Showing posts with label Oxfam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oxfam. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Global Food News: Food Security and the 2012 G20 summit


Oxfam International demonstration in Mexico City


Monday marked the beginning of the 2012 G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico. During this meeting, representatives from the world's 20 largest economies, were slated to discuss key issues including economic stabilization, reform of the international financial system, sustainable development, and alleviation of global food insecurity.


Last Thursday, Oxfam International staged a demonstration near Mexico City's Monument to the Revolution, to urge G20 leaders to create a concrete plan of attack on the problem of food security. Members of Oxfam, asserting that G20 leaders can and should use their influence and access to funding to tackle global hunger, donned masks of G20 leaders' faces, set out a giant lock labeled "food security", and held on to a large key and balloons with pictures of food and dollar signs.  Oxfam, like all of those organizations and individuals seriously concerned with the global food crisis, hoped that this year's G20 conference would be a step toward sustained, vigorous international cooperation on this front.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Global Food News: Agricultural Commodities Speculation and Global Food Insecurity

Today, we present you with two videos that focus on the widespread speculation in agricultural commodities during the 20th and early 21st centuries, and the effect of this speculation on volatility of food prices and global food insecurity. The first clip is a BBC newscast from 2010, in which Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, presents information from his report, "Food Commodities Speculation and Food Price Crises":


The second is a short piece from Oxfam Germany, depicting the disastrous effect of that rampant speculation on the the world's food insecure:


For further reading on this subject, please see De Schutter's piece (linked above) and "The great hunger lottery: how banking speculation causes food crises", an informative and detailed report released by the World Development Movement in July 2010.