STWR - Share The World's Resources

25th May 05, Jonathan Watts, The Guardian UK

The yawning wealth gap in 'booming' China is badly hampering foreign attempts to help the country's have-nots

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments. So far, however, when confronted with a choice between the two sacred commodities - market freedom and human life - the one they have chosen to preserve is market freedom, writes George Monbiot.

The world's most developed nations have reaffirmed the need to provide debt relief to poor countries.

The world's richest countries are failing to provide the funds needed for education in the developing world, the Global Campaign for Education has said.

The campaign group's report was published during ministerial meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington.

Rachia Salifu finds the rice-growing season the most difficult time of year. During the day she works the fields with her baby on her back in temperatures that can reach 43C. In the evening there is not enough food for her five children so she listens to them cry with hunger, unable to help.

Ms Salifu farms rice on one acre in the dusty village of Nyarigu near the northern border of Ghana and her story is typical of local rice farmers. Over the past three decades, Ghana's rice industry has collapsed. Farmers struggle to make a living and unemployed villagers flock to the cities.

Oxfam today highlights the plight of rice farmers in Ghana in the latest salvo of the Make Poverty History campaign. "The plight of rice farmers in Ghana shows how western policies and unfair agricultural subsidises in the US and the EU are destroying the livelihoods of farmers in developing nations," said Harriet Binet, a spokeswoman for Oxfam.

Women fruit pickers in South Africa endure 'pitiful conditions', says report

Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, will face searching questions this week over its treatment of foreign employees following allegations that thousands of women workers suffered 'appalling' conditions.

As the chain prepares to announce record profits of more than £2 billion on Tuesday, equivalent to more than £250,000 an hour, campaigners are demanding that the massive buying power of major supermarkets is brought under control.

An investigation by ActionAid found that women workers in South Africa who grow fruit sold in Tesco endured poor wages and pitiful conditions.

February 2006, Jeffrey D Sachs, The Guardian (UK)

The fight against extreme poverty can be won, but only if Bush recognises that military might alone won't secure the world

The end of poverty is a choice, not a forecast. There are a billion people on earth fighting daily for their survival. The world has committed, in the Millennium Development Goals, to cut extreme poverty by half by 2015. By 2025, extreme poverty can be banished. By dint of interest and calendar, the next step rests with Downing Street.

I'm with Wolfowitz

Liberal handwringing over the World Bank simply reflects a failure to recognise the role it exists to fulfil. It's about as close to consensus as the left is ever likely to come. Everyone this side of Atilla the Hun and the Wall Street Journal agrees that Paul Wolfowitz's appointment as president of the World Bank is a catastrophe. Except me.

Under Wolfowitz, my fellow progressives lament, the World Bank will work for America. If only someone else were chosen, it would work for the world's poor. Joseph Stiglitz, the bank's renegade former chief economist, champions Ernesto Zedillo, a former president of Mexico. A Guardian leading article suggested Colin Powell or, had he been allowed to stand, Bono. But what all this hand-wringing reveals is a profound misconception about the role and purpose of the body Wolfowitz will run.

The World Bank and the IMF were conceived by the US economist Harry Dexter White. Appointed by the US Treasury to lead the negotiations on postwar economic reconstruction, White spent most of 1943 banging the heads of the other allied nations together. They were appalled by his proposals. He insisted that his institutions would place the burden of stabilising the world economy on the countries suffering from debt and trade deficits rather than on the creditors. He insisted that "the more money you put in, the more votes you have". He decided, before the meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944, that "the US should have enough votes to block any decision".

Wolfowitz The Pawn in Global Games

The appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank has little to do with his personal credentials, writes Robert Hunter Wade

Paul Wolfowitz's nomination to be the next president of the World Bank was accepted by the board of the bank yesterday without dissent. Yet privately many, probably most, of the board members and their governments had serious doubts about his suitability.

The Europeans were particularly outraged, given Wolfowitz's advocacy of US unilateralism and his lack of contrition for the debacle in Iraq. Development NGOs reacted with dismay at the nomination, and 92% of World Bank staff expressed a negative response.

So why no significant opposition from the board? There was, after all, a precedent.

February 2006, The Guardian (UK)

Kofi Annan proposed a radical change to the workings of the United Nations yesterday, after a period of scandals and controversy that has plagued the organisation and its secretary general.