Oppose a debt relief plan dressed up in impressive numbers but which is really a tool for implementing more IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programs! Oppose plans for the sale of IMF gold that would shore up the accounts of the IMF's destructive Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF)!

No Debt, No Sweat: Organizing for Global Justice will be our fourth national activists' conference. We hold them every year the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have the Annual General Meetings in Washington -- which is to say two of every three years.

We arrived in Cologne, Germany on June 17, a couple of days before leaders of the Group of Eight nations (G-8 ) were scheduled to meet for the World Economic Summit and decide on debt relief for the poorest countries. Our hopes were high because the G-8 had placed the issue of debt on the top of its agenda.

There is "no (repeat, no) prospect for Zaire’s creditors to get their money back in the foreseeable future." That’s what Edwin Blumenthal, the International Monetary Fund’s man in Kinshasa, wrote 20 years ago in a report for the agency.

The families are members of Brazil's Landless Peasants' Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) or MST. With 1.2 million activists, the MST is the largest social movement in the hemisphere and the largest agrarian reform movement in the world. Since its founding in 1985, the MST has won the settlement of over 200,000 families. But a World Bank project aims to replace the constitutionally-mandated land reform with a market-based program that opponents fear will only increase poverty.

In July, it was revealed in a respected South African newspaper that a dozen major international dam-building companies involved in the World Bank-funded Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) in Southern Africa had lavishly bribed the chief executive officer of the project, allegedly giving nearly US$2 million in bribes over ten years.

The Mexico Solidarity Network is comprised of more than 70 organizations. It is trying to build links between members of civil society, including agricultural cooperatives and human rights organizations, both in Mexico and the U.S., searching for alternatives to capital-centered globalization and struggling for justice and democracy

The World Bank Inspection Panel was created in 1993 to increase the accountability of World Bank lending and to provide local people with a forum of last resort to enforce their rights under Bank policies and loan conditions. Claims can be brought by peoples affected by a World Bank project if they can demonstrate that they have been harmed by Bank failures to adhere to its policies. For the most part, the Panel has been successful in bringing problems with project implementation to the attention of the Bank's Board of Directors. To date, fourteen claims have been brought to the Panel, with mixed success. The very first claim, that brought by a Nepalese group opposing the giant Arun Dam, resulted in the project's cancellation. No other claim, however, has succeeded so completely.

The Cologne Initiative, the 'historic' debt-relief plan for the world's poorest countries announced by the industrialised nations, is panned by social groups as a tool to keep participating countries tied to the policy dictates of the International Monetary Fund and to ensure that they continue to repay their debts to the international financial institutions. The Initiative would perpetuate the devastating impacts of structural adjustment programmes in poor countries.

Grassroots activists and policy experts from several Southern countries will meet in Washington DC to discuss agricultural and rural sector development just prior to the annual 50 Years is Enough conference.

The World Trade Organization -- the world's most powerful legislative body -- will be holding a Ministerial Summit in Seattle from Nov. 29 through Dec. 3, 1999. This meeting will literally shape the rules of the global economy for decades to come. We can stop the top-down globalizers -- just as we stopped the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) and 'fast-track'-- if we mobilize enough people.