Global water use has increased six-fold over the last century, twice the rate of population growth, and agriculture represents 70 percent of this consumption, the United Nations reports in advance of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). People across the world are dying from hunger as drought shrivels crops again this year.

Global drug dealers are earning billions of dollars from trade in endangered species and toxic waste, environmental law experts said Monday.

South Africa's population could level out at between 30 million and 40 million people in about 20 years' time, South African environmental journalist James Clarke has said in his latest book, Coming Back to Earth.

It is vital that world leaders tackle the growing global water crisis before it's too late and start implementing the Millennium Declaration goals, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has said.

We, the National Association of Child and Youth Care Workers in South Africa (NACCW) would like to subscribe to this excellent newsletter.

The 50,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries set to throng the Johannesburg summit this month will have no problem finding a common language to thrash out a strategy for sustainable development. They'll be immersed in the eco-jargon that splits experts from the lay community, most of whom have no idea what the broad, vague phrase "sustainable development"
actually means.

A US federal court began preliminary hearings last Friday into a multibillion-dollar lawsuit brought by South African apartheid victims against a host of multinational corporations and banks.

What does it mean to be a poor, single mother in the new South Africa? Lots of guilt and anger, reports Health-E News Service, as women confess to taking out their frustrations on their children.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) opened in Durban at the International Convention Centre (ICC) on 5 June 2002. I managed, on the strength of an SABC interview, to enter the portals of the ICC. As the day unfolded I moved between a passionate band of protestors outside and the soirée happening inside. It gave a wonderful insight into the unfolding transition in the country. Inside Jay Naidoo, the former Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) general secretary and Minister in charge of the RDP, wandered around. He wore a beautiful green suit and a pair of brogues with an extra layer of leather on the heel. Working the other side of the expansive foyer was former chief of NEDLAC and Arms Acquisitions czar now Executive Director of the J&J Group Jayendra Naidoo. As they moved closer, I watched from the balcony with bated breath. Without taking their eyes off future contacts and contracts they passed each other in choreographed moves reminiscent of the O'Jays. Outside the protestors were being pushed behind barricades some 300 metres from the ICC. At the previous year's WEF conference they were right outside the ICC but this time the police would have none of it. Undeterred, the protestors were busy rigging up a speaker system and giving out pamphlets condemning Thabo Mbeki's New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as a home-grown form of structural adjustment.

INSIDE THE TRANSITION

The integration and deracialisation of the economy with accompanying liberalization and marketisation has wrought significant economic changes. The African middle class and professional class have grown considerably while a small economic elite is furiously consolidating. […]

Central to the transition also is the impact on the composition of the South African working class wrought by the macroeconomic strategy of the ANC. A recent Reserve Bank report has shown that wages for skilled workers have steadily grown as well as productivity. The report also discerned a growing gulf between the unionised and better skilled on the one hand, and marginalized South Africans on the other.[…]

Alongside this one has spiralling unemployment. In 2001 University of Cape Town economist Haroon Bhorat wrote that "the job creation performance of the formal economy has been abysmal". This conclusion has been supported by later studies that have pointed to escalating job loss and unemployment. […]

According to the 1996 Census the poorest 40 percent of our population got less than 3 percent of the national income, while the richest 10 percent enjoyed over 50 percent. The poorest 40 percent of African households' economic situation has progressively worsened over the last decade. […]

Ironically inequality has been exacerbated by the lack of state support (like a social wage) with South Africans aged between seven and 59 (women) or 64 (men) totally cut-off from any form of social security. This translates into over 13,8 million people in the poorest 40 percent of South Africa's households not qualifying for any social security transfers. This means that the poor have had to largely come to rely on themselves for survival. […]

This then is the economic location of the Poors - the unemployed and lower working class. […]

THE NEO-LIBERAL SQUEEZE AT THE ‘LOCAL’

The Poors have been spewed out by the transition. It is the Poors who have opposed the water and electricity cut-offs and evictions and who have begun making connections between their situation and that of people first in Soweto and Tafelsig but then also in Bolivia, South Korea, America's prisons, Zimbabwe and Chiapas. But the Poors have no grand ideology. They are actors on a local stage, squaring off against home-grown villains like Operation Masakhane. The latter is touted as "part of a drive to normalise governance and the provision of basic services at the local level. It aims to persuade people across South Africa that they must contribute to this process through participation and by paying for housing and services". But where would the money come from to pay for services?

In the most comprehensive study of affordability David McDonald found a serious crisis. "If for example, 18 percent of the seven million people who are reported to have been given access to water since 1994 are unable to pay their water bills 'no matter how hard (they) try', then 1.26 million of these new recipients are unable to afford this water and an additional 1.2 million have to choose between paying for water and buying other essentials like food. Similar percentages apply to the 3.5 million South Africans who have been given access to electricity". […]

RISE OF COMMUNITY MOVEMENTS

As the ANC's assault on the poor resulted in more and more evictions, disconnections and retrenchments a variety of new community movements began to arise. Hesitantly at first, movements began to arise to challenge the water and electricity cut-offs, the evictions and lack of land redistribution. The rise of these movements based in particular communities and evincing particular, mainly defensive demands, was not merely a natural result of poverty or marginality but a direct response to state policy.

