AN ASIAN CANDIDATE FOR UN SECRETARY-GENERAL

India\'s choice for UN Secretary-General of senior most Indian in the UN secretariat and renowned thinker and writer Shashi Tharoor, passing over many senior politicians, is testimony to its traditional approach to the organisation, writes T.P. Sreenivasan, former ambassador of India to the United Nations (Vienna) and former governor for India at the International Atomic Energy Agency. In this article, the author writes that India has not sought to use the UN as an instrument of its policy nor sought sinecures in it for its politicians. The next Secretary-General has to be a good manager and a strong reformer. For the US, this will be the real issue. Of all the candidates, only Tharoor has worked at various levels in the UN and knows the organisation inside out. He has proven managerial skills and has a vision for reform, which he has already written on. Indeed, he would do well to present a blueprint for change even before his election. None of the other candidates would be able to do so convincingly.

CENTRAL AMERICA BENEFITS FROM SHAKE-UPS TO THE SOUTH

A few months ago no one was betting on the progress of Central American integration, much less the region\'s hopes for a free-trade agreement with the EU, writes Joaquin Roy, Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the Centre for the European Union at the University of Miami. However, Roy writes in this article, the one-two punch administered by Venezuela\'s surprising decision to enter MERCOSUR and pull out of the Andean Community, and by the bout of nationalisation in Bolivia, set off alarms in Europe. The Andean Community, with which Brussels hoped to work out a moderate agreement, is now definitively out of commission, while the viability of MERCOSUR is in doubt. Consequently, Brussels is now setting its sights on Central America, willing, it would seem, to temporarily overlook its shortcomings. In this new opportunity for integration opened by the possibility of a Central American Free-Trade Agreement (CAFTA), or mini-FTAAs with the US, those problems presented by crucial elements that still lack a common free-trade zone must be resolved. While 94 percent of products are already covered, 53 percent of that remaining six percent are agricultural products. Despite the fact that there are agreements for the exchange of services and transport, there are also major asymmetries and not all countries apply them.

BIOMASS: A WIN-WIN ENERGY SOURCE

Fully developed, biomass could reduce reliance on hydrocarbons of all kinds, foreign and domestic, not only as fuel for light-duty vehicles but as a raw material for biodegradable manufactured plastics. At the same time, rightly utilised, biomass could be harvested not from food crops but from the stalks and stover of grains that would otherwise go to waste. In the process, it could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fuel a rebirth of long languishing rural regions worldwide. Unlike oil, coal, uranium and other conventional fuels, the processes that produce biofuels are not intensely toxic to humans or the natural environment. Moreover, unlike fossil fuel and nuclear plants, biorefineries are most efficiently run when they are small-scale, decentralised, and locally-managed, with raw materials drawn from as little as a thirty-mile radius of the plant. One of the benefits of biofuels is that they offer the possibility of returning the sources of energy, income and political power to each locale. In an era when centralised power is revealing itself to be ever more inefficient and untrustworthy, an energy system of distributed power driven by biology rather than mineralogy might provide not only heat and light but, as a beneficial byproduct, a greater measure of democracy.

THE POLITICS OF MONEY

The word is out that economics, never a science, has always been politics in disguise, writes Hazel Henderson, author of Creating Alternative Futures and numerous other books and co-creator of the Calvert Group, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. In this article, Henderson writes that civic action with local currencies, barter, community credit, and the more dubious rash of digital cybermoney all reveal the politics of money. Economics is now widely seen as the faulty sourcecode deep in societies\' hard drives, replicating unsustainability: booms, busts, bubbles, recessions, energy crises, resource depletion, poverty, trade wars, pollution, disruption of communities, and the loss of cultural and biodiversity. Citizens all over the world are rejecting this malfunctioning code and its operating systems: the World Bank, the IMF, WTO, and central banks. As local groups and communities created their own local scrip currencies and exchange systems, they learned about economists\' deepest secret: money and information are equivalent -- and neither is scarce! Barter, dismissed in economic textbooks as a primitive relic, went hi-tech. The deconstructing of money systems, and the growth of all the healthy local, real world alternatives is propagating widely.

DEVELOPMENT MUST REMAIN AT TOP OF GLOBAL AGENDA

These are difficult times -- both for the United Nations, and for the world. It is thus all the more imperative to ensure that development remains at the top of the global agenda, writes Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). There are increasing pressures on developing countries to open their markets, with the promise that this is the key to making the biggest gains. Such promises should not be allowed to disguise the fact that there are still serious trade barriers to the key exports of developing countries as a whole --both tariff and non-tariff barriers-- that need to be addressed. Indeed, a worrying trend is the resort to new forms of protection as tariffs and quantitative restrictions have come down.

