GCAP Blog

With Japanese drums, bamboo trees and millions of wishes, GCAP campaigners sent off their delegations with strong demands on education, health and HIV/AIDS, climate change and international aid.

Read more about the events:

Gordon Brown sent off to Japan with 60,000 wishes for action

Prime Minister Harper gets your wishes for the G8 meeting in Japan

10.000 Wünsche, 200 Menschen, 50 Bambusbäume

Japanese 'taiku' drummers joined 10,000 wishes on bamboo trees in front of the German Chancellory

According to Reuters:

"When the rich nations' leaders arrive in Hokkaido, northern Japan, to discuss problems such as soaring fuel and food prices, global warming and nuclear proliferation, they will be asked to each write a wish on a piece of paper and tie it to a bamboo tree to make it come true."

Source: G8 leaders to wish upon a bamboo tree at summit

We hope when they're making their wishes, the G8 leaders will bear in mind the wishes of people in G8 countries and elsewhere, who have strongly supported demands on education, health and HIV/AIDS, climate change and international aid.

The petition reached 1,003,469 today and it's still growing! The latest count will be handed over to the G8 during the summit, so there is still time to add your voice.

Join the Tanabata petition and Act Now to End Poverty and Inequality.

You may also want to take a look at our G8 events and actions, including today's send-offs.

GCAP co-chairs Kumi Naidoo, Adelaide Sosseh and Sylvia Borren responded to the article on behalf of GCAP:

To renege on promises to increase aid, to abandon the target of ensuring everyone affected by HIV/Aids is supported and to water down commitments to provide healthcare and education for poor people, made amid great fanfare in Gleneagles in 2005, would destroy millions of lives and be another failed attempt by our leaders to act in time of crisis.

If, as people struggle to afford soaring food prices, the G8 considers it acceptable to cut back and sweep over the necessary targets of 2010 so that they can afford to bail out the richest and their banks, then greed really will have won over justice and basic rights.

The also added a reminder tor the G8 that people are mobilising against poverty and inequality and expecting them to take concrete actions.

The G8 must remember that it has a mandate to uphold its side of the bargain. Like previous years, almost 1m people have already signed up to a petition calling for the Japanese G8 to deliver on education, health, HIV/AIDS, climate change and aid commitments. Leaders Yasuo Fukuda, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Stephen Harper and Dmitry Medvedev will all get these wishes delivered to their doors this week by campaigners. They owe it to the people not just to listen but to show courage and act.

Read the full FT article G8 leaders ready to backtrack on $25bn aid pledge to Africa

Every year they meet, and every year they make resolutions, which they then promptly fail to meet.

This year GCAP is joining the G8 leaders in Hokkaido to ensure they make the right decisions, and to remind them that words are not enough. In our suitcase we have packed demands on Aid, Climate Change, Education and Health and the supporting wishes of people in G8 countries and elsewhere who joined our Tanabata action demanding Action Now: End Poverty and Inequality .

On July 3rd, in various events in some of the G8 countries, we will be pressing these wishes into the hands of government leaders going to the G8, to make sure that their suitcases carry the right contents en route to their annual talks.

During the G8 summit in Japan GCAP will take part in the alternative civil society summit, bring the voices of people living in poverty to the meeting and hand over the full petition.

Check our blog for more updates during the meeting or subscribe to our G8 RSS feed.

…and if you haven’t joined already, take action now!

At the Food Aid Organisation in Rome forty World leaders arrive at the invitation of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon. Speech after speech they speak about the causes of this crisis. Insufficient investment in agriculture, already for years. High oil prices. Unfair trade allowing rich countries to dump subsidized high-oil-intensive agricultural products in developing countries.

Western tariff walls, monopolistic practice from agrarian multinationals, financial speculation, more meat-eating middle classes in China and India.  And the farming for biofuel instead of food. They agree about everything except that: president Lula from Brazil claims that not a millimeter of rainforest is lost, nor a single bite of food less available because of bio-fuel production. According to him it provides work, makes profit and benefits the environment. He compares it with ‘good cholesterol’ instead of the ‘bad cholesterol’ of the protectionism of the west.

