Arab Revolt Revives Hope For a New World: Brazil's Lula

Agence France-Presse, February 7, 2011

http://news.ph.msn.com/business/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4627162

Former Brazilian president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva on
Monday urged Africa to become aware of its own power
amid rising hopes of a new world order in the wake of
the popular revolts sweeping the Arab world.

Attending the annual World Social Forum which brings
together leftists seeking an alternative to
globalisation and capitalism, Lula said here that
liberal "dogmas" had failed.

"In South America, but especially in the streets of
Tunis and Cairo and many other African cities, hopes
for a new world are being revived," Lula said,

"Millions of people are protesting against the poverty
to which they are subjected to, against the rule of
tyrants, against the submission of their country to
world powers."

Recalling that Brazil is home to "the world's second
largest black community after Nigeria," Lula urged
Africans to realise they had "an extraordinary future"
with the continent's 800 million people, vast territory
and riches and could achieve food self-sufficiency.

"The global economic order is no longer shaped by a few
leading economies," he noted.

Rich countries who "saw us as peripheral and dangerous
... those who arrogantly gave lessons on how we should
manage our economy, have not been able to avoid the
crises which reached their own countries and all
humanity," he said.

"All efforts to tackle poverty and inequality were seen
as charity or populism ... but history has refuted
these false theories... the market is not a panacea,"
the Brazilian statesman said.

Another keynote speaker was Senegalese President
Abdoulaye Wade, who portrayed himself as a "liberal",
an "advocate of the market economy and not the state
economy that has failed almost everywhere in the
world."

Participants at the gathering, an alternative to the
World Economic Forum held in Davos last week, hope to
change the world economy and the relationship with the
environment.

The six-day meeting is being held in Africa for the
second time after Nairobi in 2007 and comes 10 years
after the first edition of the Forum took place in the
southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001.

This year's theme is: "Crises of the system and
civilisation."

The 83-year-old Wade who is seeking a controversial
third presidnetial mandate next year, said he "does not
agree" with the anti-globalisation movement even though
he shares "the idea of changing the world which is
going badly."

He caused a slight uproar when he asked whether the
Social Forum had succeeded in changing things on a
global scale.

The second day of the forum focused on the rush across
Africa to buy up land amid a growing global food
crisis.

Lamine Ndiaye, a Senegalese working for Oxfam cited
"the case of a Libyan company which acquired 200,000
hectares in Mali, a private British company buying land
in Tanzania" and other examples in Senegal, Ghana,
Mozambique and Ethiopia.

"Africa is not a battleground for powerful countries
... It is a rich continent, provided it is allowed to
determine its policies and development strategies,"
Tunisian Taoufik Ben Abdallah, coordinator of the
African Social Forum, said at the opening of the
gathering.

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