INSouth

 Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prime Minister, Nepal

"Social injustice is when poor farmers lose the right to choose their way of farming or their choice of crops and fertilisers to multinational agro-industrial businesses. More than two-thirds of the people in South Asia depend on agriculture – almost all of them poor, small-scale farmers. This also means that they depend for their very survival on land, water, seeds and other natural resources. Increasingly, those life-giving natural commons, the joint birthright of humanity which has fed and nourished generations since the dawn of time, are being privatised for the profit of a few..."

The Poznań Climate Change Conference, the Conference of Parties Meeting 14  (COP14) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will be held from 1-12 December 2008 in Poland. Several Parties from developing countries (India, Panama, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Sri Lanka, China, Central American Countries, and the Group of 77 and China) have made new submissions to the conference.

Professor Jayati Ghosh, India

The poor have subsidised the rich for too long. Greater state involvement in economic activity is now necessary.

Everyone now recognises the need to reform the international economic regime. But the idea should not simply be to fix a system that is obviously broken: we need to exchange it for a better model. That is because the current financial architecture has failed in some very important ways.

Most importantly, the international financial system has failed to meet two obvious requirements: of preventing instability and crises, and of transferring resources from richer to poorer economies. Not only have we experienced much greater volatility and propensity to financial meltdown across emerging markets and now even industrial countries, but even the periods of economic expansion have been based on the global poor subsidising the rich.