One of India’s most incisive and committed journalists won himself an important gong recently. P Sainath, editor for rural affairs at The Hindu, has long been writing about the systemic poverty, despair, courage and organising that erupts from India’s land.
While I was writing Stuffed and Starved some of the most thoughtful and incisive analyses I came across were those by Utsa Patnaik. She has now made available a fine summary of her thinking on rural poverty in India, and for policy wonks in particular, it’s a must read. Abstract below. Full article here. Keep Reading »
Here’s advance warning of protests against the World Bank and IMF in October 2007, in Washington DC. Find out more at www.octoberrebellion.org.
Here’s a tremendously thoughtful article about the world’s richest man. No, not Bill Gates. Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecoms magnate. His irresistible rise is, to quote the author, Louis Nevaer, “the story of how NAFTA’s limitations distort income distribution in both Mexico and the United States.”
The good people at Food News have just posted a fine piece on Detroit’s Food Deserts. The concept of a food desert is one that has a great deal of analytical traction, but one that, as this thoughtful article from the British Medical Journal notes, also fits into a broader social phenomenon of victimising the poor.
Kerrin Hands, the man who designed the splendid banner above, spotted this on the BBC’s website. It’s a radio documentary about obesity in South Africa. Although it doesn’t quite go into the deeper explanations for obesity, linked to the structure of urban work, the architecture of the modern city, and the availability of certain kinds of high-sugar snacks for working people, it’s not half bad for a BBC effort. And the title, ‘Globesity’, is none too shabby either. More here.
Adding to the commentary about Special Economic Zones, here’s a solid article from Devinder Sharma, a man whose thoughts crop up in Stuffed and Starved. The scourge of ‘Special Economic Zones’ shouldn’t come as any surprise, of course. It’s a similar process wherever ‘export industry’ has successfully wrangled concessions from central government, whether in rich countries or poor.
This press release is a little dated, but it’s important to post. It concerns “Economic Partnership Agreements”, the arrangements between that Europe and large parts of Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific Island States, which began life as invasion and colonialism. After Europe begrudgingly handed sovereignty back to its colonies, it offered ‘preferential access’ to its markets – as close as Europe gets to an apology for colonialism. Unfortunately, that access ran counter to the emerging World Trade Organization rules (which Europe had a large hand in drafting). The response has been to remove the apology, and to maintain a relationship of ‘reciprocity’ between trading nations. The effects of this have been to drive farmers in developing countries to bankruptcy.
Read more below, from the FIAN Press release.
The British Food Standards Agency (FSA) have come out with some useful research on the nation’s health, and food poverty. The message from the media seems to be this: ‘the poor don’t have it as bad as we thought’.
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