Controversy over the call for debarment of a Canadian contractor is proving a litmus test of the World Bank's commitment to apply the same standards to corrupt Northern companies as it does to Southern companies and government officials. In a landmark judgment on 15 August, the Court of Appeal of Lesotho rejected the major appeal of Canadian engineering firm Acres International. The company was convicted of bribing a public official to win a contract on the World Bank-funded Lesotho Highlands Water Project last year.

The Kenyan delegation played a critical role in the collapse of the World Trade Organisation in Cancun, Mexico. NGO and media sources in the UK say it was the decision of Trade minister Mukhisa Kituyi to walk out of the talks, following the refusal of the EU to back down on some of its key demands, after days of tough talking, which finally signalled the end of the talks.

A Norwegian government delegation arrives in Kenya next month to lay the foundation for the re-establishment of a development aid agency. The team, to be led by former prime minister, Torbjorn Fagband, will be in the country from 22 October to re-launch the Norwegian Development Agency. Norwegian parliament vice-president Inge Lonning said Norway was happy about the Kenya government's commitment to fight corruption.

Water privatisation was on the radar screen of officials, activists and corporate executives alike during the WTO Cancun meetings in Mexico. Privatizing municipal water services is a worldwide phenomenon in both developed and developing countries. However, community outcry against the practice is also on the rise. French-based Suez, the worlds second largest water company, has concessions in more than 100 countries around the globe. Yet, as local residents can attest, privatising water has actually made it much less accessible.

It was agricultural subsidies, not education, that led to the collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks at Cancun yesterday. But activists warn that a less well-known component of WTO negotiations, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), is a lurking threat to public education systems everywhere. Groups including Education International, the worldwide federation of teachers’ unions, say that GATS would force countries to allow more foreign providers to sell education services, whether through distance learning or by establishing satellite institutions overseas.

Across the world, poor people are facing another attack on their living standards by rich countries and big companies at the WTO. The results of the WTO agreements have already led to more people going without water, electricity, access to land, housing, the right to fish, education, hospitals, medicines and food security. With the current WTO meeting in Mexico governments from Europe and US want to further attack these rights. The biggest threat at this WTO meeting is the attempt to force all countries to privatise all government services, including, transport, water, electricity, housing, education, health and even tourism. On the 13th of September there will be a Global Day of Action to show big companies and governments from the north that their plans will not be accepted.

Some 65,000 refugees who fled recent fighting in western Sudan are living out in the open in northern and north-eastern Chad with no food, safe drinking water or healthcare. These are some of the findings of an assessment mission comprising officials of the UN refugee agency, the UN World Food Programme, and two Chadian members of parliament who have just returned from visiting the refugees.

Forty-two journalists have been killed worldwide in 2003 so far, according to the International Press Institute. In Africa, Kloueu Gonzreu, 51, a correspondent for the state-run news agency, Agence Ivoirienne de Presse, was found dead by a team from the Red Cross near Toulepleu, a town in the western part of the country, where Liberian mercenaries employed by the Ivorian government reportedly kidnapped the journalist on January 11.

South African anti-globalisation protesters have branded the South African government as a sell-out willing to abandon the rest of Africa and the developing world to further its own business interests. The six protesters levelled the charges on Sunday before heading to Cancun, Mexico, to join about 50 000 other activists who will protest against the latest round of the World Trade Organisation negotiations that are scheduled to start on Wednesday. The six are part of the African Trade Network that wants to "constitute a strong African voice that opposes and seeks alternatives to further expansion of the WTO".

African trade ministers and officials are approaching the fifth World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial talks that began in Cancun, Mexico, on Wednesday, with low expectations. Since the collapse of the WTO's 1999 session in Seattle, Washington, the organisation has struggled to come up with a new world treaty on trade. It took about two years before trade ministers met in Doha, Qatar in November 2001 and gave themselves three years to complete work on a new treaty.
Related Link:
* Gloomy forcast for sunny Cancun
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=20037

With trade ministers from around the world gathering in Cancun, Mexico, this week for a key round of negotiations under the World Trade Organisation (WTO), labour unions are complaining loudly that workers rights have been excluded from the agenda. Globalization has the potential to bring prosperity to people across the world, but today's crude, free market globalization is pushing standards down and leading to massive exploitation," said the ICFTU's General Secretary, Guy Ryder, who will be observing the Cancun meeting.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, Afropessimism permeates both the scholarly and popular literatures on Africa. In the dominant discourses, Africa is constructed as "hopeless," "hemmed in," on the periphery, and even as "left out" of the global economy and community of nations. This interdisciplinary volume interrogates these interpretations and offers a probing critique of neoliberal globalization and its uneven impact on Africa. The essays debate the constraints and opportunities for Africa’s political economy, civil societies, and cultural production in the current era of intensifying globalization.

