In 1999, Amnesty International raised alarms about the killing of four indigenous people protesting a hydroelectric dam in Colombia that has devastated their food source and, if completed, would flood most of their land.

In 1998, an accident at a mine in Kyrgystan resulted in two tons of cyanide entering a river. A lack of an emergency response plan worsened the disaster, leaving two people dead and over 600 hospitalized.

Debt aspects related to export credit agencies
The cancellation of Third World debt has been a rallying cry of social movements for years, gaining in volume and numbers in 2000 as a result of the global Jubilee movement. Much attention has been focused on the debts owed by poor countries to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. However, export credit agencies collectively own more debt of Third World countries than the World Bank and the IMF combined.

Currency transactions taxes such as the Tobin-type tax are often dismissed by critics before all the arguments have been heard. They view the tax as too difficult to adopt and too easy to avoid. Much criticism is ill-informed or designed to stifle debate. Here are the most common myths and our response to them:

A TOBIN-TYPE TAX WILL HIT THE POOR
The tax is a progressive one, designed to target only those profiting from destabilising currency speculation.** The poor don’t flip millions of dollars a day on currency and bond markets, the world’s biggest banks urrency and bond markets, the world’s biggest banks and investment firms do. This tax will hit them.

The world of international finance has become a global gambling casino, w

 
Backgrounder (1999)
 

An international consortium consisting of Exxon, Shell and Elf, a French company, is sponsoring the project. The project includes the drilling of 300 wells in the Doba oilfields of southern Chad, the construction of a 1050 km long, 30 m wide buried pipeline through to an offshore marine export terminal facility 15 km off the coast of Cameroon.

...what the World Bank and IMF require, and how it hurts the poor
The World Bank and IMF adopted new rhetoric about reducing poverty, and linking debt relief primarily to poverty actions in the fall. But countries entering the debt relief process are still facing the same old conditions that have nothing to do with poverty reduction, and can actually increase the hardships of the poor.

Guinea - Conditions for debt relief include: privatization of energy, privatization of telecommunications, deregulation of petroleum prices, removal of subsidies for public transportation (December 1999).

Honduras - Conditions for debt relief include: privatization of telecommunications, liberalization of mining sector, implementation of bank service fees (November 1999).

Here is what these kinds of "structural adjustments" have done, and are still doing, to the poor:

FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS:
HOW WORLD BANK FINANCING OF FOSSIL FUELS
UNDERMINES THE
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT FACILITY (GEF)
INTRODUCTION

Factsheet
Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), were originally designed to stabilize developing country economies. Instead, they have imposed harsh economic measures which deepen poverty, undermine food security and self-reliance and lead to unsustainable resource exploitation, massive environmental destruction, and population dislocation and displacement. Given the mounting evidence, Northern countries must reconsider the appropriateness of using their lending and aid programmes to support the structural adjustment regimes of the World Bank and IMF.

What are SAPs?