STWR - Share The World's Resources

Médecins Sans Frontières and other groups campaigning for access to affordable medicines in developing countries are closely following a case filed by the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis against Indian patent law.

Ethiopian plantation workers are paid a daily rate that is a fraction of the price of one London espresso. Now growers are fighting for fairer trade.

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz's anti-corruption crusade could jeopardise those it claims to protect, the poor in developing nations, by letting powerful players off the hook and by not extending corruption probes to the Bank's past lending, a leading U.S. whistleblower group says.

This week, the International Monetary Fund will be holding its annual meeting in Singapore. No doubt, the economic restructuring and forced leveraging of Iraq will be a key component of talks surrounding the meeting. In these past few months, free trade zones have been established along the borders with Syria and Iran; foreign investment laws have been vetted and approved; and laws governing investment in the oil sector have been drafted and introduced. Iraq continues to move forward in implementing conditions imposed upon it through the Stand By Arrangement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in December of 2005. While the command economy established under Saddam Hussein's regime was unsustainable, it is also highly probable that the benefits of the economic restructuring under way at present will accrue to the benefit of an elite segment of Iraq and of the international community. It is improbable that ordinary Iraqi citizens will be the beneficiaries of these changes.

Devinder Sharma examines the links between globalisation, trade, and corporate interests, arguing that aggressive trade interests have topped the EU economic and political agenda, even though many developing world increasingly seeing through the inequities of international trade.

The announcement from Geneva that the "Doha Round" negotiations for another global trade agreement is in "collapse" lacked high drama since impending failure was already clear to all but the most fervent cheerleaders for the World Trade Organization. Five years of sloganeering and media pep talks and clever maneuvering failed to persuade developing nations or even inspire much enthusiasm in advanced economies. This is very good news for peoples of the world, though you won't see the story played that way in the American press.

The World Trade Organisation is unfit to address the needs of the world's poor. There should be no attempt to resuscitate the current global trade talks.