By Tamar Shapiro and Thomas Legge WASHINGTON — On May 15, Richard M. Daley stepped down as mayor of Chicago. With his retirement, his city lost its chief executive of 22 years, but America also lost one of its most environment-friendly local leaders.  With the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive climate and [...]

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WASHINGTON — Last week, while attention was focused on New York and the U.N. conference to review the global development goals, a less prominent UN gathering took place in Rome. It was an emergency meeting, an emergency about food. Concerns are growing that a surge in wheat prices could trigger a global food crisis. Therefore, [...]

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The world’s farmers have to produce 70% to 100% more food by 2050, and yet do so while reducing the roughly 30% of greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture causes.   That was the challenge under discussion at Agriculture Day in Copenhagen on Saturday, a day-long set of meetings sponsored primarily by the CGIAR network, the [...]

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This weekend, GMF is hosting with its partners the third annual Brussels Forum, a gathering of political, academic, and business leaders to debate the countless items on the transatlantic agenda. Public sessions will be streamed live in  video and audio from Brussels, and transcripts and video for download will be available shortly after each session. [...]

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WASHINGTON — The news from Afghanistan on the counter-narcotics front is bad.   Opium production from Afghanistan’s 408,000 acres of poppy rose almost 50% in 2006, contributing to global heroin production that set a new record high of 606 metric tons in 2006.   The effort to stop the growing and production of illicit drugs, [...]

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At an international biofuels conference hosted in Brussels last week, the EU Commission announced that imports will be an important policy tool in order to reach the EU’s ambitious goal of a 10% biofuels share by 2020. This came at a point when serious doubts were raised, even within the Commission, about the feasibility of [...]

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