CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...

The United Nations Conference on Women was held nearly 15 years ago in Beijing, China. This was an extraordinary moment in the history of the international women’s movements as well as women workers around the world, with unprecedented mobilisation of feminist policymakers, activists and academics in the international political arena, both prior to the conference and subsequently. The two-part conference, referred to as Beijing Platform and the Call for Action,...

With the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen just 13 days away, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) has highlighted the need to ensure that the energy needs of developing countries are central to any new climate agreement, after a new report found that almost a quarter of the world’s 6 billion people live without electricity. The majority of the 1.5 billion people who live in the dark are in the...

“THE world’s attention is back on your cause.” That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists gathered recently to honour the late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. The tycoon-turned-philanthropist was right. This week, the world—in the guise of 60-odd heads of state including the pope—held the first United Nations food summit since 2002. As the world’s attention turns from the receding financial crisis, it is switching to one...

IN 1974 Henry Kissinger, then America’s secretary of state, told the first world food conference in Rome that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. Just over 35 years later, in the week of another United Nations food summit in Rome, 1 billion people will go to bed hungry. This failure, already dreadful, may soon get worse. None of the underlying agricultural problems which produced a spike in...