The East African Regional Seminar on Debt is for me a tremendously encouraging sign, growing as it does from discussions at a Pan-African conference in Senegal, and taking as its challenge regional capacity-building and greater cooperation among debt campaigns in an entire region facing many related political and economic challenges. The growing number of South-South exchanges are fostering a consciousness in the South that the challenges are not limited to one's own country or one's own region, but are the consequence of a global economic system that oppresses all of the countries of the Global South, and, not incidentally, large segments of the population in the North as well.

The Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform, coordinated by La Via Campesina, an international alliance of small farmers' and landless peoples' organizations, and the Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), supports landless and land poor peoples around the globe in their on-the-ground struggles to achieve the right to land. Action Alerts are posted when we receive word from the Campaign or from our other partners, like the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil , that a crisis exists somewhere in the world where land rights are being threatened and where those involved believe that international action can help.

The International Advisory Committee formation meeting June 9-10 - São Paolo, Brazil

The World Bank Bonds Boycott marked its one-year anniversary in April with an announcement that nearly 30 entities throughout the U.S., including city governments, trade unions, churches and investment firms, have committed not to buy World Bank bonds. Officials at the World Bank are getting the jitters.

On July 17, 2001, President Bush gave a speech at World Bank headquarters in which he called for that institution as well as the regional development banks (African, Asian, and Inter-American Development Banks) to "dramatically increase the share of their funding provided as grants rather than loans to the poorest countries [þ]. Specifically I propose that up to 50 percent of the funds provided by the development banks to the poorest countries be provided as grants for education, health, nutrition, water supply, sanitation and other human needs."

The World Bank will launch its Development Gateway internet initiative on 23 July. This site is being presented as a helpful store of data, links and analysis on virtually all global issues. Unlike the Bank¹s own website, this one claims that all opinions are welcome and that it will be decentralised and independent. The quotes in the box accompanying this article, from a leaked World Bank External Relations Department document, expose what may be the truer Bank agenda: reaching more people with its perspectives and thereby countering the backlash against corporate globalisation.

Access to farm land is a fundamental human right for rural peoples. Grossly inequitable distribution of land is one the most common underlying causes of poverty and destitution in much of the world. The redistribution of land through comprehensive agrarian reform is a basic prerequisite for the kind of inclusive, broad-based development that would allow nations to provide all of their citizens with a decent standard of living, and make possible more ecologically-sustainable management of natural resources.

At the end of May, a group of Africans representing national associations of non-governmental organizations met in Washington, DC. On May 31, Soren Ambrose and Njoki Njoroge Njehu of the 50 Years Is Enough Network interviewed Oduor Ong¹wen, who is the Director of the Nairobi-based EcoNews Africa and Chair of the National Council of NGOs of Kenya. In the latter role, he sometimes engages in processes his own organization disavows, such as the IMF/World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) process. While in Washington, however, he and about half of the other African NGO council representatives boycotted a meeting with the World Bank.

The important statement below comes out of a recent pan-African meeting held in Kampala, Uganda at which African civil society groups, convened by Jubilee South, analyzed the IMF and World Bank¹s new Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers" (PRSPs). The statement makes it very clear that despite the new rhetoric of "poverty reduction" and "participation" coming from the IMF and World Bank, the same old policies of "structural adjustment," which put corporate rights before human, environmental, and social rights, are firmly entrenched in the PRSPs. The document calls for the PRSP process to be exposed and for groups North and South to push forward with the demands of total debt cancellation and an end to devastating structural adjustment programs, under whatever name they appear.