Emotions and figures fly across the table, and each of the speakers could be employed by Oxfam. Why then don’t we find the 15 billion dollars needed to send each child and person to bed with a full stomach – and the second 15 billion needed to invest in sustainable local agriculture? “Yes indeed”, I foam in my small NGO corner of the enormous conference hall (where no more then 80 people were allowed in with great difficulty), “Yes, indeed leaders, you are right, so why don’t you do something about this?” In the last six months America has passed a farm bill of nearly ten times the 30 billion needed – to subsidise their own megafarmers. Forty times this amount is spent on arms yearly. Europe arranges EPA's (European Partnership agreements) with African countries to open their boarders for our trade, or they’ll get less aid. Europe has spent 75 billion less in aid this year than promised. And is going to spend less on the millennium goals in the coming years, more on transport: for European contractors? And the worst fact: since December 2007 the European and American Reserve Banks have magically found 1000 billion dollars to ‘stabilise the financial world’. And then we can’t find one-thirtieth of that for the food crisis?

‘Boys’, I think angrily as I sit there, ‘Stop talking and solve it!’, because they are nearly all gentlemen speaking here whilst food production in the world is mainly in the hands of women. Mostly bare hands: only 5% of the measly 3.4 billion invested in agriculture in developing countries reaches women. When they can’t repay their micro-credit loans or can’t bear to hear the cries of their starving children any longer, they commit suicide. Often by taking pesticides. In the last five years more than 200.000 of these suicides were recorded in India. Because of the cheap cotton dumping.

I speak very politely about the mobilization in many countries to Mr. Ban when we get a quarter of an hour of his time. We hand over 340.000 support emails that Avaaz and GCAP (Global Call for Action against Poverty) received in the last weeks: symbolically placed in a grain bag.  We speak of the 43 million people who stood up against poverty last October, and Ban Ki-Moon immediately puts on the white band I give him. He says explicitly that he agrees with me strengthening the role of women is part of the solution of the world food crisis.

So shall we finally really start supporting women? With money, not just words?

Visit: Take action: Stop the food crisis!

The crisis is already affecting millions, women in particular that cannot afford basic food like rice, maize and corn and are going hungry. Women cannot feed their families- they already spent three quarters of their income on food and have now the stark choice of eating less food or switching to less nutritious, cheaper food. As hunger rises so does civil unrest - in many countries protests have already been quashed and dozens of people have lost their lives in clashes with police. Hunger riots have taken place in at least 40 countries. Farmers are committing suicide. Efforts to meet the MDGs are being seriously undermined as maternal health and child mortality rates increase due to lack of food, families fail to send their children to school due to hunger and the increased need for child labour and government investment in essential services is redirected to emergency areas.

The crisis is a build up of several factors that came in to play to create the current situation. Some include; crop yield is not commensurate with population growth; rate of consumption has gone up particularly in terms of animal products like poultry in many rich countries. Decades of neglect in supporting sustainable local agriculture; agricultural subsidies and other distorting trade barriers in developed countries;  the diversion of maize yields toward bio fuels; the high cost of petrol, fertilizers and seeds; climate change, desertification and decreasing water resources; a weak US dollar; commodities futures speculation, etc.”

 There is a high range of variability in food consumption e.g. in countries like the US and Russia one tonne will support one individual, in poor countries, one tonne supports nearly six individuals. The average in the world is three persons per tonne. At present more than 65 countries are either producing or importing less than this food average.

The major trigger was the increase in energy price that has a downstream impact on all inputs. Agriculture in many countries is energy intensive. As a result of increases in) energy prices, industrialised countries diverted some of the grains for bio-fuels. United States in particular is diverting 30% of corn, maize production for ethanol. Above all, global warming and uncertain meteorological factors also affected the situation.