A last-minute World Trade Organisation compromise in Geneva on intellectual property protection and access to medicines is being heralded by some as finally opening the doors to imports of generic medicines by poor countries without a manufacturing capability. In intense negotiations in recent months, the U.S. reached behind-the-scenes agreements with key countries such as Brazil, India, South Africa, and Kenya. The U.S. and the international pharmaceutical industry made some concessions after blocking an agreement for almost two years. However, the compromise also imposes extremely complicated procedures designed to protect patent rights, which leave enormous obstacles to overcome before affordable medicines are actually made available. The World Health Organisation and treatment access activists stress that the real test will be whether affected countries and international agencies take full advantage of their right to put public health before patent rights. Clicking on the link provided will take you to the rest of this posting by Africa Action containing a variety of statements and articles on the issue.

From 14-17 August 2003, we activists from across Africa, representing African civil society organisations, labour unions and other social movements, gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa to evaluate the current state of negotiations in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and to strategise and make known our positions on the 5th WTO Ministerial Conference due to be held in Cancun, Mexico from 10-14 September 2003. Our stand on WTO's role: We re-affirm our recognition of the WTO as a key instrument of transnational capital in its push for corporate globalisation. We noted the many destructive effects of WTO agreements on the lives of working people and the poor, especially women, in Africa and throughout the world. We renewed our determination to continue resisting corporate globalisation, and the WTO itself until it is replaced by a fully democratic institution.

A new report reveals the key role transnational corporations play in shaping the policy of the WTO. 'Business Rules: Who pays the price?', released on August 28, was produced by Friends of the Earth International and the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). Friends of the Earth International is highlighting the WTO meeting which it believes could have devastating impacts on people and the environment around the world. Through a series of eight case studies, the report strips back the rhetoric of free trade and the "pro-development agenda" and reveals the reality of the WTO system.

The world is beginning to look like France, a few years before the Revolution. There are no reliable wealth statistics from that time, but the disparities are unlikely to have been greater than they are today. The wealthiest 5% of the world's people now earn 114 times as much as the poorest 5%. The 500 richest people on earth now own $1.54 trillion - more than the entire gross domestic product of Africa, or the combined annual incomes of the poorest half of humanity. Now, just as then, the desperation of the poor counterpoises the obscene consumption of the rich. Now, just as then, the sages employed by the global aristocrats - in the universities, the thinktanks, the newspapers and magazines - contrive to prove that we possess the best of all possible systems in the best of all possible worlds. In the fortress of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay we have our Bastille, in which men are imprisoned without charge or trial.

Is it fair that every European cow laps up $2.50 a day in subsidies while half the people in the world live on less than $2 a day? Cutting through the technical jargon, that is the crucial political question that trade ministers from 146 countries must answer when they meet next week in the Mexican resort of Cancun. The gathering will assess the prospects for the World Trade Organisation's Doha round of market-opening talks, launched in the Qatari capital in November 2001 and ambitiously scheduled to be wrapped up by the end of next year.

Watching the news, it seems that there's a new environmental crisis occurring almost daily: global warming, pollution, habitat destruction, species depletion and extinction, and much more. The bad news is plentiful and painful. But then, on a fairly regular basis, a nice-looking man pops up and says that everything you are seeing is an exaggeration. The environment is fine. Everything's fine. To the average person, it must be quite confusing. What's going on here? Are the stories on environmental calamity really an exaggeration? The quick answer is no.

Privatization of public services and natural resource extraction is now a central component of IMF and World Bank program and project work in developing countries. For most impoverished countries, it is a condition for development assistance and debt relief. This review by the Halifax Initiative, a coalition of organisations concerned about the international financial system, looks at privatisation in the areas of water, land and labour - and indicates that broad assumptions about the benefits from privatization are an error. "For the poor especially, privatization as a whole has not brought better service at an affordable price," says the review.

Non-contributory pensions can help to reduce and prevent poverty among older people and their households in developing countries, according to evidence from a new research study, which compares and examines the impact of non-contributory pension programmes in Brazil and South Africa. The joint project was undertaken by researchers in the UK universities of Manchester and East Anglia, universities in Brazil and South Africa, and HelpAge International.