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Swap sugar for solidarity

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

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

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

Landing into stalemate?

I arrived into Rio late last night, and headed straight to the small apartment that is to be home for the next ten days. Sarah, fellow WDMer had landed a few hours before, and already orientated herself around the city and had plenty of information to share. Whilst we are here, Sarah will be spending her days at the People’s Summit coordinating with social movements, participating in actions and discussing alternatives to the false solutions that are being proposed at the official summit, and I will be following what’s going on inside the Rio+20 conference (officially known as the UN Conference on Sustainable Development).

Today, I headed on the long journey to the Rio Centro, where the official summit will take place – typically this is over an hour’s drive from the city centre, a space far from the world of real people of Rio, which can be easily monitored and policed. Arriving at a UN summit is always a dizzying process. Working out the bus routes, negotiating the registration process, and orientating yourself around a massive, overbearing and stuffy conference space – in this case a huge airport-style hanger designed for 15,000 people – approximately the same population of the town where I...

Bullying in Doha
This week sees the quadrennial conference in Doha of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN body responsible for championing the interests of countries in the global south vis-à-vis trade and development. UNCTAD was set up in the 1960s in response to concerns that existing bodies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) weren’t adequately set up to deal with the specific problems developing countries faced.

Since then, UNCTAD has fulfilled a valuable role, providing an alternative perspective on the global economy, and challenging the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’ which has dominated the policies of other multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and has led to increased inequality and economic injustice. 

The organisation has worked on a range of important issues, including aid, debt cancellation and trade policy. More recently, it has produced detailed and insightful research demonstrating how the huge increase in financial speculation in the commodity markets is driving volatility and contributing to price spikes for staple foods. And despite having much more limited resources, UNCTAD is recognised as having predicted the financial crisis when...

Past campaign successes

WDM was founded in 1970, by bringing together a number of groups which had been campaigning against world poverty during the late 1960s. We broke new ground by focusing on the causes of poverty and demanding policy changes rather than charitable giving. Since then, WDM has evolved into a democratic, politically independent organisation, with 15,000 supporters and a network of 60 local groups across the UK. Read more about our campaigning successes below.

WDM protesting about the arms trade

  • 2012 Following a prolonged campaign by a coalition of Scottish NGOs and local pressure groups including WDM Scotland, plans for a new coal-fired power station in Hunterston, North Ayrshire were shelved.
  • 2011 After concerted lobbying by WDM supporters, French oil company Total postponed plans to mine tar sands deposits in one of the poorest regions of Madagascar. 
  • 2010 After campaigning by WDM, RBS commits to developing external environmental, social and ethical risk statements and internally implementing similar policies for oil and gas, mining and metals and forestry and defence...

Europe's unfair trade deals

We campaigned against Europe’s unfair trade deals from April 2008 to December 2009.

We are not against trade, but we do want to stop the European pirates stealing our resources"
- Norma Maldonado, Guatemala

In 2006. the European Union announced a new trade strategy which targeted developing countries for trade deals. These trade deals were clearly stacked in favour of European companies, for example unrestricted access to raw materials from poor countries and demanding less regulation for European corporations. The trade strategy also tried to get poor countries to open up their markets to subsidised, imported European goods and produce, rather than allowing space for developing countries to build their own industries.

Campaign successes

The campaign got a quarter of all UK MEP candidates at the 2009 European parliamentary election to sign up to the TJM ‘trade pledge’. Candidates committed to take action if they were elected to get a review of EU trade policy and to promote coherence between trade and development issues. 

WDM groups and supporters took an active part in lobbying their MEPs...

Aid is meant to alleviate poverty, not to help sell fighter jets

The news that the Indian government might choose to buy French fighter jets instead of British Typhoon jets should have nothing to do with the UK’s development aid. But thanks to comments from development minister Andrew Mitchell, aid has become entangled in the media story about the arms trade.

Really? So is it OK, Mr Mitchell, to use aid as a tool to help sell weapons?

No, it’s not OK, and it’s also illegal. The World Development Movement’s exposé of the Pergau dam affair back in 1994 prompted a judicial review that made this emphatically clear.

The UK government had planned to spend £234 million of aid money on the Pergau Dam project in Malaysia, as a sweetener to encourage the Malaysian government to buy arms from British companies. The World Development Movement took the government to court and won, and this landmark case made it clear that UK law does not allow aid to be used as a political tool.

The law hasn’t changed, and the only legal purpose of aid is still to alleviate poverty and promote the welfare of the recipient country’s people....

Occupations and food justice – from Brazil to the UK

Highlights from a recent event in Manchester featuring leading Brazilian and Sri Lankan activists for land redistribution and food justice. And what next for food sovereignty in the UK?

MST march

Delwek Matheus is no stranger to occupations. As one of the coordinators of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil (MST), he has been on the frontline of efforts to redistribute land in one of the world’s most unequal countries. Over the last three decades, the MST has helped organise half a million people to claim land.

A key tactic has been peaceful, mass occupations of uncultivated land – which under the Brazilian constitution can be redistributed.The MST has also occupied the state-controlled Banco de Brasil, challenging its support for industrial, export-led agriculture rather than local food production. Delwek visited the London occupation by the stock exchange during his visit and said it was part of a global movement showing “a new vision of how society can be organised” in relation to finance, resisting the drive to turn essential natural resources into commodities:

Today’s problem of food speculation is...

Grassroots activists meet in Europe’s first food sovereignty forum

Bristol activist; Dan Iles, gives you a tour of Bristol’s food movement on route to Austria to take part in food sovereignty forum  Nyeleni 2011

I've been given the opportunity to represent both World Development Movement (WDM) and Bristol’s community food projects at the European Food Sovereignty Forum, Nyeleni, in Austria. This forum will be a meeting point for around 400 delegates from producers, consumer organisations (food cooperatives, etc), NGOs and community projects from all countries in Europe. It will be an excellent opportunity for food projects across Europe to share ideas and collaborate their actions so as to forge a fully fledged European food sovereignty movement.

My blog posts over the next week or so will be documenting this forum, the decisions made in the working groups as well as profiling the various radical food projects that have been set up in countries across Europe.

First of all however, I am going to write a bit about my thoughts over food sovereignty and tell you all about projects struggling for its realisation in some parts of Bristol.

 

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