The LINK Centre, School of Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in conjunction with the University of Michigan School of Information has a limited number of places still available on the Global Graduate Seminar on Globalisation and the Information Society: Information Systems and International Communications Policy.

The West African IT Training and Education Forum will run concurrently with the 6th AITEC West African Computing and Telecommunication Conference and Exhibition. The Forum will among other objectives brainstorm on a wide range of issues pertaining to the enhancement of IT training and education at all levels in both formal and informal educational system of West African states.

The first volume of a three volume study "Abortion Policies: a Global Review", prepared by the Population Division of the UN has been published with financial support from the United Nations Population Fund. The study comprised an analysis of abortion laws and policies in every country of the world, both developed and developing. It includes information on the social and political settings, the ways in which these laws and policies have been formulated, and how they have evolved. Information on the incidence of abortion and the setting in which abortion occurs is included wherever possible in order to complement the policy picture.

Many Third World countries feel they have no easy solutions, and thus turn a blind eye on the "embarrassment" of slavery. They would even deny its existence. Sudan is one country where reports of slavery have persistently emerged, and the Khartoum government is accused of having a hand in promoting this act.

Legislation is urgently needed to help fight the growth in the sexual trafficking of women and children into Europe, the British government was told Monday.

Thousands of civil-society organizations have completed a major multi-country assessment with the World Bank of the impact of the economic adjustment policies of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund on local populations in the developing world. The results, summarized in a 25-page report, The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis and Poverty, show a systematic weakening of the productive capacity of the countries implementing Bank policies and the inability of these countries to generate productive employment at a living wage. Poverty has been further deepened by the inability of the poor to access essential services at affordable rates.

Throughout the 1980s, incomes, living standards and investments in Africa plummeted, while poverty declined in South and East Asia. With world attention now focussed on global issues, not least damaging effects in Africa, this timely book argues that structural adjustment programmes in Africa, enforced by the international financial institutions, have produced a tighter dependency than colonialism achieved. 978156475X, 2001, Fourth Dimension.

Recent Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, along with well-known economist Paul Krugman, have of late made a flurry of public statements critical of the policies and processes of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank / IMF, and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) — while leaving plenty of harsh words for the blatantly pro-corporate actions of the Bush Administration. Both economists point to the disruptive and distorting influence of large corporate entities through their dominance over both domestic and international institutions.

Although the European Union is developing the capacity to become a fully-fledged crisis management actor in the international arena and is co-operating with the United Nations, it does not regard its humanitarian work as a crisis management tool and is not in favour of a humanitarian alliance.

The International Monetary Fund has called on the world's richest countries to boost aid budgets and debt relief efforts to prevent the gathering downturn in the global economy pushing millions more people in the developing world into abject poverty.

International AIDS activists and medical organizations protested at the opening day of meetings of the Board for the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, in Brussels, and demanded the Global Fund subsidize cheap AIDS Drugs.

The effects of global poverty have been much in the news this week. At a World Bank meeting in Ottowa last weekend, there were prominent calls for an increase in aid from richer to poorer nations. Gordon Brown, the UK Chancellor, called for rich countries to double the aid they give to the poor, while Clare Short, the UK Development Secretary strongly criticised America for "almost turning its back" on the rest of the world. It was a "paradox" that a country that prided itself on its generosity gave only 0.1 percent of its GDP in international aid, compared to Britain's 0.3 percent and the UN target of 0.7 percent, she said. At a recent meeting of EU development cooperation ministers in Brussels, increasing member contributions of aid was high on the agenda, while at the WTO meeting in Doha, the developing world won a significant victory over the right to medicines at times of public-health emergencies.

European diplomats, Clare Short and the World Bank have all cited the ‘Bin Laden effect’ as having a galvanising effect on richer nations view of poverty across the world. The terrorist attacks created an "historic opportunity" for the international community to make a concerted effort to try to solve global poverty, Short said. “The suicide bombers of September 11 appeared not to come from poor countries, but the conditions which bred their bitterness and hatred are linked to poverty and injustice." The World Bank too has come to the view that poverty alleviation in states like Afghanistan is needed to stop them becoming breeding grounds for terrorism, while the World Trade Organisation has promised to address the marginalisation of least developed countries and contribute to a durable solution to world debt. With such a concerted interest in global poverty from many of the biggest players this week, it is hard to believe that half of the world's population still lives on less than $2 a day, while the richest 20 percent consumes more than 80 percent of the world's resources,

But as George Monbiot has argued in this week’s UK Guardian, one of the reasons why the current institutions charged with managing the global economy – the IMF, World Bank, and more recently, the World Trade Organisation - have failed to deliver economic justice and sustainability is because they were not designed to do so. Despite the recent resolutions from the World Bank and WTO on debt cancellation, and a concern for greater global economic equity, these reforms are not, in Monbiot’s words, “in the WTO’s gift”.

As Monbiot demonstrates, the architects of the modern world economy had a vastly different vision than the system we have ended up with today. Many economists at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 were aware that issues of economic justice would have to be addressed if greater commercial freedom was to work. Among the proposals made at Bretton Woods were calls for an international trade organisation, which as well as working to reduce tariffs would also protect workers rights, transfer technology to poorer countries, and regulate the world economy to prevent big corporations from becoming too dominant. But, Monbiot reports, US corporations blocked the proposals. GATT – the general agreement on tariffs and trade - was strung together on a temporary basis to bring down trade barriers, while negotiations for a proper trade body continued. It never saw the light of day; GATT turned into the WTO, and the moment was lost.

