Welfare Economics

Over the summer of 2012, INESAD‘s Ioulia Fenton is researching food and agriculture issues at Worldwatch Institute‘s Nourishing the Planet project. In her latest article, she discusses a new study suggesting that school food policy matters when it comes to the health of school kids in America.

New Evidence Shows That School Food Policy Matters When It Comes to Kids’ Health

Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. According to the 2011 F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens Americas’ Future report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Trust for America’s Health, nearly one-third of all American kids ages 10 to 17 are either obese or overweight. This puts them at risk of more than 20 major diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Today, The Statesman in Austin, Texas, United States published a op-ed co-written by Danielle Nierenberg, Director at Worldwatch Institute‘s Nourishing the Planet (NtP) project and INESAD‘s Ioulia Fenton, who is spending the summer researching food and agriculture issues with NtP.

Helping Poor Children Avoid Poor Diets, The Statesman, Monday, August 13, 2012.

It’s almost time for kids to go back to school. But for many children in Austin, this means a return to terribly unhealthy school lunches fried chicken, pizza pockets, corn dogs, and desserts loaded with high-fructose corn syrup that jeopardize the health and well-being of America’s next generation. This needs to change. Read More »

U.S. exports obesity epidemic to Mexico was the conclusion of a recent Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) report. The study looks at the health consequences of the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA), a tri-lateral trade liberalization agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. that came into effect in 1994. The researchers tracked the increases of U.S. exports into Mexico that followed NAFTA’s implementation. These included such items as soft drinks, snack foods, processed meats, and dairy, as well as raw inputs such as corn and soybeans that are used in the food processing industry. They then linked the rises to increased consumption of unhealthy foods and, thusly, to an incremental rise in the nation’s climbing obesity epidemic. Read More »

Since the 1995 United Nations Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women, the world of development has been obsessed with the idea of mainstreaming ‘gender’ throughout aid delivery programs and operations. Nowhere has this been more true than in Africa. So, almost two decades later, has gender mainstreaming succeeded? And if not, what has been the reality and how should the world move forward? The Development Roast sat down with the incredibly inspiring Khadija Bah-Wakefield to learn from her quarter century career as a senior gender and socioeconomic advisor to the World Bank, different factions of the United Nations, West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development, New Partnership for Africa’s Development and many other donor groups in over twenty African countries*. Read More »

What would you do if you were the mother of a young girl born into a social setting where her gender automatically affects her chances of independence, riches and success? Most of us live in such societies as gender imbalances are institutionalised and pervasive the world over. Take the recently exposed gender gap in US election coverage published by 4thEstate.net that showed that even on important issues specifically facing women (such as reproductive health, birth control, women’s rights), the US media consulted the voices of actual women only 12-31% of the time. Read More »

It is practically impossible to look into any part of international development without coming across “livelihood diversification”. It is a process whereby families in poor countries move away from relying on just one livelihood strategy to many different ones.

This is widely accepted to apply to the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America alike. The implication being that helping people diversify their livelihoods would be beneficial to development and poverty reduction, especially for those who cannot diversify themselves. Read More »

Ah, the sea of red that must be flooding your imagination: images of red flags intercepted by golden stars, shining hammers, crossing sickles, mixed in with flashes of Mao, Stalin, Che, Castro, bread queues and cold wars. Communism has become a hugely loaded word, most widely associated with political ideologies and regimes that we (UK, Europe, US and beyond) deem to be communist countries of Russia, China and Cuba.

Yet, as Anthropologist David Graeber points out in his recent book Debt: The First 5,000 years*, even the leaders and ruling parties of these nations never actually called their arrangements communist. Rather, they see themselves as socialist, with communism representing a distant, utopian, stateless ideal. Read More »

“If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average”

Psychologist Shawn Achor in a hillarious and wildly inspiring TED talk.

Walking into the shady classroom of the second school we visited last friday, we were disappointed to find only a handful of young, primary school students, one teacher and a parent inside. The two-classroom school in the community of El Terrero, adorned in blue and white colours of the Nicaraguan national flag, as all of the country’s schools are, was recently built as a joint project between Pencils of Promise and Seeds of Learning – two NGOs working to improve education and promote community cohesion in the Matagalpa region of Ciudad Dario. Read More »

Over the last two days I have been involved in a global experiment – a 48 hour brainstorming session between 1,600 people, from 50 countries who identified the barriers to solving poverty and put forward ideas for solutions.

The experiment was set up in a form of a game called Catalysts for Change. The more you contributed by putting down your thoughts, critiques, questions and ideas in less than 140 character soundbites, the more points you collected. In the end, the two short days yielded over 18,600 soundbite playing cards covering a range of topics from improving education to challenging capitalism itself. Read More »