The state's inability or unwillingness to be a provider of public services and the guarantor of the conditions of collective consumption has been a spark for a plethora of community movements. While the movements mobilize around diverse demands like land titles, water and electricity supplies, access to housing and health facilities, the general nature of the neo-liberal emergency concentrates and aims these demands towards the state.
[…]

The Poors, or what others have variously called the "multitude", "the unwaged", "slaves-in-waiting", the "metropolitan militant", "the mob" and "the wretched of the earth" have come to constitute the most relevant social force post-1994 from the point of view of challenging the prevailing political economy. The community movements of the Poors have challenged the very boundaries of what for a short while after the demise of the apartheid state was seen exclusively as "politics". […] The poor are not just involved in recognition, or the discovery of the right policies, or the creation of the right administrative framework, or even the goodwill of power-holders. They are challenging the very distribution of power in society and are doing so in ways that do not stick to the gradualist, corporatist, and nation-building script.

UN-CIVIL SOCIETY

The new social movements were strong enough to put 20 000 on the streets at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban. They have fought off the state's hired guns to prevent evictions and disconnections. They have reconnected water and electricity. Although they are still fragmented and largely without money for transport and printing and legal fees they have made one thing very clear: the Poors will not take the neo-liberal assault on their lives lying down. They will fight and the fight has begun. This is a struggle that already has heroes, legends and martyrs. Already the ANC flag is being burnt and spat at outside the Martin West Building that houses the debt collectors of the eThekwini Council in Durban.

Their actions have achieved a number of successes. The Council in Durban announced the writing off of arrears to the tune of R17 million in June 2002 soon after 5000 residents marched onto their offices. In Cape Town and Johannesburg the reconnection of water and electricity by community movements has reached 'epidemic' proportions, reappropriating basic needs and creating no-go zones of decommodification. […]

If community movements are to grow and spread and build a culture of revolutionary confrontation, they have serious challenges to confront in the immediate. The Poors face an ANC which, sensing the growing combativeness of the Poors, have started to differentiate the ANC from government and the ANC as a liberation movement, not to challenge the former but to try and head off challenges emanating from outside corporatist structures. […]Alongside this there has been increased repression. The Regulation of Public Gatherings Act of 1993 gives police and civic authorities far reaching powers in preventing and even banning mass demonstrations. The recent arrest of National Land Committee and Landless People's Movement members in Ermelo is a particularly graphic example of the repressive use of this Act.

Beyond the immediate challenges, the Poors have serious questions, which strike at the heart of a longer-term project. How do they link up with the militant unions like SAMWU? How do they broaden their movement into rural areas that are either marked by a absence of basic services or when they do arrive are commodified in a manner putting it out of reach of the intended consumers? […] What is to be their relation to the formal institutional sphere of 'politics'? In particular should they contest elections at least at a local level? How are connections to be made with similar struggles in Zimbabwe, in Mexico, in Argentina, in Indonesia and with those movements directly taking on the IMF and the World Bank on the streets of Seattle and Genoa? How do the Poors turn their actions that have remained defensive (fighting bloody battles to stay in the apartheid ghettoes) into demands that take the offensive against the neo-liberal state? One of the dangers is that the very success of campaigns like Operation Khanyisa is that it leads to demobilization because once people have their lights switched on, they do not see the need for the collective. It also serves the purpose of reducing anger because people now have lights and water. This has certainly been the case in Mpumalanga, Chatsworth and Wentworth. This is the danger of remaining localized, particularistic and single issue. The state faced with collective resistance and exposes at a public level, simply retreats from the more militant areas and moves to areas less organized. […]

WE ARE THE POORS
Ashwin Desai

We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labour struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001. It describes from the inside how the downtrodden regain their dignity and create hope for a better future in the face of a neo-liberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country.

Changes in South African society and family structures are responsible for the increase in teenage violence in the country, experts believe.

South Africa's internet professionals have accused the government of trying to hijack the worldwide web.

Health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala Msimang sent a letter this week to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria requesting that its R720-million grant to KwaZulu-Natal be channelled through the SA National AIDS Council to be disbursed throughout the country.

The South African drug safety board is considering reversing a decision that would have allowed the AIDS drug nevirapine to be used to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to newborn babies. The prospect of a reversal is stirring outrage among advocates for AIDS patients.

Women's Day, which takes place on 9 August, celebrates the heroics of more than 20 000 women who 45 years ago, marched to Pretoria against the extension of pass laws to African women.

This is a senior position with responsibilities for technical support to governmental and non-governmental organisations within the South-
ern African Development Community.

Although the cabinet has not yet given a final yea or nay to the proposed Basic Income Grant, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel has repudiated the grant as unaffordable economic "populism", while government communication CEO Joel Netshitenzhe says the cabinet's "philosophical approach is different".

Efforts to beef up South Africa's justice system received a R160 million boost from the United States on Monday. The money from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) will be used in a six-year strategy to streamline court activities and train justice officials. Business Against Crime (BAC) will manage the Criminal Justice Strengthening Programme, formally adopted by USAID and the Department of Justice about two years ago.

The South African network for trauma service providers, Themba Lesizwe, on Monday announced a disbursement of R2.6 million to 14 organisations working with victims of violence and crime in six provinces.

An unexpected convergence has emerged suddenly in the often stormy courtship between SA's nonprofit and business sectors. The findings of a recent research report suggest that it is time the two sectors seek co-operation in the interests of sustainable development and business growth.

Local pop Idols finalist Cindy Bester will sing at a concert tonight to raise funds for the East London Children's Home while the Mercedes-Benz Border Cricket Academy players will run a 200km relay for the same cause.