The ITO was not the only institution proposed at Bretton Woods. John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, is often credited as the mastermind behind the IMF and World Bank, the major institutions to emerge from Bretton Woods; but Monbiot argues that in fact, Keynes was bitterly opposed to them, believing that if such institutions managed the world economy, they would preside over deepening inequalities between rich and poor. Keynes called instead for an “international clearing union” which would redeem imbalances in trade, and cancel debt, by the radically simple method of charging creditors the same rates of interest on currency surpluses as those charged to debtors. But, the British delegation, lead by Keynes, was also forced by the US to back down. The US threatened to withdraw its war loan unless Keynes withdrew his proposal, and he ended up having to agree to the bodies that later became the World Bank and IMF.

The problem with the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation is, therefore, that they are constitutionally designed to fail in delivering greater economic justice in world trade. All they can do, in Monbiot’s words, is “set maximum standards for global trade, rather than the minimum standards which might restrain big corporations”. In other words, the IMF, World Bank and WTO police existing inequalities that have been allowed to develop on behalf of richer nations: world debt, tariff inequalities, the lack of regulation; and despite noises to the contrary, pursue these inequalities further in the name of liberalisation.

This is perfectly illustrated by the rejection by WTO of the recent proposal made in Doha, Qatar, by seven African countries that WTO study the impacts of trade liberalisation measures imposed by structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). The proposal - submitted by Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Zambia - was made in response to the original draft declaration issued by WTO General Council chair Stuart Harbinson in September. These countries pointed out that many developing countries were subjected to "an over-ambitious liberalisation programme" as a result of structural adjustment reform policies that did not offer flexibility in their tariff-cutting exercises. These countries were, as a result, experiencing widespread unemployment and the collapse of local industries.

What is now needed therefore is not the spectacle of Gordon Brown promising to deliver more aid to developing countries, desperately needed though that aid is, nor of the WTO promising everything and delivering nothing. As Monbiot puts it, “if the men who had planned the Bretton Woods conference knew that in 2001 we would be arguing about about how much aid to give to poor nations, they would have packed up and gone home. The stated purpose of their meeting was to render generosity redundant.”

The recent WTO negotiations may be a potential indicator of the way the future of such institutions may develop. While the negotiations at Doha were only a partial success for developing countries, they were also far from a neo-liberal victory that many in the developed world would have liked. Important areas of negotiation have effectively put on hold, to be dealt with in the future; and perhaps most importantly of all, developing countries are prepared to fight their corner much harder than in previous rounds. But, the inadequacy of the WTO as an institution capable of managing these issues was also very much in evidence, and the effectiveness of its future in increasing doubt. Without root and branch reform of world economic institutions, greater economic equity – a more distant dream now than in 1944 – is never going to be established, and the credibility of such institutions restored.

Tinkering with poverty

Doha Dreams?
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/0111dohaconc.html

WTO rejects Africans' request for study of SAP effects before more tariff cuts

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/topic/adjustment/a26africadoha.htm

Millions of dollars worth of aid to Malawi suspended due to corruption and the curtailment of the government's privatisation programme will be released soon, a government spokesman told IRIN on Tuesday.

The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)--a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website or email us to share your thoughts with us.

Email the UK government for reform of global trade rules in the run up to the WTO meeting in Qatar. State your concern about Trade Related Intellectual Property agreements (TRIPs).

At the core of the questions facing Ministers at the Conference is whether governments are ready to launch a wider process of negotiations-a new round-and if so, what should its content be. Developing countries, more important in size and sophistication than ever before, are now pivotal to the success of the world trading system. How, then, can their interests be taken into account to strengthen the multilateral system?

A major section of the draft Doha Ministerial Declaration deals with “Market Access for Non-Agricultural Products”, or in short, “industrial tariffs.” Paragraph 16 of the “Harbinson draft” (27 October) has Ministers agreeing to negotiations to reduce or eliminating tariffs in industrial products, with product coverage to be “comprehensive and without a priori exclusions.” An earlier draft (26 September) had allowed “less than full reciprocity” for developing countries, but this was dropped in the present text. Business sources in the US cheered the striking off of the phrase as they felt it would have “skewed tariff negotiations in favour of developing countries,” according to a news report from “Inside US Trade”.

The transatlantic slave trade saw the greatest deportation in history. From the mid 15th century to the closing decades of the 19th century tens of millions of Africans were brutally wrenched from their villages and transported to the plantations and mines of the Americas and West Indies. The impact of this unprecedented movement is still burdening the descendants of these stolen people, and the continent that was their home.

Mt Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania could lose its entire icecap by 2015, symbolising that global climate change "may be felt first and hardest by the environment and people of Africa", the environmental lobby group Greenpeace reported this week.

The Association for Women's Rights in Development presents The 9th International Forum on WOMEN'S RIGHTS and DEVELOPMENT: RE-INVENTING GLOBALIZATION October 3-6, 2002 Guadalajara, Mexico. How can we re-invent globalization to further the rights of all women? The 9th international AWID Forum will take an innovative approach to this central question. We'll go beyond the all too familiar critique of globalization to examine what we really see as alternatives and how we translate these alternative visions into realities. Deadline for Submission 31 December, 2001.