Rising Tide - Action for Climate Justice
90% cuts in fares now! On March 25th the 90% for 90% campaign was launched. The campaign invites people to find creative ways to demand a 90% cut in public transport fares as a vital step to achieving 90% cuts in emissions. Actions are being planned throughout the year.

Roadshow. Throughout May and the first two weeks of June the Climate Chaos Roadshow is coming to town offering a potent cocktail of talk, theatre, comedy, and videos to entertain, inform and empower. There may still be a few slots free for events- so if you want to host the roadshow call Mel on 0161 273 8516.

Spread the message! There will be an all day speaker training in Oxford on June 9th. We are asking everyone attending to perform a minimum of three speaking engagements (we can help you to find them). Call Jo on 01865 241 097

COP 6.5 The pathetic COP (out) governmental climate talks which proved so utterly crap in November in The Hague drag on. The next meeting is in Bonn, Germany from 16th-28th July and the European networks are gearing up. A British contingent will attend, so come along and express your anger. COP 7 in November is in Marrakesh, Morocco; a country unlikely to tolerate much street protest!. There will also be events in Britain during the first week.

Web page- details of the above, contacts, news, updates and MUCH MUCH MORE are on the spanking new web site www.risingtide.org.uk.

Contact: Mel 0161 2738516 or George on 01865 244746 weathersave@netscapeonline.co.uk

Scorched Earth - get big oil out of Sudan
In a report published lasst month, Christian Aid called on oil companies to suspend their operations in Sudan, and for oil giants BP and Shell to divest their shares in companies whose parent corporation is complicit in atrocities in Sudan. The report ‘The scorched earth: oil and war in Sudan’, presents eyewitness testimony showing that Sudanese government forces and sponsored militias are mounting a systematic 'scorched earth' strategy in the oilfields where foreign companies operate.

Since the completion of the oil pipeline two years ago, Sudan has become a net oil exporter - earning enough to pay for the estimated $1 million a day it spends on the war. Sudan's 18-year civil war, in which two million people have died, is now fuelled by oil revenues. British companies directly involved in multi-million contracts in Sudan include Rolls Royce (engines for the pipeline and engineers) and Weir of Glasgow (pumps for pumping stations). Indirectly, BP and Shell are involved through their shareholdings in two CNPC subsidiaries, PetroChina and Sinopec. BP invested $578 million in PetroChina in March 2000 when it was floated on the New York Stock Exchange; BP, Shell and ExxonMobil together invested $1.83billion in Sinopec in October 2000. This report follows BP's refusal to accept shareholder resolutions questioning its 2.2 per cent holding in PetroChina. PetroChina operates in Tibet and is indirectly linked to Sudan through its parent corporation, the Chinese state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which is a major operator in an oil area of intense human rights violations.

Contact: Christian Aid (Dominic Nutt) 0207 523 2427 dnutt@christian-aid.org

Urgent appeal from the Cointreau Workers’ Union in Haiti
Check out the Cointreau web site, and read how they grow bitter oranges in the Caribbean, how the peel is separated from the pulp by hand, dried in the sun, and then shipped to the Cointreau distillery in Angers, France where it blended with water and alcohol to a recipe unchanged for 150 years. What the web site won't tell you is that the workers in Haiti who so carefully separate the peel from the pulp must endure pay and conditions that are also unchanged in almost 150 years.

At the Cointreau plant in the north of Haiti, men and women labour all day to make a minimum wage equivalent to about £1.03. The factory is in a squalid condition - toilets and showers are disgusting. Working without gloves or protective clothing, the workers are soaked in the orange spray and inhale the citric acid vapor - fingernails are corroded away, and lung complications are common. The workers have formed a union to press for basic rights, but Cointreau's Haitian managers are refusing to even enter negotiations with the union.

Please write to Dominique Hériard Dubreuil, chair of Rémy Cointreau. There is currently no threat of a boycott of Cointreau products. Just ask Rémy Cointreau to instruct its managers to recognise the Union's right to begin negotiations, and express your hope that meaningful negotiations regarding the Union's demands will start immediately.

Dominique Hériard Dubreuil, Rémy Cointreau 152, avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris FRANCE

Women march on Whitehall
The second Global Women's Strike on March 8 saw female activists across the world demonstrating for a series of humanitarian demands. In London, hundreds of women endured the rain to join a march through Whitehall demanding deinvestment in military budgets, pay equity for all, workplace rights, the abolition of Third Word debt, accessible services, non-destructive energy and technology and asylum from persecution. Check out the multilingual website at http://womenstrike8m.server101.com/

Contact: Crossrroads Women’s Centre 230a Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2AB 0207 482 2496

GATS - update
Since being featured in the last newsletter, campaigning on the General Agreement on Trade in Service (GATS) has shifted into high gear. As GATS negotiators gathered in Geneva for the next round of talks on 19 March, organisations representing 30 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America launched an international campaign to 'stop the GATS attack' Already more than 200 groups from over 40 countries have signed on to a statement calling for a moratorium to the new negotiations. They want GATS to be the subject of broad public debate with a thorough and independent assessment before new negotiations continue.

