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Despite its pro-poor, pro-climate rhetoric, the World Bank’s fossil fuel lending has increased 400% since 2006. What’s worse, according to Oil Change International's independent analysis, 0% of these projects were funded specifically to provide energy access to the poor. 

At the same time, the International Energy Agency (IE) predicts that continuing to pursue centralised coal powered electricity will only lower the un-electrified population from 1.4 billion today to 1.2 billion in 2030. In fact, it stated in the 2010 World Energy Outlook that in order to achieve universal energy access 70% of today’s un-electrified population will rely on decentralized renewable energy systems. 

So how do we get the World Bank to change it’s disastrous lending? The first step is updating the World Bank's energy strategy so that it is more effective in fighting poverty, reducing global warming, and environmental impacts. 

On March 1st, NGOs and activists will hold actions in London, Paris, South Africa, and elsewhere across the globe to call on the World Bank to update its energy strategy to phase out fossil fuel lending. Participants will dress up as prisoners with balls and chains, with the balls representing CO2 and coal.

The tag line will be 'Free us...

Iain Thom, Scottish campaigns assistant

Timed for release just as this year’s round of bonuses and bank profits are announced, documentary film ‘Inside Job’ does just what it says on the reel tin:  Director Charles Ferguson argues that both investment bankers and financial regulators knew that the way banks and hedge funds turned a profit was rotten to the core, but that they carried on regardless. 

In short, that the 2008 financial crisis was avoidable.

Authoritative US professors and industry figures are interviewed, including the ubiquitous George Soros, but there is also a long list of names that refused to appear, the food commodity traders Goldman Sachs high up on that list.  The interviews are widely interspersed with narrative shots but sometimes I felt the chopping and changing did not allow the personalities to come through.

The film is almost exclusively US-based.  We learn of bankers who earned massive bonuses on short-term profits in a mortgage market with incentives so perverse it was set up to fail, and of regulators staffed by people who made millions from the rotten system and who simply did not do their job.

Foreclosures and job losses across the US as a result of the credit crunch cardiac arrest and...

Eddy Richards, Global Connect Project Officer

In an online debate in July last year a respected economist, Mr Homi Kharas, rebuts claims that because most small farmers in the developing world are net buyers of food they will lose from higher prices. "That is a static argument. It does not incorporate the supply response that would surely follow."

Now I don't propose to look at this particular issue, interesting and important as it is. What I am concerned about is the underlying attitude economists often seem to display in this type of debate. They look at the (theoretical ) economic response - in this case that growing more food is incentivised - as if that is the be all and end all, without apparently considering what happens in between times. Maybe an analogy would help.

When you get into a bath the water level will rise, depending on your mass and volume. However, if you lower yourself in gradually the change is slow and smooth; whereas if you leap in, the water splashes around, your rubber ducks are...

The World Social Forum (WSF) took place all last week in Dakar, Senegal. It is now a whole decade since the first WSF took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a people's alternative to the annual World Economic Forum - the meeting of political and business elites in Davos, Switzerland.

Although there is some intense debate about the future of the WSF, it continues to be a useful place for movements for economic, social and environmental justice from all over the world to meet. For more detail read Jubilee Debt Campaign's blog from the event. A call was also issued from Dakar to mobilise for the G8 and G20 summits in France this year, which you can read below:

Put people, not finances, first

Call from Dakar to Mobilize for the G8 and the G20 in France in 2011

For the G8, May 21 and 22 in Deauville
For the G20, from October 31 to November 5, 2011 in Cannes

Gathered together here in Dakar during the Convergence Assembly for Action against the G8/G20 at the World Social Forum, we - the social movements, trade unions, international solidarity associations, women and men from all continents - are calling for...

Liz Murray, WDM campaigner and UK taxpayer

Stephen Hester, boss of bailed-out bank RBS, is set to get just over £2million worth of shares as a bonus for his last year’s work.  Well, as one RBS shareholder (mine are part of the Government’s 83% stake, since they bailed you out and I’m a UK taxpayer) to another, Mr Hester, I think we’d better watch out because who knows what might happen to our shares if you don’t have a long, hard look at your bank’s future investment strategy.   I’m talking about coal, oil, gas and now high-carbon, super-polluting tar sands that RBS continues to finance.

