Opinions
The racism at the heart of Flint’s crisis
An important new report makes clear the principal cause of the water crisis in Flint, Mich.: the state government’s blatant disregard for the lives and health of poor and black residents of a distressed city....
Connecting the dots: Human rights and poverty
Where rights are at stake, immediate action is required. Those who continue to uphold the existing, highly skewed international economic and financial order delay the realization of human rights by many decades, thereby becoming responsible for hundreds of millions of poverty-related deaths in the m...
Soil: the sustainable alternative to oil income in Africa
The 2014 Africa Progress Panel report presents the two faces of Africa: robust economic growth and continuing poverty. But the report suggests Africa could change this duality by asking: how can resources make a positive impact on development? While impressive headline growth figures are reported, i...

These cheap, clean stoves were supposed to save millions of lives. What happened?
About 3 billion of the world’s poorest people burn wood, charcoal or dung in smoky, open fires to cook their food and heat their homes. Millions die annually from lung and heart ailments caused by cooking with solid fuels, according to the World Health Organization....
Letting (some of) India’s women own land
This month, 600 women gathered under a huge blue-and-yellow-striped tent in Baripada, a small city in Odisha, a state in India’s east. They were among India’s most neglected people. Widowed, abandoned or divorced, many had ended up living like servants in the households of their fathers, brother...
The farm bill drove me insane.America’s top nutrition thinker tried to unpack the most important food law. It was a mistake
In fall 2011, in an act of what can be described only as hubris, I had the bright idea of teaching a course on the farm bill.For nearly 25 years, I had been writing and teaching about food politics and policy at New York University, and I knew that the farm bill dictated not only agricultural policy...
Feeding big cities in growing, fragile, and conflict-ridden states
As Ethiopia faces its worst drought in 50 years, some of the ten million people in need of food, and the 400,000 children suffering from malnutrition, reside in the slums of Addis Ababa. Increasingly the face of hunger is in a slum or city. While it is important to fight hunger and malnutrition in r...
Urbanization, food security and youth employment
A stunning fact: nearly 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities by 2050.As our primary goal is to increase food and nutrition security for all people, we must consider the ability of youth to forge productive livelihoods so they can feed themselves and their families....
Kenyans reaquire an old taste: eating healthier
In the 1950s and ’60s, governments in Africa and Asia started subsidizing the production of staple crops like rice and corn because it was the fastest way to fill bellies and reduce starvation in those regions. Today, needs have changed: The problem is no longer chronic hunger but malnutrition, an...
Beyond deportation: Fixing a broken immigration system
The Obama administration's self-contradictory stance on deportation perpetuates a long tradition of U.S. immigration policies that ignore the root causes of migration....