WORLD RESPONSE TO IRAN A MAJOR FACTOR IN INTERNAL POLITICS

Given the fragmentation of Iran\'s conservative ruling elite, the response of the major powers to Iran\'s nuclear ambitions will greatly affect the outcome of the current power struggle inside the country -- and by implication, the fate of Iran's nuclear program, write Dariush Zahedi, who teaches International Political Economy and Peace & Conflict Studies at University of California, Berkeley, and Ali Assareh, a student instructor and analyst specialising in the political economy of the Middle East at UC Berkeley.

AN AFRICAN PRAYER FOR PEACE

May 5 seemed to be yet another day of good news for our continent, signalling that we were indeed advancing towards the realisation of the goal of Africa\'s renaissance: Sudan took a step forward towards the restoration of peace in Darfur, as the government of Sudan and one faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) signed a peace agreement in Abuja, Nigeria, after a protracted process of negotiations, writes Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa. In this article, Mbeki writes that it is most unfortunate that another faction of the SLM/A, led by Abdel Wahed Mohammed al-Nur, as well as the second Darfur rebel movement, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), decided not to sign the peace agreement. The negative impact of the Darfur conflict on inter-state relations, as between Sudan and Chad, as well as Eritrea to the east, which Sudan accuses of supporting the Darfur rebels, must communicate the strong message to the Sudanese negotiators in Abuja that, truly, the resolution of the Darfur crisis and the overall challenges of Sudan, would make an important contribution to the resolution of Africa\'s problems. A just resolution of the conflict in Darfur must indeed be based on the repudiation of any winner-takes-all approach, which makes it impossible to build the inclusive societies that are the only condition for the achievement of peace, stability and national unity and reconciliation in all African countries.

INTERVIEW WITH ALAN GARCIA :’I WILL RENEGOTIATE CONTRACTS WITH FOREIGN COMPANIES.”

lan Garcia, who polls show is the favourite in Peru\'s presidential elections, scheduled for June 4, says that his government will not expropriate foreign companies doing business in Peru but rather will negotiate with them --as well as others that have no presence there yet-- so that they will process copper, gold, fish, and food locally. \'\'In short, this is so they will invest more, but in order to spur our development, not so they can extract our raw materials and process them in another country.\'\'

WORLD TRADE: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH APPROACHES

The end of this year marks the deadline for negotiations of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), writes Pascal Lamy, WTO Director-General. The date was not picked out of the air: it is the day the US Trade Promotion Authority Act expires, the author writes in this analysis. The Act gives the US president \'\'fast-track\'\' authority to enter into trade agreements which the US Congress must then submit to an up-or-down vote without amendment. If this deadline is missed, trade liberalisation on the scale envisaged by the Doha Round would become impossible to achieve in the near future. The main loser would be the developing world. The main aim of Doha is \"development\", in other words, redressing the existing imbalances in multilateral trade relations. We are now faced with a difficult situation. The Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration called on countries to complete the \"modalities\" for the agricultural and industrial goods negotiations by 30 April. In the services areas, the Declaration called for revised offers to be submitted by 31 July. For these deadlines to be met, all actors will need to move.

WATER: LIQUID CAPITAL OR HUMAN RIGHT ?

Yet again the economic and political forces that control the World Water Forum (WWF) have succeeded in blocking the principle of access to drinking water as a human right (universal, indivisible, indefeasible) from being recognised in the final ministerial declaration of the Fourth WWF held in Mexico City from 16-22 March, writes Riccardo Petrella, Secretary-General of the International Committee for the World Water Contract. In this article, Petrella writes that the rejection confirms that the World Water Council, organiser the tri-annual WWF, is but the emanation of a world water oligarchy at the beck and call of the French water lobby, which is comprised of the two largest water multinationals, the French government, and the World Bank. Now that the wind has begun to blow less uniquely in favour of the privatisation of water, the liberalisation of water services, and the privatisation of the common good, it is time that the principle of the right to life for all people as the foundation of social justice and of a true democracy become the rallying call of a new world water politics. It is time to take back from the market and finance the power to govern the destiny of human society.

WALLS

The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From dawn to dusk we read about it, heard about it, and saw it: The Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire. In this column, Galeano writes that eventually, this wall, which deserved to fall, fell. But other walls have sprung up, and continue to spring up, and though they are far larger than the Berlin Wall, little or nothing is said about them. Little is said about the wall the United States is erecting along its border with Mexico, or the double razor wire fences around Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. And next to nothing was said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will soon be fifteen times longer than the Berlin Wall. And the Moroccan Wall, which for twenty years has perpetuated Morocco\'s occupation of Western Sahara, goes unmentioned altogether. This wall, continuously mined and surveilled by thousands of soldiers, is sixty times longer than the Berlin Wall. Why is it that some walls are so vocal and others are so mute? Would it be because of the walls of uncommunication that the major media erect each day?