 
With RBS having such a fossil-fuel rich portfolio of loans and investments, we shareholders are pretty exposed.  Because as climate change policies tighten, and the fiscal and regulatory measures needed to meet those policies are brought into play, then your bank’s fossil fuel investments could well go bad – and that would be bad news for your £2 million of shares, Mr Hester (not to mention mine).   So, let’s protect our investment. 

I think the answer is for me to ask the Chancellor to meet with you to see whether, between you, you can’t come up with a solution that reduces your investments in fossil fuels,...

Murray Worthy, used to be Policy officer

Paul Krugman is an economist I have huge respect for, and one with whom I often agree. This made it all the more disappointing when I read his recent post for the New York Times dismissing the role of speculation in current high food prices. Sadly Krugman’s arguments, apparently lifted from an economics primer, fall far wide of the mark when it comes to the reality of food markets.

The core of his argument is his simple price graph, indicating that the current price of any physical commodity will be based on the exact balance of supply and demand. Krugman dismisses the role that speculation can play in affecting commodity prices unless banks or other financial speculators take delivery of food:

“plays in the financial markets can only move the price to the extent that they affect physical flows and stocks”

While this model is nice in theory, even the textbooks admit that price formation based on a perfect balance of supply and demand can only happen when:
a) there is perfect information about supply and demand.
b) participants are well (if not perfectly) informed about supply and demand...

Iain Thom, WDM campaign assistant

Susan George, is a political scientist and world-renowned author writing about social justice issues for over 30 years.  Susan is the keynote speaker at this year’s Scottish campaigner convention in Glasgow on 19 March and I had the honour of interviewing her for WDM.

Iain: Please tell us a little about yourself?

Susan: American born, French resident for 50-some years and now a citizen, 3 university degrees at ten year intervals, first book published 1976, 14 others since if you count small ones and those written in French. I’m a scholar activist meaning I’ve always been active in organisations, particularly TNI and Attac. Personally: 3 children, 4 young adult granchildren, widowed 8 years ago, 77 this year, try not to look or feel it, I work every day.

Iain: What is the Transnational Institute and how are you involved?

Susan: TNI is a community of scholar-activists which has Fellows from many countries and in house projects. The strap line says it pretty well: The TNI carries out cutting-edge analysis on critical global issues, builds alliances with grassroots social movements, develops proposals for a...

Environment Minister, Chris Huhne, was here in Scotland yesterday, speaking to MSPs about the UK Government’s plans for the Green Investment Bank.  Talk, perhaps inevitably, turned to whether the bank might be based in Edinburgh, given the renewable energy investment expertise that exists here.

Here at WDM we’re right behind the idea of the Green Investment Bank (wherever it ends up being), although there is a big question mark about the rather puny £1billion of initial capital that the Government is suggesting that it starts off with.  But it shouldn’t be overlooked that there is already a bank based in Edinburgh that, like the proposed Green Investment Bank, is almost entirely owned by the Government and that, with the right investment criteria, could make an even bigger contribution to moving the UK swiftly to a low carbon economy than the GIB’s £1billion initial capital. 

That bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, is more than 80% owned by the Government (and the UK taxpayer) after being bailed out with a whopping £45.5billion by the last Government, but it finances more fossil fuel exploitation than any other bank in the UK.  This is in direct conflict with Government targets to tackle climate change and the proposed low carbon...

Rosie Rogers, campaigner

It’s been two months since the first WDM pig piñata went to the public slaughter. Since then, the World Bank piggy banks have been smashed (or held in custody!) in Brussels, Cancun and over a dozen cities and towns across the UK.

The piñatas (which were made with lots of love, care and creativity) were smashed in public to represent our demand that the money for developing countries to combat the impacts of climate change should be controlled by the United Nations Adaption Fund and not the undemocratic World Bank. The homemade World Bank piggy banks were filled with fair-trade chocolate coins and then smashed so all could see the coins cascade into a box labelled ‘United Nations Adaption Fund’. The stunt was a new way for supporters to introduce the climate debt campaign to the public.

After the smashing success of the pig stunt for WDM supporters across the UK, the pigs went global.

December 8 saw the world-wide launch of the campaign ‘World Bank out of climate finance’ which is supported by...

Julian Oram, Head of Policy and Campaigns

The dust is starting to settle and my jetlag subsiding after a frantic last week in Cancun. As I readjust to winter, I’ve been taking a cool analysis of those final couple of days of UN climate talks, and the eventual settlement reached in the early hours of Saturday morning.