The high level conference by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bio-energy in Rome may address this issue. Among many other state delegations from member countries the meeting will be attended by the UN Secretary General, several Heads of State as well as World Bank and IMF representatives, where they will discuss ways to address the current global food crisis. This meeting can be an opportunity to address the structural problems contributing to the crisis such as under-investment in agriculture, unfair trade rules, lack of progress on the MDGs, lack of delivery on aid commitments and gender injustice. Further to minor initiatives nothing much is done or promised by the developed countries to address the problem. UN call to for immediate support to countries facing sever crisis to buy and produce their own food and prevent a starvation has not received the response the crisis requires UN also alerted that food prices are not going to go down in the next 10 years, ringing alarm bell to the world leaders. Some civil society groups like Global Call to Action against Poverty is organising people’s response on the food crisis and brining people’s voices, testimonies to these global leaders and forums. But we need more than just meetings and discussions. Concrete steps need to be taken immediately to avoid any mass scale hunger or starvation. At global level clear political decisions should be taken to stop using food products for bio-fuels, provide immediate support to countries facing crisis to buy food and control oil prices.

At national level all these governments must take immediate measures to legalise land and succession rights for women, provide agricultural and micro-finance input to lift (mainly women’s) subsistence farming, monitor food prices in a transparent way and support food production and storage before the crisis reaches a higher level. Take away the control of the private and market forces on fixing prices of food items. Land must be secured for food production as a percentage of the population and diverting corn for fuel production must be banned immediately.

It is also advised the crisis of the first decade of the 21st century should lead to a green revolution. This is a war against hunger where every state, has own degree of  responsibility. We can't play politics with hunger; all governments, international institutions and political forces should work together. We need a global approach to agriculture and food security. If we miss this opportunity, we will have a very serious situation coming up very soon. Famine may not come but we will have famine of work, famine of income, breakdown of law and order and greater social unrest.

Henri Valot
GCAP Organisational Development Advisor

If you read the economic and development co-operation literature, you will clearly note a call for pro-poor policies. But one should now question: is poverty the problem? Or is it the alarming rate of wealth and inequality growth that is undermining poverty alleviation measures? There is something wrong and the fault does not lie with the Least Developed Countries or the poorest segments of our societies. The problem is not the poverty; the problem is the greed and the fact that speculation became dominant.

Wealth is not necessarily a problem, and it is the most common, universal quest. Right. But for all of us trying to understand what is going on, how do we make sense of the diversity of information we receive?
•    The wealthy, and the extremely wealthy are now everywhere in the media. We are flooded with important questions, such as: how do they spend their money? Who are the new extremely wealthy from India, Russia, China? What are the problems and challenges in the lives of the extremely wealthy?
•    European presidential salaries are usually around 20,000 euros a month. This would be the measure of remuneration for someone who is in charge of the public good in a country. But we hear that the remuneration of the captains of industry is significantly higher. Add their salaries, their stock options, and levels are reached that are simply unimaginable. It indicates that their job and responsibility is viewed as being more important than the public good. We regularly hear that these captains have been fired with a golden parachute of millions of dollars. Usually, he/she failed, cut jobs, lost markets but is able to secure a golden retirement.
•    But those European presidential salaries can be limited to 20,000 euros monthly, because many of them are in fact in collusion with the global capital. Some, like Berlusconi, are major industry captains or others have clear allegiance to global capital.
•    In 2004, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, military spending globally exceeded US$1 trillion. According to the 2005 Human Development Report, just the increase in military spending since 2000 would have been more than sufficient for all donors to reach the 0.7% target for aid spending (See ROA 2006).
•    “Bankers saved, human rights sacrificed” write Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, from CADTM: “On the one hand, the amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA) distributed by the rich countries in 2007 is approximately 100 billion dollars. On the other hand, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the potential cost of the current international crisis is approximately 1,000 billion dollars, a result of the so-called 'subprime' crisis that emerged in the summer of 2007 and continues to wreak havoc.” .
•    Africa leaks: Contrary to a commonly accepted view, Africa is a net exporter of capital, says the economist Charles Abugre.  Between 1970 and 2000, whereas Africa received about $100bn in aid (including loans), it lost $274bn in capital flight induced by debt, trade mis-invoicing and imputed interest. Christian Aid calculated that over the past 2 decades, Africa lost in income terms the equivalent of over $270bn from the negative growth effects alone of trade liberalisation. This amount alone more than matches the accumulated value of grants, loans and net FDI channelled into the continent. It is also estimated that at least $11.5 trillion is currently held in about 74 tax havens – lost to tax authorities – by wealthy individuals. As is obvious from above, Africa is not as poor or as helpless as is often presented. Instead, it is a continent that leaks heavily. We have an obligation to plug the leaks, and to rely on domestic sources for financing development, which in turn also provide a more conducive environment for promoting democratic accountability than the dependence on aid, concludes Abugre.

