right to development

Resource war: India after 2020

If the developing world today is the locus of climate change mitigation, including reductions in emissions, then there surely must exist a picture of how Indian industry does and will perform. Analysing the 6 energy- and emissions-intensive sectors of Indian industry, Chandra Bhushan finds that after 2020 efficiency plateaus. Growth also poses formidable challenges of sourcing minerals, water and land. Read (...) read

Groups in Africa, Latin America condemn World Bank biosafety projects

> Libération Afrique

http://www.liberationafrique.org/spi (...)

The World Bank is set to secure funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for two projects that will undermine public debate and aggressively drive GM crops into the heart of peasant agriculture. The two projects, one in West Africa and the other in Latin America, will hasten the spread of GM crops into farmer seed systems and even into certain centres of origin.
The projects are clearly being driven by an outside agenda. At their core is a longstanding strategy pursued by the World Bank and the US government to harmonise regulations for GM crops across regions in order to override national processes that are more susceptible to local opposition. The idea is to establish favourable regulations in a few countries whose governments are open to GM crops and then to use these regulations as a model that can be imposed on neighbouring countries by way of regional policy bodies. In this way, harmonisation side-steps any possible democratic debate and provides corporations with a large, one-stop shop for their GM crops.  read