Among the very many parallel workshops and lectures at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, and the meetings of the ecological debtors in Davos, we found a space in order to explain environmental history, the ecological debt, and the launching of the Alliance of Southern Peoples who are Creditors of the Ecological Debt. 

We of the Alliance organized a workshop, Who owes whom?, together with Friends of the Earth International (though FoE Brazil) and Jubilee South. This was attended by approximately one hundred people. On the External Debt, Eric Toussaint (from the Committee for the Annulment of the External Debt, Belgium), Dot Keet, AIDC, South Africa, and Reinaldo Gonçalves, PCS, Brazil, spoke. On the Ecological Debt, Jose Augusto Padua (Brazil), Autora Donoso (Accion Ecologica, FoE, Ecuador), Frei Sergio Gorgen (MST, the Movement of the Landless, Brazil), Shalmali Guttal (Focus on the Global South), and Alberto Villarreal (Redes, FoE, Uruguay), took part. Ther workshop was led by Beverly Keene, of Dialogue 2000, Jubilee South. 

The relation between the Alliance of Creditors of the Ecological Debt and the Jubilee South campaign becomes ever closer. The arguments for claiming the Ecological Debt are gaining strength in the campaign for the cancellation of the external debt of the countries of the third world. This was expressed in the agreements of Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Barcelona, Dakar, and now Porto Alegre. 

Similarly, the Alliance looks for a close relation with the campaigns of Friends of the Earth International on International Financial Institutions (IFI), and on TES (Trade, Environment and Sustainability) because of the link between Trade and the Ecological Debt. 

We made a small demonstration on the Ecological Debt in the World Social Forum, which attracted attention from a local television station and some radio stations. 

We also organized a meeting on the Alliance with members of FoE from Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and with other interested persons from Fobomade (Bolivia), and from Thailand. We informed about the Alliance, and we empahized the need to place the arguments on the Ecological Debt in the national and international agendas, and how to include the Ecological Debt concept in the work of each organization thus contributing to the Alliance. Members of FoE in different countries are interested in the Alliance. Also, Shalmali Guttal (from Focus on the Global South, Thailand) and Maria Luisa Ramos from Fobomade, Bolivia have joined the group of promotors of the Alliance. 

We distributed posters and leaflets on the Ecological Debt. Together with FoEI, we determined to hold a conference in Benin on Trade and the Ecological Debt, the date will be established later. 

All this was done in the democratic atmosphere of Porto Alegre, governed by the PT, among many other initiatives and claims against the global economic system, where Hebe de Bonafini called Soros an "usurer" to his face via satellite, and the MST and Via Campesina with José Bové pulled out transgenic soybeans from Monsanto's fields. Meanwhile, in my own country, Ecuador, a violent repression was under way against the indigenous organizations demonstrating against structural adjustment imposed by the IMF.