The Cape Town-based Alternate Information and Development Centre (AIDC), together with the Latin American-based Peoples Dialogue will be hosting a Crisis of Civilisation Conference from the 18th – 20th October 2010 at the Heia Safari Ranch, north of Johannesburg.

The conference will deal with the multidimensional crises where the food and energy crises intersect with the global economic and ecological crises, and the interrelated stresses placed on local and global communities.

This important conference is co-facilitated with the People’s Dialogue, a network of South-South organisations with a strong base in the indigenous and peasant movements of Latin America and in peasant and social movements in Southern Africa. AIDC and the People’s Dialogue are focusing on developing perspectives and strategies for alternatives. The conference will create a space critical for the engagement of social movement activists from Southern Africa and their counterparts in Latin America. The conference aims to facilitate promoting alternative visions of a socially-just, post-carbon economy.

The conference will ensure that social movements, and broader civil society advocacy formations, integrate issues of climate change, and planetary sustainability. Recall how the slogan ‘think globally, act locally’ arose from the challenge of integrating issues of globalisation into locally and nationally based activism for social justice. Today, the threats of climate change and the related ecological crises impel popular forces to expand their visions, strategies and programmes.

There is a significant process whereby the global justice movement, which came to prominence during the Seattle and Genoa counter summits to the World Trade Organisation and the G8 Summits and around which the World Social Forum itself was born, is reorganising around the COP United Nations Summits on climate change. Last year during the Copenhagen Summit (COP15), more than 100,000 activists were mobilised. This process was taken forward during the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba Bolivia. Activists and peoples movements will reconvene during COP16 in Cancun Mexico. Relevant for South Africa and for popular movements in the region will be that South Africa will host the most significant climate change Summit, COP17 in December 2011, which is expected to be where a final binding agreement on emission cuts will be taken.

The Crisis of Civilisation Conference will play a significant role in developing our strategies as civil society to meaningfully intersect with this process.

Participants and Speakers

Participants will be drawn from activists of various popular organisations in South Africa as well as their counterparts from Latin America and Southern Africa. Many of these are active in important networks and coalitions including the Peoples Dialogue, Climate Justice Now!, Southern African People’s Solidarity Network, and Via Campesina.

Some speakers include:

Haiti (Key note speaker)

•    Camille Chalmers – Former director in the office of ousted Haitian President JB Aristide. Chalmers is an economist and the executive director of PAPDA (Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif) a development organization which focuses on popular mobilisation as a tool to find alternatives to the World Bank and IMF policies. Between 1993 and 1994 he served as Director of Haitian then President Jean Bertrand Aristide’s staff. Chalmers has done extensive work in Haiti’s agricultural sector and is a long standing advocate of debt cancellation.

South Africa

•    Ayanda Kota is the national chairperson of the Unemployed People’s Movement which was established in August 2009. It is based in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape and is a newly formed movement vying for the rights of the unemployed through social transformation.

Uruguay

•    Lilian Celibriti – an academic and activist, Celibriti is well known for her work in gender and youth and is the co-ordinator of a feminist collective across Latin America – Cotidiano Mujer – as well as Uruguay’s national co-ordinator for the Youth and South American Integration Project. Celebriti headed the technical secretariat of the MERCOSUR Expert Meeting on Women to promote a gender approach to regional integration and co-ordinates its participation in the Inter-American Platform of Human Rights, Democracy and Development.

Mali

•    Mamadou Goita – Goita is the Executive Director of the Institute for Research and the Promotion of Alternatives in Development (IRPAD) in Mali, and a social economist.

Venezula

•    Edgardo Lander – Lander is a Professor and researcher in the sociology department at Universidad Central de Venezuela in  Caracus, and fellow of the Transnational Institute. He was actively involved in the World Social Forum in Caracus in 2006 and was part of the negotiating committee that eventually saw the breakdown of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.

Conference spokespersons

South Africa

•    Brian Ashley – Director, Alternate Information and Development Centre (AIDC).       © 082 085 7088, email (English)

•    Mercia Andrews – Director, Trust for Community Outreach and Education focusing on issues of land and rural development. © 082 368 3429, email

Brazil

•    Moema Miranda – Anthropologist and organizer at Brazilian organization, IBASE, the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic research. She is also a key organizer for the World Social Forum, Brazil. Email – (please note Ms Miranda will be present in South Africa on the 17th October)

•    Carlos Aguilar –  Ecological activist in Latin American movement, Cry for the Excluded, and key person in Peoples Dialogue, a global south movement of social and environmental movements. (Please note Mr. Aguilar will be present in South Africa on the 17th October).

Tel. direto: 55 21 2178 9421

Fax: 55 21 2178-9402, email