On the final Friday, a palpable sense of gloom filled the conference. I went to a meeting between some NGOs and a contingent of MEPs accompanying the EU delegation, and was posed a question by an MEP which struck at the heart of what was at stake. “For the poorest and most vulnerable countries,” he asked, “is it more important that the process is kept alive, or that a deal is struck that tackles climate change and its impacts?”

The answer, of course, was both: developing countries depend on a multilateral process to keep their voice heard in the negotiations on climate change; but at the same time a lowest common denominator approach pushed by the US, Canada, Japan and other rich countries would do nothing to help keep climate change in check or help poor countries deal with its effects.

With neither outcome seemingly likely, it was with some despondency that we entered the final sessions of the negotiations. Then, at mid-...

Julian Oram, used to be head of policy and campaigns

I’m writing this on the bus in transit from the ‘hotel zone’ to the conference centre as we enter the final day of negotiations here at the COP16 in Cancun. If I was to describe my mood now the word that comes to mind first is nervous; I feel like its final exam day, although it’s the delegations who will ultimately leave here with the pass or fail mark.

Thursday was an odd day. There were a series of statements from various Ministers in the morning, and again in the late afternoon, on their hopes and fears of what is to come out of here. The perspectives and emphasis differed, but the key message was strikingly similar: we must not let Cancun be a failure; and we must find a way to reach agreement and set aside our individual self-interests to work towards the common goal of averting catastrophic climate change.

In between the set-piece statements, Ministers of some countries were working behind the scenes in ‘informal’ meetings to craft yet another set of negotiating texts. These surfaced around mid-afternoon, although its difficult to be sure of exactly when, because the texts were not made public or posted on the UN website. This is when it becomes useful to have connections to delegations,...

Julian Oram, used to be Head of policy and campaigns

Yesterday morning we were greeted with new negotiating texts from the twin tracks of the talks here in Cancun. These new texts represent the closest approximation of the ‘progress’ reached thus far through the past ten days of discussions.

These discussions have happened primarily in the multitude of working groups in  the twin negotiating tracks of the Kyoto Protocol and the framework for Long-term Cooperative Action. Wednesday’s documents represented an effort to consolidate these tortured talks into something vaguely coherent for Ministers to sink their teeth into.

I qualify the word ‘progress’, because in most areas the texts are neither especially advanced nor particularly encouraging for the world’s poorest countries.

Take the area of finance. The text dealing with a new global climate fund for poor countries to access finance for climate adaptation and low-carbon development is still heavily bracketed (i.e. under debate) and littered with opposing options.

Under one option, the aggregate sum is still pegged at a $100 billion/ year by 2020 for adaptation and mitigation; a sum that falls far short of amounts needed by most reliable estimates. Another option (put forward by...

Catherine Negus, used to be WDM intern

WDM members and supporters from Dorset, Brighton, St Albans and London turned out in the freezing cold on Saturday to join the National Climate March and send the message to the UK government that the action being taken on climate change is appallingly insufficient.

The march coincided with the COP16 (Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) meetings in Cancún, Mexico, where world leaders have congregated (in theory) to thrash out a deal to tackle climate change. Activists worldwide are calling for decisive action. ‘We’ve come here in solidarity with the poor and vulnerable of the world’ declared Phil Thornhill from the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Despite the disruption caused by snow, the turnout was strong enough for one thousand marchers to arrange themselves into a massive ‘2030’ in Hyde Park, to highlight the march’s key demand of a ‘Zero-carbon Britain’ by the year 2030. The atmosphere was convivial yet resolute as we left Speakers’ Corner to upbeat music from blaring sound systems. The march closed off roads down Park Lane, up Piccadilly and Lower Regent Street to Trafalgar...

This morning, as I was trying to locate the bus to take me down the long mangrove lined road to the building that was host to the COP16 (short hand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), I met Gopal who had traveled from Nepal to be here. Gopal showed me the way to the bus, and we started talking about his work in Nepal. He was an expert in adaptation, researching local, community-led solutions to enable people to adapt to the impacts of climate change. His main focus was in considering how this locally driven knowledge could be shared, replicated and built on.

He talked about the issues now facing Nepal; melting glaciers, increasingly unpredictable rainfall, a net decrease in food production and a huge falls in the level of ground water table that has already forced a notable migration. I asked where his organisation got its funding from, and he reeled off a list of government departments for international development from across Europe.

I then asked how they found working with these donors. At first he was a little hesitant to sound critical, saying that he didn’t work with them directly, that was someone else’s job. But after I probed a little he went on, "The thing is with these donors" he said "is...

