Developing the Meat Grab

This paper by Mindi Schneider looks at the dramatic effects of Chinese agriculture’s shift towards meat production and how the state’s narrative of ‘food-security’ is crumbling fast. Schneider suggests looking at this phenomenon through a “meat land-grab” lens, “not only to include the damaging impacts and externalized costs of industrial agriculture, but also to connect the dispossessions and struggles of marginalized people living in the wake of industrial meat production to those of people living in the wake of industrial livestock feed production. In doing so, meat grabbing offers a way to approach and further politicize the connections between industrial meat in places like China, and soy frontiers in places like Brazil.”
(Journal of Peasant Studies)

Partnerships for food and nutrition security in Africa

The latest edition of GREAT Insights magazine looks at some of the biggest food and nutrition programmes in Africa and beyond. This includes articles from the CEO of NEPAD, the Secretary-General of COMESA and a piece by Lawrence Haddad, former director of the Institute of Development Studies.
(ECDPM – pdf)

Policy making processes around food security

A new paper by IFPRI looks at ‘Conceptualizing the Drivers of Policy Change in Agriculture, Nutrition and Food Security’. They develop a framework called the kaleidoscope model which aims to account for dimensions of power, external actors, identify policy gaps that lead to failure, and remain applicable across different countries.
(IFPRI – pdf)

Chains of Knowledge Creation

JICA has published a new paper looking at the possible contribution of ‘emerging donors’ in ‘knowledge creation’ based on their experiences of receiving aid. This looks at the interactions between local knowledge and external knowledge and, within that, the interaction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. This seeks to counter technical cooperation models that flow in one direction by stressing the importance of mutual learning, or ‘two-way interaction’ as they refer to it.
(JICA – pdf)

This news roundup has been collected on behalf of the China and Brazil in African Agriculture (CBAA) project.

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