DEVASTATION AND MISERY IN BURMA

A recent visit by ASEAN parliamentarians to a refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border provided a searing glimpse of a country devastated by violence and repression, writes Son Chhay, a member of the Parliament of Cambodia and an active member of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus and other pro-democracy networks in Asia. In this article, Chhay writes that military offensives, forced labour, forced relocation, extra-judicial killing, and torture by Burma\'s military government have driven many hundreds of thousands of Burmese into neighbouring countries as well as into the myriad refugee camps that line the country\'s borders. Forced labour and forced relocation have been perpetrated to allow military control over economic activity. Systematic sexual violence by military personnel targeting ethnic nationality women is rife and has been widely documented. Moreover, children as young as eleven are often forcibly taken from their homes for military duty in the Tatmadaw, the Burmese army.

A MORE MODERN, AND MORE PRO-FAMILY ITALY

The House of Liberty alliance has led Italy through one of the most difficult periods of its history, writes Pierferdinando Casini, President of the House of Deputies and leader of the Union of the Democratic Centre, which is a member of the House of Liberty alliance. In this article, Casini writes that the Italy of today is not the same we inherited in 2001 from the centre-left. No one can pretend not to see the roots of a country that is more modern and advanced and that the House of Liberty planted in this legislature. Only by making the markets truly competitive can we provide a sufficient stimulus to business to improve efficiency and open industry to internationalism. But completing the process of liberalising the markets means above all cutting the cost of services: this is the goal we must measure ourselves by, and which has the greatest impact on the quality of life of the citizens. The core of our strategy for the country is family, first and foremost. The birthrate of Italy is the lowest in the European Union except for Germany. This figure reflects a profound discontent. Our goal is to introduce a system whereby the more children you have, the less taxes you pay.

ROYAL ROLLBACK IN NEPAL

After three weeks of a growing people power movement, Nepal\'s King Gyanendra finally yielded on Monday and restored parliament, which he dissolved four years ago. That met the key demand of an alliance of seven opposition parties, who will now sit in the reconvened parliament on Friday, writes Kunda Dixit, Editor and Publisher of the Kathmandu-based weekly newspaper, Nepali Times. But it doesn\'t go all the way to addressing the demand of the Maoists for elections to a constituent assembly. The Maoists have been fighting a guerrilla war for the past ten years to overthrow the monarchy. On Friday, parliament will immediately deliberate on the Maoist demand, which would pave the way for them to renounce violence and join the political mainstream. This compromise deal was brokered by the Indians and gave the king, the parties, and the Maoists a face-saving way out of the impasse. In the end it took three weeks of nationwide non-violent people power to achieve what the Maoists couldn\'t get with years of armed struggle.

SPAIN: EQUALITY IS NOT A UTOPIA

A fundamental commitment to the recognition of social rights and the equality of all citizens is at the core of the initiatives undertaken by the government of Spanish president Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, writes Jesus Caldera, Minister of Labour and Social Issues of Spain. In this article, Caldera writes that the first law that this administration presented and which received the unanimous support of all groups in parliament was the Comprehensive Law Against Violence Against Women. The draft bill of the Organic Law that was approved by the Council of Ministers on March 3 has the objective of effectively implementing the principle of equality and eliminating all discrimination against women in all areas of private and public life. Its goal is to modify all laws that are affected by the introduction of the principle of real equality and devise effective instruments to apply it to, among other areas, government offices, health and education policy, labour policy, access to new technology, and the information society. Our intent is to make the formal equality consecrated in the Spanish constitution a concrete reality in all areas of life, public and private. With this law, the Spanish government wants to issue naturalisation papers to a cultural change that a large part of Spanish society is already calling for and that needs legal codification.

UNITED STATES: AN ADMINISTRATION ADRIFT

Behind the recent personnel changes at the White House lies a single objective: protecting Bush from further investigation and scrutiny from Congress. In the end he is guilty of all the disasters that his successor will inherit, republican or democrat, writes Joaquin Roy, \'\'Jean Monnet\'\' Professor and Director of the European Union Centre of Miami University. In this article, Roy writes that Defence Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a magnificent job as lightning rod. Behind the recent criticism of him by a dozen retired generals lies the feeling that the war in Iraq is not being shouldered by the American people as a whole but rather by a poor minority, isolated and made to carry out dubious orders and play the role of occupier, torturer, and executioner. While it is unthinkable that the generals would rebel against civilian authorities in the middle of a war (it wouldn\'t occur to them), their outburst could nonetheless harm the country. Their indirect intervention in politics, cloaked in military expertise, is a risk that the US can hardly afford to take.

