Post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals Proposal

The outcome document of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, entitled “The future we want”, inter alia, set out a mandate to establish an open working group to develop a set of sustainable development goals for consideration and appropriate action by the General Assembly at its sixty-eighth session. It also provided the basis for their conceptualization. The document gave the mandate that the sustainable development goals should be coherent with and integrated into the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015.

biosafetypaper – Governing Biotechnology in Africa

The last decade has been a defining moment for policy makers in Africa, especially for those charged with policy for the agricultural sector. Despite the highest level of agricultural technological advancement in the world over the decade gone by 75 percent of the population in Africa still wallows in abject poverty, threatened by hunger and food insecurity. Most of the food insecure are smallholder farmers who wake up every morning to till the soil.

Agricultural_Input_Vouchers_SA

This paper synthesises the findings of research undertaken in Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia on the different ways in which relief seed and seed vouchers are programmed, and seeks to identify how such interventions can potentially best benefit both farmers and commercial seed markets. However, the review of the seed interventions in the three case study countries reveals that it is difficult to distinguish relief interventions from the supply of subsidized inputs or social protection and longer-term developmental interventions. This blurring of relief and developmental objectives is due to chronic vulnerability and recurrent drought in the region.