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In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and (…)

LRAN Briefing Paper Series no. 2
On World Food Day, it is estimated that almost a billion people around the world are now suffering from hunger and malnutrition - a dramatic rise in number since the soaring food prices over the last three years. Of these, about half are estimated to live in (…)

The European Union is changing its rules on how carbon is traded in response to a series of fraud cases and the financial crisis. This report looks at how corporate lobbies are trying to influence this process, and notes that such measures are bound to fall short since they attempt to "regulate (…)

The Libyan war is often portrayed through a “tribal” lens that fails to explain how the country’s tribes coexist with a sense of nationhood.
The Libyan war has not been a tribal conflict. Yet throughout the seven months of fighting, much external commentary predicted and expected that the war (…)

A production model based on soy monoculture results in economic growth, but also causes social instability that can lead to political crises. The temptation is to use armed force to resolve them.
At the end of September, construction began on the World Trade Center of Asunción. The first step (…)

Arriving in Egypt the day before the September 9 protests that brought tens of thousands into the street, marches to the Ministry of Interior and the Supreme Court, and then the storming of the Israeli embassy, certainly threw me in at the deep end! But arriving in Cairo at almost any point (…)

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have defied many of its early critics, with tens of thousands of people still supporting those camped out at New York’s financial centre and the heart of US capitalism a month after the protests started.
It has since spread to over 70 cities across the (…)

Climate change predominantly impacts those who have benefited least from fossil fuelled industrialisation. The poor have less social, economic and political capacity to adapt to climate change than the rich. The arrival of the global climate negotiating lobby on African shores must focus the (…)

A plan to boost agribusiness, but based mainly on family farming and cooperatives, in Argentina is geared to producing and exporting more food – in a more sustainable manner.
That is the goal of the Strategic Agribusiness Plan (PEA) that representatives of the country’s 23 provinces and of 53 (…)

The idea of taxing international financial transactions is gaining ground. The European Union is promoting it internationally and studying the possibility of imposing it throughout the bloc, or at least in the euro area.
But it is still not clear what the scope of the tax would be or what the (…)

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be (…)

Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, COP17, clean up its act? The August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban – offers an early chance to test whether new municipal leaders are climate (…)

With a crucial conference on climate change taking place in Durban, South Africa, in December, Patrick Bond cuts through the elite conspiracy that will result in a no deal scenario and a continued rise in global temperatures. ’The strongest possible stance will be needed to finally address the (…)

Nanoparticles are harmful, but India is yet to regulate their use
NANOTECHNOLOGY has revolutionised industry. It is used to improve wide ranging products, from cosmetics, toys and toothpastes to textiles and missiles. Industry thinks the technology holds promise to change every facet of life (…)

Next year, in June, world leaders will get together in the joyful city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark 20 years of UNCED—the Earth Summit (see Down to Earth, May 15, 1992).
Unbelievably, it will be 40 years since the Stockholm conference, when the question of the environment first caught (…)

By Philippe Bourbeau, Routledge Editions, 176 pages.
The international movement of people is provoking worldwide anxiety and apprehension. Nation-states around the globe, especially Western ones, are cracking down on migration for security reasons. International migration has become a key (…)

The world is tipping over into unknown territory. All the pundits are now starting to agree with US economist, Nouriel Roubini, famous for his prediction of the 2008 financial crash, that a second recession is inevitable. South Africa’s Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus has also added her voice (…)

The world has experienced an explosion of openness. From individual artists opening their creations for input from others, to governments requiring publicly funded works be available to the public, both the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results.
Creative (…)

“Yes we accepted to sell our land, but we had no choice...”, Community member, Bousra village
Economic land concessions (ELC) are long term leases granted over land for agro-industrial exploitation. Over the past years, ELCs have dramatically increased in Cambodia and are the subject of severe (…)

The Southeast Asian city-state strives to end its dependence on Malaysia for water
How does a city-state that has no natural water body, very little groundwater and even less land to store rainwater quench the thirst of its five million people? Singapore faces this question just as one of its (…)