Tuesday, 30 October 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

African Union to set up Food Safety Authority and rapid alert system

Posted: 30 Oct 2012 05:00 AM PDT

The African Union has announced plans to set up a new Food Safety Authority and a 'Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed' (RASFF). It is hosting a regional workshop on 29-30 October in Kigali, Rwanda, on the subject.

Seeing more clearly: new perspectives on the global land grab

Posted: 30 Oct 2012 04:22 AM PDT

Mechanised agriculture in Tanzania

Land grabbing is never far from the headlines. It's also an issue marked by secrecy in land deals themselves, as well as conflicts over evidence, causes and impacts. What should be done about land grabs, and who should do it, remains a topic of intense debate on the international stage.

So what new debates on this key global policy issues are emerging? The recent international conference on global land grabbing, convened by the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) and involving the Future Agricultures Consortium, explored a huge array of material on the subject across 120 papers and six plenaries.

What new perspectives were offered at the conference?  It is impossible to summarise everything of course, but there were a few things that struck me that had changed since the conference held at IDS in 2011, which I commented on in the closing session.
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