Op-ed/Commentaries
Global Agricultural Policy in an Age of Land Grabs
Published April 12, 2012
Jim Harkness
LONDON, MAR. 5, 2012 – Last year, I was invited to speak on a panel at the European Parliament with Professor Lang to provide some international perspective for a discussion they were having about the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform. I was specifically asked to comment on how the issues and proposals...
Off the rails: Food security and the WTO
Published December 21, 2011
Karen Hansen-Kuhn
Washington D.C., December 21, 2011 – At a World Social Forum event in 2006, Walden Bello warned that the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was careening down a track to disaster. Negotiators urgently needed to pull back before the Round went off a cliff, the founder of Focus on the Global South...
Stepping up: Will the G-20 allow the CFS to function? Will other countries allow the G-20 to stop them?
Published November 4, 2011
Sophia Murphy
Rome, October 2011 – Multilateralism is in crisis. It is perhaps most evident in the painful and truly frightening failure of governments to come to grips with the implications of climate change. But it was also evident on a much less well-publicized stage in mid-October in Rome, where governments were gathered...
The 2050 challenge to our global food system
Published October 20, 2011
Jim Harkness
Feeding 9 billion people by 2050 will be an enormous challenge. In many circles when people talk about feeding the world in 2050, the focus is almost exclusively on increasing food production. How can we do what we’re already doing better? What technologies can we produce to get more yield, or calories, out of...
Hungry for justice
Published October 13, 2011
This commentary was originally published September 29, 2011 on Twin Cities Runoff. The author, Chelsey Perkins, is a Food and Farm Journalism Intern at IATP. On a brisk June day on a sidewalk in southeast Minneapolis, Mario Colloly Torres ate a chunk of bread, his first bite of food in 12 days. His body felt tired....
G-20 agriculture ministers meet in Paris with little result
Published July 15, 2011
Sophia Murphy
On June 23, 2011, the G-20 marked a new phase in its evolution as a political entity with its first summit of agricultural ministers. Held in Paris, with a significant investment of French political energy in the process and the outcome, the meeting was nonetheless profoundly disappointing. The one positive outcome...
Landowners without land
Published July 12, 2011
Hundreds of thousands of American Indians own land on reservations, but few have access to it. The Cobell settlement will put almost $2 billion toward Indian land consolidation, but is it too little too late? Buffalo evolved on the plains. Their hooves don’t compact land the way cattle do, and the better soil...
Multi-lateralizing G-20 commitments on the commodity derivatives market: Two very modest proposals
Published April 27, 2011
Dr. Steve Suppan
The hype versus the reality of carbon markets and land-based offsets: Lessons for the new Africa carbon exchange
Published April 27, 2011
Shefali Sharma
Minneapolis, April 21, 2011 — The Africa Carbon Exchange (ACX) was launched in Nairobi on March 24; yet only two days before, Bloomberg headlines announced “Global Carbon Credits Die as Smart Money Backs Indian RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates).”1 While the ACX is positioning itself to be the hub...
Agriculture in the climate talks
Published April 21, 2011
Shefali Sharma
tianjin, october 18, 2010 — The climate negotiations in China where countries finished negotiating for six days (October 4–9) wrapped up just over a week ago. This was the countries’ last chance to reach common ground for major decisions on global warming before the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC...
