Global

Domestic Threat Emergency in Israel

Reading Time: 3 minutes Months-long protests and heated divisions will come to a head in an Israeli Knesset vote that has triggered a domestic threat emergency in Israel. The nation has already seen the largest protests in its history. Today, 150 major firms, including banks, are striking ahead of the vote. On Sunday, tens of thousands of protesters marched…

Global

The Green Revolution – Food Crisis Part 7

Reading Time: 4 minutes After the unique economic factors (see yesterday’s post), the second solution to the crisis of these debtor nations in the early 1980s is known to history as the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution actually began earlier in the 1960s, but its transfer to the underdeveloped world was often hand in hand with economic reforms. It…

Global

The Borrowers Become Servants to the Lenders – Food Crisis Part 6

Reading Time: 3 minutes In our last post in this series, we looked at how benevolent aid became dysfunctional politics and began reshaping the global food system in the 1960s and 70s.  Two significant factors contributed solutions to the crisis as well the perpetuation of the dysfunctional global food system. The first was strictly economic in its nature. Organizations…

Global

Benevolent Aid Becomes Pragmatic Economics – Food Crisis Part 5

Reading Time: 5 minutes By 1956, food aid accounted for half of all US economic aid throughout the world.  From the 1950s onward, food became a central piece of American aid throughout the world and a foundational element in the evolving US-dominated global economy. By 1960, one-third of the world’s trade in wheat came from US food aid (50).…

Global

How We Ruined the World – Food Crisis Part 4

Reading Time: 5 minutes The end of World War II resulted in the near total destruction of Europe’s powerful nations and the global complex of colonialism they erected over the course of the prior century. It was only a few years into the postwar period when Great Britain withdrew from almost all of its prized colonial holdings throughout the…

Global

How We Saved the World – Food Crisis Part 3

Reading Time: 6 minutes Human civilization’s relationship to food supply has always been a relatively tense one. A delicate balance between food supply and growing population demand marks much of our history. The oldest recorded human history captures the disruptive nature of famines in dictating the development and movement of human population centers. The stories of the Hebrew patriarchs…

Global

The Lands of Excess – Food Crisis Part 2

Reading Time: 4 minutes While famine rages in one part of the world, in other parts obesity is climbing to record rates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued reports in 2016 detailing how the US obesity epidemic was getting worse, not better, in spite of numerous awareness and prevention efforts. In 2016, 40 percent of American women…

Global

Food Crisis Overview – Part 1

Reading Time: 4 minutes In early 2017, the Secretary General of the United Nations warned that 20 million people were at risk of famine, including 1.4 million children at imminent risk of death (37). In Yemen alone at that time, 7 million people were on the brink of starvation while two-thirds of the population was relying upon humanitarian aid to…

Global Intelligence Briefs

Sudan on the Brink

Reading Time: 4 minutes The outbreak of violence this week has brought the world to the brink of a Sudan civil war. Such a conflict poses a risk for a wider regional war in Africa. Deadly fighting broke out in Sudan over the weekend. Various media outlets report nearly 200 dead and more than 1,800 injured as of today…