The plague of locusts in Africa (and Pakistan) is getting worse, and threatens millions with starvation. Solutions are pesticides, biopesticides (but, sadly, not ducks). China’s role is interesting.
Read more...How locusts swarm, create food insecurity, and how climate change means more swarms, absent state intervention.
Read more...Experts discuss US measures for dealing with coronavirus cases.
Read more...East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019 — warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding.
Read more...TaxCast ranges well beyond tax today, with topics including IMF warnings, the Brexit rogue UK vision, and looting in Angola.
Read more...How Europe is creating the conditions in Africa that lead to migration….and the underlying stresses are set to get worse.
Read more...The World Bank wants to double down on financial gimmickry rather than develop the public health infrastructure to combat pandemics.
Read more...The two Bretton Woods institutions the have huge credibility deficits due to the policy conditionalities and advice they have dispensed to developing countries in recent decades.
Read more...An new working paper by Sebastian Horn, Carmen Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch on China’s foreign lending has some important findings, such as that China accounts for more than 40% of the external debt of 50 developing countries. We’ve embedded the document at the end of this post. The study is an ambitious undertaking, seeking to […]
Read more...A UN report on agroecology finds that many farming methods pooh-poohed as traditional offer significant advantages over industrial farming.
Read more...Many NGOs around the world are fighting inequality between the rich and the poor, but the bigger NGOs are unwilling to fight policies that keep rich NGOs richer.
Read more...This spring, eight years later, there has been a new set of popular uprisings in northern Africa, from Algeria to Morocco, to Sudan. Let’s hope they have more lasting success than Egypt’s Arab Spring.
Read more...The World Bank has successfully promoted its ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ (MFD) strategy by embracing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, internationally endorsed in September 2015.
Read more...Unicef reports diarrhea causes more childhood deaths in conflict zones than outright violence. Bangladesh’s recent history shows even the poorest countries can reduce fatalities from diarrheal disease.
Read more...Tropical cyclone Idai may be a harbinger of further catastrophic coastal storms; climate change projections suggest the number of intense hurricanes will rise.
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