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How much should people in Britain worry about food security?  Here’s a starter for ten, taken from a recent Guardian article by Harriet Green:
For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence [...]

Just back from ten gorgeous days on holiday in Cornwall - hence radio silence on the blogging front, and a much-needed break from frenetic activity on the food prices research front. 
(As I found, Cornwall is actually about the best place you could go to get some fresh perspective on food.  The Lost Gardens of Heligan have the [...]

Is the global economic situation having an impact on poppy eradication in Afghanistan? Afghan farmers are capitalising on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch. This comes at a time when the price of a tonne of wheat in Afghanistan has almost [...]

President Putin built up his authority by promoting mates of his from KGB to senior posts in the government and economy. Now president Medvedev is doing the same, but instead of promoting spooks, he’s promoting people from a legal and business background, like him.
In his first cabinet reshuffle, announced today, Medvedev began to promote [...]

From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St [...]

Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to [...]

I’ve just published a new Chatham House paper on why food prices are rising and what it means for development: download it here.
One of the paper’s main arguments is that we need to make sure that the urgent doesn’t crowd out the essential in discussions of global food strategies: immediate action on humanitarian assistance needs to [...]

Interesting times for the peak oil debate.  Last week came the news that Russian oil had peaked: its Q1 oil production in 2008 fell, for the first time in a decade.  Later in the week, oil touched a new all-time high of $117 after Nigerian insurgents attacked a Shell pipeline there.
And today, the news emerges [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

A propos of David’s post, here’s what’s scaring me witless this weekend:
The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat farms in western Iran, is a serious threat to global food security, agricultural scientists have warned. They have said the fungus may affect additional wheat-producing countries.
Mahmoud Solh, director-general of the [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Martin Wolf penned an FT op-ed proclaiming that the rescue of Bear Stearns “marked liberalisation’s limit”.  We should remember Friday March 14th 2008, he said, for it was “the day the dream of global free- market capitalism died”: 
For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision [...]

Below the jump, Alex and my talk at last weekend’s Progressive Governance summit - it’s a four minute summary of our paper on multilateralism and global risks.

I’m a big fan of Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim - he was the first person to spot the potential for China’s Olympics to become a debacle, for instance - but I was left a bit cold by his LA Times article yesterday on the pressures that accompany the emergence of a truly global middle [...]

I normally leave  scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand.  UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment.  John Holmes, [...]

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On Saturday, Alex and I presented our paper on multilateralism and global risks to heads of state at the Progressive [...]

As David mentioned yesterday, Downing Street’s asked us to prepare a paper on reform of international institutions and present it to various heads of state and international agencies at tomorrow’s Progressive Governance Summit outside London. 
Our central argument is that the international system’s core challenge is to get better at managing global risks like climate change, [...]

On Saturday, Alex and I will be at the Progressive Governance Summit, where we’ll be presenting a new paper on multilateralism and global risks to twenty or so heads of state.
The summit’s website has just been launched on the Downing Street domain. Our paper will be published there on Saturday morning. Hopefully, we’ll have a [...]

Alex and I have recently posted on the WFP’s appeal for more funds as the price of food continues to rise. Last week the price of rice began to shoot upwards sparking fears of a major rice shortage in Asia. According to experts global rice stocks are at their lowest since 1976. However some commentators [...]

As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs.  (The FT just doesn’t seem to tire of running this story: it first appeared on July 16 last year, and made the front page then as well.)
While no-one’s [...]

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