There is something crazy going on. Add the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the so-called sub-prime crisis, and the fact that a trader can lose US$ 5 billion in half a day; then compare it to the actual cost of universal basic essential services (800 billion US$, according to UNDP).  Compare the fact that North Americans and Europeans spend more yearly on ice-cream than on official aid. Have in mind that 80% of the income of half the world’s population  is used to buy food and you will understand why people are in the streets as the price of rice rises.  As the UN says, it is not a famine per se, it is a new phenomenon: there is food everywhere in the large cities of the world, what happens is that the poorest and the most vulnerable inhabitants just cannot afford to buy it.

The rise of inequality

We all know the 80/20 law - 20% of the richest people own 80% of the wealth. But this is already outdated. While the richest 10% of adults in the world own 85% of global household wealth, the bottom half collectively owns barely 1%. Even more striking, the average person in the top 10% owns nearly 3,000 times the wealth of the average person in the bottom 10%. These are some of the results that emerge from a new UNU-WIDER study of the distribution of household wealth.

Global household wealth in the year 2000 amounted to $125 trillion, equivalent to roughly three times global GDP or to $20,500 per citizen of the world, by official exchange rates. In terms of PPP dollars, the corresponding world value was PPP$26,000 per capita, roughly the same as the average level in Poland or Turkey. Wealth levels vary widely across nations. Among the richest countries, mean wealth was $144,000 per person in the USA and $181,000 in Japan. Lower down among countries with wealth data are India, with per capita assets of $1,100, and Indonesia with $1,400 per capita (See The challenge of Inequality)

Social Watch therefore rightly asks “When will dignity for all be achieved? What is the bare minimum for a decent life for all? The world leaders who signed the Declaration did not define it clearly but its principles are embedded in the commitment to achieve certain targets by 2015. When will we achieve the basic standards of material dignity for the entire world’s people? Not in a hundred years unless we substantially accelerate the current trends of progress in social areas”!

With regard to Sub-Saharan Africa:
•    In food security (child malnutrition and under-nourishment in children younger than 5): 50% of the region registers no progress and at the current pace, the goal would be reached by 2282
•    In women’s reproductive health (births attended by skilled personnel): 32% of the region registers no progress and at the current pace, the goal would be reached by 2130
•    In basic education (adult literacy and primary and secondary school enrolment ratio): 21% of the region registers no progress and at the current pace, the goal would be reached by 2079
•    In child mortality: 41% of the region registers no progress and at the current pace, the goal would be reached by 2155
•    In water and sanitation: 28% of the region registers no progress and at the current pace, the goal would be reached by 2159.

This increasing inequality damages our common humanity, and places all societies in danger. It has an impact on our common understanding of social justice; it also has severe consequences on growth and efficiency and on political legitimacy.

Social justice: The view that there are limits to tolerable deprivation is fundamental to most societies and value systems. All major religions express concerns about equity and place obligations on their adherents to address extreme deprivation as a moral duty. Public ideas reflect wider normative concerns. Surveys show strong opinions in many countries that the gap between rich and poor is too large, thus indicating an underlying perception of social injustice.

