Global Trade

The past four days' coup and counter-coup in Venezuela leave Hugo Chavez in power, but the country on the brink of civil war. The chasm between Venezuela's poor masses and its oligarchs -- in particular, the rich, the generals and the oil companies -- is not going away any time soon. Read More

April 3, 2002 -- In the latest example of PBS's inconsistently applied underwriting guidelines, the network is premiering a six-hour series about the global economy which was sponsored by major corporations -- including Enron -- that have a clear interest in the show's content. Read More

By the end of the year, Starbucks will increase its ever-growing empire by opening a coffee shop in Mexico City -- the first Starbucks in Latin America. Ironically, Starbucks will soon be selling gourmet coffee to the very people who are under-paid for harvesting coffee beans. News of the Mexico City shop came as Starbucks was presenting its first Corporate Social Responsibility report at its annual shareholders' meeting in Seattle last month. The report emphasized the company's claimed commitment to doing business in socially, economically and environmentally responsible ways, to benefit the communities around the world where it does business. Read More

Central America is in the grip of famine, and if President Bush mentions it when he visits El Salvador on Sunday, he will likely suggest that free trade is the solution. Yet Bush's proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement is hardly going to remedy the worsening disaster in rural Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.Unregulated markets are a large part of the reason why 700,000 Central Americans face starvation and nearly 1million more suffer serious food shortages. Read More

Columbia University announces the 2002 launch of the Reuters Forum, a unique and popular course offered by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism from January 30 through May 8. The forum is open to the public. During the semester, leading experts on global trade and commerce, anti-terrorism and national security, and the economic gap between rich and poor nations will gather in ''open'' forums to debate the future of globalization, post-Sept. 11. The general public is encouraged to attend and participate during these sessions, free of charge. Read More

In a recent New York Times article, TIAA-CREF's CEO John H. Biggs said he would support the creation of a new retirement fund that would employ not only negative screens (avoiding certain companies), but also positive screens (investing in companies strong on social responsibility). Read More

One of the poorest towns in Mexico, El Porvenir last year signed a sister-city agreement with one of the richest, San Pedro Garza Garcia, on the outskirts of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon state. The pact signed last August with President Vicente Fox on hand was meant to be a model for a new vision of fighting poverty: an exchange of products, help with schooling and technical training, new investment for a town where fewer than one in five homes has electricity. Read More

Starbucks serves fair-trade certified drip coffee on campus through Sodexho, the food-services vendor. But with the school considering bids for a new 10-year food-services contract, McDonald and the group he leads, Students for Fair Trade, are pushing for all coffee including decaf and espresso drinks on campus to be fair-trade certified. To be certified, third-party monitors must have confirmed that farmers were paid a fair price for their beans. Read More

Americans consume almost 17 pounds of fresh tomatoes per person every year. It's a $1.4 billion industry. Most are grown in Florida and California but, thanks to a bilateral free trade agreement of 1988 and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian tomatoes now command more han 43% of the market, beating imports from Belgium and The Netherlands. But far from nourishing economic health and pleasing the business-oriented palate, this particular globalisation recipe is making a mess of the whole kitchen. Read More

When Arundhati Roy woke up at 5.30am this morning in Tihar prison, New Delhi, it must have struck her that reality was proving stranger than any fiction. Over the past week terrible communal violence in India has claimed hundreds of lives while the forces of law and order stood by. This has now been juxtaposed with the spectacle of a diminutive, softly spoken novelist being sent to one of the country's most notorious prisons to uphold what the supreme court called the ''glory of the law'' because she dared to criticize it. Read More