Labor Trafficking as the Modern-day Slave Trade: the Philippine Case

The Philippines is one of the great labor exporters of the world.  Some 10 per cent of its total population and 22 per cent its working age population are now migrant workers in other countries.  With remittances totaling some $20 billion a year, the Philippines places fourth as a recipient of remittances, after China, India, and Mexico.

Labor Export and Structural Adjustment

The country’s role as a labor exporter cannot be divorced from the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism.  The labor export program began in the mid-seventies as a temporary program under the Marcos dictatorship, with a relatively small number of workers involved–some 50,000.  The ballooning of the program to encompass some 9 million workers owes much to the devastation of the economy and jobs by the structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund beginning in 1980, trade liberalization under the World Trade Organization, and the prioritization of debt repayment by the post-Marcos governments in national economic policy since 1986.

• Walden Bello

Global Governance of the Internet must be Democratised!

A joint statement by civil society organisations for the UN CSTD meeting on 'Enhanced Cooperation on Public Policy Issues Pertaining to the Internet' to take place in Geneva on May 18th, 2012

 proposed byFocus on the Global South (Thailand), Instituto Nupef (Brazil), IT for Change (India), Knowledge Commons (India), Other News (Italy), Third World Network (Malaysia)

The Internet is a major force today, restructuring our economic, social, political and cultural systems. Most people implicitly assume that it is basically a beneficent force, needing, if at all, some caution only at the user-end. This may have been true in the early stages when the Internet was created and  sustained by benevolent actors, including academics, technologists, and start-up enterprises that challenged big businesses. However, we are getting past that stage now. What used to be a public network of millions of digital spaces, is now largely a conglomeration of a few proprietary spaces. (A few websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon together make much of what is considered the Internet by most people today.)  We are also moving away from a browser-centric architecture of the 'open' Internet to an applications-driven mobile Internet, that is even more closed and ruled by  proprietary spaces (like App Store and Android Market). In fact, some Internet plans for mobiles come only with a few big websites and applications, without the open 'public' Internet, which is an ominous pointer to what the future Internet may look like. What started off as a global public resource is well on its way to becoming a set of monopoly private enclosures, and a means for entrenching dominant power. At this stage, it is crucial to actively defend and promote the Internet's immense potential as a democratic and egalitarian force, including through appropriate principles and policies at the global level.

Why the Green Economy is a wrong path to restore the equilibrium with nature and what alternatives do we have?

Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, the environmental crisis continues to worsen. The unsustainable development model that gained dominance in the world resulted to grave loss of biodiversity, melting of polar ice caps and mountain glaciers, alarming increase in deforestation and desertification and the looming danger of an at least 4ºC increase in temperature, which will threaten life as we know it.

Focus on the Global South Statement on the Denial of Entry to Belgium of Mr. Walden Bello

We strongly protest the  refusal of the Belgian Ministry of Interior to allow Dr. Walden Bello entry into Belgium on May 4th. Dr Bello is a co-founder and Board Member of  Focus on the Global South, a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, and an internationally respected academic and activist for social, economic and environmental justice.  His shabby treatment has shocked and raised the indignation of civil society, academics and policy makers in numerous countries. 

After several hours and multiple requests from the Philippine Embassy in Belgium,  the Protocol Office of the Belgian Ministry of External Affairs and officers of the Belgian Border Police to grant Mr. Bello entry on legitimate grounds,  he was denied a border visa and sent on a plane back to the US, to a different city than the one he flew from.  This treatment of an elected Parliamentarian, with a busy international schedule of work commitments , is utterly disrespectful. Mr. Bello holds a diplomatic passport and it has been his understanding that all countries belonging to the Schengen system allow entry to holders of diplomatic passports from the Philippines without their having a Schengen visa.  He had used the same diplomatic passport to enter other countries belonging to the Schengen border control system without a prior visa and without any problems. Even the officers of the Border Police admitted that the rule exempting Belgium from automatically granting entry to diplomatic passport holders from the Philippines had proven “confusing” to many people.  Mr. Bello had a legitimate purpose in going to Belgium: as panelist in the two-day International Conference on the European Economic Crisis organized by Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory.  The Flemish coalition of development organizations (11.11.11) also made interventions on his behalf.

• Philippines

Video Documentary “Global Crises, Regional Solutions”

Can regional integration offer a way out of the current economic, climate, food and energy crises? In this video documentary, activists from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe* argue that regional integration is the only viable response to these crises.

WATCH ONLINE AT: www.alternative-regionalisms.org/?p=4208SHARE THROUGH FACEBOOK

Video Documentary | 26 minutes | April 2012

• Alternative Regionalisms
• Deglobalisation