Amongst all the kerfuffle about biofuels a couple of years back I frequently found myself sub-vocalising good ol’ Pete Townshend: Meet the new boss Same as the old boss And now Anna Locke over at ODI has written an excellent, balanced piece dissecting the real problem: land management and large-scale agricultural investment, of any stripe. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘agriculture’
12 Aug
Quotes to ponder
If this seems pie in the sky, [Kanayo] Nwanze [the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad)] cites a number of countries that are seeing success by focusing on agriculture – Tanzania, Rwanda and Ghana – whose governments, helped by the private sector, have made a big commitment to farming. "The potential is [...]
30 May
Blame it on the speculators, why don’t you?
Catching up on what’s been on the Guardian’s Development Matters blog, I’m surprised that no-one else has yet chimed in on the dodgy economics on show by Christian Aid’s Alex Cobham when he points the finger at pension funds for helping drive up world food prices. Now I’m not an expert economist, so I will [...]
10 Mar
Free parking for rich farmers?
Whenever I hear of a new protected area being created I always worry about which local communities maybe losing their land. Fines-and-fences conservationists with strong connections to donors may regrettably outweigh remote indigenous communities in the considerations of central government elites. Whether or not that was the case when Gambella National Park was created in [...]
14 Jan
Big farm, big deal
Last but not least on my round-up of what was blogged while I was putting my feet up, my eye was caught by this article from Madeleine Bunting on a massive land deal on Mali (bought by the Libyans). It is so far from least that I have created an entirely new category Land Tenure [...]
4 Jan
New year, new start
It’s the start of a new year (hope you all celebrated in style, folks!), and many people choose this time to start something new. Of course not all of them last, but mostly we at least mean them do so when we begin them, even all those ill-fated fitness drives. No-one deliberately joins the gym [...]
2 Aug
Zoning farms and forests?
Apparently Jeffrey Sachs and a bunch of food scientists think we should zoning farmland according to the results of scientific assessments. (I don’t have a subscription to Nature, so am having to rely on Richard Black’s blog post.) As with much of what Prof Sachs suggests, it is hard to disagree with the principles he [...]
25 May
Why can’t Africa feed itself any more?
Just listened to George Ayittey’s fascinating TED talk on African governance and economic development. He mentions the statistic, which I’ve heard before in the same context that at independence Ghana was richer than South Korea, that when the colonial era ended Africa was a net exporter of food, while now it is dependent on charity and [...]
