If someone were to spontaneously ask you where your food comes from, would you know the answer? Do you know who grows it and how? The steps taken and the ingredients used to turn your food into meals? How it reaches markets and stores before it finally finds its way onto your plate?

Food is our lifeline, yet we are largely disconnected from it. Instead, we are trapped in the illusion that we have the freedom to buy and consume products that we supposedly want and need, but know little about.

This year’s edition of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch – Not Our Menu: False Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition – attempts  to connect the dots surrounding the food that we eat.

Read the new report of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch

We know what is needed, but do we know how to get there?

On the importance of a lacking strategy:

Strategies for sustainability | Wall Street International Magazine (wsimag.com)

The prize was awarded to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for real-world research in the 1990s that demonstrated, empirically, that the idea touted by conservative economists that higher minimum wages mean fewer jobs is not based on fact.

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said: “These Nobel Prize winners have demolished the unproven, yet influential, theory that ensuring that workers have a decent minimum wage somehow means job losses.

Read the article

Blog by Dorothy Grace Guerrero, Global Justice Now:

The organisation of our economies has driven two of the biggest global crises the world faces: pandemics, of which Covid-19 will not be the last, and the climate and ecological breakdown. On top of actual infections and deaths experienced by families, Covid-19 is also affecting every person and community due to lockdowns, prolonged workplace closures, suspension of classes, travel restrictions and general economic impacts. However, it does not do so equally. The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities and injustices and the structural inequalities play a significant role in determining who lives and who dies.

Experts say Covid-19 survivors may go on to develop long Covid, creating a generation left with chronic health problems and disability, the personal and economic impacts of which might be felt for decades to come. The UN has already acknowledged that Covid-19 has also wiped out years of progress in the 15-year global work on the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, which was already off track in 2019.

Read more:

Vaccine apartheid, a strategy of social murder – Global Justice Now Global Justice Now

(from Sven Giegold, MEP):

The plenary of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Forum on BEPS sealed the final text of the international corporate tax reform today, 8 October. MEP Sven Giegold, financial and economic policy spokesperson of the Greens/EFA group commented:

“A global minimum tax is an important step forward against tax dumping. A decades-long blockade in international tax policy has been overcome today. The agreement ushers in a new era of global tax cooperation. This means that a limit has finally been set on the ruinous tax race to the bottom. However, there is regret mixed in with the joy about this agreement. It is a success with a drop of bitterness. The corporate tax reform lacks the ambition to really reduce global inequalities. The capping of the effective minimum tax at 15 percent weakens a key aspect of the international corporate tax reform. Tax avoidance by corporations and tax evasion by the wealthy remain major problems. The relatively low redistribution of excess profits to countries where, for example, digital corporations exercise market power, is also a disappointment. Developing countries in particular get too little of the global tax pie. The fight for global tax justice is far from won.

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Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s Managing Director since 2019, has been a bold leader in confronting the economic fallout of the pandemic, as well as in positioning the Fund as a global pioneer on climate change. The efforts now underway to remove her are not only unjust, but could hamstring the Fund’s management for years to come.

Joseph STIGLITZ  on this: A Coup Attempt at the IMF by Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate (project-syndicate.org)  

(via globalsocialjustice.info)