Today, we joined Reza, one of our allies from Justice and Equity Working Group in Bangladesh to pay a visit to the World Bank's stall at COP 16. Reza was asking the Bank’s representatives why they were giving loans to a country like Bangladesh, which already has high levels of debt.

Credit: WDM / Kate Blagojevic

Of all countries, Bangladesh certainly shouldn’t be the one shackled with more unfair debt in the name of coping with the impacts of a climate crisis which it wasn’t responsible for causing. One World Bank official started answering his questions, trying to justify the loans by saying they were optional, that countries had chosen to accept them. But Reza wasn't going to be fobbed off with this pathetic justification of something that was clearly hugely unjust, and went on to explain passionately about what the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh meant for the lives of people living there. Clearly, he said, the people were so desperately in need of funds that they had no choice to accept the loans. The Bank official gulped, looking increasingly embarrassed, and in the end refused to answer any more...

Kate Blagovejic, used to be press officer

On high streets across the UK over the last few months, passers-by have been greeted with the sight of World Development Movement groups taking a big stick to papier-mâché, piñata, pigs. This was part of our on-going campaign to highlight that governments should not be pushing for the World ‘piggy’ Bank to be responsible for disbursing climate finance to developing countries.

In the UK, WDM staff and volunteers formed a pig production line in the basement of our office. But in Mexico, the home of the piñata, we have decided to go pro. Consequently, today we spent hours trying to find a certain shop which employs people with learning disabilities, which specialises in making piñatas.

Thanks to everyone who played human blackjack last week! Hundreds of people took part in our online game to learn more about food speculation and join the fight to stop bankers from betting on food. Also congratulations to Mary from Glasgow who won our prize draw of people who took part - a box of Lush ethical bath goodies is on its way to you!

Though the game was fun (I tried hard to get in the top 10 of the leader board but couldn't beat the top scorers!), the story of human blackjack is a real one. Everyday bankers are betting on food prices in financial markets, making basic foods unaffordable to millions in developing countries. The battle to stop the bankers is going on right now - on both sides of the Atlantic. President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Reform Act earlier in the year which gave the US regulators the powers to clamp down on food speculation. The US regulators now have the job of working out the details but bankers have been lobbying hard for exemptions from the rules.

US campaigners...

Rosie Rogers and Kirsty Wright, used to be climate justice campaign

Yesterday people from all over the country descended on the Department for International Development (DfID). We were there to ensure that the Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell and his department didn't ignore our message that we are against countries being forced into deeper poverty with World Bank loans for climate change. As part of WDM and Jubilee Debt Campaign’s (JDC) No New Debt campaign, people have been sending pound coins to DfID, asking for them to be given to the UN Adaptation Fund as grants and calling on the UK government to honour its pre-election promises that it wouldn’t force countries into new unfair debt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCQ1PjON4-8

DfID not only refused to accept our donations, but threatened to send them to ‘a local charity’. They also confirmed that they would be supporting loans through the World Bank, in spite of Andrew Mitchell’s empty words of support for the UN Adaptation Fund to which his government have not given a single pound. Read more about DfID’s response here.

In...

Last week BBC London news reported that a small protest outside a library in Shepherd’s Bush was prevented by Westfield Shopping Centre security, for no better reason than the fact that particular strip of publicly accessible pavement happened to be owned privately.

Sadly, this story is all too familiar.

Recently released video footage shows of a group of campaigners at the Birmingham Bullring shopping centre attempting to collect petitions. Private security intervened just 38 seconds after the petitioning began.

Right to campaign curtailed from Felix Gonzales on Vimeo.

The right to protest has stealthily been curtailed as once-public areas have been bought by private companies. Birmingham’s Bullring is a case in point. This is a historic city centre market place. However, now that it is owned privately, the current law of trespass allows the owners to discriminate between different viewpoints expressed on their property, and to prohibit any activity that does not make a profit.

The area in front of the Churchill...

WDM has been campaigning on trade issues for most of its 40 year history and throughout this whole period the same thread has persisted: Rich countries forcing developing countries to open their markets to enable big business to line its pockets - at the expense of the poorest people in the world.

And so on Tuesday, when the European Union announced its new trade policy, Trade, Growth and World Affairs we weren’t at all surprised when we saw the same thread running through this ‘new’ strategy.

