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Significant developments in the energy sector are underway in western Limpopo because of the extensive coal resources in that region. Besides Eskom’s massive Medupi power station, near the existing Matimba power station, there are several other mega-projects in the pipeline. The question is (…)

Buying Congress in 2012
My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a (…)

Hundreds of activists and academics from around the world gathered at the International Seminar “Planet Earth: Anti-Systemic Movements” to discuss the importance of the 1994 Zapatista uprising on its 18th anniversary. In the context of the popular insurrections that have emerged this year across (…)

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to (…)

The annual report of the International Institute for Labour Studies projects a grim future for employment prospects.
With the United States and much of Europe grappling with the slowdown in their economies and the resultant social unrest, the publication of the World of Work Report 2011: (…)

By Susana Baria and Purnima Ramanujan, A Report for Focus on the Global South, March 2011, dowload online
Using case studies from the manufacturing sector in India this paper aims to provide an understanding of the theoretical framework proposed by feminist economists on the process of (…)

In the face of the world’s urgent economic and environmental problems, political leadership is failing. But from the ground up, new tools of understanding are emerging to fill the gap and point a way forward.
The world’s financial crisis is deepening, and protests are spreading across the (…)

For decades, the industries that thrive on destroying the planet have played a cat and mouse game with the environmental movement. We expose their bad practices and build public opposition, they co-opt our language and attempt to neutralize public opinion by creating confusion.
While in (…)

Refuse and Oppose the Domination of Global Capitalism
Bali - November 18, 2011
We, Indonesian people, representations of peasants, workers, migrant workers, fisher folk, indigenous people, women, students, urban poor, consumers, human rights activists, gather in Denpasar, Bali from 16-18 (…)

One of the world’s richest and many of the poorest agree on something, but the Obama administration is holding out.
The world’s second-richest man and a group of American nurses on the frontlines of the Occupy Wall Street protests came to the G20 summit in Cannes, France this week to advocate (…)

Census 2011, which reports a higher growth of urban population than rural as millions give up farming, does not record footloose migration, which drives desperate people to search for work in multiple directions with no clear destination. This is a giant drama that we have not even begun to (…)

It could be argued that the climate change issue has become less about climate justice and more about new profits.
In South Africa, the concept of the green economy is abuzz with nervous energy. There have been numerous conferences on the subject in light of the upcoming United Nations Climate (…)

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and (…)

The European Union is changing its rules on how carbon is traded in response to a series of fraud cases and the financial crisis. This report looks at how corporate lobbies are trying to influence this process, and notes that such measures are bound to fall short since they attempt to "regulate (…)

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have defied many of its early critics, with tens of thousands of people still supporting those camped out at New York’s financial centre and the heart of US capitalism a month after the protests started.
It has since spread to over 70 cities across the (…)

A plan to boost agribusiness, but based mainly on family farming and cooperatives, in Argentina is geared to producing and exporting more food – in a more sustainable manner.
That is the goal of the Strategic Agribusiness Plan (PEA) that representatives of the country’s 23 provinces and of 53 (…)

The idea of taxing international financial transactions is gaining ground. The European Union is promoting it internationally and studying the possibility of imposing it throughout the bloc, or at least in the euro area.
But it is still not clear what the scope of the tax would be or what the (…)

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be (…)

Next year, in June, world leaders will get together in the joyful city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark 20 years of UNCED—the Earth Summit (see Down to Earth, May 15, 1992).
Unbelievably, it will be 40 years since the Stockholm conference, when the question of the environment first caught (…)

The world is tipping over into unknown territory. All the pundits are now starting to agree with US economist, Nouriel Roubini, famous for his prediction of the 2008 financial crash, that a second recession is inevitable. South Africa’s Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus has also added her voice (…)