Laura German is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, and author of Power/Knowledge/Land: Contested Ontologies of Land and its Governance in Africa (University of Michigan Press) Duncan: I’m really pleased about this conversation because I’m way out of date on this topic. This is about land ownership and what we used to call land grabs. I last worked

Guest post by Wytske Chamberlain and Wegayehu Fitawek of Land Matrix Africa, hosted by the University of Pretoria  Remember the global riots over food set off by sharp spikes in commodity prices in 2008? The biofuel hype as THE solution to dirty oil? And the financial crisis that drove investors to look for alternative assets to invest their dollars, euros

Andy White, the Coordinator of the Rights and Research Initiative (RRI) introduces a new report. A new, unprecedented legal analysis has revealed that despite using and inhabiting up to 65% of the world’s land, Indigenous Peoples and local communities—a population of about 1.5 billion—possess legal rights to barely 18%. That’s a huge gap. And it’s a gap that explains a

An earlier version of this piece appeared in the October issue of the Government Gazette Today we fear EU ambassadors will agree a really bad deal on EU biofuel reform. In 2009 EU governments agreed that by 2020 10% of the energy used in transport would have to come from renewable sources. This target will almost exclusively be met by

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the new Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index of developing countries. Yesterday, IDS published a second HANCI for the donor countries. The Index assesses governments on both their promises and performance, strokes the good guys and slaps the bad, provides arguments and data for civil society and scrutinizes aid levels. Some of the things

You can rely on Sophia Murphy for crisp, credible analyses of agricultural trade and food issues. Her latest paper, Land Grabs and Fragile Food Systems, is up to her usual standard. She locates the current row over land grabs in some broader debates that have rather fallen off the agenda, namely globalization and trade rules. Made me come over all

Sorry for a second post in one day, but the launch of If is a biggie Ah the perils of age – am I becoming one of those annoying old guys who greets every new idea (however excellent) with a weary sigh and ‘we already did/discussed all that back in the 19XXs’? I ask because I have a distinct sense