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G20 fails one billion hungry people
by Oxfam International
 
The G20 leading economies have sidelined development and food security at their summit in Los Cabos, international agency Oxfam said. Leaders were absorbed with disagreements about how to fix the Eurozone, and lost sight of developing countries reeling from aid cuts, climate change, and volatile food prices.
 
Oxfam spokesperson Carlos Zarco said: “This is a hugely disappointing outcome for developing countries. Europe’s crisis must be fixed because it is becoming a serious drain on developing countries. But it’s not good enough for the G20 to have fought over growth versus austerity in Europe. Leaders failed to keep the world’s poorest in their sights, despite the fact that more than half these people live in G20 countries.”
 
Food security was supposed to be a priority for this summit, but the G20 failed to come up with a plan to secure food for the 1 billion people worldwide who go hungry every day. This is despite a severe food crisis facing more than 18 million in the Sahel.
 
Biofuels - a key driver of food price volatility and food insecurity globally – were ignored despite calls from multiple international agencies to scrap production targets and subsidies. There was no mention of small-scale farmers as central to food productivity and security, and no plan to support them even though there are 200 million small family farms in G20 countries.
 
Leaders have shown no interest in sourcing finance for poverty eradication and climate change adaptation in developing countries, despite strong options available to them, including taxing shipping emissions and backing a financial transactions tax.
 
Despite major falls in donors’ aid to developing countries, commitments to stick to aid targets are conspicuously absent from the G20 communique.
 
Zarco said: “This collective failure of political will is shocking, and must be dealt with in the last months of Mexico’s G20 Presidency. Poor people and poor countries deserve nothing less.”


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Gruesome Mexican Drug Violence
by News wires
Mexico
 
May 14, 2012
 
Mexican officials have discovered the mutilated bodies of 49 people stuffed into plastic bags and dumped on an isolated highway.
 
The bodies were found on a stretch of highway that runs between Monterrey, the capital of Neuvo Leon state, and the nearby US border.
 
Mexico"s unending drug war claims one life every 35 minutes. The killings are the latest in a string of brutal murders linked to a feud between rival drug gangs.
 
Forty-three men and six women were among the dead, whose heads, hands and feet had been cut off.
 
Jorge Domene, the Nuevo Leon government"s spokesman for public security says the brutal Zetas drug gang claimed responsibility for the murders in a message found at the scene.
 
A large black "Z 100%" was spray painted on a road sign close to where the bodies were found.
 
The killings in Nuevo Leon are the worst there since 52 people died in an arson attack on a casino in Monterrey last August. That attack was also blamed on the Zetas.
 
There has been an escalation of gruesome mass killings in Mexico in recent weeks. Last Wednesday 18 people were found decapitated and dismembered near Mexico"s second-largest city, Guadalajara.
 
A week earlier, the bodies of nine people were found hanging from a bridge and 14 others found dismembered in the city of Nuevo Laredo, just across the US border from Laredo in Texas.
 
At least 50,000 people have been killed since the Mexican government launched a crackdown on the violence in 2006.


 

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