Finance

Is your retirement fund a land-grabber?

The global scramble for land and resources has a big new player, and if you’re a teacher or work for a nonprofit, it might be you.

AGree—What’s it all about?

The multi-million dollar initiative known as AGree released their mission and strategies for transforming food and agriculture policy by 2030 last week. Despite a litany of plans and players involved, it’s still hard to know what to make of AGree.

Economic governance: A rich-country-only privilege?

You might think that the devastating impacts of commodity price volatility on global hunger would require policy debates in multiple international organizations.

Moving forward with speculation reforms

The food price crisis and global financial meltdown had many causes, but it would be hard to overstate the role of the deregulation and privatization policies that had taken root in the 1990s and 2000s. Globalization and financial “innovations” pushed by speculative investors also mean that when U.S. food and energy prices rise, they affect prices around the world.

The Story of Broke

Led by the budget-slashing Super Committee, most eyes in Washington are focused on how to cut government programs. Right now, the Agriculture Committee Chairs are in the late stages of a secret negotiation on how much farm and food programs will be cut. With the rising budget deficit, what choice to we have? So, the Beltway story goes.

Whose country is it? Wall Street occupies the regulatory agencies

This entry originally appeared on the Triple Crisis blog.

What does the occupation of Wall Street have to do with agriculture?

Now two weeks in, the occupation of Wall Street originated from a July call to action by Adbusters to draw a line in the sand on the growing corporate control of our democracy and government—and in particular, Wall Street’s influence.  

"Perfectly just is not going to happen here"

"The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. What we needed is 'good enough.' And 'good enough' is not 'perfectly just.' 'Perfectly just' is not going to happen here." These are the words yesterday of Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi at an event here in Cancún presenting climate finance options to governments at the U.N. global climate talks.