With its muddy roads, humble huts, and constant military patrols, Bajo Aguán, Honduras feels a long way away from the slick polish of the recurring UN climate negotiations in the world’s capital cities. Yet the bloody struggle going on there strikes at the heart of global climate politics, illustrating how market schemes designed to “offset” carbon emissions play out when they encounter the complicated reality on the ground.
For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of structural adjustment have systematically “raped” the earth and the poor and violated the human rights of women. It appears that the personal disregard and disrespect for women demonstrated by the man at the highest levels of leadership within the IMF is quite consistent with the gender bias inherent in the IMF’s institutional policies and practice.
There’s no doubt the ongoing Middle Eastern revolutions make ample use of democratic slogans, encouraged by the civic spirit of millions that have marched for liberty and equality. Though many factors are contributing to the historic changes that are sweeping across the region, a combination of decades of aggressive economic liberalization and political repression has played a crucial role in mobilizing the masses against the hand of autocracy.
Even though President Ben Ali and his wife have used privatization as an excuse to buy up state property at bargain basement prices, the U.S. still supports them.
Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.
Development circles were not shocked last year when two studies detailed how the World Bank’s research unit had been systematically manipulating data to show that neoliberal market reforms were promoting growth and reducing poverty in developing countries. They merely saw these devastating findings, one by American University Professor Robin Broad, the other by Princeton University […]
When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of the so-called borderless world. The process by which relatively autonomous national economies become functionally integrated into one global economy was touted as “irreversible. ” And the people who opposed globalization were disdainfully dismissed as modern day incarnations of the Luddites that destroyed machines during the Industrial Revolution.
While economists laud the recently deceased Milton Friedman for being Âa champion of freedom whose work transformed economics and changed the world, as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times put it, people in the South will remember the University of Chicago professor as the eye of a human hurricane that cut a swath of destruction through their economies. For them, Friedman will long be associated with two things: free-market reform in Chile and Âstructural adjustment in the developing world.