Earlier this year, the EU announced that it would be reviewing its ‘Global Europe’ strategy – the strategy devised by Peter Mandelson to target developing countries for trade deals. These trade deals massively favour Europe, enabling European businesses to make more profits, while people in developing countries lose jobs, livelihoods and industries. And this week, the new trade strategy, unveiled, after seven months of consultation, looks set to do pretty much the same thing.

The strategy wants to see the Doha round of the highly flawed and discredited World Trade...

When Jayati Ghosh was in the UK a couple of weeks ago we took the opportunity to interview her about the 2007-2008 food crisis, food security and the financial crisis. This is what she had to say.

Iain Thom, WDM campaign assistant

Earlier today I found out Mike Bonnano, one of the amazing Yes Men, made a video for our campaigner convention in Edinburgh last year.  I’m a big fan of the Yes Men’s antics, if you haven’t yet seen these comedic vigilantes in action, what have you been doing!? Watch the trailer here.

I dug out Mike’s video from the recesses of our laptop.  We had invited him to talk with us about whether campaigning really made a difference.  We were on the eve of a visit by the G20 finance ministers to St Andrews and broad coalition of NGOs were gathering to ‘Put People First’ in the post-financial crash and post-banking bailout world that was 2009.

So turns out he lives in the UK, I never knew that!

I went to that G20 finance meeting now one year ago.  In the morning on St Andrews beach twenty of us donned our suits and bowler hats and stuck our heads in the sand.  Why?  Well at the time I wasn’t sure the dizzy...

Adam Gardner, fair trade campaigner

WDM’s Gambling on Food public looked like an un-miss able event, and judging by the packed hall, I wasn’t the only one to think so. It was also my first WDM meeting and though I couldn’t claim to know too much about futures markets or commodity speculation beforehand, it was one of the most informative and inspiring events I’ve been to in a long time.

Dr. Jayati Ghosh firstly painted the picture of food price rises over the past 15 years- eloquently correlating the rise and fall of futures commodity prices with the deregulation of commodity futures markets and the boom and bust of other stock markets during the recent period of financial crisis.
Dr. Ghosh showed enormous knowledge and understanding whilst debunking the myths around food price rises in the global south, including the fact that Indian and Chinese consumption of grains has fallen in absolute terms in the past 15 years - one explanation offered by those who would like to play down the impact of casino capitalism on the world’s poor. She also addressed the impact of climate change, lack of agricultural investment and move to bio fuels worldwide, adding that the speculation on futures prices hugely exaggerates any slight price changes other factors may...

Dan Iles, used to be activism and events intern

Wednesday 20 October was a day marred with the realisation that we face the biggest threat to our welfare state in decades. With this concern in mind a large contingent from the World Development Movement offices left early from work to join the Coalition of Resistance’s march to Downing Street. From the perspective of an intern new to office life, it was a hugely inspiring feeling to be part of a workplace where so many of my colleagues came along to a political rally. If only every office in the country had this amount of political consciousness!

The rally itself was host to a decent and diverse collection of left wing organisations; students, anti war groups, black activists, public service trade unions, socialist and green parties, and anti-fascist groups. In particular there was a good turnout from the international development NGOs like us, the Jubilee Debt Campaign and War on Want. Inspiring speeches from the likes of John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas, Tony Benn and Jessie Jackson made a very commendable challenge to the dominant Tory dogma that ‘there is no alternative’.

However, in terms of building a big enough movement to challenge these cuts, it is clear that we are some way off. With notable...

Saskia Read, Edinburgh local group member

This weekend I decided to escape the rain and cold and check out some of the events at this year’s Edinburgh World Justice Festival.  Now in its 5th year of running, this year’s festival, titled “A world in crisis – what’s the alternative” promised a range of events that would not only be about raising the issues, but more importantly, would be focusing on possible solutions towards positive change.  Sounded good like a good way to spend a weekend.

Friday night’s event looked at some of the recent positive developments in Bolivia and Venezuela in their attempt to address issues of social, economic and environmental injustice.  One successful initiative that was discussed was the ‘Mission Barrio Adentro’ in Venezuela, which has seen the building of local health centres within poor neighbourhoods and the arrival of tens of thousands of Cuban healthcare workers bringing free healthcare to the poor.  The Latin American theme continued into Saturday’s discussions, where WDM’s Kirsty Wright joined the Bolivian Ambassador in presenting Cochabamba: the People’s Agreement, the Bolivian alternative to last year’s failed climate talks in Copenhagen.  One of the questions raised in the discussion with...

