Food security

When weather becomes the "single biggest factor"

Sixty-eight percent.

Tollhouse tortillas won’t end hunger

Efforts to solve the problem of hunger and poverty by turning to the same corporations that helped create the problem have gone viral. Michelle Obama and the President of Mexico have hit on the same scheme (and the same companies) for solutions to hunger and the growing crisis of diet-related illnesses. Both will likely make matters worse.

Making food aid work for those who need it (rather than those who profit from it)

IATP joins many NGOs, academics and policy experts today in celebrating a move that could make U.S. food aid more efficient and responsive to the world’s hungry. Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2014 proposes to shift close to half the food aid budget to procuring food aid from local and regional markets rather than the shipping U.S. grains on U.S. ships halfway around the world.

TPP: Doubling down on failed trade policy

The 16th round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) began this week in Singapore.

New report: Governments must protect land, food systems as trade liberalization accelerates land grabbing

IATP has always argued that trade agreements need to respect and promote human rights, not drive a process of globalization that privileges commercial interests and tramples on public interests. In a new paper on land grabs, we reaffirm that position.

Change in the wind on food aid?

Washington D.C. is a gloomy place these days, with grey skies and a weirdly warm winter, the sour prospect of failure around the sequestration debate, and more cuts on the horizon. It’s possible, however, that on international food aid there just might be a silver lining to all that gloom.

Food crisis update: Main drivers of price volatility still not addressed

Last year international food markets suffered their third price spike in five years. The trigger was a terrible drought in the United States—a major agricultural producer and exporter. An unstable climate met low levels of international grain reserves, while U.S. ethanol gobbled up maize supplies.

Five questions for Frederick Kaufman, author of Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food

In 2010, journalist Frederick Kaufman wrote in Harper’s Magazine about how Wall Street speculators wreaked havoc with wheat markets and, in turn, helped drive the 2008-09 food price crisis.

How to invest justly in small-scale agriculture

As the Rome-based Committee on World Food Security begins preparing principles for “responsible agriculture investment” (RAI), its advisory body, the High-level Panel of Experts (HLPE), gets ready to revise its report on “Smallholder agriculture investment.” It is hoped that the RAI principles, if crafted with input from small-scale food produce