Is food the new oil? Fertiliser wars and Brazil as food superpower

August 30, 2010
In the Financial Times, Javier Blas gives us the back-story to the attempt by the world’s largest mining company, BHP Billiton, to buy its largest fertiliser company, PotashCorp. Suddenly fertiliser is big business: in the first eight months of the year, deals valued at $61bn have been announced by companies in the industry, a high that more than doubles the peak
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How about some MDGs for the TOP billion?

August 27, 2010
In the run up to the big UN MDG summit next month, this sweet idea comes from Andrew Revkin on his dot earth blog: “Here comes a question to ponder over the weekend. There is a set of Millennium Development Goals for the poorest of the poor – a cohort of humanity sometimes described as the the “bottom billion.” But,
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Locked latrines, meat offsetting and development apps

August 26, 2010
I just spent an enthralling couple of days at a get together of Oxfam GB’s country directors (CDs). A combination of group discussions and speed-dating as I talked to as many as possible of the incredibly impressive people who are on Oxfam’s frontline, lobbying ministers and officials, consulting poor communities and doing (lots of) management stuff. I picked up some examples
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Africa’s four different kinds of economies

August 25, 2010
I’m a sucker for typologies. I guess they’re a wonk’s equivalent of those ‘what were the ten best punk/ska/heavy metal albums of all time?’ discussions in the pub. Here’s a nice one from ‘Lions on the Move’, a breathlessly upbeat new McKinsey report on Africa. It finds four clusters of African economies + a few outliers. Click on the scatterplot for
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Fun with data: the history of the world 1960-2008, and you’re in charge

August 24, 2010
I just spent a happy half hour playing with this – the first of many, I suspect. It’s the latest version of the Hans Rosling/Gapminder graphs that I’ve blogged on before and this one is really user friendly – even I can get it to work. Just click here to start messing around. It allows you to construct a graph
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Visual metaphor of the week – the hanging donkey

August 20, 2010
My colleague Kate Raworth includes this gem in her presentations on research methods. It illustrates the tendency for policy papers to endlessly expand their remits – ‘just add it to the terms of reference’. Sharp, focussed initial ideas come to resemble Christmas trees decorated with everybody’s particular passion. From working on many Oxfam papers over the years, I feel a
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What are African countries already doing to adapt to climate change?

August 19, 2010
While climate change negotiators seem to be wading through metaphorical cement, national governments have no choice but to get on with adapting to current and future climate change, as far as they are able. A recent review of 10 African countries’ adaptation plans by IFPRI shows some patterns to the response. (The countries were Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea,
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How much does US corn dumping cost Mexican farmers?

August 18, 2010
Remember dumping – the rich country farm subsidies that allow them to dump their products in poor countries at artificially cheap prices, thereby wiping out local agriculture? Tim Wise on the Triple Crisis blog has been running the numbers on the impact of NAFTA (US-Canada-Mexico Free Trade Agreement, in force since 1994). He calls it a the ‘controlled experiment’ “because
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The world’s next 20 years on one slide – and it’s pretty scary

August 17, 2010
This is the summary slide from a recent powerpoint on the global challenges facing humanity between now and 2030. It sets out the key questions (easier to read if you click on the slide). The answers to any one of which might well be ‘no’, with scary consequences. And please don’t try and dismiss this as ill-informed climate alarmism. It’s from
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What is happening on global bank taxes? Robin Hood reports from the frontline

August 13, 2010
Earlier this year, I posted a fair amount on the new Robin Hood Tax campaign for a financial transactions tax to fund aid and the fight against climate change (start here and follow the links). In a guest blog, Oxfam’s top RHT obsessive, Max Lawson, updates us on the subsequent behind-the-scenes progress “In today’s aid-speak, Robin Hood was a pretty
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Will the new UN Panel on Global Sustainability have an impact?

August 11, 2010
The diplomatic circus is full of high level commissions and panels on this and that, most of which deliberate, publish and sink without trace. But the UN’s new High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, launched this week by Ban Ki-moon, may just be an exception. It certainly has a hell of a job description: ‘finding ways to lift people out of
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What did we learn in the global economic crisis? Multimedia wrap-up on resilience, gender impact and fiscal holes (plus me waving my arms around)

August 10, 2010
We’ve been churning out a bunch of materials on the global economic crisis summarizing our conclusions to date on its developmental impact (though who knows if this is the end, or just a pause, in the financial chaos). The Global Economic Crisis and Developing Countries brings together our findings from research in 12 countries involving some 2,500 people. It’s the final
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