Blog

Last week’s Queen’s Speech saw a glaring omission – the failure to include a key coalition promise to enshrine into law the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of our gross national income on development aid. 

The commitment, made at the 2005 Gleneagles summit, has for years been seen as the holy grail of development policy – often referred to, never fully attained. It was even upheld by all political parties during the 2010 general election, despite the severe economic downturn. But after a few years of defending 0.7 per cent, politicians are now backsliding. A recent report form the House of Lords proposed that the government should abandon the target, arguing that aid may hinder rather than help development. 

But the coalition purportedly remains committed. So, as a way of fighting off the sceptics, David Cameron and international development secretary Andrew Mitchell have been vociferously...

Author Tim Gee will be speaking at our Scottish campaigner convention on the 19th May. Here he talks to WDM Scotland about his new book on the history of social movements across the globe - Counterpower: Making Change Happen - and how history has shaped his own global justice campaigning.

WDM: Your book ‘Counterpower’ looks at how social justice movements across the world and across history have won change using ‘people power’. As global justice campaigners, what can we learn from history?

TG: I find history most useful for myth-busting. Specifically it shows us that policy-making is not a process whereby wise elites find the best solution for the most people. On the whole government policy is a reflection of the balance of power in society. From that we can learn that simply designing good ideas and communicating them to those in power isn’t enough. Real transformational change comes when the interests of elites are challenged, and when the movement has the capability to remove the power of regimes altogether.

WDM: What are the...

Among the many participants at Corporate Europe Observatory’s EU in Crisis conference this weekend were a host of WDM allies – people we’ve campaigned with against water privatisation, on climate justice and on debt cancellation. This time they were coming together with other organisation and movement representatives to debate the Eurozone crisis and organise against the dead hand of austerity and corporate capture which is gripping the continent.

A new pan-European network was formed out of the conference, which aims to oppose the EU’s ‘austerity treaty’, officially known as the Fiscal Pact, and the related imposition of privatisation and cuts across Europe.

According to Kenneth Haar of Corporate Europe Observatory: “The treaty and the policy it represents are hitting the poorest in Europe the hardest. People in Greece, in Portugal and Spain are paying a particularly severe price, but these unjust polices will lead to more inequality, more poverty and disenfranchisement throughout the continent. It is time to stop listening to banks and big business. Low wages...

Shareholders attending the Barclays AGM in London on Friday were greeted by the World Development Movement’s two ‘evil eagle’ bankers on Barclays bikes as they entered the meeting, and our chants of ‘one two three four, Bank on hunger no more!’, and ‘speculation means starvation, what we need is regulation!’. Catchy, huh?

Our Barclays eagles were popular with the crowd of press photographers, and their pictures appeared in London’s Evening Standard that afternoon and most of the national papers the next day. As the AGM began, our policy officer Christine spoke live on the BBC News Channel about how speculation by banks like Barclays contributes to food price spikes.

Inside the meeting, Barclays’ CEO Bob Diamond was at pains to emphasise his call for banks to be ‘better citizens’. But two of our campaigners were there to challenge him, asking how Barclays could be a good citizen when its involvement in food speculation is fuelling hunger and poverty...

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...

Guest blog by Teresa Anderson, the Gaia Foundation

The issue of land grabbing has itself grabbed headlines recently.  Biofuels, so-called agricultural investors, and commodity speculators buying up land have all been criticised for driving a wave of land grabbing and ecosystem destruction in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The resulting rise in food prices, and the reduced access to land, livelihood and home, means that the world’s poorest are hardest hit.

But in addition to these recognised trends, the Gaia Foundation is calling the alert on another major cause of global land grabbing: mining. Our recent report “Opening Pandora’s Box” signals a wake-up call that the scale, expansion and acceleration of the mining industry today are far greater than most of us realise. We are no longer talking about isolated pockets of destruction and pollution. New lands and communities, new ecosystems and virgin territories, new depths of earth and sea: all are now fair game for the expanding mining industry.

