Marx's theory of crisis

This is, without doubt, the best short exposition of Marx's theory of crisis that I have ever heard. It is brilliant, and congratulations to Cliff Bowman of Cranfield University for being so succinct.

An excellent new short video on the food system from Oxfam International:

The secret history of your favourite hamburger

An excellent article that emphasizes the cruelty of the food system:

The secret history of your favourite hamburger - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Recent activities, spring 2012

With the end of the 2011 - 2012 academic session it was, as usual, extremely gratifying to meet graduating students one last time. They will be missed. Spring of 2012 will be busy. Following a seminar for the NGO Working Group on Food and Hunger at the United Nations, I will be returning do the second half of my graduate teaching, Development economics, on the Master's in Development Practice Program at Emory University, Atlanta, USA. I then travel to Korea, continuing my advisory work for the Gender and Economic Policy Management Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme's Gender Team. I will also commence an assignment for UN Women on engendering macropolicies. Following the annual conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development, I travel to New Zealand (for the first time) to deliver the Keynote Address to a symposium entitled 'Reconsidering gender in Asian studies: a Pacific perspective', organized by the Asia New Zealand Research Cluster at the University of Otago in Dunedin. Of course, my administrative responsibilities as Chair of the Department of International Development Studies will continue, particularly in light of the forthcoming program review that must be undertaken by the Department. In terms of research, I plan to finally complete my essay on contextualizing land grabbing in the developing world, for the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and submit my manuscript, Hungry for Change? Farmers, Agrarian Questions and the Global Food Crisis, to Brunswick Books/Kumarian Press.

Reframing R+20: zero ten twenty

The media portal that seeks change, tve, has started to post a series of short films that follow the lives of 11 boys and girls born in different countries round the world in 1992 - the year of the first Rio Earth Summit, where world leaders signed up to a blueprint for a greener, fairer world – a world that would safeguard resources for future generations. ‘Zero, Ten, Twenty’ is tve's flagship, long-term project that seeks to document what it’s been like to grow up in a fast-changing, 21st century world – how globalization and the Earth Summit have impacted on their lives, and what now are their hopes, fears and ambitions for the future, on the eve of the new Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. The stories of these children, from Brazil, China, India, Kenya, Latvia, Norway, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, England and USA, constitute a unique diary of global change. This first entry is an overview of a series of films that will emerge. It really is something quite remarkable -- a partial transcript of our world.

Memories of the Sahel

An excellent perspective of the food crisis in the Sahel from expatriate Africans from the region living in New York. Perspective is everything.

Thanks to David Styan for showing me this.

UN food envoy decries 'shocking' conditions in Canada

A hard-hitting article on what Oliver de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has found on his mission to Canada, his first to an OECD country:

UN food envoy decries 'shocking' conditions in Canada