Search

Thanks to the IMF and the World Bank, chicken and other local agriculture staples in Ghana are being replaced by subsidized foreign imports.

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.

Soy rules the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso and it's not the soy that much of the world associates with the ostensibly eco-friendly, vegetarian diet, either. With help from the World Bank, André Maggi (the Soy King) is bankrolling the destruction of one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems: the savanna.

Pittsburgh -- In a speech today to the Ninth World Steel Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, United Steelworkers of America (USWA) international president Leo W. Gerard assailed the U.S. Treasury for supporting International Monetary Fund (IMF) financing plans for developing countries that exploit workers, drive up the U.S. trade deficit, and wipe out millions of American manufacturing jobs.

DAVOS, Switzerland -- While participants in the World Economic Forum here debated the consequences of a possible war in Iraq, police officers with tear-gas grenades and water cannons mounted a huge security operation to keep protesters away from the delegates, who included Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Argentina has failed to make a crucial $681m debt payment, dealing a further blow to hopes of an economic recovery.

Developed with support from the Sunlight Foundation, CrocTail provides an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand corporations publicly traded in the U.S. and their domestic and foreign subsidiaries. In this new version, users can click on different years and see how subsidiary relationships for a company have changed over time.

Come Sunday, Latin America's biggest country could elect its first leftwing leader for 40 years, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers party. With 41% support in the polls and 20 points ahead of the next challenger - ruling party candidate Jose Serra - Lula, as he is commonly known, could win the presidency outright in the first round.

Washington, D.C. and Manila (September 25, 2002) -- The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) today released a new report documenting the World Bank's continued funding of incineration, a polluting technology receiving intense criticism in many countries. The report, available online at www.no-burn.org, documents 156 World Bank Group projects in 68 countries in the last 10 years that have promoted incineration; 26 of those projects were initiated since 2001, including two projects that recommended incinerating PCBs in Argentina and Brazil, an Indian project that recommended incinerating PVC byproducts, and another Indian project that recommended an incinerator at a pesticide plant.

Washington, DC (September 25, 2002) -- Ahead of this weekend's Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), Africa Action denounced the failure of these institutions to respond to Africa's growing debt crisis, and issued the recommendations below for immediate action from creditors.

MASERU, Lesotho -- Advocates of corporate accountability are pointing to the sweeping implications of a landmark verdict delivered Tuesday by the High Court in the tiny kingdom of Lesotho that a Canadian multinational company was guilty of paying bribes to win contracts on a dam project.

* indicates required