Director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP).
Facing increasing rejection, the biotech industry, in its latest strategy, appears to be attempting to do this by gift wrapping its latest developments in genetically engineered rice in the guise of 'developing world friendly' concerns.
Promoting the welfare of small-marginalised farmers and working towards alleviating global malnutrition is the catchcry of the latest genetically engineered rice crop-high yield vitamin A rice or 'golden rice'. Targeted for distribution to Asian farmers, 'free' of charge and 'without restrictions', 'golden rice' is being touted as a miracle cure for blindness-"a break through in the efforts to improve the health of billions of poor people, most of them in Asia."
The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) will be one of the agencies involved in the transfer of the 'golden rice' trait to local hybrid varieties.
Rafael Mariano, Chairperson of KMP (Peasant Movement of the Philippines) says: "Research and development into genetically engineered rice undertaken by IRRI, like blight and blast resistant (BB) rice, is partly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the same supporter of the infamous and unsuccessful 'miracle rice' of the 1960s."
Ms. Rengam, objects to the exploitation of the image of the poor and hungry as a public relations strategy to push a technology that is unsafe, unethical, exploitative, environmentally unfriendly and of no benefit economically to small-marginalised farmers.
"Golden rice' is really about clouding the real issues of poverty and the control of resources, serving to fast-track the wide scale acceptance and release of genetically engineered rice varieties throughout Asia," comments Mika Iba, Coordinator of the Japanese based Network for Safe and Secure Food and the Environment (NESSFE).
According to Philippines based MASIPAG, a farmer scientist coalition promoting organic and sustainable agriculture, the biotech industry and its allies already have 160 patent claims on rice with half belonging to the top 13 companies. Since 1986 an apomixis gene* for hybrid rice production; nitrogen (N)-fixing rice; Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) rice; BB rice; a perennial rice variety*; and micronutrient (vitamin A, iron and zinc) fortified rice strains have been, or are being developed.
Mr. Mariano says: "The powerful biotech industry is aggressively targeting southern agriculture, particularly rice, in an effort to open this lucrative market and take it over by creating dependency on agricultural genetic engineering technology."
To alert millions of people, particularly farmers and consumers, to the latest developments in genetic engineering, various farmers groups and anti-pesticide advocates across the Asia-Pacific region will hold a People's Caravan - "Citizens on the Move for Land and Food Without Poisons!" from November 13-30.
Travelling through India, Bangladesh and the Philippines, the caravan aims to give these people a voice in counteracting and choosing alternatives to the exploitative, profit-driven motives of agrochemical TNCs.
According to Ms. Rengam: "The People's Caravan will inform farmers and consumers of local initiatives towards more sustainable healthy agriculture that embrace local/ traditional knowledge and practices as alternatives to corporate dependent systems."
*Explanatory notes: The apomixis gene will give the hybrid plant the ability produce offspring with the same traits as the parent as reproduction will be independent of the union of male and female floral parts (Source: Mga Magsasaka at Siyentipiko Para sa Ikauunlad ng Agham Pang-Agrikultura (MASIPAG). MASIPAG News & Views. 2000. 'GE Rice: Asian Farmers have everything to Lose').
*Genetically engineered perennial rice is designed to reproduce more than once in its lifecycle and last more than two years (Source: Mga Magsasaka at Siyentipiko Para sa Ikauunlad ng Agham Pang-Agrikultura (MASIPAG). MASIPAG News & Views. 2000. 'GE Rice: Asian Farmers have everything to Lose').
For more information contact:
People's Caravan 2000, P.O. Box 1170, 10850, Penang, Malaysia. Jennifer Mourin, Campaigns and Media Coordinator OR Sarah Hindmarsh, Programme Assistant Genetic Engineering Campaign at PAN AP (Pesticide Action Network Asia & the Pacific) . Tel: (60-4) 657-0271/656-038. Fax: (604) 657-7445 E-mail: panap@panap.po.my or visit the People's Caravan Web site: www.poptel.org.uk/panap/caravan.htm
END
U.S. Congress Gives Governors Authority Over Future Water Sales
By Katherine Rizzo, Associated Press ~ November 3
WASHINGTON (AP) Legislation approved Friday would give governors of the eight Great Lakes states power over whether their water can be exported.