Growth and efficiency: Extreme inequality is not just bad for poverty reduction, it is also bad for growth. In the long run, efficiency and greater equity can be complementary. Poor people remain poor partly because they cannot borrow against future earnings to invest in production, the education of their children and assets to reduce their vulnerability. Land insecurity and limited access to justice can create further barriers to investment and pro-poor growth.

Political legitimacy: Extreme inequalities also weaken political legitimacy and corrode institutions. Inequalities in income and human capabilities often reflect inequalities in political power. Poor people (especially women), rural populations and indigenous communities are disadvantaged partly because they have a weak political voice, and vice versa. Where political institutions are seen as perpetuating inequalities or advancing the interests of elites, democracy and stability can be undermined.

The MDGs or more ambitious economic policies needed

We could ask ourselves if the resolution adopted by the General Assembly-2005 World Summit Outcome, “To adopt, by 2006, and implement comprehensive national development strategies to achieve the internationally agreed development goals and objectives, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)” has in fact happened.

Being unrealistic about the MDGs in our public rhetoric and campaigns “runs the risk of creating a climate of inaccurate pessimism about development and aid”, adds Brian Tomlinson.  Indeed, in the absence of radical reforms to foster greater global equality on the part of developed countries, beyond delivering more aid, an exclusive emphasis on MDG targets potentially sets up poor people and poor countries to take the blame once again for “their failure” to achieve the unachievable. Yet again, it will be said that these countries failed to take the advice of the international community and squandered billions of dollars of aid and debt relief without reaching the Goals”.

Commitment to the MDGs is no doubt worthy. However, we need to be wary of allowing them to be used as an excuse for avoiding difficult political issues, and ignoring the very real complexity of human development in its widest understanding. We need to ensure that we maintain a vision of social justice, gender equity, and human development that relates to more than just the MDGs.  To achieve the MDGs, economic policies have to be bolder and more expansionary, advocates Terry Mc Kinley.  Fiscal policies should be focused on substantially scaling up public investment, financial policies geared to channelling considerably more lending to productive private investment and monetary policies reshaped to target not just inflation, but also real economic variables, such as increases in incomes and jobs and meaningful reductions in poverty.

The call for substantially larger Official Development Assistance (ODA) contributions to many developing countries, especially in Africa, necessarily involves making Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) objectives much more ambitious. Such an injection of funds should rapidly scale up public investment in physical and social infrastructure.  A sizeable share should be targeted, upfront, to enlarging ‘absorptive capacity’ - i.e., each country’s ability to effectively disburse these monies for development purposes (Nebie, 2004). Otherwise, national ownership of poverty reduction strategies will be sacrificed in the process.

Growth alone will not be sufficient to eradicate income poverty within a reasonable time-frame of two or three decades. Eradicating poverty requires reducing inequality through direct redistribution. It is not a matter of choosing between labour and transfer strategies, but of recognising them as complementary. As the work of Amartya Sen demonstrates, people-centred development for poverty eradication is ultimately about recognising the rights of the vulnerable in transforming the power relations, as well as affecting the cultural and social interests that sustain inequality. The poor are not objects to be acted upon by development officials who “deliver” the MDGs. The impoverishment  of large numbers of people in the South has been the consequence of complex national and international economic, social and political processes. The challenge of combating poverty therefore is not so much “political will” of donor governments, as it is strengthening the means to address unequal power, capacity, and access to resources for those whose rights are systematically denied - the poor, impoverished women and children, and other marginalised peoples.

Most societies see reducing poverty and addressing inequality and economic injustice as important goals for public policy. Extreme disparities undermine the pursuit of these goals, and limit the rate at which growth can be converted into poverty reduction. Similarly, extreme disparities in health and education reduce the scope of disadvantaged groups to take advantage of opportunities for improving their welfare. The appropriate response is to ensure that inequality and the measures to overcome disparities in life chances figure more prominently in the design of poverty reduction strategies. National income is not a good measure of welfare, because it ignores the distribution of income.

