-The Christian Sciences Monitor Wealthy Western nations are financially exhausted and unwilling to commit to help fund greener development for poorer nations. Will this week's conference in Rio find any solutions? So what happens if you hold a UN conference on sustainable development, and world leaders make speeches, and sign treaties, and then nothing happens? This, of course, would be absurd. The problem, says Bill Easterly, a development expert at New York University,...
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New FAO report profiles how sustainable forestry can help meet development goals
-FAO The world's forests have a major role to play in the transition to a new, greener economy, a theme being discussed at the Rio+20 Conference. But to spark that shift, governments must enact programs and policies aimed at both unlocking the potential of forests and ensuring that they are sustainably managed, FAO said today. In a new report, The State of the World's Forests 2012 (SOFO 2012), the UN Food and...
More »Foreign farms in Africa bring investment and controversy
-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself. China, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive. But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...
More »Power-less lives blamed on sadhus
-The Telegraph Surtama, a 37-year-old woman from the mountains of Uttarkashi, was in the capital yesterday to express anger at having to live with no electricity and demand a revival of stalled hydroelectric projects in her state. “We walk more than 2km to a village in Himachal Pradesh to charge the mobile phone battery,” said Surtama from Pujeli, a village of about 80 households some of which have acquired mobile phones to...
More »Poor want ration, not cash: Activists
-IANS The government's plan to replace the public distribution system (PDS) with direct cash transfer into people's accounts under the proposed Food Security Bill is not getting any takers, some social activists said here Friday. According to the proposal, the PDS through which subsidised foodgrains are made available to people will be replaced with direct cash subsidies where a fixed amount will be transferred into people's bank accounts each month. Talking to media...
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