The extractive industries have grown significantly in the last 10 years, due to changes in consumption patterns, and a throwaway culture where regular technology...

It is increasingly looking like the British government is using aid as a way to further British business interests rather than to fight global poverty. This worrying trend prompted our director, Deborah Doane, to write in the Guardian clarifying that since the Pergau Dam legal case that the World Development Movement won in 1994, tied aid has been illegal. This is cartoonist Ben Jennings' take on the story. 

There has been good news this week for those concerned with the impacts of food speculation on the world’s poor. The Danish bank Nordea, which is the largest financial services group in Northern Europe, has agreed to move out of agricultural commodities, whilst German bank Deutsche has announced that it is moving in the same direction.

In its annual report, Nordea acknowledges that there are “questions” over the impact of increased food speculation upon prices, as more and more of the market becomes held by financial players. According to Nordea “it cannot be out ruled that agricultural markets no longer respond to underlying fundamentals of supply and demand”. It is on this basis, Nordea has decided to stop offering financial products in food speculation.

In Germany, after mounting public pressure, Deutsche Bank announced that for the rest of the year it will not set up new investments in agricultural commodities whilst it...

Facebook timeline is here. Show your support for the World Development Movement by using one of our specially designed Facebook timeline covers. 

This is what mine looks like:

Download the covers

Download 'A fairer world is possible'

Download 'A fairer world is possible 2'

...

James Angel, campaigns and policy intern

We might have hoped that the 2008 financial crash would have presented us with an opportunity to rethink the power and influence that the financial sector has amassed since its deregulation in the 1970s. But, far from this, since the crash we’ve seen ever-increasing financialisation, meaning that financial markets, motives and institutions have taken on even more of a role in our economy, in our political systems and within society at large.

In a desperate attempt to kick-start growth we have seen new avenues for financial speculation and investment explored. WDM has exposed the human cost of this in highlighting the role played by financial speculation on food commodities markets in causing spiralling food prices that have sent millions into poverty. But the scope of financialisation and the social and environmental havoc that it promises does not end there.

Rio+20: what’s on the table?

Next on the agenda for profit-hungry financial institutions like banks and hedge...

Guest post by Meera Karunananthan, The Council of Canadians

The Council of Canadians, Food and Water Watch and Focus on the Global South invite you to virtually Occupy the World Water Forum – a corporate trade show aimed at giving the world’s largest water multinationals privileged access to high-level policy making behind closed doors.

The World Water Forum, held every three years, is run by the World Water Council, a corporate think tank whose founding members include the World Bank, Suez and Veolia. With endorsements from several United Nations and government agencies, the World Water Forum fancies itself a multi-stakeholder platform for policy negotiations, yet its 18-month process and expensive entry fees make it inaccessible to grassroots organizations and frontline communities facing the impacts of the global water crisis, particularly those from the Global South. And “high-level” policy roundtables are open only by invitation. 

Organisers of the sixth forum, which will take place in Marseille from March 12-17...

10 per cent of Europeans are unemployed. To solve the crisis we need to grow… food. The idea of becoming a farmer may not seem very appealing. Isn’t the countryside scattered with producers struggling to eke out a living from supermarket prices that barely cover the cost of production? Driving tractors across vast monotonous landscapes or herding cows into industrial milking sheds? Don’t young people up sticks and head for the city, part of a great wave of migration around the world? 

Oil has taken their jobs. Diverse farming, which needs many skilled workers, has largely given way (in the global north) to giant monocultures powered by fossil fuel-hungry machinery and fertilisers. But with climate change almost at a tipping point and so many millions out of work, it’s clear that this is unsustainable.

Subsidising land grabs in Europe 

At a gathering of activists and food producers from across Europe yesterday, I heard about how some growers and community initiatives are realising an alternative, based on the principles of food sovereignty. But small-scale farmers said they face an uneven policy field. 80 per cent of the payments under Europe’s common agriculture policy (CAP) go to just 20 per cent of farmers. Smallholders are entitled to a...

