World Development Movement blog

Adam Ramsay, Bright Green

In 2005 Latin America made up 80% of the IMF’s total lending. In 2007 it made up only 1%. Over 3 years, their total loan book dropped from $81 billion dollars to $11.8 billion. To put it another way, they lost nearly all of their power.

With a backdrop of a stagnating economy and a population increasingly questioning the logic of his strategy for cutting the deficit, this morning I heard the chancellor, George Osborne, defend his and the government’s policy of fast-reaching, sweeping cuts, many of which are yet to make their teeth fully felt. The IMF, he insisted, were soon to announce their backing for the strategy, and who could be a more independent (and thus compelling) judge than they?

Earlier this week, the European Parliament’s economic affairs committee voted overwhelmingly – 36 against 1 – in favour of a draft law to regulate shadowy derivatives trading. Derivatives are complex financial contracts that can be bought and sold and are the way that banks can speculate on food prices. One of the demands of our food speculation campaign is that food derivatives are traded on ‘open exchanges’ where they can be regulated properly and all trading is transparent, in the same way shares are traded on the stock market. 

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

Environmental campaigner Holly Rakotondralambo from Madagascar is visiting the UK this week to highlight the threat to her country from proposals to mine tar sands there.  Here she tells WDM about the concerns of the local communities around the mining areas that she has visited and what we can do to help stop the threat of tar sands mining in her country.

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

Steve Rolfe, Glasgow WDM group member

It's not often you get the chance to dress up as a blue eagle or a profit-crazed banker (or a bit of both!) in the middle of Glasgow. But it's fun when you do.