News

The UN’s new Green Climate Fund could be used to finance dirty energy including coal and shale gas. The Green Climate Fund’s board, which includes the UK government, meets from 18-21 May in Songdo, Korea, and is expected to agree details of what the fund will finance.

The Green Climate Fund was set up to help poor countries deal with climate change and develop using clean energy. But campaigners fear that unless this week’s meeting explicitly excludes fossil fuels, the fund will be used to subsidise the coal, oil and gas industries that are driving climate change. 

Global justice campaigners have called on Unilever to pull out of an aid scheme they say will damage African countries’ ability to tackle poverty.

Unilever, which holds its AGM in London on Wednesday 14 May, is a leading member of the G8’s ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’. The scheme claims it will lift 50 million people in Africa out of poverty by 2022. But the World Development Movement believes the New Alliance will increase hunger and poverty by taking land and power away from millions of small-scale farmers.

£600 million in UK aid money is going to a scheme to help big businesses increase their profits in Africa, a report by the World Development Movement reveals. The report slams the scheme as fuelling a ‘corporate scramble for Africa’.

EU negotiators last night agreed to introduce regulation to prevent speculation by banks and hedge funds driving up food prices and exacerbating the global hunger crisis - but opposition by the UK government resulted in serious loopholes.

Five banks made an estimated total of £2.2 billion from speculating on food including wheat, maize and soy between 2010 and 2012, prompting campaigners to accuse the banks of fuelling a global hunger crisis.