Trade and aid are the new pillars of international cooperation. But does it make sense to link these two together? There’s nothing wrong with finding out whether trade and aid can complement each other, but let’s not overdo it.
Last week Both ENDS’ Wiert Wiertsema attended the launch of Forum SUAPE in Brazil. During this second fact finding mission Wiert talked to Forum SUAPE and local residents about the social and ecological effects of the dredging activities in Suape carried out by a Dutch company.
It has been planned for several years, but had so far been postponed: the Korean steel company POSCO wants to build and operate on a large scale in Orissa, an Indian state. Local people, environmental organizations and experts strongly resisted the plan, with all the consequences that entailed. Local police and militias cracked down the protests and recently there were four deaths. Wiert Wiertsema points out the responsibility of ABP, the Dutch pension fund that invested in POSCO. Wiertsema and ABP talked recently about the issue following an official complaint by the FGG Alliance on violations of the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises.
To ensure that everyone on the planet will be protected against the impacts of climate change, a lot of money will have to be made available. By now, most scholars do agree on this. All this money (ultimately about $ 100 billion per year) will be put into one large fund: the Green Climate Fund. But what's going to happen with all that money and who will benefit from it?