Anti-globalisation activists meet from Sunday for the 11th World Social Forum in Dakar, homing in on the crises of capitalism and civilisation in a world plagued by social and economic ills. The left-wing alternative to the World Economic Forum held in Davos last week hopes to change the world we live in, our society, economy and the relationship with our environment it believes have put civilisation in peril.
The six-day meeting is the second in Africa after Nairobi in 2007 and comes 10 years after the first, held in Port Alegre in southern Brazil in 2001. The theme of the Forum this year is: "Crises of the system and civilisation." French NGO Attac said in a statement the Forum was being held as the world finds itself in a "full-blown social crisis after the financial crisis of 2008."
After massive rescue payouts countries tightened their belts with strict austerity plans and it is "citizens who are paying the price", the statement said. "Social, environmental, food and geopolitical crises, all intertwined, are the backdrop to this forum which will highlight the crisis of capitalism and a crisis of civilisation."
The WSF 2011 also comes amid "social struggles for democracy and justice in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and the Mediterranean region as a whole," where autocratic regimes face popular revolts like that which led to the fall of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said Attac.
Mignane Diouf, the co-ordinator of the Forum's executive secretariat, told AFP the 2011 edition posed "a challenge to consolidate a decade of experience and ... mobilisation by the African continent tasked with organising it." Organisers expect between 40,000 and 50,000 participants including leftist presidents such as Bolivia's Evo Morales, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, Benin's Boni Yayi and the head of the French socialist party Martine Aubry.
Marches, conferences, debates and workshops will be held at several sites including the University Cheikh Anta Diop and Goree Island, a symbol of the slave trade off the coast of Senegal. The budget is around 1.5 million euros ($2m), financed mostly by the NGO members of the Forum. In the past the Forum has been criticised for bad organisation, chaos and an inability to find realistic solutions.
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