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The 2013 World Social Forum will be held this March 26-30 in Tunisia, where only two years ago, a revolution began and resulted into a historic change that created a ripple effect across the region. Now, Tunisia is an inspiration to movements both old and new, across the globe.

Food & Water Watch and Food & Water Europe are busy getting ready to participate in the World Social Forum on water, fracking and food sovereignty issues. As a coordinator of the European Water Movement, our main aim is to build up links with local and regional groups and set up a Euro-Mediterranean Alliance for Water to facilitate the exchange of experience and information. Many North African countries are currently facing the same problems we have in Europe namely with the threat of privatization of water services and unconventional energy sourcing projects such as hydraulic fracturation. The same private water companies and energy companies are trying to push through projects in the North African region which have been met with resistance by civil society in Europe.

Food & Water Europe has joined a growing group of civil society organisations in calling on the EU to abolish its Emission Trading System (ETS) to open space for truly effective climate policies.

More than 90 organisations from around the world launched this campaign called Time to Scrap the ETS with a declaration that lists the structural flaws of the ETS and the risks of trying to fix it.

Why are we supporting it?

The EU’s main policy to address climate change has taken attention away from the need to transform our dependency on fossil fuels and growing consumption. High prices were supposed to curb carbon emissions in the EU, instead prices have been very volatile and have been on a constant downward spiral since early 2011. Now that prices have dropped to less than 2.81€ per tonne, it is clear that this is not a solution to decreasing emissions and that it is time to make a new space for effective and fair climate policies.

Cap and trade policies have not been proven to work, they rely on unverifiable offsets and permit allocation schemes that benefit companies which are already polluting. The EU ETS is also being carried out at great public expense. European citizens are already going through austerity measures in a time of financial crisis and are being forced to bear the cost of running the ETS, including legislation, regulation and much of the quantification of emissions that carbon markets require.

By Eve Mitchell

If we’ve learned anything in the past few weeks, it must be that the UK Food Standards Agency’s “If you tell us it’s there, we’ll look for it” approach is not a recipe for food safety.

As far as we can tell now the situation is that Irish authorities, almost by accident when trialling a new protocol, found a good deal of horsemeat in foods processed in Irish facilities, including for export. This led to widespread product recalls, more testing in Ireland and the UK and rapid assurances all round that everything was under control.

Further testing revealed even more adulterated meat, including products labelled beef that tested at 100% horsemeat. The wider the net is cast, the bigger the problem is revealed to be, and it is all too clear we are nowhere near understanding what we have been feeding our kids quite yet. If this is “under control,” we’re in trouble.

Today’s revelation is that horsemeat from the UK exported to France into the human food chain, quite possibly for processing and re-entry to the UK, contained the veterinary drug phenylbutazone, often called Bute, which is unsafe for human consumption. There are now two very serious issues at play: 1) criminality in labelling due to what has all the hallmarks of major international fraud, and 2) criminality in presenting unfit meat for sale.

By Mitch Jones

Two recent news items highlight the need for policy makers concerned about climate change – which should be all of them, but sadly it isn’t – to rethink their recent approach to reducing carbon emissions.

When President Obama gave his Inaugural Address on January 21, he highlighted the need to take action on climate change. The mention of climate change, after the issues was largely ignored in the election before Sandy hit, was lauded by environmentalists as a sign that the Obama administration was going to do some to curb emissions. What that something would be was left unsaid.

Just three days after President Obama’s speech, carbon prices in Europe’s cap and trade system plummeted to an all time low, causing speculation that the trading regime stands on the verge of collapse. My colleague Geert de Cock wrote a post last week that explains how and why the carbon market in European has failed. Food & Water Europe has joined with other organizations across Europe calling for the EU trading system to be abolished.

The collapse of the EU system – basically a pay-to-pollute scheme – shows that as we move forward to combat climate change in the US we cannot return to the policies put forward as recently as 2009. In that year the US House passed a cap and trade bill that would have created a nationwide carbon market. And the initial news is that the administration is looking at actually reducing emissions, rather than hoping a system that hasn’t worked anywhere, will suddenly start working.

We need to address climate change now, but not by adopting pay-to-pollute deregulatory schemes cooked up in right wing think tanks. We need to truly reduce emissions, building on successes like the increase in fuel efficiency standards implemented by the Obama administration, and committing to ending our addiction to dirty fossil fuels.

By Kate Fried

Thanks in part to the consumer backlash against wasteful, unnecessary bottled water Nestlé’s sales figures are declining in the United States, Europe and Australia. The company has recently resorted to unorthodox, nay, illegal measures to maintain its stranglehold over the earth’s vital food and water resources. Even before the company’s share of the bottled water business fell by two percent in the west in 2011, Nestlé ripped a page from a James Bond villain’s playbook, turning to good old-fashioned espionage to protect its corporate interests.