STWR - Share The World's Resources

Tax havens in Europe are depriving poor countries of more money than they receive in development aid, it has been alleged. Some 11.5 trillion (million million) dollars is held in offshore accounts across the world, according to Tax Justice Network, a grouping of economists, accountants and academics

The randomness of numbers sometimes throws up some striking coincidences. Behind the shadow plays conjured up by the zealous servants of neoliberal globalisation, the brutal backstage reality revealed itself this week, through the publication of two international statistics.

Rich countries have made "patchy progress" in honouring pledges to improve their contribution to the fight against global poverty, according to a new report. In a declaration agreed at a 2005 international conference in Paris, 35 donor governments and many international agencies gave an undertaking to ensure that their development aid would become more effective.

Seven years ago as the economy boomed, the United Nations agreed to a set of ambitious goals for cutting poverty and disease and improving health care and education for the world's poor by 2015. Now, those "millennium" efforts are lagging. 

Hopes for peace in Afghanistan have been undermined by the failure of major international donors to deliver some 10 billion dollars in pledged humanitarian assistance and the "wasteful and ineffective" use of available aid money, according to a new report entitled 'Falling Short'.

Because of the way the US allocates its food aid, soaring prices mean less is available at the very moment developing nations need help the most

Britain's leading international aid agencies yesterday called for emergency food programmes to be overhauled as the soaring price of grain and other staple crops threatens to bring further misery to many parts of the developing world.