Guest post from the Move Your Money campaign

On-going bonus culture, failing to meet lending targets to small business and increasing customer complaints has been the narrative for the exasperated public this February. Post the financial crisis, behaviour in the city hasn’t changed and it’s high time something was done about it.  

We look at our neighbours in the US and Europe, with thriving local banking sectors and supportive government policy, hear the call from the Federation of Small Business for radical change, and we realise we could, and must, have something better.

March 2012 is Move Your Money Month. We’re calling for people to move their money from the five big banking groups into local, mutual and ethical alternatives. 

There is a large network of credit unions, building societies, ethical banks and community development finance institutions in this country that keep our money safe and offer competitive rates, while investing responsibly.

Change and progress are preceded by action, individual and collective, and local banking systems thrive when we support them. Since the financial crisis the alternative sector has grown considerably. Several ethical...

UPDATE: Bettina has now been released. However, she still faces the charges. We have updated the information below, so please write to the contacts listed below challenging these charges. We have suggested some points you could make.

I have just heard news through friends in Mexico that Bettina Cruz Velázquez, an indigenous Mexican activist who WDM has been campaigning with, has been arrested. The information available suggests that she is the target of unfounded charges and detention as a way to deter her from her campaigning to defend the rights of indigenous people over the interests of multinational corporations. Please read on to find out what has happened, and how you can take action to support Bettina.

Jonathan Stevenson, Jubilee Debt Campaign

As Eurozone finance ministers sat down in Brussels to decide on Greece's future, across town a well-timed University of London conference was underway to try to learn lessons from Latin America's own debt crisis in the 1980s and '90s. Eurozone ministers would have done well to attend because what happened in Latin America three decades ago bears a striking resemblance to what is currently taking place in Europe. 

Then the International Monetary Fund and World Bank lent money to dozens of countries which would otherwise have defaulted, in order to keep the debt repayments flowing back to the banks of the rich world who had created the crisis by their own reckless strategies. They then insisted those countries adopt a set of structural adjustment policies which saw industry privatised, money freed from government control and markets ripped open to competition with...

If you've ever been to the World Development Movement's offices in South London, you'll know that our walls are covered in posters from various demonstrations, events and social movement struggles around the world. Earlier today I went around the office and photographed five of my favourites.

The Zapatista cooperative Las Mujeres con la Dignidad Rebelde, 'The Women with Rebel Dignity'.  

The construction of a dam on the Narmada River, starting in 1989, displaced over 300,000 people and sparked the 'Narmada Bachao Andolan' social movement. Although the movement lead to the World Bank withdrawing from the project in 1995, the Indian government went ahead with it anyway.

The people's...

The Tax Justice Network has launched a new 15 minute monthly podcast service with the latest news, research and analysis of events in tax evasion, tax avoidance and the shadow banking system. TAXCAST producer Naomi Fowler explains why it's so important.

Despite plain evidence to the contrary, there's a disturbing consensus among our politicians that austerity is the only way to go. And that 'austerity-or-broke' agenda has been comprehensively absorbed and regurgitated by the mainstream media, with a few honourable exceptions. Since opposition to this 'Austerity Age' comes largely from outside the Westminster bubble, it gets the occasional brief mention and it's framed as quirky, naive and purely anti-capitalist in nature.

I'm pretty sure research would show that the BBC rarely uses the words 'Occupy movement' without prefacing it with 'anti-capitalist.' Some in Occupy are indeed anti-capitalist but there's also a strong body of opinion within Occupy that wants to reform a financial system that's clearly broken and clearly corrupt. As the recent Occupy Economics Working Group article in the Financial Times shows,...

This blog appeared on the Guardian's Poverty Matters blog on 6 February 2012.

The worrying trend – and potentially illegal direction – of British aid policy showed further signs of rearing its ugly head last week, when the government expressed disappointment at not getting the contract for Typhoon fighter jets in India. The contract was largely expected in return for the UK's ongoing commitment to provide aid to India. India, of course, has increasing prosperity among the middle and upper classes, but it is still blighted by high levels of extreme poverty.

