The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS promotes the principle of just economies. We are opposed to economic development that violates social and economic rights and increases inequalities in the pursuit of economic growth.
Glenn Ashton -
Sugar is currently trading near record highs, at levels not seen for around 28 years. Industry commentators cite predicted low monsoon rainfalls affecting the Indian crop and shortages from Brazilian producers, coupled to technical trading positions as the ostensible causes.
A major cause for the price spike is being overlooked. This is the increasing profitability of ethanol production from sugar cane and the pressure this is exerting upon international sugar markets.
Ethanol is globally...
David Barsamian -
Vandana Shiva is an internationally renowned voice for sustainable development and social justice. She is a physicist, scholar, political activist, and feminist, and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize. She is also director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. Author of many books, her latest are Earth Democracy and Soil Not Oil.
She spoke in New Delhi with David Barsamian, founder of...
Stephen Greenberg -
An important question facing humanity at present is how to ensure enough food is produced so that everyone has enough. There is a distribution issue that is unresolved in a capitalist system: the market distributes, and those without the resources to participate in the market are excluded. This produces the reality of obesity in some countries side by side with starvation in others, and surplus production that goes to waste or is fed to animals, side by side with food deficits in other...
Michelle Pressend -
Since the last World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial meeting took place in Hong Kong in 2005, the WTO Doha negotiations have remained at an impasse. Attempts to revive negotiations last year during the July 2008 mini Ministerial meeting failed.
In principle what the Doha Declaration agreed to in 2001 was meant to foster ‘development’ in developing countries and address the adverse impact of trade liberalization and deregulation.
Since then, Doha negotiations have been...
Glenn Ashton -
The current global economic turmoil gives rise to the question, "If capitalism dies, what alternatives exist, or will emerge, to replace it?"
The question inevitably provokes utterly predictable positioning. The stock response that capitalism has already trumped communism, to the degree that the old communist bogeymen of Russia and China have embraced the capitalist model, is dishonest.
Do we really have to take an either/or position regarding capitalism and communism? Western...
Eamonn McCann -
Shuffling out from U2’s Popmart tour — the one with the McDonalds-style Golden Arch — at Lansdowne Road 10 years ago, I chanced on Philip King, singer, songwriter, television producer and music adviser to the Irish Arts Council.
"Whaddya think?"
"Whatever it is," pronounced the elfin Kerry sage, "it’s a fucking big one of them."
Which has always been the way with the emperors of bombast. Now they, or at least their stage sets, are...
