International aid agency Oxfam will fly out with 14 tonnes of water, sanitation and hygiene equipment on Thursday 15 February to help thousands of people who have been left homeless by severe flooding in Mozambique. Heavy rains and rising flood waters are forecast to continue in the region this week, which threatens to worsen the situation of up to 285,000 people living in vulnerable areas.
Attacks on civilians in eastern Chad must not be allowed to reach levels seen in Darfur, said international aid agency, Oxfam, today as the UN Security Council prepares to decide whether to send a peacekeeping force to the country.
International agency Oxfam is providing assistance to people affected by flooding that has hit the greater Jakarta area since 1 February 2007. Oxfam Australia has deployed Jane Bean and Ben Fraser to Jakarta to join the relief effort.
Australian, Canadian and US mining companies that persist in dumping billions of tonnes of toxic heavy metals such as mercury and lead into the rivers and oceans of some of the world’s poorest countries are causing irreversible environmental damage as well as driving human poverty. This warning by a coalition of human rights groups and mining watchdogs as mining ministers from the Asia-Pacific gather in Perth this week for a summit.
Oxfam Australia has attacked Federal Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane for effectively giving overseas Australian mining companies the green light to continue dumping
Call for an immediate ban on the practice of dumping billions of tonnes of toxic mine waste into rivers and oceans. That’s the clarion message 27 international human rights groups, mining watchdogs, unions and Indigenous people’s organisations voiced in an open letter to the mining sector in today’s The Australian newspaper.
On a typically steamy day in Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, the Australian manager of one of the country’s gold mines said, ‘We don’t have a social responsibility program because we didn’t think we’d be operating more than two years.’ Ten years after mining began and with plans to expand production, the Australian-owned mine still has no intention of ending the practice of dumping more than 140,000 tonnes of toxic waste such as lead and mercury into the local river system each and every year. In fact, the company has no plans whatsoever to minimise the social and environmental impacts of its operations. Meanwhile, downstream, out of sight and out of mind, vulnerable people who rely on the river for drinking, fishing and washing as well as land cultivation find themselves at the pointy end of the senseless and selfish actions of a multibillion dollar Australian mining operation. The company however cannot plead ignorance. Neither is it oblivious to the harm it’s caused ‘ local people have complained bitterly on several occasions about the irreversible environmental and social damage caused by the mine.
Celebrating five years of exponential growth, Oxfam TRAILWALKER Melbourne is putting on the biggest TRAILWALKER event in Australia from March 23 – 25, 2007 when a record 600 teams will compete.
International agency Oxfam welcomed the Bush Administration’s proposal to reform the 2002 Farm Bill as a first step toward unlocking the paralysis in multilateral trade negotiations. However, the organisation cautioned that it is still unclear if the proposal will significantly reduce export dumping or signify a meaningful shift in the American position at the WTO. Importantly, there is no guarantee that the US Congress will adopt the proposal.
Forty-years ago 90 per cent of Australia voted to give Aboriginal Australians equal rights ‘ equal rights as citizens of Australia to help redress the ‘White Australia’ policy as well as to right wrongs experienced by Indigenous Australians. It was heralded as a watershed moment in Australian history ‘ 200 years after the first Britains settled and claimed the land for themselves, Indigenous Australians were to be recognised as equals.