This past week, the Obama Administration announced its intention to nominate Rick Barton as the nation’s first ever Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations.  The announcement marks Washington’s latest run at creating a serious civilian “surge capacity” for managing instability and conflict in fragile states. Rick Barton, if the Senate chooses to [...]

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By Mark Allegrini and Kate Ritterspach This summer, the issue of food security in sub-Saharan Africa has been thrown into cruelly sharp focus. The United Nations reports that over 3 million Somalis (almost half the country’s population) are in need of food aid, and the U.S. Agency for International Development claims that over 12 million [...]

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WASHINGTON — The Easter deadline to have the Doha Round endgame in sight has come and gone with no sign that the nearly decade-long stalemate has been broken. The commitment by the leaders of the G20 nations to complete the Round in 2011 now seems out of reach. World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Pascal [...]

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The European Union spends ‚¬55 billion a year on farm subsidies. Until recently the question of where the money goes was a closely-guarded secret. But thanks to a campaign by journalists, researchers and computer programmers, European taxpayers now have the right to know how their tax money is spent. Jack Thurston, Transatlantic Fellow at the [...]

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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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After years of neglecting the links between farming, insecurity and poverty, last week G8 leaders committed to shifting development policy away from food aid toward food production in the world’s poorest countries. They seek to address the negative fallout from declining foreign direct investment, exports, and remittance flows and the rising fragility in these states. [...]

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On July 6-7, as part of GMF’s on-going disemmination of the Transatlantic Taskforce on Development, I had the privilege of engaging with over 100 business and policy leaders from Africa at the Commonwealth Business Council’s G8 Africa Business Forum in London. In my remarks to the group, I urged G8 leaders and their counterparts in other nations to refocus on energizing the private sector in Africa to become the primary source of economic growth and poverty alleviation for the continent. Nonetheless, it is likely that G8 leaders will once again fall short on fulfilling promises on development for the poor.

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As leaders of the Group of Twenty  (G20) largest world economies  prepare to meet in London at the beginning of April in the midst of deepening global economic difficulties, there is real and justifiable concern that the meeting is  almost guaranteed to fail. These fears are  based on the scale of the tasks at hand, [...]

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History tells us that multilateral trade rounds never die, and Doha is no exception. If the negotiations cannot be concluded this year, they will enter a period of hibernation, and things will pick up again when conditions are ripe to engage in a meaningful negotiation (probably during the second half of 2009 at the earliest). [...]

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Making progress in multilateral trade negotiations involving more than 150 countries is very difficult. Negotiations require exchanges – offering something for what you want. Given the widely discrepant wealth of developed and developing countries, the poorest countries must, in relative terms, offer a great deal more. Negotiations can advance because the internal interests of the [...]

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