Representatives of 153 nations and regions will meet in Geneva this week to try and salvage one of the longest and most laborious trade negotiations in modern times. For almost a decade, the World Trade Organization has been trying to lower trade barriers for thousands of goods and services, and now a self-imposed deadline is looming at the end of this year. But whether the WTO succeeds or not will make little difference to most people; indeed, trade negotiations would actually go much further if the WTO simply closed down its talks altogether.

Continue reading about why WTO is about to go obsolete….

Plenary Session 4: The Global Food and Financial Crisis: Lessons and the Way Forward

1. Grassroots Strategies to address the crisis: An Indigenous Perspective by Jenifer Lasimbang, Asia Indigenous Peoples’ Pact
2. Food Crisis as the Result of Disobedience to Peasants by Aliansi Petani Indonesia/API (Indonesian Peasant Alliance)

Plenary Session 5: Agriculture and Food Governance – CFS in Focus

1. Reflections

IPS | By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 14, 2010 (IPS) – The 2009 global financial crisis marked the definitive end of longstanding paradigms of the global economy and development, such as the “Third World” and “North-South”, according to World Bank President Robert Zoellick.

Speaking on the eve of next week’s annual spring meetings of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Wednesday, Zoellick declared that the world needs a “new geopolitics for a multi-polar economy, where all are fairly represented in associations for the many, not clubs for the few.”

“For decades, students of security and international politics have debated the emergence of a multi-polar system,” he told an audience at the Wilson Centre for International Scholars here. “It’s time we recognise the new economic parallel.”

“If 1989 saw the end of the ‘Second World’ with Communism’s demise, then 2009 saw the end of what was known as the ‘Third World’. We are now in a new, fast-evolving multi-polar world economy in which some developing countries are emerging as economic powers, others are moving towards becoming additional poles of growth, and some are struggling to attain their potential within this new system – where North and South, East and West, are now points on a compass, not economic destinies,” he added.

continue reading about “the end of the third world” here…