Free Trade

Trade deals are used to extract valuable resources from the Global South - but a recent victory shows we can make a difference.

We need strong local economies that are built on the foundation of local, independent businesses and cooperatives designed to meet people's needs.

James Thornton, the chief executive of ClientEarth, will call for a ban on any new secret trade courts that allow companies to sue governments for imposing environmental regulations. He is giving a keynote speech at a conference attended by Michael Gove, the environment secretary, today. BRENDAN MONTAGUE reports

A combination of free trade and volatile food speculation is squeezing small-scale Mexican maize farmers and allowing agribusiness to dominate. Photos by Adriana Chow

The first blows may be struck on Canadian ice, but it's at the checkout that the coup de grace is delivered. Andrew Wasley explores the UK companies profiting from the trade in seal fur

If it is not to be choked by debt and taxes, Ireland must return to the self-sufficient, localised vision of one of its founding fathers

This budget season, and so a short perambulation around the vexed question of the national debt seems in order. As a nation we've been living with debt for more the 300 years now, since 1694 to be precise, when Scottish privateer William Paterson persuaded the government of the time that creating £1.2 million of IOUs would get them out of their spending difficulties.

Ravaged for decades by famine and war, Ethiopia is trying to eliminate hunger for good with organic farming. Robin Maynard met the man spearheading the campaign

The millions of people in Niger who died during the recent famines, did so because the IMF pressured its government to tax food and the poor simply couldn't afford to save themselves

The economies of whole islands in the Caribbean face ruin if the WTO, acting at the behest of US-owned multinationals, forces the EU to end preferential trade agreements with small-scale West Indian banana producers

Bono may be cheerleading for its charitable wing, but corporate America is not waging a war on AIDS for the sake of its health, says Tom Hodgkinson

Revenues obtained from the often illegal extraction and supply of commodities such as timber and diamonds are directly bankrolling corrupt regimes and armed insurgency groups, and fund the purchase of weapons and other contraband goods that perpetuate cycles of conflict.

Sometimes it’s good to take a peep at what the enemy is up to. I spent last weekend reading the New York Herald Tribune, and I’ll sometimes look at The Economist. Both these publications are excellent in their way – the Tribune is far superior in writing and information to The Times, for example – but essentially feed the greed of a business-minded readership anxious to figure out what is going on in the world, the better to profit from it.

Economist Herman E Daly argues that our future depends on a new economic model, one that needs to be defined by the dynamic balance – the steady state – of the natural world upon which it depends.

Environmental groups have welcomed the collapse of the latest round of Doha trade talks, which fell apart on Friday.

Environmentalists held their breath in expectation of Gordon Brown's 'green' budget. Was it worth the wait? Miriam Kennet, a director of the Green Economics Institute, looks at where the Chancellor went awry...

Collusion between UK carbon trading firms and Chinese factories is allowing them to make big profits without any significant reduction in carbon emissions.

Death is rarely something to be celebrated, but I can’t say I shed a tear last week when I heard that Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberal economics, had gone to the great free market in the sky.

Anyone serious about making poverty history needs to understand where poverty actually comes from and what it really is.

Where trade is concerned, one size does not fit all. Andrew Simms argues the case for economic self-sufficiency through localisation

Locked out of some meetings. Not even invited to others. And then all the decisions are made after you’ve left. It’s all in a day’s work for ‘developing’ World delegates at the WTO. By Mark Lynas

Matilda Lee explains how democracy is bypassed as multinationals push
changes in trade law through the labrynthine corridors of the EU

School dinners by McDonald’s. Corporations taking countries to court because their environmental regulations are ‘too tough’. The BBC sold to Rupert Murdoch. Paul Kingsnorth explains why we should be very worried by what is about to go on behind the closed doors of Cancun.

In September the World Trade Organisation will be holding its fifth ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico. Simon Retallack explains what is at stake.