Covid-19 Straw Breaks Free Trade Camel’s Back
Multilateral trade negotiations under WTO auspices have gone nowhere since the late 1990s,, and COVID-19 may be the final straw.
Read more...Category Archives: Africa
2020’s Plague of Locusts: Updates on Africa and Pakistan (and China)
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...A Plague of Locusts, Failed States, and Climate Change
How locusts swarm, create food insecurity, and how climate change means more swarms, absent state intervention.
Read more...Public Health Officials Offer Scant Details On U.S. Coronavirus Patients
Experts discuss US measures for dealing with coronavirus cases.
Read more...Climate Change Helped Spawn East Africa’s Locust Crisis
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...Another Great Depression or Tax Justice and Transparency? The Tax Justice Network January 2020 Podcast
TaxCast ranges well beyond tax today, with topics including IMF warnings, the Brexit rogue UK vision, and looting in Angola.
Read more...How Europe’s Greedy Lending to Africa Is Driving the Migration Wave That Fuels the EU’s Xenophobic Politics
How Europe is creating the conditions in Africa that lead to migration….and the underlying stresses are set to get worse.
Read more...Even Larry Summers Denounces World Bank’s “PEF” Ebola Bonds That Enriched Investors at Expense of the Sick in the Congo
The World Bank wants to double down on financial gimmickry rather than develop the public health infrastructure to combat pandemics.
Read more...Bretton Woods Institutions: Enforcers, Not Saviours?
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...China: The Covert Credit Superpower
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...Agroecology as Innovation
A UN report on agroecology finds that many farming methods pooh-poohed as traditional offer significant advantages over industrial farming.
Read more...How NGOs in Rich Countries Control their Counterparts in Poor Countries..and Why they Refuse to Resolve it
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...Spring Stirrings and Misgivings: Of Autocrats and Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa
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...Coping With World Bank-Led Financialization
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...Clean Water: UNICEF Shows More Children Die from Diarrhea than Direct Violence in Conflict Zones
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.
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