Globalisation

Debt relief, rights and wrongs

The Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) estimates that the total external debt of low-income countries is $523 billion (£260 billion). Debt is a huge problem. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is the current international debt relief scheme. HIPC was set up in 1996 by the World Bank and the IMF to reduce poor countries’ debts. It was reformed in 1999. The JDC says that by the beginning of 2005, only $49 billion (£25 billion) of debt has been cancelled. The total debt service being paid every day by low-income countries is $100 million (£50 million) and for every $1 (50p) received...

Who will end world poverty?

How can hunger, poverty, and suffering through preventable or curable disease be ended? Share the world’s food production equally, and everyone would be well-nourished. Add on some extra production achieved by reducing the subsidies given in Europe and the USA to farmers not to produce. Add more by giving plots of land to some of the one-third of the world’s workforce who are unemployed, or get only scraps of work, and also giving them the equipment to produce with. Cut the huge waste in food that is over-processed or over-transported for the world’s well-off. Then everyone could feast when...

Africa’s force for change

By Paul Hampton The voices of African workers have been missing from the recent media frenzy about Africa. Even on the left the general picture of Africans is of passive victims of disease and malnutrition in need of charity. This conception is completely wrong. The political and economic situation for African workers is generally very difficult, but their militancy and organisation is an inspiration that deserves our solidarity. And the working class in Africa is no privileged caste but the crucial agent of progress on the continent: both for reducing poverty, for improving democratic rights...

Can we save the world?

Only a radical programme can now stop climate change from impacting dramatically, disastrously, on our world. No such programme will be on the table at the G8 Summit, from any of the governments, even from those like the Blair government who claim to take a lead on cutting “greenhouse gas emissions”. Socialism is about the creative participation of the mass of the people in political and economic life, and lasting solutions to climate change and other ecological problems can only come out of rich, democratic discussion. That said, there are at least four major areas in which socialism could...

G8 in Sheffield

By Mickey Conn The G8 Justice and Interior Ministers were welcomed to Sheffield from June 15-17, invited by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary. Their stay shut down much of the city centre on several evenings, and some residents of the Nether Edge district had to use passes to get to their own homes. But many people wanted to protest about the minister and the governments pandering to racism by whipping up animosity to asylum seekers, about the arbitrary and intrusive imposition of ID cards and about their assault on trade unions and workers’ rights. The week began with an anti-war...

How Europe underdeveloped Africa

Gordon Brown claimed that the European countries should stop apologising for their role as colonial powers in past. Colin Foster explains why to “forgiving and forgetting” the past stop us from understanding the problems African and other "Third World" countries face in a post-colonial present. When Africa was not “backward” In the Middle Ages, Ethiopia was not underdeveloped. Walter Rodney — a black Marxist historian assassinated in 1980 as he tried to build a working-class party in his native Guyana — wrote: “The kings distinguished themselves by building several churches cut out of solid...

African conflicts the G8 will ignore

Sudan The Nairobi peace agreements this January brought to an end — in theory, at least, 21 years of civil war in Sudan, which have killed at least 400,000 people and forced nearly five million to flee their homes. Unfortunately, the underlying causes of the war remain largely unaddressed, as does the persistent big-power interference in Sudanese politics. What is more, there is still a war going on in Darfur, a conflict inextricably linked to that between the Islamist dictatorship and the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA). A conflict which has been driven by a vicious government-backed...

Africa, poverty, G8: some facts

AIDS In Western Europe and North America, death rates for those with HIV/AIDS have been cut dramatically through the use of antiretroviral drug treatment. In poor countries where six million people with HIV/AIDS need treatment, only 400,000 - less than 8% - are receiving it. In Africa, home to 26 million HIV/AIDS victims, only 1% are receiving treatment. The UN was understating it hugely when it commented that "treatment and care are not yet reaching the vast majority of people in need" (December 2003). This is because the massive pharmaceutical corporations producing brand drugs have fought...

Some notes on the G8 debt agreement

By Paul Hampton These notes are based on materials from the Jubilee Debt Campaign for a No Sweat meeting in London 14 July 2005 More info: Jubilee Debt Campaign . 1. Why debt relief is necessary The overall debt situation is huge. The Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) estimates that the total external debt of low-income countries is $523bn (£260bn). The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is the current international debt relief scheme. HIPC was set up in 1996 by the World Bank and the IMF to reduce poor countries' debts. It was reformed in 1999. The JDC says that by the beginning of...

Arguments against G8

Review of Hubbard and Miller, Arguments against G8, Pluto, 264 pages, paperback, £11.99 By Paul Hampton This is a disappointing book on a vital matter. The G8 - the club of world powers - is under the spotlight, with its summit in July expected to be met by counter-demonstrations, meetings and direct action involving hundreds of thousands. The book is advertised as a “one-stop guide for anyone who wants to know more about the G8, what it is, and why it's a problem” and as “a great tool for activists”. The editors Gill Hubbard and David Miller are leading members of the G8 Alternatives...

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