A bill covering restoration of the Everglades and other water projects across the country was approved by the House on a vote of 312-2. The bill now goes to President Clinton for his expected signature.
The Water Resources Development Act also urged the Great Lakes states to devise a common standard to use when making decision about withdrawing water from the Great Lakes Basin.
There are no current proposals for shipping Great Lakes water to thirsty customers in other parts of the world, but many officials got nervous about that possibility after an unsuccessful effort to export Lake Superior water from Canada.
The exportation language was added to the bill at the request of Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich.
Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, was the primary author of the bill, and it included a variety of special provisions for his home state.
One limits how much state and local governments will have to pay for a flood control project that started out expensive and has expanded substantially.
The bill says the non-federal share of the Duck Creek project in southeast Ohio cannot exceed $4.2 million.
The project has been delayed for years while the village of Fairfax negotiated with a landowner over access to an abandoned bridge and while Cincinnati negotiated with other landowners for the right to get access to one acre of vacant land.
Meanwhile, the projected price tag grew from an original estimate of $14 million to the current $34 million.
The water bill, also calls for the government to study the feasibility of developing a public port in Steubenville, Ohio.
It allows a $500,000 study of the deteriorating bulkheads in the Cuyahoga River's navigation channel.
And it gives the Army Corps of Engineers a greater role in restoring Great Lakes ecosystems in order to help fish populations. It seeks a comprehensive plan for managing fisheries in the Great Lakes.
The bill is S. 2796. Bill text available: http://thomas.loc.gov
END
US Sign-on Letter To Stop Sardar Sarovar Dam
International Rivers Network ~ November 2
Dear Friends,
We are coordinating a sign-on letter from US groups to Indian President Narayanan to stop construction of Sardar Sarovar Project. We urge you to send your organizational endorsement to Vinay Kumar at kumar@ai.mit.edu by Thursday, November 9. Please provide your name, organization, city and state.
**If you are not affiliated with an organization, we urge you to fax/mail/email a protest letter to the Indian government. Go to http://www.narmada.org/action-alerts/oct26.2000.letters.html for more info.
**If you are with an organization not based in the US, we encourage you to send a protest letter to the government and/or coordinate a sign-on letter in your country. The more letters we can generate the better! Click on the above link for more info.
Sincerely,
International Rivers Network
LETTER TO INDIAN PRESIDENT URGING HIM TO STOP SARDAR SAROVAR PROJECT
November 2, 2000
Dear President Narayanan,
We, the undersigned US-based human rights, environmental and Indian solidarity organizations, are writing to express our concern over the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing construction to proceed on the Sardar Sarovar Project. This ruling comes despite overwhelming evidence that the project will cause environmental degradation and jeopardize the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, including a large proportion of adivasis (tribals). The project was cleared although no credible environmental studies or rehabilitation plans were ever completed.
No Land for Resettlement
The court has authorized the dam to be raised to 90 meters immediately and in five-meter increments based on approval from committees that have failed in the past to give fair decisions and have shown themselves to be biased in favor of the dam. The judges have justified their decision for construction of the dam to be started immediately on the grounds that the Narmada Control Authority's Resettlement and Rehabilitation Sub-group has certified that necessary resettlement has been completed for construction up to 90 meters. Yet in fact no such approval has been given. The Madhya Pradesh government has admitted, in affidavits submitted to the Supreme Court as late as July 2000, that the state does not have any arable land to provide to oustees who will be displaced when the dam reaches 90 meters.
