STWR - Share The World's Resources

Mohammed Mesbahi is the Chair and Founder of Share The World's Resources. All his articles and reports are listed below and he can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Why, you might wonder, does Germany feel the need to barricade the G8 meeting, protecting it from the thousands of expected protestors? The answer lies in the deep unpopularity of G8 summits, writes Mohammed Mesbahi, since they are considered undemocratic by the majority world and protestors from the richest countries.

The global economy needs to be reformed to ensure that nasic human needs are secured around the world, and the United Nations is currently the only international body through which such fundamental change can be facilitated.

This report presents an analysis of the effectiveness of the United Nations and outlines measures which can significantly reform the body to ensure that it can more readily realise its humanitarian mandate and exert greater control over the global economy. 

Every living thing, every plant, every animal and every human being needs water to stay alive. For centuries, possibly millennia, all over the world, water was shared, for everyone’s right to this essential resource was recognised. For thousands of years legal systems have accepted that running water cannot be owned.

Since the tsunami world opinion has shifted. People have been so moved by the plight of the people in the devastated areas that they have begun to talk about poverty and injustice in other parts of the world, such as Africa.

In the early 1980s Willy Brandt created an Independent Commission to study world poverty. Brandt was concerned that the prevailing economic system was the cause of immense poverty, suffering and degradation. He proposed introducing emergency measures to alleviate this, realising full well that these measures would always only touch the surface of the problem and that until the deep underlying cause (an unjust economic system which favours the first world to the detriment of the third world) was addressed, the problem would never be solved.

Coca Cola was invented in the United States in 1886 as a medicine, rather than a drink, to stimulate the brain and the nervous system, from a mixture of coca leaves and kola nuts, sweetened with sugar, hence the name Coca Cola. It was not until 1893 that Coca Cola was sold and promoted as a drink. Gradually the cocaine was eliminated, but in order to maintain the stimulant effect caffeine was substituted.