ITALY: THE RECORD OF THE RIGHT IS SHEER FAILURE

When Italy goes to the polls for the April 9 elections, one thing will be certain: the right has failed in its response to the demand for work, security, and well-being it took on in 2001 after riding to power on its promise of an Italy in which everyone would be better off, writes Massimo D\'Alema, ex-prime minister of Italy and president of the Democratic Party of the Left, which is a member of the Union, the centre-left coalition. D\'Alema writes in this article that the right failed because it was unable to renew the country and make it more modern and more competitive, and because it did not know how to mobilise its best qualities: its culture, creativity, labour, and solidarity. This failure produced what may be the most grave division of the country in its political history -- an Italy divided, consumed by conflict, and as a result weaker not only economically, but socially and internationally. The Berlusconi government has led Italy away from its traditional policy of peace. This policy, which has long made Italy a crossroads of dialogue in the Mediterranean, is not a leftist policy but an Italian policy, that was supported by the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party, for decades. It is now up to the centre-left to address the large and daunting challenge of promoting social justice, innovation, and change, and restoring the dynamism of Italian society by forging an alliance of the forces of the business world, labour, and culture.

ANARCHY IN A MONARCHY

Nepal these days feels like it is in a double time warp. A medieval king who wants to be an absolute monarch is battling it out with guerrillas inspired by Mao Zedong\'s 1960s China, writes Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper in Kathmandu. This week, an alliance of seven political parties has been leading a nationwide street agitation to pressure King Gyanendra to restore democracy and roll back his February 1, 2005 military-backed coup. Protesters have fought pitched battles with riot police for five straight days. Four people had been killed and dozens wounded. Hundreds of activists and journalists have been arrested all over the country. This week is critical in resolving Nepal\'s three-way power struggle between the king, the democratic parties and the Maoists. The king has a chance to offer an olive branch during his traditional Nepali new year address to the nation on Friday. If he doesn\'t, it will only be a question of time before Nepal becomes a republic.

INTERVIEW WITH JOSE RAMOS-HORTA: WHERE DID THE MILLIONS IN EAST TIMOR AID END UP?

His name is mentioned with increasing frequency in predictions of who will succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary-General of the United Nations, but Jose Ramos-Horta, foreign minister for East Timor, denies it, though not emphatically: \'\'I continue to say that I\'m not a candidate for Secretary-General, at least for now,\'\' he stated during a visit to Lisbon. Ramos-Horta is the chief diplomat of the youngest country in the world, born on May 22, 2002, after almost five centuries of Portuguese colonisation and twenty-two years of occupation by Indonesia, which ended with the genocide of a third of the territory\'s population, which was 660,000 in 1975. His indefatigable international activity against the occupation by Indonesia brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, together with the bishop of Timor, Jose Ximenes Belo.

AL JAZEERA EXPANDS

With Al Jazeera poised to launch its international service for broadcast outside of the Arab region, the time seems right to examine the reasons for its remarkable expansion, its considerable influence, and the innovations that make it stand out in the world of the media, writes Mario Lubetkin, Director General of IPS news agency. In this article, Lubetkin writes that Al Jazeera is different from all of its predecessors in the Arab world. While its reporters trained at the BBC, it was Al Jazeera that inspired Dubai\'s Al Arabiya and the Arab Emirates\' Abu Dhabi Television. Whether or not one agrees with the new network\'s approach, it must be acknowledged that its style of reporting has unleased a cultural revolution in the region. One important development is the recent signing of an agreement between Al Jazeera and Telesur, the Latin American TV network promoted by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. This might signal an incipient tendency towards the interlinking of previously unconnected regional networks thus far dependent on US and European material.

REVITALISING THE RURAL WORLD: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF POVERTY

Today millions of families are still living in poverty because of a lack of access to land, the most basic production resource, writes Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations. The reasons for this injustice have to do with the value that land has had throughout the ages. Land is an essential economic asset in rural societies, but its monetary value is not the only, or even the most important, consideration for millions of people. For indigenous peoples, land is the basis of their identity; it is their home and that of their ancestors, their pharmacy, and their place of work and leisure. In most societies, land means power, status, and membership in a social class. For many women, land is essential to their autonomy. Some of the agrarian reforms implemented in recent years have sought to offer solutions to these problems, with varying degrees of success, but we are still far from having solved the agrarian issue. New worldwide challenges, such as the globalisation of trade, the massive rural exodus to the cities, environmental degradation and civil strife (in many instances caused by the lack of access to, and control over, natural resources) demand urgent, global-level responses.