Walden Bello, senior analyst of Focus on the
Global South [1] and professor of sociology at the University of the
Philippines, is one of the leading critics of the current model of economic
globalisation, combining the roles of intellectual and activist. As a human
rights and peace campaigner, academic, environmentalist and journalist, and
through a combination of courage as a dissident, with an extraordinary
breadth of published output and personal charisma, he has made a major
contribution to the international case against corporate-driven
globalisation.

Bello was born in Manila in the Philippines in 1945. He was studying in
Princeton for a sociology Ph.D in 1972 when Ferdinand Marcos took power, and
plunged into political activism, collecting his Ph.D, but not returning to
the university for another 20 years. Over the next two decades, he became a
key figure in the international movement to restore democracy in the
Philippines, co-ordinating the Anti-Martial Law Coalition and establishing
the Philippines Human Rights Lobby in Washington.

He was arrested repeatedly and finally jailed by the US authorities in 1978
for leading the non-violent takeover of the Philippine consulate in San
Francisco. He was released three weeks later after a hunger strike to
publicise human rights abuses in his home country.

While campaigning on human rights he saw how the World Bank and IMF loans
and grants were supporting the Marcos regime in power. To expose their role,
he took the risk of breaking into the World Bank headquarters in Washington,
and brought out 3,000 pages of confidential documents. These provided the
material for his bookDevelopment Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines
(1982), which became an underground bestseller in the Philippines and
contributed to expanding the citizen’s movement that eventually deposed
Marcos in 1986.

After the fall of Marcos, Bello joined the NGO Food First in the USA, and
began to expand his coverage of the Bretton Woods institutions, in
particular studying the ’newly industrialised countries’ of Asia. His
critique of the Asian economic ’miracle’, Dragons in Distress, was written
six years before the financial collapse that swept through the region.

His recent work has been criticising the financial subjugation of developing
countries and promoting alternative models of development that would make
countries less dependent on foreign capital.

In 1995, he was co-founder of Focus on the Global South, of which he later
became executive director. Focus seeks to build grassroots capacity to
tackle wider regional issues of development and capital flows. When the
Asian Financial Crisis struck two years later, Focus played a major role
advocating a different way forward.

Bello argues that "what developing countries and international civil society
should aim at is not to reform the WTO but, through a combination of passive
and active measures, to radically reduce its power and make it simply
another international institution co-existing with and being checked by
other international organisations, agreements and regional groupings. It is
in such a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple
checks and balances that the nations and communities of the South will be
able to carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms,
and the strategies of their choice."

At the abortive WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, Bello played a leading role
in the teach-ins around the protest events and was later beaten up by the
Seattle police. He was detained again by the Italian police and nearly run
over by a police car at the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. He also played a key
role in civil society circles in elaborating the strategy to derail the WTO
Ministerials in Cancun in September 2003 and in Hong Kong in December 2005.

In September 2006, he was banned by the Singapore government from entering
the island state to attend the World Bank-IMF annual meeting, a repressive
act that was criticized by World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz himself.

He has also played a leading role as an environmentalist, and is former
chairman of the board of Greenpeace Southeast Asia. His 1998 book A Siamese
Tragedy, documenting the environmental destruction of Thailand, became a
bestseller there and won praise from former Thai Prime Minister Anand
Oanyarachun. It received the Chancellor’s Award for best book from the
University of the Philippines in 2000.

Bello has campaigned for years for the withdrawal of US military bases in
the Philippines, Okinawa and Korea, and has helped set up several regional
coalitions dedicated to denuclearisation and demilitarisation, and a new
kind of security plan based on meeting people’s needs.

After September 11 2001, he was a leading voice from the South urging the
USA not to resort to military intervention - which he believed would
exacerbate the problem - but to tackle the root causes of terrorism in
poverty, inequality, injustice and oppression. In March 2002, he led the
peace mission to the southern Philippine island of Basilan, where the US
army recently sent their special forces. He was also one of the leaders of a
peace mission of Asian parliamentarians and civil society activists that
visited Baghdad in March 2003 in a last-ditch effort to stop the US invasion
of Iraq. He led another mission to Lebanon at the height of the the Israeli
bombing and invasion of that country in August 2006.

Bello’s current and immediate past roles include:

* President of Freedom from Debt Coalition.

* National Chair Emeritus and National Chair of the party Akbayan, one
of the fastest growing parties in the Philippines, which has three members
in the Philippine Congress

* Professor of sociology and public administration at the University
of the Philippines.

* Executive director of Focus on the Global South.

* Member and former Chair of the board of Greenpeace South East Asia.

* Board member of Food First, the International Forum on
Globalisation, and the Transnational Institute.

Bello has won praise for his writing, as the author or co-author of 14 books
on global, Asian, and Philippines issues, notably American Lake: The Nuclear
Peril in the Pacific (1984) (co-authored with Peter Hayes and Lyuba Zarsky),
People and Power in the Pacific (1992), Dark Victory: The United States and
Global Poverty (1999), Global Finance: Thinking on Regulating Speculative
Capital Markets (2000) and The Future in the Balance: Essays on Globalisation
and Resistance (2001); The Anti-Development State: the Political Econmy of
Permanent Crisis in the Philippines (2004); and Dilemmas of Domination: the
Unmaking of the American Empire (2005). His articles have appeared in
numerous periodicals including Review of International Political Economy,
Third World Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Race and Class, Le Monde
Diplomatique, Le Monde, Guardian, Boston Globe, Far Eastern Economic Review,
and La Jornada. He is currently a columnist for the Philippine Daily
Inquirer and Foreign Policy in Focus. He won the New California Media Award
for Best International Reporting in 1998.

Bello was awarded South Korea’s Suh Sang Don Prize in 2001. In 2003, he was
given the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize,
for "... outstanding efforts in educating civil society about the effects of
corporate globalisation, and how alternatives to it can be implemented."
The Belgian newspaper Le Soir called Bello "the most respected
anti-globalisation thinker in Asia." Canadian author Naomi Klein has called
him the “world’s leading no-nonsense revolutionary.” Chalmers Johnson has
hailed him as the "world’s best guide to American exploitation of the
globe’s poor and defenseless."

An academic as well as an activist, Bello obtained his PhD in sociology from
Princeton University in the US in 1975 and has been a full professor at the
University of the Philippines at Diliman since 1997. He has also served as
visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (2002), UC
Irvine (2006), and UC Santa Barbara (2006). He also taught for four years,
1978-82, at UC Berkeley. He was Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Irvine in 2004
and was awarded an honorary PhD by Panteion University in Athens, Greece, in
2005.

Contact:

Jessie (09183437001)

Jonas (09209059727)