John Magrath is an Oxfam researcher currently working on renewable energy Hats off to Sarah Best for her recent post on energy and in particular, for highlighting the excellent new Practical Action report, Poor People’s Energy Outlook 2010. I’ve been delving into energy issues too lately. I’ve just come back from Senegal, where I was trying to get clearer in my

A few weeks ago, Dani Rodrik pointed out that while East Asia has topped the charts in recent decades on growth and poverty reduction, many of the best performing countries on human development are majority moslem, scattered across the Middle East and North Africa. I’ve just been reading IFPRI’s Global Hunger Index 2010, and the same pattern emerges. Here’s the

Today in the FT: “Sugar prices suffered their biggest one-day sell-off in 30 years on Thursday, tumbling by as much as 11 per cent after speculators pulled out from the market in the wake of dizzying gains. The sell-off, which came just hours after the sweetener hit a 30-year high, started after the European Commission granted further export licences for

An intriguing new paper from Paul Segal at the University of Sussex kicks off with a great quote from Mr Getty “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights”. Segal wonders what might happen if governments defied that prediction, and just handed over the income from oil, mining etc directly to poor people as unconditional cash transfers