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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 (…)

Important draft legislation was recently unveiled in Rajasthan that would impose serious punishment for ‘witch-hunting’. Getting legislators to sign off on the bill, however, will prove difficult.
Over the years, the women’s movement in Rajasthan has had some success in making violence against (…)

Even as the elements of the roots of the current environmental and social crisis were already present at the Rio Conference of 1992, the consciousness of a finite and partially destroyed world, due to the irreversible character of the some phenomena (climate, biodiversity, resource depletion), (…)

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations to be hosted in Durban later this year, with this round of talks commonly referred to as COP 17, must not be seen in isolation of the troubled waters gnawing at the knees of multilateral environmental agreements (…)

The landmine is a morally outlawed weapon, and it is time now for Sri Lanka to accede to the Mine Ban Treaty.
SRI LANKA’S protracted internal conflict, which lasted for three decades, ended in May 2009, but landmines and other explosive remnants of war (ERW) continue to kill or injure both (…)

For some, food is a crisis of scarcity, but for many in U.S., it’s just the opposite. The book "American Wasteland" show us how much we squander and what we can do about it.
As a nation, we grow and raise more than 590 billion pounds of food each year. And depending on whom you ask, we (…)

The revolution in Libya, led by a motley group of democrats and Islamists and their imperialist allies, is likely to entrench the deep divisions in the country, writes Samir Amin, warning of the possibility of disintegration of the nation.
Libya is neither Tunisia nor Egypt. The ruling group (…)

On the morning of June 5, 2011, a 23-year-old African-American transgender woman, Chrishaun McDonald, and her friends were walking down Lake Street in Minneapolis. As they passed Schooner Tavern, Dean Schmitz, a 47-year-old white man, began shouting racial slurs at McDonald, asking, "Did you (…)