Two of Africa’s poorest countries are to receive extra debt relief from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a move Britain hopes will pave the way for a more generous approach to the Third World’s loans crisis.
The United States’s determination to write off Saddam Hussein’s -billion debt has opened the door to a more generous deal for the most impoverished countries in Africa, the head of the World Bank said this week. President Bush’s insistence on putting post-conflict Iraq on a sustainable financial footing opened the way for a fresh look at debt relief for all countries.
Agriculture ministers meeting in Brussels this week are facing charges of hypocrisy over their attempts to reform Europe’s subsidised cotton sector, after four African countries warned that the current blueprint will fail to end dumping of European Union exports in world markets.
Major oil companies are still making secret payments to repressive regimes, one year after British Prime Minister Tony Blair put his personal authority behind a British-led voluntary disclosure code for the industry, according to a new report from London-based lobby group Global Witness published last week.
Britain’s sugar industry is conducting a last-ditch lobbying campaign to prevent Brussels from removing its lucrative virtual monopoly in the high-priced European market in favour of more competitive farmers from the developing world.
World leaders must address the ”ethical vacuum” at the heart of globalisation or face the danger that the widening gap between rich and poor will lead to further conflict, political upheaval and war, says the International Labour Organisation. Its year-long commission on globalisation has concluded that the persistent imbalances in the workings of the global economy are unsustainable.
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/ 6 February 2004
Europe is the world’s largest exporter of white sugar, even though it costs twice as much for European producers to grow the stuff as farmers in poor countries. The high prices European consumers pay for sugar subsidises European exports, which destroy the livelihoods of more efficient farmers abroad.
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/ 21 November 2003
Human rights groups and green campaigners believe that companies’ glossy publications extolling their environmental and social record are unsatisfactory, with fewer than half of 56 leading lobby groups saying that these are ”believable”, a new survey shows.
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/ 18 November 2003
The United States’s labour market has roared back to life, creating twice as many jobs as expected last month, government figures showed last week, prompting speculation that the US Federal Reserve could call a halt to its policy of rockbottom interest rates.
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/ 15 September 2003
The European Commission was secretly preparing to sabotage plans to help poor countries trade their way out of poverty, as backstairs wrangling dominated the opening day of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) talks in Cancun, Mexico.