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Groups fighting for the rights of peasant communities are stepping up pressure on governments to ban the use of genetically modified ''suicide seeds'' at UN-sponsored talks on biodiversity in Spain this week.

After fighting mad cow safeguards, the US beef industry complains about the consequences - a multi-billion dollar decline in exports - and a shortage of imported beef because of inadequate domestic testing and labeling.

An independent ombudsman has confirmed that World Bank officials should have raised serious questions before the International Finance Corporation (IFC) - the private sector arm of the World Bank - approved a $30 million loan to Corporación Dinant in Honduras in 2009 for palm oil plantation projects.

TAKE ACTION NOW! Send the free fax below to the CEO of Coca-Cola and join the growing community resistance in India in demanding that Coca-Cola STOP Destroying Lives, Livelihoods and Communities in India and Internationally.

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NEW YORK -- Motivated by a growing concern that the United Nations is in danger of becoming an engine for corporate globalization, leading opponents of globalization will hold a Teach-In in New York coinciding with the United Nation's Millennium Summit.

The Coca-Cola Co. says it is willing to examine its labor and business practices in India and Colombia to keep $1.3 million worth of contracts with the University of Michigan.

"It's not just a problem of the farmworkers in Immokalee. It's not just a problem for immigrant workers in Florida," say representatives of Coalition of Immokalee Workers, "The problems in the agriculture industry are problems for all of American society."

In the '70s and '80s, the banana companies Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita used a carcinogenic pesticide, Nemagon, to protect their crops in Nicaragua. Today, the men and women who worked on those plantations suffer from incurable illnesses. Their children are deformed. The companies feign innocence.

In Immokalee, Florida, the situation is dire. South Florida is the nation's leading producer of fresh tomatoes. Taco Bell is a major purchaser of Florida tomatoes. Their enormous purchasing power gives them a unique opportunity to intervene on behalf of farm workers who subsidize corporate profits with sweatshop tomatoes.

SAN FRANCISCO and NEW YORK -- CorpWatch has learned that after a year long campaign by environmentalists, human rights groups, labor unions and other non-governmental organizations a leading UN agency abandoned its perilous partnership with a group of transnational corporations whose tarnished human rights, environmental and development records threatened to rub off on the world body.

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