Real world economic outlook is a yearly publication, produced by the team that launched the Jubilee 2000 campaign. Real world economic outlook examines the global economy from a radical perspective: that of economic and environmental justice. In stark contrast to the output of institutions like the IMF, whose bi-annual economic report it shadows, this book is both intellectually rigorous and accessible, informing and offering alternative analyses to a wide audience. With contributions from high profile and leading thinkers like Joseph Stiglitz, Dani Rodrik and Herman Daly, it sets out to integrate economic, environmental, and gender themes; to challenge dominant economic orthodoxy; and to transform mainstream economic thinking.

Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser will get his final chance in January 2004 to beat agribusiness and biotechnology giant Monsanto, when the Canadian Supreme Court is to issue a ruling that could affect farmers the world over. Schmeiser's entire canola crop was seized after Monsanto filed a legal complaint. Monsanto said Schmeiser violated their patent rights on the company's genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready canola by growing it without paying for the seed and without signing a technology use agreement. "The outcome of the Schmeiser case will set an important precedent for other countries," says Peter Rosset, an agroecologist and co-director of FoodFirst/Institute for Food and Development Policy, an organisation that promotes food as a human right. The implications for agriculture worldwide will be profound, agrees Helweil.

President George W. Bush has ordered the State Department to withhold U.S. family planning help from overseas groups that promote or perform abortions with their own money. The decision Friday expands an order issued two years ago that applied only to family planning money administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, a division of the State Department. Bush opposes abortions, except in cases of rape or incest or when pregnancy endangers a woman's life.

A new study has highlighted the key role of ethnic, religious or linguistic discrimination in establishing and perpetuating economic exclusion against minorities and indigenous peoples. The causal link between these forms of discrimination and economic exclusion often remains hidden due to insufficient data and lack of understanding by development actors of their role in the process of entrenching poverty. However, this connection has serious implications for development policy aimed at reducing poverty and inequality, a major priority of many current development efforts. The study by Minority Rights Group International (MRG), states that economic exclusion is just one of many forms of exclusion including lack of social and political opportunity and participation.

A good indicator of a country’s quality-of-life is the way it treats its most vulnerable members. Kids are a good measure of how well government policies percolate to the most sensitive and defenceless segment of society. A new report contains data on all countries with a population of more than ten million, noting that children are more vulnerable than adults to hazards of any form due to their size, physiology and behaviour. Children under age five breathe more air, drink more water and eat more food per unit of body weight than adults, so they experience a greater risk from pathogens and pollutants.

Nigerian textile firms are crumbling by the day courtesy of Nigeria's accord with the World Trade Organisation. The collapse of the firms - despite the federal government's limited protection - has thrown thousands of able-bodied men and women into the unemployment market. Since Nigeria signed a WTO agreement sometime in 1995, Nigerian firms have been groaning under the weight of goods-dumping by foreign companies.

In the context of growing interest in youth participation, child protection organisations are increasingly calling for more input from children and youth themselves. However, this focus on the “voices of youth” is often translated solely into circumscribed forums, such as contests, three-minute interventions at the UN Security Council or a spotlight of fame on a radio broadcast. Too rarely do we get an in-depth glimpse into the thought processes, experiences and opinions of young people caught up in poverty and war. Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life by China Keitetsi provides a different perspective: over 200 pages of reflections on China's early childhood in rural Uganda, her involvement as a child soldier in the National Resistance Movement (NRM, which brought current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni into power), her eventual flight to Denmark via South Africa and her opinions on past and current political developments in Uganda.

The privatisation of water has been accompanied by large profits, higher prices, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, lack of transparency, reduced water quality, bribery and corruption, says a book from the Council of Canadians and the Polaris Institute, which takes a sobering look at the growing scarcity of fresh water and argues that the commodification of water is wrong on ethical, environmental and social grounds. The book notes that trade agreements are robbing governments of their control over domestic water supplies: with water now classified as a good, global trade institutions give transnational corporations unprecedented access to the freshwater resources of signatory countries.

Senegal is shutting down all mining operations in protected forests in a bid to preserve the country's natural resources. No new mining permits will be issued for protected forestlands throughout Senegal. When current ones expire, they will not be renewed, government sources say.

Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa could earn about two billion U.S. dollars more every year if industrialised countries dropped their trade-distorting agricultural policies and opened their markets to goods from the developing world, says the International Food Policy Research Institute. The present round of world trade talks - called the Doha round - are meant to kick-start the economic development of the developing world. However, the talks have stalled because of differences between the developing world and the industrialised countries over trade in agricultural goods. World trade ministers are scheduled to meet in Cancun, Mexico on Sep. 10-14, to see if they can find a way out of the impasse.

From September 10 to 14, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will hold its Fifth Ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico. Pushed by multinational corporations, the United States, the European Union, and other developed countries are seeking to launch a new round of "free trade" negotiations and expand corporate globalization - further eroding human rights, workers' rights, environmental protections, and democracy - in the interest of corporate control. Popular movements in Mexico and their international allies will mark these meetings with massive demonstrations to demand a world that puts democracy and human dignity ahead of corporate profits.

"National States alone cannot offer individuals the protection they need and deserve, as the attacks on the Twin Towers in Manhattan show. The protection offered by national States is not sufficient to guarantee the life and freedom of their citizens if the international community, too, is not based on the rule of law. Only the existence of mechanisms for the protection of all persons in all countries can bring lasting, comprehensive peace." This is an extract from an interview with the International Criminal Court's first Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The interview was published by www.moveon.org, an organisation that campaigns to bring ordinary people back into politics.

"We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we recognize that our existence is governed by material realities, and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in which we live, then generalizes it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality." Read social commentator George Monbiot's latest column, in which he argues that climate change threatens the future of humanity, but has led to a refusal of the human race to respond to the crisis rationally.

Does the Internet have the potential to accelerate development in poor nations? Or is it an innovation that will widen the gap between wealthy and poor countries? This paper places the Internet in a framework of major innovations in modern economic history that have contributed to increased global economic inequality.

Big business is lobbying hard to get the outcome it wants at the Cancun WTO Ministerial Meeting. The World Development Movement's new action calls on the UK and EU to base trade policy on the needs of poor communities, developing countries and the environment rather than on the demands of big business and corporate lobbies. Join the call to put people before profits.

Ten NGOs have sent a joint memorandum to World Trade Organisation members on the need to improve internal transparency and participation in the organisation. The Memo highlights many things wrong with the decision-making system and gives concrete proposals. This issue looms large as the Cancun Ministerial approaches. If not changed, the untransparent process will result in an anti-development outcome in Cancun. The memorandum was prepared by: The Third World Network, Oxfam International, Public Services International, WWF International, The Centre for International Environmental Law, Focus on the Global South, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, The Africa Trade Network, The International Gender and Trade Network, and The Tebtebba International Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Rights.

Apartheid, it seems, works. Nearly 10 years since racial segregation was abolished in South Africa, identity is still rooted in race. Or so it would appear from the case of Happy Sindane, the blond Ndebele-speaking boy who walked into a police station last month saying he had been abducted from his white family by their black cleaner at the age of six and brought up among blacks. He asked the police to help him find his white parents. The story was presented, to the fury of black commentators, as that of a lost white boy who had walked, Tarzan-like, out of the jungle. The courts demolished the fantasy last week after DNA tests established that Happy had at least one black parent.

Kenyans are smuggling rare cactus plants from Somalia to Western countries where they are used to make body lotions. The Lusaka Agreement Task Force Chief Intelligence Officer, Mr Clement Mwale, said they are investigating the poachers whom he said are sophisticated operators.

This important book on the politics of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which takes the lid off how the WTO really works, and what really happened before, at, and after the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha in 2001, on the basis of interviews with 33 Geneva-based delegates to the WTO and 10 Secretariat staff members. This is the ammunition the critics of the WTO have been waiting for. It reveals the systematic subversion of an ostensibly democratic system to ensure that the "agreements" that are reached are those the major powers - primarily the US and the European Union - want, irrespective of the views of interests of most developing countries, who form the great majority of the membership.

The Mindset Network is a R225-million public-private partnership aimed at providing learning television channels in schools using Multichoice's DStv satellite network. Funded by the Liberty Foundation and Standard Bank, Mindset will launch an HIV/Aids education channel in September and a primary school channel next year. Mindset kits - which include satellite receivers, decoders, smart cards, teacher training and technological support - cost R12 000 each.