Can Green Energy Cause a Global Food Shortage?

China is one of the world’s largest food producers. Recently an acute power shortage there reduced food output. This sent markets into panic. Severe global food shortages and increased prices could follow. What caused China’s power shortage? Over-reliance on renewable energy. It led to insufficient and unreliable electricity generation. That harmed domestic food production and […]

Can Green Energy Cause a Global Food Shortage? Learn More »

The Gates of Hell (or Heaven) in Africa?

Agribusiness, Small Family Farms, or Both? According to many critics, Western billionaires do not make the best farmers. Perhaps it is their inability (or unwillingness) to downsize grandiose plans from a Western-style agribusiness model to merely helping millions of subsistence farmers that dot the African landscape succeed in providing nutritious diets for their families and

The Gates of Hell (or Heaven) in Africa? Learn More »

Food Security in a Post-Covid World

European Conservatives and Reformists Party hosts another ‘Europe Debates’ webinar US-EU trade talks are already stalled over agriculture issues. And yet the European Union’s new “Farm to Fork” strategy doesn’t just double down on the EU’s contentious agricultural regulations. It promises to use access to European markets to compel the United States and other countries

Food Security in a Post-Covid World Learn More »

UNPREPARED: Covid-19, Locusts, Refugees, Floods, and Climate Change

by G. Cornelis “Kees” van Kooten I live on a Pacific Island off the coast of British Columbia (BC), Canada. Vancouver Island is about the same size as the Netherlands, but only has a population of about ¾ million (about 60% of whom live in the Victoria area) compared to 17 million in the Netherlands.

UNPREPARED: Covid-19, Locusts, Refugees, Floods, and Climate Change Learn More »

Does Fighting Global Warming Help or Hurt the Poor?

Want to “bring nothing but misery to poor people, especially in the developing world”? Simple: Just follow the advice of the international cabal of UN leaders and their organizations calling for drastic action to fight global warming. The harangue is familiar everywhere by now: Global warming will harm everybody, but it’ll harm the poor most

Does Fighting Global Warming Help or Hurt the Poor? Learn More »

Time to End Ethanol Mandate and Subsidies

Seven years ago Indur Goklany, an economist formerly with the U.S. Department of the Interior and associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception in 1988 as an author, expert reviewer, and U.S. delegate to the organization, concluded a thorough analysis of the effect of American biofuels policy on the world’s poor with these words:

Time to End Ethanol Mandate and Subsidies Learn More »