International finances and GDP as public good

More than ever, we have the technology and the financial means to reduce poverty. To do so, civil society must be attentive to:
•    Developing the major agenda of national ownership and capacity development (See the current discussions on the Paris Declaration at betteraid.org)
•    Supporting and disseminating, through our Open Universities the work of alternative economists, and promoting our alternative indices and indicators
•    Supporting the reflection on “Innovative sources of finances”, including taxation of international financial movements
•    Supporting campaigns aimed at corporate transparency
•    Campaigning against tax concessions and for progressive tax policies
•    Working with relevant networks to campaign for the end to banking secrecy and tax havens
•    Advocating for participatory budgeting at all levels and linking all the innovative participatory budgeting experiences being held everywhere (see some Budget Tracking and Poverty Expenditure monitoring tools)

The activity was very well attended. Participants were very interested in the presentations and in the activities of the FTF.

The launch of the plan started with a video clip prepared by the support team of GCAP. It's about the mobilisation of women in 2007 around the GCAP demands.

Pam Rajput made the presentation of the tribunal in India. Previously we showed a video that you can all access following the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXyy1tMi2-k

Lysa John, though not present at the CSW, was very present through her voice in the video and the hard work she did for the tribunal.

Martha Rico presented the tribunal in Peru explaining how cases were selected and the whole process that led to the verdict. And Josephine Kamel introduced the plans for the tribunal in Egypt that will take place on 14 March.

All presentations generated great interest. And it became clear that we need to share with the list and beyond the process of the tribunals as this was particularly appreciated by participants as a way to organise their own tribunals back home.

We then launched the mobilisation plan for 8 March and distributed all documents with the demands resulting from the tribunals and others, like the ones related to the Gender Equality Architecture Reform and the financing for gender equality.

We also distributed post cards for sending to the UN General Secretary and others that can be sent to the policy makers or others that women believe should receive them as they are in a position to act. These cards are available for download from the internet and we will also be sending you copies by e-mail.

As I write this I cannot but remember the participation of a Masai woman from Kenya who, during the debate, said that poverty tends to be defined in terms of having one or two dollars a day, but that lacked all significance for her culture, as what is important for the Masai is having cattle, not dollars. She went on saying that she knew that at the end of the meeting, like in all meetings, it would be said that more information could be download from www and that she and so many other women in the world had no way to get to that www wherever it was! Hers was a strong statement reminding us about the diversity of cultures, of realities, of world views, of possibilities, and of ways to construct wealth and happiness. It is certainly part of what we, at the FTF want to send as a message in terms of unveiling different ways women have to confront poverty and build livelihoods.

See the photo gallery

Ana Agostino, GCAP IFT Co-Chair

On Day two of the Bali Conference, countries were divided over whether to discuss a provision on binding targets to curb carbon emissions.  Apparently, there is no explicit agreement to include targets in the Bali Roadmap or to leave this discussion for the next round of negotiations in Poland in 2008 and Denmark in 2009. The so-called Bali Roadmap is expected to create the next phase of commitment after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 20I2.

I’m guessing a thought balloon popped up in your head just after reading this intro. And it says: But what’s needed are targets! In fact, what’s needed are hard caps on emissions!  Millions of poor people are suffering right now from the negative impacts of climate change, hello? Action is needed now, not in 2008 or 2009!”

My thoughts exactly.  Talk about being of one mind.  

Then again being of one mind seems a remote possibility in the Bali talks. It seems that the most important thing here, the issue on which the talks hinge is whether a compromise with the United States will be achieved. The consensus from reading the media reports on the second day of the talks is this: failure to reach a compromise will weaken the Bali Roadmap. Right. But isn’t failure to curb emissions quickly going to destroy millions of lives, lands and livelihood?

Incidentally, the US and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer seem to be of one mind. They both uttered the same analogy about the Bali talks as being some kind of a first date in which the parties are not expected to make a commitment. De Boer has made a statement to the effect that a marriage contract is a culmination of a love affair, not the topic of discussion on the first date. Then comes the US with “We will be very open and flexible, but we don’t want to start off with anything here in the beginning of the process that is going to pre judge what ultimately may be concluded by 2009. So to the extent that this is analogous to a first date, we don’t want to sign the marriage contract yet.”

