STWR - Share The World's Resources

Current policies favor giant shipping companies and agribusinesses over the starving populations they are supposed to serve.

How many countries worldwide need debt cancellation? What would be the economic ramifications of debt relief on both the Global North and the Global South?

The South has already repaid its external debt to the North. Since the onset of the global debt crisis, precipitated in 1979 by a sharp increase in the Federal Reserve’s interest rates by Paul Volcker, the developing/emerging market economies as a whole have paid in current dollars a cumulative $7.673 trillion in external debt service.

Despite international commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, a recent UN report revealed that poverty will not be halved in any sub-Saharan country by 2015, indicating yet another failure of the system of aid and stregthening the call for a more robust international strategy to secure economic justice for developing countries.

Up on stage in Rostock last Thursday, Bono and Bob Geldof took time off from haranguing the leaders of the G8 to churn out a passable version of Carry That Weight, the old Beatles song. By the next morning they probably wished they had chosen Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who instead.

Sixty years ago last week, US secretary of state George C Marshall stepped up to the podium at Harvard University and set out his case for supporting European recovery from second world war devastation.

The latest overseas aid figures are no suprise to the developing world, writes Adam Parsons. Broken promises will continue to make newspaper headlines until the deeper contradictions and biases of the current economic approach are addressed.