What We’re Reading 1/9/09

Jan 9th, 2009 12:20 PM UTC
By Steve Wilson

Reuters—Zimbabwe’s Tsvangirai seeks crucial Mugabe meeting
The latest out of Zimbabwe: Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has requested a meeting with President Robert Mugabe in a last-ditch effort to salvage a power-sharing deal, an opposition spokesman said Friday. “We have written to Mugabe, indicating that we want a meeting between him and president Tsvangirai to bring finality and closure to the dialogue,” the spokesman said. The spokesman also said Tsvangirai, who has been outside Zimbabwe since a regional summit in South Africa last November, would return to the country “within days.”

Guardian—Sarkozy and Merkel tell US that Europe will lead way towards ‘moral’ capitalism
The leaders of France and Germany yesterday issued a warning to the U.S. and the global financial community that Europe would lead the way in restructuring the global financial system and ushering in a more “moral” form of capitalism. Appearing to set aside recent disagreements over how to handle the economic downturn, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel presented a united front in their efforts to reform a system they said had led to “unprecedented instabilities”. Both leaders stressed the need for Europe to play a significant role at the summit of G20 nations in London in April, when the group of leading and emerging countries will hammer out ways of reinforcing the architecture of global regulation.

Guardian—The outcry is muted, but the food crisis is getting worse
An opinion piece in The Guardian says that while attention may be elsewhere, the global food crisis is far from over, and is even likely to intensify in the near future. Despite volatility in food demand and the recent decline in food prices, the crisis is still very real. The basic problem now, the column argues, is not even one of absolute food shortage so much as the inability to pay for food, and this problem will get worse for many developing countries and their poorer citizens as wages decline and crop cultivation continues to be a challenge.

Seattle Times—Food crisis is global warming’s biggest threat, say UW, Stanford scientists
A new report says global warming’s biggest threat may be a widespread global food shortage. The report from Stanford and University of Washington researchers says the hardest-hit areas of global warming will be the tropics and subtropics, including Africa. Higher temperatures resulting from global warming cause crops like corn, wheat and rice to grow faster, but reduce plant fertility and grain production. With average growing-season temperatures expected to rise more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit, crop yields will fall 20 to 40 percent, the report estimates.

New Vision (Uganda)—New HIV cases alarm doctors
Doctors in Uganda have raised a fresh alarm over the rate at which Ugandans are becoming infected with HIV, especially married people. The Director General of Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC) said Uganda was facing a fresh crisis that required overhauling their HIV prevention programs. The Ugandan official says HIV infection rates are rising again yet most of the funding is going into treatment rather than prevention. “We have done well to put more than 150,000 people on anti-retroviral treatment, an increase from 15,000 three years ago, but that means we have shifted our priority from prevention. For every two people you put on anti-retroviral treatment, five others are becoming infected. If you wait for people to become infected and you continue treating them, you are missing the point,” he argues.

-Steve Wilson

TAGS: Policy News, What We're Reading