The same day, UK campaigners from WDM and student group People and Planet demonstrated at regional offices of the Department of Trade and Industry. In Cardiff, they staged a tug-of-war with big business against poor countries and public services, refereed by the WTO. In the interest of a level playing field, the ref forced those on the poor countries/service industries side to tug standing on one leg and holding the rope with one hand. Unsurprisingly, big business won. (no bias there, of course the WTO is a fair referee…)

At Westminster, 170 MPs from all the main parties have signed an Early Day Motion calling for an "independent and thorough assessment" of the impact of this important and far-reaching agreement on key services in the UK and in developing countries. In the Scottish Parliament, a motion on GATS is the longest running in the Parliament. It has been signed by a majority of the eligible MSPs.

Negotiations start in earnest on 26 March when the Council on Trade in Services (the WTO secretariat with responsibility for GATS) meets for a three day stock taking session. They are attemping to conclude negotiations around the procedures and guidelines that have been the focus of negotiations since the launch of GATS 2000 in February last year. The EU and US have championed controversial elements to accelerate the process of liberalisation and erode the voluntary elements of GATS. These include constructing 'clusters' of services to be liberalised simultaneously and reclassifying services - Enron Corporation has been lobbying hard in the US for oil drilling to be classified as a service. Efforts have also been made to break down sensitive sectors such as health and education to make opening up parts of them to the free market more politically palatable.

Contact: GATS campaign, World Development Movement 25 Beehive Place, London SW9 7QR Tel: 020 7737 6215 Email: wdm@wdm.org.uk People and Planet, 51 Union Street, Oxford OX4 1JP 01865 245678 people@peopleandplanet.org www.peopleandplanet.org/tradejustice

Genetix RoundupTM
GM animal feed campaigners have been celebrating a significant victory following the announcements by Tesco and Asda that they are going GM-free on their own-brand poultry and eggs by the summer and on red meat later this year. Iceland is already GM-feed free and Marks and Sparks are making moves to get rid of it. Action pressure has shifted to Sainsbury's, who are so far intransigent. Could this have anything to do with notoriously-pro-GM New Labour minister Lord Sainsbury sucking up to his chums in the biotech industry?

On February 22, herds of cows invaded five Sainsbury's depots around the country to try to prevent the movement of unlabelled GM-fed animal products. Lorries were stopped with people locking on underneath or climbing on top, with one group's blockade lasting until late evening. At an action in Watford, one driver had a fit of mad cow disease when told someone was under his truck and tried to drive off - with a protester D-locked to the chassis by his neck! Luckily the cow escaped with minor injuries. Around twenty people were arrested, mainly for aggravated trespass.

In Liverpool, local activists have been keeping up the pressure on grain trader Cargill (see Corporate Watch briefing 'Control Freaks') which is restricting the supply of non-GM products by refusing to segregate GM from non-GM in most of the soya and maize it processes. A week of action early in March saw extensive awareness-raising in Bootle, location of Cargill's main UK plant.

Contact: Genetic Engineering Network (GEN) info@genetix.freeserve.co.uk www.dmac.co.uk/gen.html More info: www.gm-info.org.uk

Claire Short-crust-flan
Welsh patisseristas showed their distaste for International Development Secretary Claire Short's bananas policies and pie-ous pronounce-ments on globalisation recently by presenting her with a high speed fair-trade banana pie while she was giving at lecture at Bangor University. The implied home economics lesson was perhaps intended to correct Short's obvious failure in global economics, visible in her part in the White Paper on Globalisation, which claims that trade deregulation is going to lift the world's disenfran-chised masses out of poverty.

Ms Short was no doubt pleased to note that after the pie-ing there was a marked Trickle-Down Effect, as her clothes were enriched by the same commodities which had been imported into her face. Agent Cwstard commented, 'Clare Short's bananas policies are flying in the face of ministerial promises to help the world's poor and protect the environment. Our alternative flan of action involves policies which stick, while distributing the fruits of the global economy to those who are most deserving.' Eyewitnesses say Short suffered a severe failure to her sense of humour after the attack and tried to have a journalist prevented from videoing the incident.