UniAlter

Josée Madéïa

I start off the day with a session at UFPA by the Indigenous Environmental Network, (“Peoples Energy and Climate Justice”). The goal of this session is to inform about the perspectives of Indigenous people on global warming and some of the solutions that are viewed as more viable. Using the language of climate justice is important then, because people are so differently affected by this chaos and we have to be able to look at these injustices and their repercussions: on health, on water, on energy, on food sovereignty… especially since these issues are too often compartmentalized (by our governments and in our own thinking). Read the rest of this entry →

Par Josée Madéïa

The next session is organized by the Network Institute for Global Democratization, and entitled “The Future of the Forum: The WSF process and the Global Justice Movements.”

Here, Walden Bello speaks about the importance of creating a meeting space for the articulation of alternatives, but underlines that we could have been more effective had we taken stands: on the war in Irak, on Palestine, on climate change. So while the WSF needs to be an open space, it can still be partisan, it can still be an activist space. Fighting neo-liberalism was the last war, our new initiatives and our new movement should focus on global social democracy. We need to exercise our radical imagination, he says with a smile. Because of this crisis of the system, this is the moment not for caution, but for action. Read the rest of this entry →

par Josée Madéïa

The last session I attend is put on by CACIM – the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement, entitled “Facing the Future: the WSF, Global Justice Movements and beyond”. Here we begin by talking about the WSF as an incubator of movements, a space where movements come to grow. The question put before us is “What is the future of the Forum?” Read the rest of this entry →

Par Germain Schmid

 Le campement de la jeunesse est un lieu de rencontre extraordinaire. Je me retrouve à manger avec des brésiliens, dont 3  parlent un anglais approximatif dont tout français serait presque fier. J’apprend, entre 2 gorgées de l’alcool local, la grande différence entre brésiliens du nord et du sud : selon eux, ceux du nord pensent avec leur tête, ceux du sud avec leur sexe. J’apprend surtout que cela peut ne pas être péjoratif. Les brésiliens sont des personnes d’une gentillesse rare. Ici, on est accueilli avant d’etre arrivé, aidé avant même d’avoir un problème.

Sur « Basta ! » J. P. Stedile, leader du Mouvement des sans terre (MST) au Brésil, dresse son bilan du FSM 2009. Ça se passe par ici.

By Janet Conway

The 2009 World Social Forum took place January 27 to February 1 in the equatorial city of Belém do Pará. It was the fifth time the world event took place in Brazil, but the first time outside the southern city of Porto Alegre, the homeplace of the World Social Forum. As with the earlier events, Belém attracted hordes of participants— 130,000 of them from 142 countries but well over ninety percent of whom were Brazilian, many of them from Pará and neighbouring states in the Brazilian North. Read the rest of this entry →