Dhaka 06 July 2008: Follwing the SAARC ministerial meeting on Climate Change held in Dhaka on 03 July Equity & Justice Working Group (equitybd) organized a press conference to express its position on the declaration of the ministerial meeting while they urged the SAARC governments to raise the climate change issues in the upcoming 15th Saarc Summit.

Rezaul Karim Chowdhury, convener equitybd, presented the key-note paper and urged that SAARC member countries should take a common position in the mitigation of climate crisis; they also should discuss the best possible ways to address the food crisis so that no member country with surplus food could exploit another country that faces food defecit. The organizers of this press conference also demanded introduction of visa-free traveling within the SAARC countries and free movement of environmental refugees from one country to other country. Among others, AHM Bazlur Rahaman, Sahadut Islam Chowdhury, Mustafa Kamal Akanda were present in the conference.

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Online Print Media Coverage of press conference :		Details
	Call for structural changes to make Saarc effective	Daily Star Click
	Climate change analysis absent at SAARC meet	New Nation Click
	Introduction of visa-free travelling in SAARC region stressed to offset debt of climate change	New Age Click

Is food price leading South Asia toward commercialization in agriculture?
Future agenda on food sovereignty

In the recent years, the soaring prices of basic foods all around the globe have brought into light a looming food crisis. In fact, the causes of rocketing food prices are complex settings of demand-supply mechanism, which, in the recent years, is being influenced by a number of global socio-political factors; and by increasingly natural calamities around the globe. This situation clearly indicates that the neo-liberal concept of food security, which is merely based on production and trading of agriculture commodities, is not working; even the  prominent food exporting countries are putting more and more tariff and non tariff barriers on the export of agricultural commodities, especially on rice. The situation gives birth of new social and political tensions in the food deficit least developed country like Bangladesh and Nepal. In this backdrop EJWG Bangladesh framed future campaign issues to uphold peoples rights on food and food production system.

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SAFTA becoming unfriendly to the LDCs

To reduce trade gap among SAARC the member countries were agreed on a South Asian Free Trade Agreement-SAFTA which was made effective on 01 January 2006. But regretfully no effective progress has been made in the implementation of SAFTA. It is still a concern how SAFTA would benefit the least developed countries like Bangladesh while SAARC inter-regional trade only contributes 2 percent of export earnings of the SAARC member countries. Besides, the trade gap among the countries is widening. In this backdrop EJWG Bangladesh, LDC Watch, Rural Reconstruction Nepal and SAAPE proposes few policy recommendations to make SAFTA effective and supportive to the trade and development of the LDCs; these are a) countries those have not fulfilled the compliance of allowing free trade of 4,200 items should fulfill this commitment, b. implementation of Article-08 of SAFTA agreement that has clearly stressed on the harmonization of non tariff barriers, and c. necessary technical cooperation from the NLDCs to the LDCs for overcoming negative effect trade liberalization.

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