Thought balloon pops back up with “I hate commitment phobes!” Ok, so maybe that wasn’t what your thought balloon says.

So to the extent that the US calls the Bali talks a first date, we can conclude that this is not going to work. First dates don’t work, it’s the law of physics. Thing is, for me, when you are running out of time, you don’t go on first dates. You plan and make a decision to commit to someone who will make you happy or contented or at least someone you can tolerate – or you make a decision not to make a commitment at all. Imagine you only have one year to live, would you go on successive first dates hoping something will work out with someone along the way?         

Anyway, talking about commitment, legally-binding targets indeed have to discussed in Bali. It is urgent to make an action now and not next year on reducing emissions drastically.  There is no debate that voluntary commitment does not work. The European Union has taken this position and it has announced that it should take the lead on setting legally-binding targets that should be discussed in Bali. Moreover, it announced that it is moving closer to achieving its collective emissions reduction target in 2010 to 7.4% below the 1990 level, which is just short of the 8% reduction target for 2012.#

lani villanueva

It's day 4 of the conference and I, for one, am exhausted. I know how delegates from some of the poorer nations must feel. I remember several years ago when I first became an activist, a round of WTO negotiations was taking place and I was told of the difficulties for poorer nations to even follow negotiations at these big conferences. I don't think I really appreciated then what this meant, but being here in Bali it is obvious that rich nations can flood the various meetings with experts whilst poorer nations must surely be expected to bring magicians who can be in seven places at once.

The main conference centre is a hive of activity with highly technical discussions going on in several fora including the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol, the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advice (SBSTA), the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and others. That is not to mention the countless bilateral discussions, meeting of political groupings such as the G77 and the EU, the packed schedule of side events and official briefings, the press conferences...the list goes on.

To cover all of these meetings, the Australian government has, according to the official participants list, 110 delegates attending the conference. That, surely, is more than enough to provide genuine experts to all of these complex areas and ensure Australian interests are met in the negotiations. Australia is facing severe consequences from climate change as a major drought has plagued the country for at least the last 6 years. Indeed, the new government swept to power partly on the back of it's commitment to ratifying the Kyoto protocol, an act it carried out on the first day of the conference.

The Seychelles is at far greater risk. Recent reports on the island show that extreme weather events are becoming more common and that global warming has led to intense bleaching of the beautiful coral reefs that exist of its shores. The Seychelles has 3 people registered for the conference. With no offence intended to those delegates, it is clear that the two representatives of the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Transport along with one Ambassadors, can not be expected to follow such complicated negotiations.

Talk about an unfair playing field.

I think this is a crucial role for NGOs at conferences such as this. GCAP, as well as Oxfam and other agencies, are working hard to ensure that the poorest people and nations are not forgotten during these meetings. That the impact on humanity is not subsumed by technical jargon.

I was privileged to join a panel at a meeting in the fabulous civil society compound near to the main conference centre yesterday. The compound, unlike its ultra-modern conference centre counterpart, is built as a temporary Indonesian village boasting raised wooden huts with thatched roofs, open sides, no central heating, and masses of passion from the mainly Indonesian participants. There were at least 80 people sat cross-legged on reed mats at the meeting I addressed and, following three presentations, there was a clamour for their stories to be heard. We heard from Indonesian farmers who are now only able to harvest rice once a year whereas before it was twice, from teachers in Jakarta whose students sometimes cannot get to school due to increased flooding, from an activist in Kalimantang whose livelihood is being destroyed as owners of a massive coal mine cut down forests and pollute the area.

This is where real action is happening, not inside the cozy air-conditioned confines of the conference centre. This is where there is real passion for change. As civil society activists, it is imperative upon us to make delegates hear these voices.

We will continue to do so.#