(May 10, 1999) A global movement is asking Western nations to forgive ‘odious’ debt extended to despotic regimes. The cause has merit, but opposition is building.
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Patricia Adams
Patricia Adams is an economist and the Executive Director of Probe International, an independent think-tank and watchdog over the environmental consequences of Canadian government and corporate activities around the world. Her books include In the Name of Progress: The Underside of Foreign Aid, (Doubleday 1985), and Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption and the Third World”s Environmental Legacy (Earthscan 1991), which exposes the jeopardy of years of loose lending for both the Third World’s environment and their economies, and proposes a legal remedy to place responsibility for the Third World’s debt crisis on the parties involved, instead of on First and Third World taxpayers. Pat also edited the English language translation of Yangtze! Yangtze!, the extraordinary critique by Chinese experts of the Three Gorges dam that inspired the democracy movement when it was first published in 1989, led to the postponement of the dam, and was subsequently banned by Chinese authorities. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia.
All aboard the EDC money train: The Export Development Corporation uses government money to prop up smokestack industries while discouraging private-sector competition in the credit insurance business
(January 11, 1999) The Export Development Corporation funds environmentally-damaging industries with taxpayer money, writes Patricia Adams.
Probe International submission to the Export Development Act Review
(December 21, 1998) The Export Development Corporation is unnecessary, costly, and unaccountable. It misleads the Canadian public and is an environmental wrecker. This patronage agency should be shut down.
Submission to the Export Development Act Review
(December 21, 1998) Export Development Corporation is unnecessary, costly and unaccountable. Misleads the Canadian public is an environmental wrecker. Patronage agency should be shut down. By Patricia Adams.
China’s great leap backward
(Autumn 1998) Uneconomic and outdated, the Three Gorges dam will stunt China;s economic growth
Whose conduct is too vile to sign Canada’s new International Code of Ethics?
(September 21, 1997) In September, at the urging of the federal government, a group of Canadian companies voluntarily agreed to follow a new International Code of Ethics in their overseas activities.
Patronage Canada
(April 2, 1997) Probe International’s Executive Director, Patricia Adams, looks at some of the disastrous projects backed by the Canadian Crown corporation, the Export Development Corporation.
Canada’s #1 threat to the global environment is trying to muzzle Probe International and its support
(March 21, 1996) Canada’s Export Development Corporation has quickly become Canada’s #1 threat to the global environment, and it is determined to stop the attention Probe International and its supporters have been giving it.
Letter to EDC President and CEO
(March 1, 1996) Letter by Probe International’s Patricia Adams: EDC finances some of the world’s worst environmental disasters.
A troubling deposit at World Bank
(November 29, 1995) For 5O years government guarantees have allowed the World Bank and its sister development banks to amass the world’s riskiest loan portfolios. Three months ago, the weakest of these sisters, the African Development Bank, was downgraded. And now for the first time, the World Bank admits that many of its own loans can’t be paid back.
Cyanide devastated Guyana’s main waterway, thanks to a project supported by your tax dollars
(August 21, 1995) The disaster in Guyana began in the early morning hours of Saturday August 19: at a Canadian-owned gold mine, a red, poisonous sludge erupted through a breach in an earthen dam which was holding back a waste pond.
Misspent billions: Third World aid?
(May 10, 1995) If the tiny country of Laos had the same population density as the city of Manhattan, we would all be there–the globe’s entire 5.7 billion population, in fact, would have more space per person than do Manhattan residents, who pride themselves on living in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities. The space outside Laos–virtually the entire globe–would then be available for farming, mining, and whatever else our Laotian populace required.
Your tax dollars are financing the forced relocating of 1.3 million Chinese
(March 21, 1995) Last November, while leading his Team Canada mission in China, Prime Minister Jean Chretien shocked Canadians by announcing Canadian government support for the mammoth Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River, and his intention to use tax dollars to help finance this controversial project.
Population prophets well behind the people
The world does not have too many people – it does have too many ill-conceived mega-projects that have created pockets of grief.The London Free Press.
Patricia Adams
Brady Yauch
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
Lisa Peryman
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