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Global food companies are aggravating poverty in developing countries by dominating markets, buying up seed firms and forcing down prices for staple goods including tea, coffee, milk, bananas and wheat, according to a report to be launched today.

While the world's biggest CEOs and politicians gather in Davos, Switzerland to network and negotiate, activists and NGO-workers meet halfway around the world in Porto Alegre, Brazil to imagine other, more humanity-focused possibilities.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (now known as WWF) continues its career as the thinking corporation's greenwasher with a recent initative designed to extend the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) soya across much of Latin America.

The European Patent Office is currently considering an application by crop science giant Syngenta to control the DNA that regulates the way flowers grow in rice plants.

Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that the nation's meat packing industry has such bad working conditions that it violates basic human and worker rights.

A new study is particularly critical of donors' tendency to use large western contractors to repair infrastructure damaged in the war, importing foreign personnel and equipment at a huge cost. In Iraq, that policy has proved disastrous, one of the authors said.

Acceptance of KBR into the project will provoke political controversy. Halliburton, previously led by the U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney, attracted criticism when it won a series of contracts to support U.S. military operations in Iraq, and took a central role in the reconstruction effort after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The Pentagon is offering bonuses of up to $150,000 to keep elite commandos, such as Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, in the military and prevent them from being lured away to higher-paying jobs by private security contractors in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, defense officials said.

Pentagon competing with security companies for skilled commandos; Extra pay of up to $150,000.

Activists in India have held nationwide protests against multinational soft drink companies Coca-Cola and Pepsi.