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	IMF needs to help Africa meet the Millennium Development Goals by One International   Mar 2010   Anti-poverty group ONE has called for the IMF to amend their proposal to raise revenue from ‘financial activities’ by making clear some of the proceeds would also be used for African development.   Oliver Buston, ONE European Director, said: “The IMF have come up with proposals to recover bailout money for Western countries but they have ignored the fact that the financial crisis spread across the world. Countries in Africa that did nothing to cause the crisis are estimated to have lost $130billion due to falls in trade, FDI, remittances and bank lending.   The IMF should make clear in their report to the G20 that some of the revenue raised from their proposal on financial activities will also be directed to Africa. Africa should not be forgotten when it comes to securing a global recovery.”   The IMF’s own analysis found that “the global financial crisis greatly compounds the policy challenges confronting the region as it strives to consolidate its economic gains and meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)”.   ONE made a submission in January setting out two tests by which to judge the final report. Any proposal needs to be sustainable and substantial in nature. A short-term measure would fail to provide the predictable and permanent streams of additional finance that are required.   At least part of the revenue raised should be used to provide additional finance for global public goods, including further assistance for developing countries to reach the MDGs. The financial crisis is threatening to undermine hard won progress on reducing extreme poverty. Additional resources to prevent this happening, alongside compensation for governments who bailed out their banks, would be a truly fair solution.   * The IMF was mandated at the Pittsburgh G20 to come up with options for the financial sector to make a “fair and substantial contribution” to paying for the effects of the crisis.   Mar 2010   ONE has welcomed the release of an EU action plan to help poor countries reach the Millennium Development Goals, the set of targets agreed by the world’s governments to halve extreme poverty by 2015.   The campaign group singled out Commissioner Piebalg’s strong focus on holding member states to account for their promised targets on development assistance spending – and on making this aid more effective.   “Ten European states have already reached their agreed aid targets and the Spanish presidency is on track which shows it can be done if the political will is there,” said ONE’s Brussels Director Eloise Todd. “The Commission’s new plan could be a useful stick with which to chase the laggards, countries like Italy which has cut aid substantially in the last year and only paid lip service to its promises”.   Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK have all kept their promises.   “Leaders cannot keep recycling old promises without delivering; it erodes trust with developing countries. Every commitment made by European leaders must be clear, budgeted, results-orientated and transparent,” said Eloise Todd.   “The summit is critical because it will be the first time the Millennium Development Goals have been centre-stage at a European Council and that’s where leaders will set their position for the key UN Summit in September.”   The Commission’s Action Plan calls for member states to produce “realistic, verifiable action plans” laying out timetables for how they will reach their aid targets - and to publish them by September when world leaders will meet in New York for a key summit aimed at getting the Millennium Goals back on track by 2015. It also calls for leaders to peer review each others’ records and to adopt legislation that legally binds them to aid targets.   Over the past decade effective aid combined with improved African leadership has helped put more than 40 million children into school and more than three million people onto anti-AIDS drugs.   Other issues at the heart of the Commission’s action plan are how to help developing countries improve monitoring of government spending, and giving a stronger voice to developing countries in international negotiations. Visit the related web page
	Asia inhales while the West Bans the Deadly Carcinogen Asbestos by Melody Kemp CorpWatch & agencies   Feb 2010   Asbestos, a known carcinogen banned in much of the world, is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia’s development and construction boom. The white powder causes at least 100,000 occupational deaths per year, according to Medical News Today.   Clouds of asbestos fibers in factories and on construction sites draw official shrugs and denials. But in some Asian nations including China, asbestos is in the top ten causes of occupational disease in laborers, some of whom were exposed as working children. The numbers are generally thought to be higher since much of Asia"s data rely on a highly mobile workforce with high a turnover rate.   Asbestos can be deadly when disturbed, and all along the mining, manufacturing, installation, cutting, and deconstruction processes, the mineral is turned into air-borne fibers that lodge in the lungs and cause fatal respiratory diseases, including mesothelioma.   Across much of Asia, white asbestos, also known as chrysotile, is widely used to make asbestos-cement construction material such as roofing tiles, wall panels, and expansion joints, as a fire proofer, and in brake linings and gaskets in large vehicles. As part of the process of development, people are trading bug-filled, flammable grass roofs for asbestos cement tiles and walls.   A few years ago at a state-owned roof tile factory in Vietnam young male workers clad only in shorts carried bags labeled “Asbestos-Kazakhstan.” The air was thick with white dust huffing up like steam from lava. Visiting occupational health and safety experts held their breath as long as they could; some smothered their faces in dust masks. The workers did not have that luxury. Their only protection was handkerchiefs tied bandit-style over their mouths and noses as they climbed the sides of the hoppers.   “I know it’s dangerous,” said the manager spreading his hands and shrugging, “but it’s also cheap, and people only want to buy cheap tiles.”   “It''s just a PR campaign when they say that asbestos can kill,” Uralasbest''s Viktor Ivanov told AFP in 2007, when he headed the Chrysotile Association, an industry group based in the Russian town of Asbest. The website for Uralasbest, the Ural Asbestos Mining & Ore Dressing Company, calls the company the world''s “oldest and largest manufacturer and supplier of chrysotile.”   In 2005 the Russian firm produced about a quarter of the world''s chrysotile asbestos and exported it to 35 countries: 53 percent outside the Commonwealth of Independent States (to China, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, etc.), and 13 percent within the CIS nations that had been part of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine).   Very little of the product ends up in the West. More than 60 countries have partially or completely banned asbestos, including the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea. The EU nations and others have completely banned both brown amphibole and white chrysotile asbestos, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified all types as a human carcinogen.   But asbestos merchants, disputing World Health Organization (WHO) data and overwhelming scientific evidence, spuriously claim that chrysotile is safe. In 2008 India – along with Pakistan, Canada, Russia – rejected the banning of chrysotile asbestos mandated under the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent (PIC). PIC lists chemicals that require exchange of information on health hazards prior to trade.   Workers and activists around Asia are not convinced by industry reassurances and are getting organized. At a September 2009 meeting in Phnom Penh of the Asian Network for the Rights of Accident Victims (ANROAV),120 activists and Asian-based academics from 16 countries heard stories of frustration and harassment. Delegates charged that globalization has led to "state sponsored pimping"-- governments selling workers’ bodies and lives in return for investment.   AV''s annual meetings over its ten years'' existence. “While lots of money is made by CSR [corporate social responsibility] consultants, we see little change in the death rates” said Hong Chee, a Hong Kong delegate.   Opposition to asbestos is growing and is fueled around the world by a flood of compensation demands. Claimants, dragging desperately on oxygen, have pleaded before TV cameras for compensation and an end to asbestos use.   A regional coordinating group was set up earlier in 2009 at a meeting in Bangkok. A-Ban is seeking an Asia-wide asbestos ban. It has its work cut out. As the anti-asbestos activists know all too well, bans on international trade in asbestos have been barely disturbed the industry.   Like Uralasbest, companies have merely shifted their marketing focus to developing countries where environmental and workplace standards are more lax. China now absorbs 54 percent of global production, says Ye-Yong Choi of BANKO, the Korean movement that recently achieved a ban on asbestos.   He recommends a global campaign in which activists “move much more strategically and collectively. …I have felt we are too gentle in some way whilst our enemy, the asbestos industry, moves very collectively and aggressively.”   Despite industry and government denials, evidence of chrysotile''s harm was clear in lung X-rays showing unmistakable white patches indicating the inevitably deadly progression of mesothelioma--a cancer directly linked to asbestos exposure. Etched into the medical data on the corner of each film was the word “chrysotile,” the supposedly safe form of the mineral.   The X-rays belonged to Dr. Domyung Paek, chest disease specialist and epidemiologist from the University of Seoul, Korea. His collection of medical transparencies showed that work-and environment-related chest disease leaves a distinctive radiological calling card that is easy to differentiate from tuberculosis and other lung diseases.   All the victims in Paek''s X-rays were Asian workers, belying the myth propagated by some Asian labor officials that asbestosis and mesothelioma are "Western" diseases. Paek predicted that Asian nations would see tsunamis of asbestos-related diseases, marked by the gasping deaths of the pale, drawn - and often young - victims. His view is supported by Japanese researcher Ken Takahashi, who on reviewing historical and global trends, found that marked rises in incidence and prevalence inevitably preceded national bans.   Studies cited by McCulloch and Tweedale have found asbestos disease in young Russian and Kazakh workers with less than three years exposure. Victims usually die a year after diagnosis.   “I have seen young men suffering from the cancers caused by this material [asbestos],” says a guard at an asbestos cement sheet factory in Guangdong, China. “The bosses don’t care, and the government intimidates us [who are] working for safety. They say we are sabotaging China’s development. Sometimes I get very frightened and cannot sleep thinking I will be arrested. I may get the disease, as the air is full of dust. I hope that someone would help me if that happened. I can’t quit. Where would I go? I have no skills and jobs are hard to find.”   This worker''s story is echoed throughout the Asia. In China alone, the official incidence of industrial lung diseases is around 100,000 per year. Experts familiar with Beijing''s official statistics would multiply that figure by three or four to get close to the real toll.   Harvard University and the World Health Organization report that occupational injuries and disease already surpass infectious disease as the major causes of death in the developing world and threaten to undermine any economic or moral imperatives gained by trade.   More people die per day of workplace illness throughout the world than are killed by global terrorist attacks, wars, drugs, or by the various pandemics (such as avian and swine flu) that attract huge institutional funding, according to Sanjiv Pandita, director of the Hong Kong based Asia Monitor Resource Center.   * Visit the link below to listen to a recent radio interview with Melody Kemp and Laurie Kazan-Allen, Coordinator of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat. Visit the related web page
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