In every step of commercial supply chains, purchasers look to standards to ensure that suppliers are providing valid products and services. Standards are essential for buyers to know what they are getting and to document transactions so that users further along the value chain know where their product has originated. Standards allow for smooth transactions of goods, and ultimately protect the consumer.
Nutrient enriched crops, also called biofortified crops, are a relatively recent innovation developed by HarvestPlus and its CGIAR global agricultural research partners to improve the micronutrient content of the world’s most-widely consumed staples, without use of transgenic modification. The primary objective of these traditionally bred crops is to tackle micronutrient deficiency (hidden hunger) on a large scale.
Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case
For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.
The Coming of Neo-Feud.
Kotkin, Joel
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Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.
Food systems actions: charting the pathway through complexity
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London, 5 February 2021 -
Food systems are notoriously complex. Many actors are involved, from subsistence farmers through to multinational corporations with more economic power than many small nations, and from informal ambulant vendors through supranational bureaucracies. All of them interact with each other directly and indirectly, amplifying (sometimes, dampening) each other’s actions.
Policymakers seek to cut through this complexity, identifying and prioritising actions that lead to more favourable outcomes for the stakeholder groups that they care about. Two recent, and very different, publications move us forward on this path, both focusing on food systems actions that could improve nutritional outcomes.
The Rockefeller Foundation has announced an initial $34.95 million to ensure more equitable access to Covid-19 testing and vaccines; leverage innovation, data, machine-learning; combat the escalating food crisis; and scale up access to renewable energy in Africa.
Collaborating with 24 organizations, businesses, and government agencies, this pan-African effort will also focus on 10 countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
The announcement comes 100 days after the Foundation s landmark commitment of $1 billion over three years to help end the Covid-19 pandemic and drive a more inclusive and sustainable global recovery. Since The Rockefeller Foundation first opened its Africa Regional Office in Nairobi in 1966, the region has remained a top priority for us, said Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, President of The Rockefeller Foundation. With this initial round of funding, we are beginning to deliver on our billion-dollar pledge