Issue Areas

• Strengthen and Ensure Economic and Social Human Rights
  
  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) guarantees a full range of economic human rights: the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself, including the right to food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services.
  
  

  Bring Trade Policies Into the Public Realm
  
  Trade agreements like NAFTA and institutions like the WTO promised to create new jobs. Since NAFTA, new maquiladora plants near the U.S.-Mexico border hired about 500,000 Mexican workers, yet 1.4 million Mexican jobs have been lost since 1994. Meanwhile, the cost of living in Mexico has tripled, and average wages are 27 percent lower. Yet, the nations of the South are not the only victims of this process. There is also a "South in the North" right here in the U.S. While NAFTA promised 250,000 new jobs each year, between 1994-2000, the U.S. is reported to have lost over 3.2 million jobs.
  
  

  Bring Genetic Engineering Debate to the Public Realm
  
  Resistance to GE crops is growing internationally, however, we still lack an environmental and socio-economic ethos that commands international consensus. For one, it is dominated by single-issue advocacy, for example demand for labeling GE foods that tends to treat threats to the environment such as genetic pollution, or denial of farmers' right to seed, as discrete, semi-sovereign problems. While this narrow focus may make sense from a legislative point of view, it has proven inadequate in addressing more systemic problems. As such, the very nature of our environmental discourse discourages the emergence of multi-issue coalitions that are needed to reverse environmentally damaging patterns of development and technology. The debate over the role of genetic engineering (GE) in agriculture is a key area where stakes are enormous, with the specter of gene spills that cannot be contained or reversed, the loss of crop and wild plant biodiversity, increased use of herbicides, new allergens and toxins in our food supply, antibiotic resistance, gene transfer across species, the privatization of public institutions and of life itself, farmers losing the ability to save seeds, and countries losing their ability to protect their borders from importation of potentially dangerous organisms and technologies. It is this specter which the Oakland Institute seeks to counter. We work both nationally and internationally to forge a new environmental ethos around the genetic engineering debate that can command a wider international consensus and help bring it into the public realm.
  
  

  Redefine Security in the New World Order
  
  In the New World Order, dominated by trade liberalization, war on terrorism, and the hegemony of giant corporations, we need to redefine security in terms of human security. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was held essential for "security" by the Bush administration. The military budget for fiscal year 2003 was increased by $45.5 billion - the largest single increase since 1966-to become a total annual military budget of $396.1 billion-26 times larger than the combined military budgets for the countries considered "rogue states" by the administration: Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.
  
  

  Learning from Popular Struggles: How We Might Unite
  

  One of the most important political developments in today's world has been the emergence of new and surprising alliances within countries, and significantly, across national boundaries and across political spectrums. This has taken the form of 'civil society strategies' and what has been called 'globalization from below.' February 15, 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq-where more than a million people jammed the centre of London, similar throngs marched in Rome and Barcelona, and hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Seoul, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Sydney, and New York and every major city in the world - the people of the planet spoke out as never before in one unified voice. The New York Times reporter Patrick Tyler conferred "superpower" status on this anti-war movement. Even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan used the phrase in referring to antiwar opinion.
  
  

  Agriculture
  Biotechnology
  Challenging the Right
  Development
  Environment
  Food Aid
  Food Sovereignty
  Foreign Aid
  Foreign Policy
  Genetic Engineering
  Globaliazation
  Human Rights
  Hunger
  Poverty
  Security
  Social Movements
  Trade