It’s interesting to look back a few years – to when the world was worried that food was too cheap, not too expensive. In 2004, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization looked back on a long bear market for food: forty years in which real prices of agricultural commodities had fallen 2% per year, or [...]

The good news: poverty is in retreat. The bad news: hunger isn’t.  That’s the headline finding for the first Millennium Development Goal , which aims to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the proportion of people living in hunger between 1990 and 2015. Great strides have been made [...]

The MDGs are so over Having just been rude about one World Bank report, here’s a positive review of another – the Global Monitoring Report 2011, which the Bank produces jointly with the IMF. The GMR updates progress against the Millennium Development Goals – targets that were set as the culmination of a push throughout [...]

A 1989 article on ‘the global teenager’ in Whole Earth Review was way ahead of its time in identifying the crux of what today’s youth bulge means for global change

The pros and cons of a new global set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – and how they might work in practice

Mark Lynas’s new book The God Species is a must-read for environmentalists

Thoughts after from a joint WWF / Oxfam seminar on resource scarcity, fair shares and development.

The ‘powershift’ narrative about US-China relations obscures how much they have in common: unsustainable growth paths, shaky financial sectors, political sclerosis, massive inequality, reliance on imported resources and above all their status as the two principal obstacles to collective action on shared global risks.