The illegality of tied aid was clarified 18 years ago in a landmark legal action. In 1994, the World Development Movement launched an action in the high court about the proposed British financing of the Pergau dam, a hydro-electric dam on the river Pergau in Malaysia. The UK's partial funding of the dam, through aid totalling $351m, was alleged at the time to be linked to the sale of arms by British firms to Malaysia.

While the UK government had pursued a controversial policy of aid for trade since the late 1970s, the World Development Movement asserted in the...

Guest post by James Angel, used to be campaigns and policy intern

Remember 2008? After decades of unchecked greed and corruption, the neoliberal house of cards finally toppled over, leaving us with the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The big banks have been gambling with our money for years but, as we all know, the costs of the crisis – the unemployment, the lost homes, the austerity measures – have been borne by us. 

Since the crisis, public bail-outs to the tune of several hundred billion pounds have quickly secured a return to record profits and bonuses for the guilty banks. At the same time, their destructive activities have only increased. As has been exposed by the World Development Movement, since the 2008 housing crash banks like Goldman Sachs and Barclays have turned to betting on food as a new means of extracting profit. Financial speculation on food commodities markets has pushed up food prices, leaving the world’s poorest people unable to afford to eat.

In its starkest moment of crisis yet, neoliberalism’s true colours have been made plain for all to see: whilst the banks are ‘too big to fail’, people’s lives can slip...

Soon after it got light on Saturday morning, I set off from a tiny chalet, lugging my bags through a blizzard down a snowy track impassable to cars. The bags were heavier than when I’d arrived, because I was carrying an award. The previous day, Barclays – the UK’s biggest food speculator – had declined to show up to the Public Eye Awards to collect its prize for being the world’s worst corporation. Following WDM’s nomination, Barclays was selected by a jury, while the ‘winner’ of a second prize decided by over 90,000 voters was mining giant Vale.

Last year, WDM revealed that Barclays makes up to £340 million a year from betting on food prices. Our groups across the country helped to bring home to people in the UK what rising food prices mean in the global south, holding sales of impossibly expensive food outside their local branches of Barclays.

But Barclays continues to speculate on food and maintains a close relationship with UK Treasury ministers who are seeking to scupper EU regulation that would curb food speculation. It was time to have another crack and pile on the pressure...

The Durban UN climate talks saw a repetition of the pattern of injustice and inaction of previous climate talks, with rich countries protecting their own interests and those of multinational industries over those of people.

The Durban climate talks were my third experience of what has increasingly become a farcical annual event in the arena of international politics. Throughout two humid, wretched weeks, rich industrialised countries dedicated themselves to protecting economic elites and polluting industries over the survival of people and the planet.  Each year, I have seen bullying and bribery tactics become more ingrained into the process, and the drive to ensure the forum becomes a space where the interests of corporations are ranked higher than the well being of humanity becoming ever stronger, as rich countries desperately struggle to protect the status quo by avoiding the key question: how are global emission cuts to be reached?

...

It’s heartening to hear that President Obama has stood up to Big Oil by rejecting the permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline sought by Canadian oil firm TransCanada. The reason given was that the project is not in the national interest. The pipeline was planned to carry tar sands oil more than 2,000 miles from Alberta in Canada to the oil refineries and ports in Texas. A huge campaign from indigenous activists, environmentalists, farmers, ranchers and youth climate activists was run against the project, and American citizens submitted more than 250,000 public comments against the proposal. 

This is good news. While it is still possible for TransCanada to reapply for the permit to build the pipeline, it must surely be a major blow to the tars sands industry in Canada, which needs to be able to get the oil out of Canada if it is to be economically viable.  

But the tar sands industry has to be stopped. Tar sands are one of the most polluting sources of fossil fuel, threatening water supplies and land locally when it is extracted and threatening the climate when it is burned. 

We’re linked here in the UK to the tar sands project by the global...