Development (Society for International Development)最新文献

Understanding how science, technology, and innovation is produced by the UN Food Systems Summit process offers a lens into how dominant actors in global food policy continually rework their power and legitimacy. Focusing on discourses and material networks, the article shows that the Scientific Group makes appeals to inclusivity-of people of colour, women, youth, smallholders, and more-while extending old Green Revolution ideas through new 4th Industrial Revolution innovations and governance ambitions.

Given the failures of the UN Food Systems Summit and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to tackle the problems related to the corporate capture of food governance, this article calls for developing comprehensive legal frameworks for corporate accountability in food governance. In doing so, the authors identify key regulatory elements that need to be taken into account in food governance discussions. Their recommendations are borrowed from the guidance developed in the context of the negotiations for an International Legally Binding Instrument on TNCs and other Businesses with Respect to Human Rights, as well as in the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the WHO Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors, and the WHO Financial Regulations and Financial Rules.

What is the impact of COVID-19 on Portugal's Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS), the country's national health service? The story, still unfolding, has all the elements of a recipe for disaster: one of the most elderly populations in the world; a weakened SNS, the result of a litany of policies and interventions by the 'Troika' (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund); a health care delivery system focused on non-communicable diseases and long-term care; the growing public distrust in public services, compared to private, hotel-like health care facilities. We are aware that these are still the early days of the epidemic, yet it is safe to say that algorithmic scenarios of doom and gloom have so far been averted. In the past six months of the pandemic, the level of trust of the Portuguese population in the SNS and its health personnel has significantly improved, while the government has started to provide additional funding and to work for the expansion of the public system. At the very inception of the pandemic, private hospitals practically closed their doors to COVID-19 patients. Unexpectedly a new disease, COVID-19, by definition the foe of any health system, has granted the opportunity for a rare consensus amongst different key political and/or corporate actors in a long-called-for reform of the SNS. Social science and humanities, with their analytical tools and theoretical-conceptual frameworks, are mandatory in providing well-funded answers to such riddles and better grasping the reasons for the twist and turns.

The global response to COVID-19 has been uneven and disappointing in the vast majority of countries. The United States has borne the largest absolute burden of disease globally, as COVID-19 exploited pre-existing poor population health among Americans to spread rapidly, with devastating consequences. Why does the country that spends the most on healthcare in the world have one of the worst responses to COVID-19? We argue that this is because the United States conception of health is predominantly focused on healthcare, an overwhelming investment in developing drugs and treatments, and an underinvestment in the foundational conditions that keep people healthy. COVID-19 has exposed the limits of this approach to health. In order to prevent COVID-19 and future such pandemics, we must create the conditions that can keep population-level health threats at bay. This means addressing the conditions that shape health, including economics, employment, community networks, racial disparities, how we treat older adults, and the physical layout of our communities. To do so means acknowledging health as a public good, as a transnational project with countries working together to build a healthier world. It also means acknowledging that everyone has a right to health. These aspirations should become core to the global community's health aspirations in the post-COVID-19 era.

The premises of the feminist economist tradition from the Global South center their analysis in the wellbeing of people and the planet, under the human rights framework, gender equality and environmental integrity, as cross-cutting principles. The pandemic brought to the surface what the feminist movement has been saying all along, namely that the wellbeing of persons, and the planet they live in, depends on a complex web of elements beyond a limited notion of bodily health. The current capitalistic system has always kindled a tension between life and profits, a game that has undermined human rights of all persons by prioritizing the circulation of merchandises, goods and capitals. That struggle is more acutely felt now with the confinement measures imposed all around the world, and the ensuing impossibility for millions of people in precarious circumstances of respecting the lockdown measures. Women are even more carrying the burden of subsidizing entire economies. The feminist movement is now looking at solutions of solidarity at the crossroad between and within social movements, public policy, local and community resistance, while refusing to go back to a world where women may have to subsidize even more entire economies under recession.

Governments must become active shapers of medical innovation and drive the development of critical health technologies as global health commons. The 'race' for COVID-19 vaccines is exposing the deficiencies of a business-as-usual medical innovation ecosystem driven by corporate interests, not health outcomes. Instead of bolstering collective intelligence, it relies on competition between proprietary vaccines and allows the bar on safety and efficacy to be lowered, risking people's health and undermining their trust.

It is a well-established fact that biodiversity is pivotal to human and planetary health, completely entwining biodiverse natural systems into a continuum, through our food systems, into human health. This means there is an intimate connection between the biodiversity of the soil, the biodiversity and interrelationships of cultivated and wild plants and animals. This article looks through an ecological sciences perspective at the interconnections and interrelations between human health and Earth's health. But regardless of the wide recognition of the benefits of biodiversity, we are seeing a political and economic landscape which actively runs contrary to and further erodes diversity in favor of the globalized industrial food system, seed uniformity and further centralization through false tech solutions. A food system which is responsible for both setting the preconditions for the severity of the global COVID-19 pandemic by weakening human and animal health through an explosion of non-communicable diseases. The way forward is instead shown by small farmers, local communities and gardeners who are already implementing biodiversity-based organic agroecology, which both preserves and rejuvenates the health continuum between the soil, plants, animals, food and humans. Acting as a holistic paradigm shift where diversity in all areas is cultivated for ecological resilience.