Comments on: How can the global system manage scarcity?

By: PS Baker

PS Baker — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:40:45 +0000

Good stuff! And all done without mentioning MDGs and sustainable development, either above or in the 70 page report, (can’t be an accident, are we resting those terms now?).

But after the usual process (‘the launch, the lunch, the logo’) what next?

We’ve had so many good reports by Oxfam, ActionAid, ISTAAD, IFPRI etc., but what’s going to be the game changer? What’s going to be different this time?

By: Ines

Ines — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:58:15 +0000

Alex Evans may be on a roll and his paper may be a ‘great summary’ but it seems to me that it has a serious gap: it misses the opportunity to highlight that investing in women’s rights and especially in agriculture, has been shown to lead to significant increases in productivity and thus growth. The paper has also a disappointing flaw: every single reference to women and their ’empowerment’ is exclusively in function of what they can do to ‘help reduce unsustainable population growth’. I had thought that we had finally all agreeed that girls’ education and women’s empowerement are important per se, for being rights. The Cairo consensus had also done too much to rescue women’s reproductive health and rights from the clutches of neo-malthusinism to have them fall prey to ‘scarcity’.

By: Miles Newman

Miles Newman — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:46:43 +0000

How might it be helpful to give desert-making goats to people who live on the edges of fast extending deserts?