Developing and distributing staple seed varieties for small-scale farmers promises to increase food production and reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. This brief from IFPRI, an international food policy research organization, lays out guidelines for how African nations can develop new varieties of crops, produce and market them, and build effective and sustainable seed systems. It also discusses how to distribute responsibility for these tasks between the public and private sectors.

The recent rise in food prices offers an opportunity for Sub-Saharan African nations, with their increasingly strong agricultural bases, to foster agricultural growth. This brief from IFPRI, an international food policy research organization, argues that African nations and their partners need to take advantage of the current world food situation to create the conditions for a rapid and strong supply response over the medium to long run that will reduce poverty and promote food and nutrition sec more...

Globalization encourages policies that improve the lives of many. How does globalization work? Citizens and companies do not seek to do business in faraway places for the sheer adventure of it. They do it because it makes them better off. This is the natural process of capitalism, constrained by the cost of transport and information and accelerated by technologies that make it cheaper to move goods, services and ideas. Globalization will proceed apace unless or until the governmental authorities more...

The process of globalization has been an integral part of the recent economic progress made by India. Globalization has played a major role in export-led growth, leading to the enlargement of the job market in India.

One of the major forces of globalization in India has been in the growth of outsourced IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) services. The last few years have seen an increase in the number of skilled professionals in India employed by both local and foreign companies to ser more...

When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of the so-called borderless world. Fifteen years after the prophesied borderless, stateless international economy, globalization has in fact reached its high water mark - and is receding.

Globalization may be its own worst enemy, driving a new trend of regionalization. There are several very strong trends that are now in the process of reshaping the terrain of the global economy in a very unglobal way. Source: The Pravda

Hundreds of local government and civil society representatives gathered from June 11-13, 2008 for the “First World Conference on City Diplomacy,” hosted by The Hague. The new book, 'City Diplomacy: The role of local governments in conflict prevention, peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction' was presented during the event. The book, which provides a background to current thinking on this relatively new area of study, features The Glocal Forum in both the opening chapter as well as in more...

Inger Linge, Vice-Chair of the Committee on Sustainable Development for The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, addresses the Conference on Children's Rights, which took place in Stockholm Sep 8-10.
In her speech, she underlines the importance for cities and regional authorities to protect and provide for children. As many cities are becoming increasingly dangerous and unhealthy places, children are unable to grow freely in public spaces, and instead are confined to 'safe' areas such a more...

“Peace First” by Ambassador Uri Savir is now available from Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Savir, who acted as Chief Negotiator for Israel in the Oslo Peace Accords and is also President of the Glocal Forum, promotes glocalization as a feasible model for a modern culture of peace. His narrative outlines his model while drawing on past experiences as a peacemaker and examples in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, and the former Yugoslavia.&nb more...

One hundred finalists have been chosen to participate in the final round of the World Bank Global Development Marketplace on Sustainable Agriculture for Development competition, held in Washington, D.C. in late September. 768 proposals were received from 114 countries, addressing the three topics: Linking small-scale farmers to markets, Improving land access and tenure for the poor, and Promoting the environmental services of agriculture in addressing climate change and biodiversity conservatio more...