This morning I read the new economics foundation’s new report Where did our money go? – building a banking system fit for purpose. The report looks at the causes of the financial crisis, what the results have been and – more importantly – what can be done to reform the banking sector.

A few worrying things immediately stand out. The first is that nef, looking at Bank of England data, find that the banks appear to face a ‘funding cliff’:

“In order to maintain existing levels of activity they currently have to borrow £12 billion a month; the projections we reproduce in this report indicate that in 2011 they will have to borrow £25 billion a month. We believe the public sector is likely, once again, to be asked to bail out the banks for the emerging funding gap."

Another bail out?

The second is that, despite the crisis, the banks have not reduced their reliance on high-risk securitisation processes and they don’t seem to have any strategies to reduce it in the future. This has massive implications as these processes include complex derivatives and credit default swaps which caused the crisis in the first place.

‘What is securitisation?’ I hear...

Kate Blagojevic, used to be press officer

I am sure there are few things that Richard Branson and WDM agree upon; one is the preceding sentence and the second is that excessive speculation by banks and hedge funds exacerbated the food crisis in 2008.

That's all i can think of so in short WDM and Virgin have little in common: WDM has campaigned for the aviation industry's emissions and subsidies to be cut, and on a personal note, Richard Branson throwing Kate Moss over his shoulder and the sexism rife in Virgin ads all make me cross, so it was somewhat surprising to hear conversations about 'a great letter in the Economist from Branson' in the office. But it was true, and regarding this letter in which Branson took The Economist to task over its some of its analysis on the effects of excessive speculation on the price of food and oil.

The OECD report to which Branson refers claims that there is no link between speculation and food prices is widely touted by the banks, and others who oppose reform and regulation which seems to include the Tory party. From Virgin to the World Bank to UNCTAD to the FAO to the UN expert on Food to the US government and to the French government and...

Howard Reed

The recently published report A Bank for the Future by James Leaton and myself recommends that the government should reform RBS into a Green Investment Bank to provide financial support for the UK's transition to a low carbon economy. In the report we argue that the alternative to a Green Investment Bank – carrying on with 'business as usual' – risks imposing huge costs on the UK economy, in terms of making it more vulnerable to future systemic financial crises of the type that almost brought down the entire banking system.

But just how large are the potential costs of returning to business as usual? It's impossible to know for sure. But, as the FT's John Kay (for example) argues, since the mid-1990s each financial crisis – the Asian crisis, the “dot com” collapse and now the credit crunch – has been worse than the previous one. Therefore, it seems reasonable to take the overall costs of the 2008 crisis as an estimate of the minimum costs of the next crisis in the absence of doing anything to make the UK economy less likely to encounter...

Sharon Jordan

Over the weekend hundreds of people concerned about human rights abuses and the environment have gathered outside the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh. They’ve set up camp for four days to educate and campaign against the root causes of climate change.

After mobilising and helping stop the proposed third runway at Heathrow and a new coal fired power station at Kingsnorth, this growing mass movement is reclaiming our future from government and profit-hungry corporations.

Since the bank bail-out in 2008, the UK government has used a staggering £45.5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money – the GDP of Kenya and Tanzania combined – to prop up the Royal Bank of Scotland.

And RBS has been using that public money to finance projects and companies that are wrecking the climate and threatening human rights, such as tar sand extraction in Canada.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has been a Scottish institution for nearly 300 years, with its headquarters in Edinburgh. The £45.5 billion bail-out has left more than 80% of RBS owned by the UK taxpayer.

We have the right to demand that the government rein in the power of RBS, and the other bailed-out banks, and force them to keep to the highest environmental and human...

Wheat prices have hit a two year high. Prices are again climbing steeply for wheat and, despite claims by some analysts in the media, there is plenty of wheat available and talk of global shortages is unfounded.

The last time prices were higher, there was a food crisis and people were going hungry across the developing world, whilst in the US and UK people were paying more for their weekly shop.

Whilst drought, fire and flooding have reduced Russia and Canada's wheat harvest respectively, there is a bumper yield in the United States and global wheat stocks are high. So if the price were based on supply and demand for wheat itself, the price would not be rocketing in the way that it has over the last month. According to Jonathan Barratt, managing director at Commodity Broking Services in Sydney “There are two things driving the market, fear and fund buying.”

