Globalization

Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis

Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis – The Independent
Speculators blamed for driving up price of basic foods as 100 million face severe hunger. Monsanto reported net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled. Cargill’s net earnings soared by 86 per cent and Archer Daniels Midland increased its net earnings by 42 per cent. More

Globalization

Globalization is good for you

Globalisation is good for you – Red Pepper
Many socialists look to the state as the decisive instrument of social change. Nigel Harris argues that, on the contrary, nation states, with their priorities and resources focused on maintaining power through military might, hold back the reduction of poverty. He insists that globalisation, despite all of its ambiguities, is essentially a liberation from the shackles of the competing nation state. We have to look to NGOs and social and labour movements to constrain the market, he says.

Church, Environment, Latin America

Brazilian bishops join national movement against slave labor

BRASILIA, Brazil (CNS) — Brazil’s Catholic bishops have joined a 21st-century abolitionist movement called the National Front Against Slave Labor. The front, which includes congressional leaders and representatives of unions and social movements, was launched June 4. Its immediate goal is to push new anti-slavery legislation through Brazil’s National Congress before the July recess. “Slavery is an abominable practice that the church in Brazil, through the voice of some bishops and the Pastoral Land Commission, has denounced since the 1970s in a systematic and documented way,” said a bishops’ conference statement read by Father Jose Ernanne Pinheiro, political adviser to the bishops, during the campaign launch. Slavery was abolished in Brazil 120 years ago, but special teams in Brazil’s Ministry of Labor have rescued nearly 29,000 people from forced labor since 1995. Many of them were poor peasant workers on farms.