STWR - Share The World's Resources

If Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is to be believed the current food crisis is “a silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world.” That’s just wishful thinking. If the tsunami were really silent, then it’d be much easier for cretins to propose trade liberalisation as a remedy, or for Gordon Brown to support genetically modified crops as a way of responding to the disaster.

“Free trade” has produced some of the most contentious political debates of our times. In a famous April 2000 article in the New Republic, economist Joseph Stiglitz argued, “Economic policy is today perhaps the most important part of America's interaction with the rest of the world. And yet the culture of international economic policy in the world's most powerful democracy is not democratic.”

Small changes to the way we live our lives are not enough to tackle the environmental challenges facing the planet. The only option is to cut the unsustainable consumption of the Earth's finite resources

Demystifying the issue of energy, from oil, ethanol and technology, to one of the many paradoxes of the new energy order - that more energy security means less energy independence.

I'm no economist, and definitely not a Nobel Prize winning one, but by my calculations Joseph Stiglitz has under-estimated the cost of the Iraq war by a factor of 100 in his recently released 'The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict'.

A significant proportion of the world's 2.2 billion children, many of whom are victims of violence, sexual abuse, labour exploitation and preventable diseases, are from the crisis-plagued African continent.

Social movements come and go, represent all manner of political beliefs, and aim to achieve their political objectives by influencing a particular target group’s opinion. Some groups reach out directly to just a few key decision makers or constituencies, while others act more indirectly by broadcasting their message to as wide an audience as possible.

We have it in our power to restructure the world energy economy and avoid disastrous climate change. All we need is the leadership, the vision, and the will 

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the  lives of six people.  There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina  Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco,  Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that  last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal  crops.

When was the last time you were hungry? Not the pang of a missed breakfast or delayed lunch, but the gnawing obsession of a hunger that has lasted 24 hours? For me, it was 25 years ago - when, for 10 days I lived off one bowl of gruel a day for breakfast. The memory of the desperate desire for food followed by a debilitating weakness has lasted a quarter of a century. But while my experience was a lifestyle choice, for the villagers of the rural district of Katine, in Uganda, it is their everyday life.