- Volunteers uncover £50 million in corporate funds to UK universities
- DFID: Aid to India continues with greater focus on private sector
- Tar Sands row threatens Canada-EU trade deal Volunteers uncover £50 million in corporate funds to UK universities People & Planet volunteers uncover £50 million from Oil, Arms and Big Pharma being channelled into UK universities. The Reclaim Research group conducted interviews and sent Freedom of Information requests to 17 universities and are starting to uncover the hidden connections between research and corporations at universities. The group aims to uncover, challenge, and change the ways in which universities are working to create profit. The £50.7 million of funding comes from the UKs five biggest oil, weapons, and pharmaceutical companies. BP have given grants amounting to £5.2m and BAE £2.7m. Interviews with PhD students and academics at Birmingham and Edinburgh universities highlighted how the corporate funding is influencing research: funding bodies increasingly look for immediate, tangible results from research with researchers having to justify how any results expected will be applied and marketable, which makes research necessarily more commercial. This pressure is happening whilst the government makes historic cuts to university funding and increasingly relies on, and in fact wants, corporations to fill the funding gap. Corporate Watch produced a report on similar themes in 2003 entitled Degrees of Capture: Universities, the Oil Industry and Climate Change. DFID: Aid to India continues with greater focus on private sector Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, announced on 15th February that the UK will continue to give £280 million a year to India as development aid. In a speech to Chatham House he argued, it is in both India's interest and in Britain's interest for us to continue our highly successful collaboration on development, but that, we need to bring our development partnership up-to-date. He told the BBC earlier in the day that the DFID will only continue to work in the 3 poorest states (Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Bihar), and that, over the period about half of our programme will change from grants to pro-poor private sector investment. He developed this later saying: India's private sector miracle has not yet reached some of its poorest areas. Over the next few years we want to help unlock the potential of the private sector to deliver jobs, products, infrastructure and basic services in areas which desperately need them. We asked the DFID for more details but they told us they are waiting for the results of the mutlilateral and bilateral aid review, scheduled to come in March, as well as those of the International Development Committee's inquiry into the DFID's programme in India, which is currently in progress. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that it is at the state level, especially in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, that the DFID has exerted its greatest influence, often in tandem with the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank (see here) and that the results of this have not exactly been universally appreciated. And previous DFID reforms in India that resulted in people's electricity being cut off (see here), their lands being given over to mining companies (see here) and the encouragement of unreliable and unsuitable crops (see here), were all advertised as unlocking the potential of the private sector, or words to that effect. Tar Sands row threatens Canada-EU trade deal Canada has threatened to scrap a trade deal with the European Union if the EU persists with plans that would block imports of fuel from Canada's highly polluting tar sands extraction project. The EU is planning to reduce the carbon footprint of fuels used over the next decade and aims to help suppliers identify carbon-intensive imports. If the EU implements its fuel directive, there would be no European market for anything from Canada's tar sands. Canada has been lobbying the European commission to try to avoid a situation where fuel from the tar sands would have a separate default value. The country has denied threatening to scrap the trade deal, however Canada has challenged the EU at the World Trade Organisation in various disputes, such as over genetically modified foods. The EU seemed to be backing down on tar sands last year, but sources are now saying that negotiators for the 27 countries in the EU are becoming more willing not to back down in the face of growing evidence over the tar sands.
- DFID: Aid to India continues with greater focus on private sector
- Tar Sands row threatens Canada-EU trade deal Volunteers uncover £50 million in corporate funds to UK universities People & Planet volunteers uncover £50 million from Oil, Arms and Big Pharma being channelled into UK universities. The Reclaim Research group conducted interviews and sent Freedom of Information requests to 17 universities and are starting to uncover the hidden connections between research and corporations at universities. The group aims to uncover, challenge, and change the ways in which universities are working to create profit. The £50.7 million of funding comes from the UKs five biggest oil, weapons, and pharmaceutical companies. BP have given grants amounting to £5.2m and BAE £2.7m. Interviews with PhD students and academics at Birmingham and Edinburgh universities highlighted how the corporate funding is influencing research: funding bodies increasingly look for immediate, tangible results from research with researchers having to justify how any results expected will be applied and marketable, which makes research necessarily more commercial. This pressure is happening whilst the government makes historic cuts to university funding and increasingly relies on, and in fact wants, corporations to fill the funding gap. Corporate Watch produced a report on similar themes in 2003 entitled Degrees of Capture: Universities, the Oil Industry and Climate Change. DFID: Aid to India continues with greater focus on private sector Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, announced on 15th February that the UK will continue to give £280 million a year to India as development aid. In a speech to Chatham House he argued, it is in both India's interest and in Britain's interest for us to continue our highly successful collaboration on development, but that, we need to bring our development partnership up-to-date. He told the BBC earlier in the day that the DFID will only continue to work in the 3 poorest states (Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Bihar), and that, over the period about half of our programme will change from grants to pro-poor private sector investment. He developed this later saying: India's private sector miracle has not yet reached some of its poorest areas. Over the next few years we want to help unlock the potential of the private sector to deliver jobs, products, infrastructure and basic services in areas which desperately need them. We asked the DFID for more details but they told us they are waiting for the results of the mutlilateral and bilateral aid review, scheduled to come in March, as well as those of the International Development Committee's inquiry into the DFID's programme in India, which is currently in progress. It is perhaps worth noting at this point that it is at the state level, especially in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, that the DFID has exerted its greatest influence, often in tandem with the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank (see here) and that the results of this have not exactly been universally appreciated. And previous DFID reforms in India that resulted in people's electricity being cut off (see here), their lands being given over to mining companies (see here) and the encouragement of unreliable and unsuitable crops (see here), were all advertised as unlocking the potential of the private sector, or words to that effect. Tar Sands row threatens Canada-EU trade deal Canada has threatened to scrap a trade deal with the European Union if the EU persists with plans that would block imports of fuel from Canada's highly polluting tar sands extraction project. The EU is planning to reduce the carbon footprint of fuels used over the next decade and aims to help suppliers identify carbon-intensive imports. If the EU implements its fuel directive, there would be no European market for anything from Canada's tar sands. Canada has been lobbying the European commission to try to avoid a situation where fuel from the tar sands would have a separate default value. The country has denied threatening to scrap the trade deal, however Canada has challenged the EU at the World Trade Organisation in various disputes, such as over genetically modified foods. The EU seemed to be backing down on tar sands last year, but sources are now saying that negotiators for the 27 countries in the EU are becoming more willing not to back down in the face of growing evidence over the tar sands.