economy: production and consumption
Our food system is making people sick
> By K. I. Hope
Corporate America & obesity: why Americans can’t Live on food stamps America is gaining weight and the most vulnerable populations are those with low levels of education and income, as well as those with black or Hispanic heritage. The most obese state in the country, Mississippi, also happens to be the poorest. And with the rates of obesity increasing in 16 states last year and declining in none, America’s diet is influencing policy, politics and programs. Unfortunately, the system is (...) read
date of on-line publication : 9 August 2011
WWF timber scheme allows illegal logging, forest destruction and fails to prevent human rights abuses
WWF’s flagship scheme to promote sustainable timber – the Global Forest and Trade Network (GFTN) – is allowing companies to reap the benefits of association with WWF and its iconic panda brand, while they continue to destroy forests and trade in illegally sourced timber, a new briefing by Global Witness reveals. While GFTN is intended to reduce and eliminate such practices over the first 5 years of membership, systemic failures blight the scheme’s ability to deliver for forests. The Global (...) read
date of on-line publication : 4 August 2011
Consumers Reject Patents on Foodstuffs
The European Patent Office awarded Syngenta a patent on melons „with a pleasant taste“, after an opposition filed by another seed company to revoke the patent had been rejected. According to a poll among Swiss consumers a majority of respondents reject such patents as well as the food products they protect. Non-governmental organizations, farmers’ organizations, breeder associations, and governments have raised objections against the patenting of crop plants for years. Patents monopolize food (...) read
date of on-line publication : 28 July 2011
The politics of agrofuels and mega-land and water deals
> By Sofía Monsalve Suárez
Insights from the ProCana case, Mozambique The Procana Bioethanol project in Mozambique is a clear example of how agrofuel investments contribute rather than mitigate climate change, and are often accompanied by dispossession and impoverishment caused by landgrabbing. This paper examines the politics of large-scale commercial biofuels production and mega-land–water deals, with special reference to the dynamics of changes in land/ water use and property rights and how these impact on the (...) read
date of on-line publication : 26 July 2011
Nestlé Colombia under scrutiny
Alliance Sud and Nestlé have been engaged in a high-level dialogue on Colombia between 2006 and 2011. Alliance Sud examined the behaviour of the multinational and the accusations being levelled at it by local trade unions. Two years later it evaluated the implementation of its recommendations. The dialogue led to concrete improvements, yet the deep conflict with the trade unions persists. At the end of October 2005, the watchdog organisation Multiwatch – to which Alliance Sud and some of its (...) read
date of on-line publication : 19 July 2011
Urgent need for binding obligations on transnational corporations raised at the UN
> By Brid Brennan
John Ruggie’s proposed guidelines to the UN on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations fail to bring TNCs under any binding law, thefore enabling human rights and environmental crimes to continue with impunity. The Transnational Institute has joined many civil society organisations and social movements urging the UN Human Rights Council to reject the “Guiding Principles” by Mr. John Ruggie, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General (SRSG) on Human Rights and Transnational (...) read
date of on-line publication : 14 June 2011
The coffee paradox: how farmers and consumers are held hostage by the market dominance of a few
> By Saliem Fakir
About 2.5 billion cups of coffee are consumed every day. Culture and coffee are treated as synonymous. Ever since the first coffee shops opened doors in the Middle East, around the 15th century onwards, coffee culture spread like wild fire in the western world. Coffee houses are places where artists, writers, intellectuals and those seeking the pleasures of good conversation are meant to hang out. However, this image of civility belies the real world of coffee trade, which is far more (...) read
date of on-line publication : 8 June 2011
Run on the bank
The unseemly termination of Muhammad Yunus’s career at Grameen only highlights the deep problems faced by microcredit internationally. In Bangladesh, banking has turned rancid, and the rot is spreading so fast and far that the entire global microfinance industry is now under threat. The issues range far beyond poisonous local politics, the factor most often stressed by those close to Grameen Bank’s crisis. [...] This situation is of global importance because it reflects microfinance’s (...) read
date of on-line publication : 27 May 2011
Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people’s health
> May 2011
School children in the US were served 200,000 kilos of meat contaminated with a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria before the nation’s second largest meat packer issued a recall in 2009. A year earlier, six babies died and 300,000 others got horribly sick with kidney problems in China when one of the country’s top dairy producers knowingly allowed an industrial chemical into its milk supply. Across the world, people are getting sick and dying from food like never before. Governments and (...) read
date of on-line publication : 16 May 2011
dossier
Subverting Safer Finance
This report argues that the UK is subverting progress towards a safer financial system, and has become a major barrier to international efforts for reform. Compared even to the US, a jurisdiction with a reputation for market friendly regulation, and other major international jurisdictions, the UK is found to be part of the problem in key areas of financial reform, and not leading the search for solutions. Read more and Download the (...) read
date of on-line publication : 27 April 2011
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