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Across Bangladesh, the situation is much better than it was 30 years ago both in terms of the proportion of the population with access to improved sanitary facilities and in terms of absolute numbers. In the late 1970s, the national sanitation coverage was 2%, while over 300,000 children under (...)

In May 2006, after voting in the congressional elections, my family and I went up to visit some relatives up in the mountains just south of Rio San Juan. There we played dominoes and were preparing a sancocho, when my cousin walked in very proudly telling us that she had just gotten RD$500 for (...)

Venezuela has undergone profound political and social changes since Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency in February 1999. These transformations have been reflected in the fundamental pillars of the government’s economic policy. Chávez’s initially spoke about combating “savage neo-liberalism” and (...)

It is obvious that the discourse around content regulation has shifted mostly towards the protection of children from harmful content and child pornography on the internet. Any references to gender-related concerns were dropped, including even problematic conceptions that women and children (...)

The dating scene is often compared to a jungle: rough, tough and a little bewildering. But when you’re HIV-positive and looking for love, the map’s even harder to decipher, the journey fraught with esteem-threatening decisions and nagging uncertainty.
To mark Valentine’s Day, IRIN/PlusNews had a (...)

This position paper has been prepared by the International CSO Steering Group (ISG) coordinating the “CSO Parallel Process to the Ghana High Level Forum Network”. The ISG coordinating CSO Parallel Process to the Ghana High Level Forum network brings together various local, national, regional and (...)

In a narrow and formal sense, last month’s Climate Change conference in Bali achieved its objectives. The Kyoto Protocol is due to expire in 2012: the Bali gathering’s purpose was to adopt a roadmap for negotiating a new treaty — and that was done. A new roadmap, called the Bali Action Plan, was (...)

Myanmar (formerly Burma), with a population of some 52 million, is one of the poorest countries in Asia, yet international aid had been negligible until recently.
Aid flows are rising, despite the isolation of the regime, a tense political environment and limited humanitarian space, according (...)

One of the terrible truths of the 20th century is that it was a blight on small farmers or peasants everywhere. Before looking at the question of whether Asia’s farmers need protection, it is necessary to consider this historical background.
In both wealthy capitalist economies and in socialist (...)

The recent US election was a redemptive election. At a time that many throughout the world had written off the American electorate as lifeless putty in the hands of Karl Rove, it woke up to deliver the Republican Party its worse blow in the last quarter of a century. Not only independents and (...)

Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and — while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances — its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. This paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.

In the beginning of the 1990s, Samuel Huntigton argued that the "third wave of democratization" would free the world from dictators, and spread the model of Anglo-American democracy worldwide. However, history took another path. Analyzing the recent democratic trends in countries like the Philippines, Brazil and Argentina, this article warns that "capitalism and democratic deepening are no longer compatible."

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 (...)

This isn’t a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: where are women in the global economic crisis?
The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer the brutal inequality and injustice of an economic system that, in crisis, (...)

The established democracies are accepting flawed and unfair elections for political expediency, Human Rights Watch said today in releasing its World Report 2008. By allowing autocrats to pose as democrats, without demanding they uphold the civil and political rights that make democracy (...)

Southeast Asia Civil Society Statement on Internet Governance
Firstly, we applaud and welcome the report by UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Mr Frank La Rue, at the 17th session of the UN Human Rights Council, which affirmed human right in the internet. Nothing the important (...)