For some time now, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been the organising framework for the activities of international organisations and donor agencies. It is probably not very useful any more to quarrel about their relative lack of ambition, their limited aims and absence of recognition of the structural causes of poverty and inequality. All that is well known; even so, simply because of their wide acceptance, the MDGs have...

With less than two months to go until the big-ticket UN climate change conference in Copenhagen from 7-18 December, are cracks appearing in the tough-as-nails approach that has characterised Indian officialdom? A leading Indian newspaper reported on Monday that Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, suggesting that Delhi should accept a deviation from the 1997 Kyoto protocol on climate change which puts the onus squarely...

More suggestions that biofuels are not an environmental free lunch ONCE upon a time, biofuels were thought of as a solution to fossil-fuel dependence. Now they are widely seen as a boondoggle to agribusiness that hurts the environment and cheats taxpayers. A report commissioned by the United Nations endorses neither extreme. It gives high marks to some crop-based fuels and lambasts others. Meanwhile, two papers published in Science, a leading...

The United Nations’ Human Development Report of 2009 paints an idyllic picture of migrations. THE recently released United Nations Development Report-2009, titled “Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development”, presents a strong case for governments all over the world to encourage human mobility. Migrations, including those of low-skilled workforce, pay dividends all round, the report says. However, it does not quite attempt to seriously understand why people migrate, sometimes subjecting themselves...

Global economic and financial crisis (2007-2008) coupled with food and fuel crises (2006-2008) has pushed the number of undernourished in the world to 1.02 billion during 2009, This has happened despite international food commodity prices declining from their earlier peaks, finds a newly released report of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO, www.fao.org) titled: The State of Food Insecurity in the World Report 2009: Economic Crises-Impacts and Lessons Learnt....