Those funds are the same speculators which caused food prices to go so high in 2008, and have sent coffee and cocoa prices all over the place in recent months. Now they are once again pushing up the price of one of the world’s staple foods. It has been reported that speculators bought an unusually high number of wheat contracts in recent weeks.

Some producers of biscuits and bread have said that...

Yesterday afternoon, James, Kiama Kaara from Kenya Debt Relief Network and I drove to Thika, a medium-sized town 40km north east of Nairobi along a bustling road lined with traders, construction workers and shops for a meeting with Zachary Makanya from the PELUM Association.

PELUM, which stands for Participatory Ecological Land Use Management, are a network of civil society organisations and NGOs working with small-scale farmers from East, Central and Southern Africa. Their vision is an inspiring and humbling one and what Zachary told us was very clear. Kenyans are still not seeing an improvement in their quality of life despite decades of aid money being poured into the country by mostly good-intentioned by often ill-informed and patronising donors and NGOs. The effects of aid dependency and the legacy of colonialism mean that the urgent process of ‘decolonising the mind’ must now start in earnest if African nations, Kenya included, are to resist the fierce and bullish march of globalisation and industrialisation, which is already wiping out traditional knowledge, languages, indigenous communities and the natural environment.

...

The Kibera slum in Nairobi is home to around 1.5 million people. That's half the population of Nairobi, squeezed into just 2.5 square kilometres. On the way there, our driver, Charles described the extent of the violence that erupted in Kibera during the 2007 elections. Cars were set alight, men, women and children were beaten as they were forced out of from their homes and pumped with tear gas by the Kenyan police. As we approached the entrance to the slum, Charles locked down the doors and wound up the windows. The public perception of Kibera within Kenya is that it’s a dangerous, lawless place.

Our perception was a very different one. We met with a group of eight women and Sheikh Ahmed Abdulrahim, a community human rights activist for a meeting under a tree just on the edge of the slum. They spread out their scarves on the ground for us to sit on and started to tell us about their campaign and their own personal experiences.

Kibera Women for Peace and Fairness connect the violence in 2007 with the extreme poverty they live in. The unrest was partly to do with a huge hike in food prices, which meant many people could only afford to eat one meal a day. This, and the horrific conditions and deprivation people have to suffer in Kibera led to the overflowing of...

While I’ve been in Kenya I’ve been reading a new book by Milford Bateman; Why doesn’t microfinance work? The destructive rise of local neoliberalism. Microfinance has been feted as an effective solution to poverty for the very poor for a number of decades now, and in 2006 Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the first microfinance institution, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Milford Bateman’s contention is that microfinance is not only very bad at ‘lifting people out of poverty’, but that it has only survived and prospered in the mainstream development community because it fits very well with needs of maintaining a neoliberal economic system.

Africa is, of course, now flooded with microcredit lenders, and Kenya is no exception. Bateman’s book is excellent at demolishing the ‘myths’ about the efficacy of microfinance, including the contention that it empowers women. But with particular reference to Africa he argues that what Africa needs is not “a vast reservoir of self-employed traders” but “a robust light industrial foundation … and manufacturing-based enterprises capable of productivity growth.” In fact, he argues, “the proliferation of microfinance...

Rosie Rogers, used to be campaigns and policy intern

Bright-eyed and ready to save the world in one internship, I was ready to take on any challenge! As part of our new commodities campaign. I was asked to find out how to complain about Goldman Sachs (GMS). A simple task I thought…

FSA: "You have no rights"

First stop, the Financial Services Authority (FSA). I called the general enquiries number and was met with a friendly 'customer services' handler who was happy to answer my questions, but kept asking who I worked for and where I was calling from - my poker voice served me well!. I was told that the FSA don’t deal with formal complaints and that since I’m not a GMS customer, I 'have no rights'.

I was advised to make a formal complaint with GMS, then they had 8 weeks to respond and if the response was not satisfactory, I should take my case to the Financial Ombudsman Service who was ‘better equipped to deal with complaints’. I then stated to my previously friendly FSA buddy – who was now slightly fed up – that it’s ridiculous that only customers have rights, to which he reeled out some standard FSA statement about what the FSA can and can’t do. I was sent a standard leaflet on how to make...

Tim Jones, used to be policy officer

Some of us may have been surprised to wake up this morning to hear that a hosepipe ban may be introduced soon in north-west England following a lack of rain. For the past few years the ‘weather story’ in the UK has been one of cold, wet summers. Those unable to distinguish between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ have used this story to spread absurd falsities about climate change, such as the Conservative MEP who told me “the world has been in a cooling phase for the last ten years”.

