Colin Todhunter The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and an assortment of high-profile figures and policymakers are pushing for unregulated gene-editing technologies, the rollout of bio-synthetic food created in...

The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a...

Colin Todhunter With over 800 million people, rural India is arguably the most interesting and complex place on the planet but is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing...

Colin Todhunter In the above short video on the empirediaries.com YouTube channel, a protesting farmer camped near Delhi says that during lockdown and times of crisis farmers are treated...

Colin Todhunter Agriculture in India is at a crossroads. Indeed, given that over 60 per cent of the country’s 1.3-billion-plus population still make a living from agriculture (directly or...

Colin Todhunter The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of rich and powerful land speculators and agribusiness corporations. Smallholder farmers...

Colin Todhunter The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, brings together international business and political leaders, economists and other high-profile individuals...

John Griffin From the vantage point of a remote Portuguese hill village, life in faraway cities seems either quirky or crazed. The Celtic inhabitants—my neighbours—have managed to weather (or...

Colin Todhunter The deregulation of international capital flows (financial liberalisation) has effectively turned the planet into a free-for-all bonanza for the world’s richest capitalists. Under the post-World-War Two Bretton...

Although millions of people were suffering, the hope was that the Covid-19 crisis, there was a belief that people working together with their respective governments could start building a...

We are already seeing food shortages in the making. In India, for instance, supply chains have been disrupted, farm input systems for the supply of seeds and fertilisers have...

Colin Todhunter The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world...

Philip Roddis Reshaping global food production in the image of corporate imperialism, a brief and bloody history of capitalism in its lead nation and the pillorying of the world’s...

Colin Todhunter This month, India’s Supreme Court will hold a lengthy hearing on the commercialisation of genetically modified (GM) mustard, which would be the country’s first GM food crop....

Colin Todhunter Fast food nations and global nutrition Daniel Maingi works with small farmers in Kenya and belongs to the organisation Growth Partners for Africa. He remembers a time...

Colin Todhunter There is mounting evidence that a healthy soil microbiome protects plants from pests and diseases. One of the greatest natural assets that humankind has is soil. But...

Colin Todhunter In India, the ‘development’ paradigm is premised on moving farmers out of agriculture and into the cities to work in construction, manufacturing or the service sector, despite...

Colin Todhunter The UK-based Independent online newspaper recently published an article about a potential link between air pollution from vehicles and glaucoma. It stated that according to a new...

Colin Todhunter The world already produces enough food to feed 10 billion people but over two billion are experiencing micronutrient deficiencies (of which 821 million were classed as chronically undernourished in 2018). However,...

Colin Todhunter M.S. Swaminathan is often referred to as the ‘father’ of India’s Green Revolution. In 2009, he said that  no scientific evidence had emerged to justify concerns about...