Due South

The recession may have quickened a move to a new aid architecture with the emergence of new players, new directions and new types of aid. Traditional donors from the G8 have failed to achieve their commitments to give 0.7% of their gross national incomes, due in part to “severe constraints of public debt”. But despite the recession, new donors have emerged, and with them a shift to new patterns and ways of giving aid. Indeed the recession has demonstrated the durability of aid during hard times but has also added to its complexity. We now need to work even harder to make sense of that complexity and ensure that aid is considered as one small part of a more joined-up and transparent development agenda.

Now that Fairtrade has proved its resilience to recession is it time to make it the gold standard for all ethical produce and move beyond its origins in agriculture? Is the certification scheme that circumvents traditional market and pricing dynamics ready for new challenges in new markets? If so, what will those challenges look like?

For millennia civilization was entirely solar powered. Solar energy captured by biomass provided the food which powered human muscles and wood for heat energy. Fossil fuels have briefly allowed societies to break the energy cap that reliance on solar energy caused. However, modern concerns about carbon emissions force us to reconsider the role that solar energy must play in the future. Realignment back to this ultimate energy source is urgently required. How is this to be achieved with a global recession? And what effects will this have on the poor?

The minutiae of climate change negotiations are, for want of a better term, rather dull. Hundreds of negotiators trapped in many rooms debating the details of square brackets contained within the negotiating document, colloquially known to the UNFCCC elite as ‘The Brick’.

Much more interesting to non-lawyers is the way in which these hundreds of points of negotiations build up into geopolitical positions and strategies. How do the players really think climate change will play out? How much does public posturing reflect internal ideologies and intentions? What strategies are really being employed? And beyond the climate, what else is at stake?

Seeking an easy way to prepare fish at home, many families in the developed world turn to fish fillets. Grilled, sautéed or fried, the fish is ready to eat in minutes, having been pre-scaled, pre-gutted, deboned and pre-packaged before it arrives at the local supermarkets. But what happens to those fish scraps that are stripped away?

In Uganda, a landlocked east African country hit by fish scarcity, these scraps or fish bones are called fille, after the late musician Philly Lutaya, whose bony frame shocked Ugandans in the early 1990s when he publicly announced that he was dying of AIDS. While fillets – with a ‘t’ – are exported for consumption in the rich North, fille – the fish bones without a ‘t’ – are left for the locals to scavenge on.