World Development Movement blog

At 11.34am on Tuesday 22 January, more than 260,000 of us who had campaigned for a radical Robin Hood tax had big news: we had won.

Even the EU head of tax admitted that we made "tax history". I think that's a bit like making history, but with more paperwork and probably less fun. To be honest, I don't know: as far as I'm aware I've done no "making history" to compare it to. There was that time I made a lego statue for my grandma and she said I'd truly made history, but I think she was just being nice.

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

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

Dan Iles takes a look at the latest World Bank food price figures.

Guest blog by WDM ally Lidy Nacpil, from the Jubilee South Movement on Debt and Development Asia Pacific, writing from the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar.

This statement was put out by some civil society groups in Bolivia, including WDM allies, ahead of the UN climate talks taking place in Doha at the moment.

Last week I went to my first reading group meeting. With the impacts of the financial crisis hitting the poorest people the hardest and a growing movement against austerity; I thought it was time to brush up on my knowledge of economics. The ‘Econo…what?’ reading group project provided the perfect opportunity for doing so.