Global production of soybeans and palm oil has increased enormously in the tropics over the last two decades. The Tropical Oil Crop Revolution provides a broad synthesis of the major supply and demand drivers in their production; their economic, social, and environmental impacts; and the future outlook to 2050. The planting of these crops is controversial because they are often sown on formerly forested or savanna lands, rely on large farmers and agribusiness rather than smallhold...

This book aims to provide key pieces of information needed for informed debate about large-scale land acquisition by drawing on the experience from past land expansions discussing predictions for potential future demand and providing empirical evidence of what is happening on the ground in the countries most affected by the recent increase in demand for land. It complements demand side considerations with a detailed assessment of the amount of land whether currently cultivated or not that mig...

As we struggle to feed a global population speeding toward 9 billion, we have entered a new phase of the food crisis. Wealthy countries that import much of their food, along with private investors, are racing to buy or lease huge swaths of farmland abroad. The Global Farms Race is the first book to examine this burgeoning trend in all its complexity, considering the implications for investors, host countries, and the world as a whole.The debate over large-scale land acquis...

From the vantage point of many in the West, Africa remains a continent of woe – a place stalked by ethnic conflict, corrupt dictatorships, religious strife, war and famine. But today, at last, the flawed mythology that treats Africa as a homogenous disaster area is being challenged by investors, economists, fund managers and academics. Age is not often associated with speed; but Africa, the cradle of civilisation, now has more of the world’s fastest-growing economies than any other. After ...

An Inconvenient Truth of water.“Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert."“Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear ...

China Versus the West is an innovative book.The author, a leading specialist on the international and Asian economy and business, presents the most comprehensive picture of the changing power balance between the emerging superpower China and the "old" developed economies of the West: mainly the US, Europe and Japan. The reader can clearly see in what areas and to what extent China has become the world leader, in what areas it is catching up and in what are...

Paul Roberts, the best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic need is failing.In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.At the heart of The...

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.This hard-headed crit...

Cities now house half the world's population and produce 70 percent of its GDP. Managing them well helps development. Strengthening municipal management of planning, finance, and service provision has been at the core of World Bank support through municipal development projects (MDPs). This book reviews how, worldwide, nearly 3,000 municipalities have benefitted from 190 World Bank-supported MDPs over the past decade, three quarters of which achieved satisfactory outcomes.The finance dimensio...

In this international bestseller, currently available in more than a dozen countries, Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke describe the real and worsening global water crisis, and reveal the plans of transnational corporations to profit from it. The authors present both a compelling case and a practical plan for fighting back against the corporate takeover of this most precious natural resource.

This evaluation assesses the Bank Group's support for environmental sustainability in both the public and private sectors over the past 15 years. It identifies several crucial constraints that need to be addressed, perhaps most importantly insufficient government commitment to environmental goals and weak institutional capacity to deal with them. But constraints within the Bank Group, including insufficient attention to longer-term sustainable development, must be reduced as well. The Ba...

Stop Being Manipulated by the Animal Foods IndustryStop the meat industry from eating into your wallet. Few Americans are aware of the realities of the economic system that supports our country's supply of animal foods. Yet these forces affect us in ways we can hardly imagine. Though we only fork over a few dollars per pound of meat products at the grocery store, we end up paying much more than that in tax dollar-fueled government subsidies—$38 b...