Safety net does more to ease poverty than previously thought, new study finds

The Baltimore riots have re-ignited the ideological wars over the efficacy of government spending to alleviate poverty, with Republicans who want to slash the budget seizing on images of urban chaos to argue that federal anti-poverty policy has been an abject failure at accomplishing its own goal. Paul Ryan suggests dumping more cash into the bottomless pit otherwise known as federal spending on the poor will only produce the “same failed result.

Feeding ourselves thirsty: how the food sector is managing global water risks

The global food sector, which uses 70% of the world’s freshwater, faces extraordinary risks from the twin challenges of water scarcity and water pollution. Rising competition, combined with aging water infrastructure, weak regulation and climate change are creating a water availability emergency that the World Economic Forum recently ranked as the world’s “top global risk.”

These things can change: wages and working conditions in agriculture

In 2013, Rosario Ventura and her husband Isidro Silva were strikers at Sakuma Brothers Farms in Burlington, Wash. In the course of three months in 2013, over 250 workers walked out of the fields several times, as their anger grew over their wages and the conditions in the labor camp where they lived.

Aid agencies pour into Nepal – and then what?

Following the earthquake that killed 220,000 Haitians in 2010, the influx of hundreds of aid agencies and civil society organisations – many with no prior knowledge of the country – proved impossible to fully coordinate and in some cases was actually detrimental to the response, according to an assessment by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).