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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.

We deserve to celebrate being one of the hundreds of thousands of grassroots optimists who wrote to our MPs, shared links on Facebook and dressed up as Robin Hood on marches. Strong public pressure forced 11 EU countries, including Germany, France, Spain and Italy, to seek - and win - the green light to introduce a tiny financial transaction tax. This tax of less than 1 per cent could raise £29.3 billion a year. There's still a lot to be done before we've truly won, though: we need the tax in more countries, including here in the UK, and along with 127 coalition partners, the...

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.

Vedanta's mine would destroy the home of the Dongria Kondh. © Lewis Davids/Survival

Most infamously, Vedanta wants to mine for bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills in the Indian state of Odisha, despite the determined resistance of the Dongria Kondh indigenous people who live in the hills. The Dongria, for whom Niyamgiri is sacred, say the mine would destroy their forests and rivers and their way of life.

Vedanta has already built a bauxite refinery at the foot of the Niyamgiri Hills, causing pollution and disease, and taking away the homes of more than one hundred families.

Last week saw anti-Vedanta protests by indigenous people and farmers in Odisha mirrored by demonstrations...

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...

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

The recent World Bank’s quarterly Food Price Watch, released this November, yet again paints a concerning picture in terms of continued high food prices across the world. Worryingly, the World Bank recognises a new norm of high and volatile food prices but still refuses to mention any reference to food speculation and the actions of financial institutions. 

Key points:

• International food prices remain close to all-time highs. Food prices in October are still 7% higher than a year ago, and the prices of grains remain particularly high. Prices of grains are 12% above their levels 12 months ago and very close to the all-time high observed in 2008
• The national price of wheat increased by 27% in Tajikstan between July and September
• Countries reliant of US exports of maize are still very vulnerable to price fluctuations. The price of maize in Haiti and Honduras went up by 28% and 19% respectively between July and September 
• The World Bank...

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.

I arrived in Doha on 2 December for the second week of the UN climate negotiations, to find that no progress has been made on the critical issues that should be resolved at this meeting. I didn’t find this surprising. My direct experiences with the last five annual UN climate talks before Doha have shown a clear effort by many of the rich, industrialised countries – ‘developed countries’ in UN language – to evade compliance with their obligations under the Climate Convention and their legally binding agreements to take urgent and immediate action to address the climate crisis and prevent it from reaching catastrophic levels.

It is no wonder that some climate justice activists are now refusing to get involved in the battles taking place in the context of the international negotiations. The odds are heavily stacked against the rights and interests of the majority of people all over the world, especially those from the South - from the ‘developing and least developing countries’ - who are the most vulnerable to the devastating impacts of the crisis.

Many of us do still choose to fight in the...