Mozambique's lost cashew nut industry
As world trade talks are set to begin in Cancun, Mexico, developing countries like Mozambique say it is unfair that they are forbidden by the World Bank to subsidise their agriculture while Western countries spend billions on their farmers.

Mozambique's cashew nut industry used to be one of the largest in the world.

And crucially for a country which is among the poorest, they could process the nuts as well, adding value and profits to the raw materials.

But the nut industry collapsed after the World Bank insisted that Mozambique end subsidies as part of a tough austerity package.

The new winds of economic reform were designed to enable Mozambique to enter the world economy, winning debt forgiveness and new international funding.

But the result instead was that 10,000 people who were directly employed by the industry lost their jobs, another million nut collectors lost an income, and Mozambique remains resolutely close to the bottom in league tables of world poverty.
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Mozambique's Vice Minister of Trade, Salvador Namburete, will be one of the eight-person team sent by Mozambique to Cancun to negotiate with the hundreds of specialists and officials who will be fielded by the developed world.

He is surprised by the gap between promise and delivery in what the developed world is offering.

"Is there any chance for us to take these proposals very seriously? Or is it just a way of entertaining us?" he told the BBC.
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Two worlds prepare for a showdown in a Mexican nest of vipers
Next week's Cancun trade summit is being held in a rich playground beside a vast slum

Thirty-five years ago there was little trade on Kan Kun island, in the remotest corner of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. It was a series of pristine white sandbars in a calm blue sea. Only three fishermen lived there, and only for part of the year.

But in the early 1970s it was discovered by international bankers, who thought they had found financial paradise, and the world's first purpose-built giant holiday resort was built.The ancient Mayan name Kan Kun -which means "nest of vipers" - was softened to the more tourist-friendly Cancun.

Next week 10,000 trade ministers and other government delgates, up to 20,000 Mexican peasants, students and intellectuals, 5,000 activists from international pressure groups and 2,000 media personnel from 146 countries will gather there for the biennial global trade summit. They will find themselves in one of two worlds.

In the hotel zone 12 miles of sandbars have been replaced with the fantastical skyline of modern industrial tourism - 200 luxury hotels plus casinos, fast-food joints and tacky pleasure palaces. The lagoons, coral reefs and wetlands are now irrevocably destroyed. Last month a Cancun marine park imported 36 dolphins from the Solomon Islands. World Trade Organisation delegates will be invited to swim with them for $86 (£54) a time, or pet them for $45.

In the other world, nine miles away across a narrow spit of land, a sprawling city of about 300,000 people has grown in the past 30 years to serve the tourists. Environment and development groups say that up to 40% of them live without sewerage or piped water, lucky to earn $10 a day.
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The U.S. continues to fuck over the world however they can while the somambulent citizens at home watch unreality shows and wonder, in their media drugged state, why do they hate us? The Matrix continues to rule.