In this report, ETC Group provides evidence that six companies are exercising an anticompetitive oligopoly in seeds and agrochemicals. To stave off criticism, they’re launching a series of initiatives – including the promise of cheap, post-patent genetically modified (GM) seeds – to mollify antitrust regulators and soften opposition to GM while advancing their collective market control. The “Big Six”, which own most of the market, are argued by ETC group to be constructing agreements that aim to scare off competitors, confound regulators and pass off oligopolistic practices as acts of charity. The author argues that antitrust regulators cannot allow an oligopoly to control global agricultural inputs. The world needs agricultural biodiversity to achieve the Right to Food and to respond to the uncertainties of climate change. National governments and UN agencies need to respond, including the UN Committee on World Food Security, which meets in Rome in October 2013.
Poverty and health
Previous studies have consistently found an inverse relationship between household-level poverty and health status. However, what is not well understood is whether and how the average economic status at the community level plays a role in the poverty–health relationship. The study investigated the concentration of poverty at the community level in Tanzania and its association with the availability and quality of primary health care services, the utilization of services, and health outcomes among household categories defined by wealth scores.
While there has been widespread reporting of the riots that have broken out around the world as a result of the global food crisis, little attention has been paid to the way forward. The solution is a radical shift in power away from the international financial institutions and global development agencies, so that small-scale farmers, still responsible for most food consumed throughout the world, set agricultural policy. Three interrelated issues need to be tackled: land, markets and farming itself.
The current global food crisis will impact most in the world’s poorest countries civil society leaders said in Accra on the opening day of UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The meeting, organised with the collaboration of UNCTAD and the UN’s Office of the High Representative for LDCs, LLDCs and SIDS (UN-OHRILLS), was addressing the continued vulnerability of LDCs. Hosted by Ghana, the UNCTAD XII conference entitled “Making Globalisation Work for Development” is seeking to identify opportunities of globalisation for developing countries. However as the civil society meeting heard current international policies are not addressing the systemic problems facing LDCs.
This report provides a comprehensive summary of global progress on improving water, sanitation, hygiene, waste management and environmental cleaning (WASH) in health care facilities and is intended to stimulate solution driven country and partner actions to further address major gaps. It provides practical steps to improving WASH in health care facilities, selected country case studies illustrating bottlenecks, gaps, and successful strategies, and recommendations for addressing gaps and sustaining services.
This special issue explores how the forces of globalisation influence poverty; describes and discusses the main transmission channels and mechanisms; and analyses the impact of globalisation on Africa through six case studies.
This paper from World Institute for Development Economics Research looks at the impact of globalisation on rural poverty, in both the agricultural and non-agricultural sector. The paper analyses the processes through which globalisation, in terms of openness to foreign trade and long- term capital flows, affects the lives of the rural poor. The author believes that globalisation can cause many hardships for the poor but it also opens up opportunities which some countries utilise and others do not. This largely depends on their domestic political and economic institutions and policies.
The International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, known as UPOV 91 is argued by the author to be dangerous to African farmers. It will force farmers to buy patented corporate seeds and agrochemicals from the same corporations. The ETC Group, the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration has released the report: ‘Putting the Cartel Before the Horse …and Farm, Seeds, Soil, Peasants, etc. Who Will Control Agricultural Inputs, 2013?’ The report details how the agribusiness giants have gobbled up most of the seed and agrochemical companies and control most of the agriculture in the US and Europe and are now aiming to take over the agriculture of the global south, particularly Africa. Peasant farmers, who feed at least 70 percent of the world’s population – are not tied to the corporate seed chain. The agribusiness giants want to tie them in. They are focusing on ‘education’ which seeks primarily to stop farmers from saving seeds.
During the recent years of economic decline in Zimbabwe, many of the formal processes for land transfer have been weakened or even abandoned, local government has faced a rolling crisis of sustainability and the collapse of the national currency has ascribed a greater value to urban land as a commodity, according to this report. At the same time, there are signs now emerging of community-driven innovation and participation in urban management. The need to revive and renew human resources within local government has been widely supported, while UN-Habitat has recommended that the Town and Country Planning Acts should be reviewed, and various external funders are considering future assistance to the reform of legal and policy frameworks for urban development. There is thus a strong probability that fundamental changes to the systems and structures of urban land governance in Zimbabwe will be implemented in the foreseeable future, the authors argue. In this scoping study on urban land markets in Zimbabwe, they investigate and identify opportunities for practical partnerships in the field of urban management and land studies, and propose a potential programme of work that could contribute to the more effective functioning of Zimbabwe’s urban land markets.
Current high world food prices serve as a reminder of the vulnerability of large parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to hunger and undernutrition. Good nutrition status for children and adolescent girls is fundamental to attaining many of the Millennium Development Goals. Despite this, donors and governments underinvest in interventions to improve nutrition. Underinvestment is due to a lack of incentives for donors; few take a strategic approach to investments that have the potential to improve nutrition and they have little idea whether current investments are making a difference. Furthermore, their ‘critical friends’ – research institutes and non-governmental organisations – lack the leadership to engage with donors strategically on this issue. The authors suggest that this desperate cycle can only be broken by a new alliance between donors, governments and critical friends. This will require new leaders to come forward and develop politically aware strategies that raise public consciousness and put human and financial resources, both public and private, to effective use.