Global

chathamhouse.org - April 2013 - Jon Liden

The decade 1998-2008 was a period of rapid growth in the resources devoted to global health problems and of unprecedented innovation in the way these resources were delivered.
 
The innovation was principally manifested in new forms of partnerships which included in their governance the private sector, foundations and civil society alongside governments.

This institutional innovation was driven forward by dynamic new leadership at the World Health Organization under Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland and by political leaders in the G8 countries seeking to give globalization a human face, who were themselves heavily influenced by the moral and political force of AIDS activists and protestors.

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earth-policy.org

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

by Lester R. Brown

With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. “In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil,” Lester R. Brown writes.

What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world’s shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.

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http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep

Chapter 1. Food: The Weak Link
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep/fpepch1

Image: A worker mounts solar panels on the roof of a  barn in Binsham, Germany, in March 2012. (photo: Michaela Rehle/Reuters)

slate.com - March 29th, 2013 - Andrew Curry

It’s been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn’t been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. Easter is around the corner, and the streets of Berlin are still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when the snow finally melts, it will reveal the glossy black sheen of photovoltaic solar panels glinting from the North Sea to the Bavarian Alps.

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Click on each balloon for more information on individual patients infected with the avian flu virus: blue, patients infected with the H7N9 virus under treatment; red, those infected with H7N9 who have died; and pink, those infect with the H1N1 avian flu virus.