So far, Review Sessions have been held on the 6 chapters of the document known as the "Monterrey Consensus". We would venture to suggest that the resultant document brings nothing new, though with a few exceptions. Those exceptions are of some importance, but they are prompted more by new circumstances rather by any in-depth review of the Consensus as such. The "new circumstances" are precisely this fearsome context referred to in the title: crisis upon crisis. The financial crisis of the rich world. The food crisis. The energy crisis. The environmental crisis.

Apart from the first, all those crises will require a great deal of money and a great deal of resources. And they will all demand a great deal of imagination and political courage. However, so far only the financial crisis is meeting with a response (and a scandalous one when seen through the eyes of the world's south): the rich world's central banks are issuing more new money now than ever before in their history.

By contrast, nobody has made any move so far towards providing developing countries with new additional sources of finance of a predictable, stable kind to enable them to cope with all those other crises listed above — crises which will of course affect those countries to a greater extent.

In this area, the discussions held so far have reflected those concerns, and we will try to outline them in this second special Newsletter monitoring this process.

Accordingly, we will reissue first of all our recent statement on the food crisis, which examines among other things the interdependence of all these crises and calls once more for the building of World Democratic Governance as an essential step in making real progress towards solving them.

Source: Forum Mondial de Réseaux de la Société Civile