The majority judgment claims that "a properly drafted [resettlement and rehabilitation] plan would improve living standards of displaced persons after displacement" and has given project authorities four weeks to draw up a plan for the 200,000 people to be displaced by the reservoir. A plan was supposed to have been completed by 1981, as per the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award. It is not credible that the authorities who have failed to produce a credible plan in 20 years can complete one in a month's time.
Violations of Environmental Clearances
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the majority judgment by Justices Kirpal and Anand states that "experience does not show that the construction of a large dam is not cost effective or leads to ecological or environmental degradation. On the contrary there has been ecological upgradation with the construction of large dams." This opinion flies in the face of a huge corpus of evidence showing the massive environmental impacts of dams in India and around the world.
In his minority judgment, Justice Bharucha has pointed out that construction has been pushed forward in systematic violation of legal requirements for environmental clearances. Conditional environmental clearance was given to the project in June 1987 despite the fact that basic environmental impact studies required under Indian law were never completed and even today remain incomplete. For this reason, Justice Bharucha stated that further construction should be halted until a new clearance is given based on the completion of a comprehensive environmental impact assessment of the project.
Call on President to Stop Construction
In light of the arguments outlined above, it is clear that any further construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam will have grave consequences. It is imperative that immediate steps be taken to safeguard against the blatant violation of the right to life and livelihood of the many adivasi communities in the Narmada Valley. Otherwise, a serious human tragedy will develop in the coming monsoon as homes and fields of thousands of families will be flooded. As the Constitutional head of the Union of India, we urge you to:
* protect the lives of adivasi communities by immediately halting construction of the Sardar Sarovar Project.
* ensure complete resettlement and rehabilitation of the thousands already affected by the reservoir, canal system, construction site and other related project infrastructure.
* constitute an independent commission for a complete, participatory review of all aspects of the Sardar Sarovar Project.
Sincerely,
NAME:
ORGANIZATION:
CITY:
STATE:
END
By Devaki Jain, The Hindu ~ November 2
THE NARMADA valley has to be seen to be believed. Looking up at the hill slopes on either side, from a boat on the river, we see cattle and goats grazing on rich green fodder lands. Women are washing.
Young men from the tribal communities wearing beads and silver jewellery sit on the banks and slopes playing the flute. Driving from Indore to Maheshwar and beyond, the road side is adorned by incredibly tidy fields of food crops, fruit orchards. Entering houses in the villages on the way, usually housing large joint families, we see healthy babies, laughing strong women whose granaries are full, whose cattle give them the necessary milk and who have no water shortage. A haven of peace.
What madness is it that wants to bury this space? While on the one hand, we wish to inhibit rural migration into the cities and towns, want to provide food, water, shelter and livelihood in the rural areas, spending crores under rural development, on the other, we want to drive a settled group of people into a ``basket'' of assistance and dependence. Drive them into small townships with their shacks and slums - women and children on the streets always under some stress of deprivation.
Whatever the leaders and Governments say on their capacity to rehabilitate the families that will be displaced from the Narmada valley, it is these peripheral habitats that the families from the valley will join. What land can they be given with which they can simulate their earlier lives? One man I met on my journey to the valley said he would prefer cash compensation. This is also a typical response of men who usually prefer cash - remember Chipko? Men wanted to sell the trees for cash? Women needed the trees for fuel and fodder.
With the cash a man may buy a shop and be content. It is the women who face the brunt of a change, which distances water, food, kitchen garden, fodder and fuel supplies. It is the women who are in the vanguard of the Narmada Bachao Andolan's protest.
When young tribal boys and girls are replanted in their recreated habitats, they will mutate into harsh discontented social forces - and their restlessness will not only hurt others, but will hurt themselves.
The disturbance in the valley is not going to remain a problem only for the displaced. The very same Governments of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, and the Centre - who see this only as a problem of water and power - will rue the day they turned away from the deeper wounds they are making into their own body politic.
