This, the first in of two human-rights-related posts today, is for policy wonks only. It’s a report that I helped Diane Elson and Radhika Balakrishnan with, and the aim is to bring together macroeconomic policy makers and human rights activists. There’s a great deal of guidance in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about what governments should and shouldn’t be doing to promote human rights. Providing basic healthcare to everyone – yes. Place pensions into the private sector- not so much.
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Here’s a guest post from Wayne Roberts, whose No Nonsense Guide to World Food is, as I’ve said before, a cracking introduction.
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Pambazuka News has published another winner, this time from William Aal, Lucy Jarosz and Carol Thompson. It’s a response to a particularly bad Foreign Affairs article in which Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, suggests that what we need to combat hunger is to throw the peasant off the land, bring machinery to bear on agriculture, and plant GM crops.
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From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida comes this appeal. Click here to do the needful, and see the full appeal below.
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Irin sends news of the latest food summit, this time in Madrid. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that in 2008, 40 million more people were added to the rolls of the hungry. This seems a low-ball estimate, particularly given the galloping pace of the Depression at the end of the year. (The world’s hungry went up by 50 million from 2006 to 2007, when things were comparatively rosy.) But whatever the outcome of the summit (and I suspect it’ll be more of the same “we must try harder to increase world trade” message we saw from the FAO and G8 meetings last year) it’s certain that the consequences will be felt for years to come. [Via DM]
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Brazil hopes to supply drivers worldwide with the fuel of the future — cheap ethanol derived from sugarcane. It is considered an effective antidote to climate change, but hundreds of thousands of Brazilian plantation workers harvest the cane at slave wages…. Read more at Truthout [via PW].
How do you fight obesity, food import dependence, global warming and food price inflation, while eating great Japanese food? Live in Japan!
Here’s a public service announcement from the world’s largest importer of food which ends with a “why can’t consumers, producers and the food industry all get along – after all we’re all Japanese?” message which ignores the reason we’re in this mess at the moment. But the video nonetheless pushes the question – what’s your ministry of agriculture doing to join the dots between hunger, obesity and the globalisation of food? [Via DD]
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From the ever-important InterPress Service comes this news in the wake of Haitian food riots. It’s a reminder that, above all, the riots had a political origin, and will need a political solution. And it’s a reminder that the politics won’t come from above, but from the grassroots.
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More on the New Scramble for Africa, courtesy again of the Financial Times. One of the most poisonous British companies, Lonro (formed from “London” and “Rhodesia”, the colonial name for Zimbabwe) is looking to relive the glory days of Empire, by getting a 25,000 hectare land deal in Angola. It is unlikely that they’ll be troubled by the public outcry that force Daewoo to back away from its claim over 1.3 million hectares of Madagascar. That is, unless readers in Britain want to take it to the streets (pretty please).
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