Maybe the lack of rain in the north-west of England will open the mainstream media’s eyes to the true climate story which continues unabated. The decade just ended was the warmest ever recorded. 2010 is so far on track to be the warmest year ever.

Across the world we continue to see how these changes in climate affect real people. India has been suffering from a heat-wave, with temperatures reaching almost 50°C. The monsoon has made a stuttering start, after one of India’s worst ever droughts last year. Over 2 million people have been displaced from their homes by extreme floods in China.

But there...

4 June 2010

We have recently launched www.whoshouldicheerfor.com – a website that ranks the countries playing in the World Cup based on development and social justice indicators such as income inequality, maternal mortality rates and carbon emissions per capita.

This means that if you want to support a team that gives aid generously, you could choose to cheer for Denmark or the Netherlands. And if you wanted to choose a low carbon country, you could choose Cameroon or Ghana.

The site is not an overall ranking of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we think each country is. It is intended to be a fun and interesting way to think about the serious issues of global poverty and the inequality between the nations competing in the World Cup. 

For example, Nigeria is the poorest country in the World Cup with an income of £730 per person a year. It takes England centre-back John Terry just ten minutes to earn the same. Some of the poorest countries in the world are playing in South Africa and we think that we should cheer for them.

We have also put together a great team of bloggers from a range of organisations who will write daily during the World Cup on issues around football and social justice...

“Sin preguntas, sin negociar, el agua es vida” read one of the last billboards I saw as I was leaving La Paz. "Without question, without negotiation: water is life". The right to water, and the fear of losing it, has been a common theme since I arrived in Bolivia. Realising the right to water has long been a struggle for people here, even before the famous water wars in 2000. Now climate change brings a new threats, with melting glaciers and erratic rainfalls putting new pressures on the already scarce resources.

Yesterday, I went to visit the Khapi community at the foothills of the Illimani glacier that overlooks La Paz, dominating the skyline. Illimani has long been said by indigenous Aymara communities to be a guardian of the people. There’s certainly some wisdom in this. Not only is the glacier the source of water for the hundred of communities who live in the hills below it, as well as upwards of twenty percent of La Paz’s water supply (some estimate that it is closer to forty percent), but these agricultural communities are also the gardens of the La Paz, providing...

From what I have seen in the last few weeks, Bolivia seems to me to be one of the most politically engaged countries I have experienced. In my short time here, I’ve already stumbled across a number of impromptu demonstrations. Last week in Cochabamba, as I was walking to visit Marcella Olivera, an amazing and inspiring activist who played a significant role in the water wars of 2000 and an active campaigner on water ever since, and people were blockading the crossroads down from her office. It was hard to know why; even the people in Marcella’s office weren’t sure. It’s hardly surprising then, that 1st May, Labour Day, is a big event in La Paz, Bolivian’s capital.

The Labour Day march had started early in the morning in El Alto, one of the poorer districts on the outskirts of La Paz. Still struggling with the altitude (at over 4,000 metres, La Paz is the world’s highest city), I was glad to that I had friends from the cumbra arriving that morning, providing me with an excuse to join the march until a little later when it reached the city’s centre. Not familiar with the route, we went to Plaza Murillo, the march’s final destination, and followed the sound of the fire crackers in the distance. We came out of one of the small side streets, towards the footbridge...

I’ve been campaigning for stronger corporate accountability for a fairly long time. So it should come as no surprise to me that I don’t generally see eye to eye with corporate executives. But sometimes, just sometimes, you hope the facts speak for themselves – and that those corporate executives would have a sudden attack of conscience. So when a group of us met with RBS executives in Edinburgh after their AGM, we hoped the facts would speak for themselves.

When we were invited to meet with Sir Philip Hampton, RBS Group Chairman, and several of his team in public affairs and corporate sustainability, we of course thought the meeting had an air of PR spin to it.  But we also thought that perhaps, if only because they had made a serious endeavour to move the meeting and accommodate us (Chairmen don’t generally accommodate), they were prepared to move every so slightly on their position.

Canadian First Nations campaigners Eriel Deranger, and Heather Milton Lightning spoke poignantly about what was happening in their communities as a result of the tar sands mining just up river. Human, health and environmental disasters are what the tar sands are all about - an energy resource that’s six-times more carbon intensive than conventional fossil fuels, scarring an...