If Secretary of State John Kerry’s G.M.O.-boosting speech announcing the World Food Prize at the State Department last week is any indication of his ability to parse complicated issues, he might be better off windsurfing. Because Kerry appears to have bought into the big ag-driven myth that only by relying on genetic engineering will we be able to feed the nine billion citizens of our planet by 2050. And he enthusiastically endorsed granting this mockery of a prize to three biotech engineers, including Robert Fraley, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Monsanto and a pioneer of genetic engineering in agriculture.

Never mind that Monsanto is a sponsor of the prize (and that the list of other backers reads like a who’s who of big ag and big food), or that we never get to know the names of either the nominees or the nominators. [1] Never mind that we’re not feeding the seven billion now, or that we’re sickening a billion of those with a never-before-seen form of malnourishment. Never mind that we already grow enough food to feed not only everyone on the planet but everyone who’s going to be born in the next 30 or 40 years. And never mind that, despite the hype, there’s scant evidence that the involvement of genetic engineering in agriculture has done much to boost yields, reduce the use of chemicals or improve the food
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LILONGWE, Malawi, July 22 (UPI) -- A United Nations official is calling on the government in Malawi to release its plan to combat malnutrition to ensure food aid is reaching the needy.

More than a quarter of the African nation's 15 million citizens do not make enough money to buy food that meets minimum caloric intake amounts, U.S. Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter said. Malawi has one of the lowest minimum wage standards in the world, $1.16 per day, and about half the country's people live in poverty, a U.N. report
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The United Nations Human Rights Council today urged Putrajaya to move away from charity-based schemes to rights-based programmes to avoid exclusion of groups, graft and leakages.

Olivier De Schutter, who is the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur to Malaysia on the right to food, said while cash aid programmes such as Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia (BR1M) and Kebajikan Rakyat 1Malaysia (Karisma) can offer assistance to the needy, it is unsustainable for Malaysia to continue with such schemes.

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NEW YORK – Trade negotiators in Singapore recently failed to finalize a deal on the long-awaited Trans-Pacific Partnership; they will soon have another chance to complete what would be the world’s largest regional free-trade agreement. But, given serious concerns that the TPP will fail to consider important human-rights implications, that is no cause for celebration.

The TPP talks involve the United States, Canada, and ten other Pacific Rim countries with a combined annual output of around $26 trillion, or about 40% of global GDP. Their economic clout is matched by their ambitions; the talks go beyond traditional trade issues, which account for only five of the 29 proposed chapters, and consider a wide range of investment and regulatory issues that will affect many millions of people – and not always positively.

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