The transnational corporations are our common enemy; they constitute the present form of capital which exercises control over our economies. In the rural areas we are witnessing a savage offensive by capital and by the transnational corporations on agriculture and natural resources. It is a privatisation war of plunder directed against peasants and indigenous people, a privatisation robbery of the land, biodiversity, water, seeds, production, and agribusiness trade.

This report on Integrated Resource Recovery (IRR), written by Justin Carter for the Global Environmental Institute (GEI), outlines various components of a conceptual design that attempts to integrate community and industrial processes with ecological design. It is intended that by extracting the relevant parts of this approach, IRR-specific guidelines can be created that will serve the IPP program’s overall objectives. Much of what is described here is done with one of the Global Environmental Institute’s (GEI’s) core mandates in mind.

Specific home and host-country policies, cheap land, the lack of a legal infrastructure, investment opportunities and the promise of quick profit returns are the driving factors behind land acquisitions throughout Africa, argues Nikolaj Nielsen in this week's Pambazuka News.

Salma Soliman reviews 'Global Unions, Global Business', by Richard Croucher and Elizabeth Cotton. Engaging with key themes such as the challenges for trade unionism presented by the growth in 'informal' employment, Soliman lauds a leading work on the central question of how imbalances between multinationals and employees can be redressed to the benefit of workers around the world.

More than half of HIV-positive pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries continue to go without life-saving anti-retroviral medication that could prevent transmission of the virus to their unborn children, according to a new report, Towards Universal Access. "Although there is increasing emphasis on women and children in the global HIV/AIDS response, the disease continues to have a devastating impact on their health, livelihood and survival," Ann Veneman, executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), said in a statement.

Aid for thousands of survivors of an earthquake in the Indonesia port of Padang began trickling in on Friday, but rescue efforts were hampered by power blackouts and a lack of heavy equipment to shift masonry. The United Nations said more than 1,000 had been killed in Wednesday's quake in and around the city of 900,000, which sits atop one of the world's most active seismic fault lines along the Pacific "Ring of Fire".

The Civil Society and Outreach Unit of the United Nations Secretariat's Division for Social Policy and Development invites organizations to take part in a survey on the current situation that local, national and international civil society organizations (CSOs) are facing as a result of the global economic and environmental crises. The results of the study will be published for advocacy use of CSOs and also made available at the next session of the UN Commission on Social Development.

The top United Nations official in Cote d’Ivoire warned today that technical difficulties may adversely affect the timeline for the country’s long-awaited presidential elections, which were to have been held as far back as 2005, and are now scheduled for 29 November. Young-Jin Choi, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and head of the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI), said that two months have already been lost, but he noted some successful political developments, such as the establishment of mobile court hearings across the country and the end of voter registration.

Nigerian militants said on Tuesday they opposed a bid by a Chinese energy group to secure 6bn barrels of crude reserves, comparing the potential new investors to “locusts”. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta told the Financial Times that the record of Chinese companies in other African counties suggested “an entry into the oil industry in Nigeria will be a disaster for the oil-bearing communities”.

A very successful Second Edition of the Price Moot Court took place in Oxford from 18 - 21 March 2009. Teams from Malaysia, India, China, Jordan, Europe and the United States competed, and many internationally recognized media law experts acted as judges, including Judge Dean Spielmann from the European Court of Human Rights, Ms Siobhain Butterworth from The Guardian, Ms Gugu Moyo from the International Bar Association, Mr Mark Stephens from Finers Stephens Innocent and Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC. The finals of the Third Edition of the competition will be taking place in Oxford in March 2010.

When is a government guilty of mass murder? If a government knowingly allows hundreds of thousands of people to die unnecessarily, what is its responsibility? Is indirect guilt, or guilt by omission, less culpable than direct guilt or guilt by commission? All these fraught questions now arise because Apotex, the Canadian generic drug giant, has sent its final shipment of inexpensive AIDS medication to Africa. The company says that the five-year-old federal legislation meant to facilitate this process is impossible to work with, and the Harper government refuses to fix it, writes Gerald Caplan.

The shoe industry is one of the most globalised industries in the world. Shoes, and in particular plastic shoes that have been analysed in this study, have become a throwaway item for many people the world over. This study has been conducted in collaboration with six of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservtion's (SSNC) co-operation organisations in the Philippines, India, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Indonesia.

Since its founding 60 years ago, the People's Republic of China has been transformed from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. The journey has been fraught with twists and turns on a road paved with hardship, upheavals and reversals. It's been an important process, however, as any search for direction in the course of human development. And it's taught us valuable lessons about the entire process of a planned-to-market economy transformation.

The resource-based corruption and international greed that has typified so much of the West's interactions with African countries has now arrived in the tiny and impoverished West African country of Gabon. Only this time, the external predator, working in tandem with a venal, autocratic local ruler, isn't the West - it's China.

This report, the first of its kind, provides a snapshot of working conditions in Katanga in Chinese-run enterprises. It synthesizes the views, experiences, concerns and recommendations of Chinese and Congolese workers interviewed. The report is based on a survey carried out in 2008 by Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) into working conditions in Chinese private mining companies in Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In the past several years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has bolstered its diplomatic presence and garnered international goodwill through its financing of infrastructure and natural resource development projects, assistance in the carrying out of such projects, and large economic investments in many developing countries. This report examines China’s economic impact in three regions — Africa, Latin America (Western Hemisphere), and Southeast Asia — with an emphasis on bilateral foreign assistance.

Among the stories covered in this week’s Emerging powers news roundup, Russia’s influence as an investment partner grows, China signs deals in Ethiopia, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and African nations lure Indian businessmen.

China’s successful economic policies are specifically Chinese. But they are made up of universal elements.

Sixty years ago, as Mao Zedong declared the founding of a new communist nation, considered a pariah state. Today t is a world power with sweeping influence -- it is financing America's debt, snapping up access to natural resources in Africa and Latin America, and making its voice heard on major diplomatic issues.

V. R. Raghavan highlights that the growing output of studies and books on the implications of the power-shift to Asia has generally been based on the need to protect the interests of developed countries, but the latest edited volume by N.S. Sisodia, V. Krishnappa provides a refreshing contribution to the discourse by examining an Asian perspective on the global power shifts.