The World Social Forum wants to make its voice heard at the upcoming UN summit on climate change to be held in Copenhagen. This is based on the logical claim that the struggle for climate justice and social justice is the same. According to the WSF, it is the same struggle for territories, indigenous rights, and fair distribution of wealth. This is perhaps because the emphasis was on the Amazon and what has been happening to the so-called “lungs of the planet.” Nearly 2,000 Indians were invited to the World Social Forum in Belem.

The WSF calls for finding a common agenda to fight against predatory destruction that is in the name of development and exclusionary conservatism that ignores the original peoples of the region. An example was cited about numerous traditional Amazonian communities that are often isolated and without partnerships. Colombia and Peru are reported to be dying from epidemics of malaria and hepatitis, but the government of Lula who spent 39 million euros in organizing the WSF has done nothing to abate the disaster.

The World Social Forum, admittedly not an organization nor a political platform, claims to be “…an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and inter-linking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo- liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a society centered on the human person.”

The WSF hopes to be an alternative to the prevailing forces of globalization, hegemony, and capitalism – being a leftist alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is what its tagline says: ‘another world is possible.’

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Via The Huffington Post