Currently, the mainstream debate on the legitimacy of the struggle against the Sardar Sarovar Dam is quite naturally concentrating on the Supreme Court judgment. It is argued that once such a judgment is passed - after years of sharing of knowledge, building up of public action events, several Government-created reviews, national and international advocacy against the raising of the height of the dam - the public action and resistance activities have to be ended, as there is no further space.
At the other end, the debate concentrates on three points. One, that the judgment has not taken note of the facts and contradicts itself, since the very legal provisions on which it bases its judgment have already been violated. Two, that the choice between a mega project such as the Sardar Sarovar and the needs of the people living in the threatened area is skewed against the poor. The impact of the dam, the benefit of its construction, as well as its power and water outcomes, will benefit the better-off classes. Water will not reach the thirsty people of Kutch, and the unit cost of power will be greater than what poor people can afford. Third, that it reveals the undemocratic nature of the state. The state is not listening to the voice of a broad-based struggle and opinion, but is going by the criteria of politicians who are in collusion with contractors.
The road ahead has been defined as one of confrontation - in the sense of a struggle to capture the very land which will be inundated or the construction which is to be completed. This is where there is need to pause and reflect on the earlier history of non-violent struggle and the earlier experience of the use of broad-based support. This is not the first time that mass action has been ignored and the lives of masses of people have been broken by an undemocratic state. Nor will it be the last.
We may recall Gandhi's satyagrahas. But Gandhi too, like Jayaprakash Narayan later, had to educate people, both those at the actual ground level as well as those up in power, and those not directly involved, about the issues at stake, in his various battles for justice, especially for the masses.
For the struggle in the Narmada Valley, this is what is needed. The awakening of an ever-widening circle of activists, whether they are in the academic, judicial, business, or social change arena, about the dismantling of this temple. It is a temple not only because of its grace, its all-embracing power, its offer of salvation to so many thousands of species including people. But it is also a temple for those who are working towards making the state, the judiciary and the Indian elite more sensitive to environment, more sensitive to the innovations now available for aesthetic and efficient generation of power and use of water, conservation of the nutrients in soil. It is also a temple for those who imagine that they can transform the lives of the most deprived, without taking cognisance of institutions of democracy and how they need to be strengthened through electoral reform, through improving the quality of representation, through participating in politics in order to transform politics.
This kind of strategy of communication, using this apex court judgment as an alarm bell, through public education is perhaps what Gandhi would have done. He used to take five to seven years receding from one `failure' before he renewed his next struggle. The interim was used to think and also to enable his followers to think and to spread knowledge.
A campaign needs to be initiated in the dry areas of Gujarat where people being postulated as the beneficiaries assume that five to 10 years down the line they will have a green space - so that their rights and hopes are not violated in the same way as those whose land and livelihood are being inundated.
Next a whole series of presentations, in every form of the media including books, which portray the lives of those displaced by earlier mega projects such as the Bhakra Nangal dam. What kind of life are the children of the Bakra Nangal oustees living today? What about the soil and the agricultural and power programmes that were envisaged as outputs of the Bhakra dam? The TV cameras need to help us to understand whether promises have been kept. Finally, a deep wide scan which captures the voices of the "to be displaced'' persons, especially the young men and women of the tribal communities.
While this is happening, perhaps the struggle would pause rather than precipitate itself into a confrontation which would divide the ranks and also make people complacent. It has always been the case, worldwide, that when there is a real battle on, civil society turns away because then it is only like a cricket match - they watch to see who wins.
On the other hand, if the confrontation does not take place but the pause becomes one for inviting the participation of more people in preventing the demolition of the temple, then it might not only bring more support and make a better case for another round of negotiations even at the level of the state, but it would also educate the Indian public on the nature of development that is taking place and how it is like the scorpion. What looks benign today will be poisonous tomorrow.
END
ARTICLES BEFORE NOVEMBER ARE IN THE ARCHIVES
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