It’s been a busy week or two for food and agricultural policy news, what with the Arab world supposedly ignited by high food prices and weighty documents elsewhere calling forth high-minded rhetoric and tosh in roughly equal measure. To be honest it doesn’t feel right to do more than offer our endless refrain: that there is no one-size-fits-all solution out there, and that diversity brings resilience at levels from the individual meal to the global food network. And to point to some thought-provoking items. To whit:
The Economist’s deeply cynical story How much do rich governments really worry about feeding the world? seems to hit all the right spots.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food seems to hit all the spots you might have expected him to hit, buttering parsnips like nobody’s business.
And the European Union has, as usual come up with a very snappy acronym for a million euro project to tackle malnutrition in Africa: SUNRAY, short for Sustainable Nutrition Research for Africa in the Years to come. Here’s what they’ll be doing.
- WP1 optimises communication and coordination within the Consortium.
- WP2 maps current nutrition research activities in sub-Saharan Africa, and examines the operating environment.
- WP3 analyses the views of stakeholders.
- WP4 examines the impact of environmental changes on nutrition.
- WP5 builds consensus on research priorities through workshops in three African regions.
- WP6 develops a strategic framework for future research in the form of a roadmap.
- WP7 disseminates project outputs.