Not a fly in your soup but a horse shoe in your lasagna!

Where to even begin describing all the issues related to the newest horse meat lasagna blow up story raving through Europe last week!

For those of you that didn’t hear it: Findus, a Swedish food producing company, was selling deep frozen lasagnas, claiming it contained beef meat. However, turns out that when tested, the lasagnas contained 60-100% horse meat. Of course this triggered all sort of investigations and eventually, there were more companies found guilty for treachery, such as the French company Spanghero, which knowingly had been selling 750 tons of horse meat as beef. Now, two men have been arrested in Wales in relation to the Findus scandal, but this story shouldn’t just be filed away now alongside the criminal report. This is an excellent opportunity to start thinking about the food industry, our individual behavior as consumers and how we treat animals in order to satisfy our greed for cheap products.

But let’s start with the company first, as it is much easier to point fingers at the big guys and say it’s their fault. It’s a scary thought that in today’s system, a food production company like Findus doesn’t know what goes on it its supply chain and what ingredients they are using. They should though. Findus, on their website, claim that “meat quality and safety” is their highest priority to provide their customers with “natural, good, nutritious and sustainable food”. So how to explain the fact that horse meat ends up in the beef lasagna? Findus, quite rightly, can point fingers at all of its suppliers and say that they were cheated, too. But whose responsibility is it to make sure they sell what they print on the box? I’d say that’s them. This is a good example of how big multinationals have to create better checks and balances for their supply chain, as they are responsible and so can be held accountable when something goes wrong.

Findus doesn’t know what goes in their lasagnas but we consumers don’t really know what we eat either, do we? More so, we don’t really seem to care. Can consumers be blamed for this though? Our price system has been skewed for too long – you really think you’ll get high-quality, yummy beef meat lasagna for 2 euro? You get what you pay for, is all I have to say regarding that matter. We have lost sight of what real, nutritious food should cost.

Next on my list is the bigger picture of the whole system. Consider the Eurotrip this meat was on before landing in the frozen food section: Romania, The Netherlands, Cyprus, France, Luxembourg, Sweden…for one lasagna! How Findus can consider this sustainable food I do not know. All I know is that it sounds like a story on human trafficking.

Except that it is; not human but horse trafficking. It seems as if there is some sort of black market for horses in Northern Europe. Between 4000 to 9000 horses disappear every year in Sweden, in Britain and Ireland it’s 75000 horses per year that cannot be found in the registries anymore. (Well, now we know!) To make matters worse, thousands of horses are burnt or buried in Sweden because we don’t want to eat horse. So in order to feed our greed for cheap beef (?) meat, we import it from Romania. The irony in this story would make me laugh if it weren’t so tragic.

My last point, but definitely not least:

Why do we feel sentimentally worse when eating horse than eating cow?

Will this food scandal lead people to seriously consider what they buy and to inform themselves about the products and different local options? Will it show the big corporations that they have to step up and assure accountability and control where needed? Will the EU start thinking about stronger enforcement rules that can help with our borderless trade? Most likely, this will all stay buried deep inside the frozen food section in our supermarkets.

 

Comments Off on Not a fly in your soup but a horse shoe in your lasagna! / 17 Feb 2013 por Julia Senninger
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EU ETS (Sustainability Policies)

It is evident that change regarding green house gas (GHG) emission policy is crucial on a global scale. Depletion of natural resources are increasing, human induced climate fluctuations are becoming more prominent, and the stability of ecosystems on a grand scale are threatened significantly due to increasing emissions of green house gases. The European Union has implemented a system to encourage industries to decrease green house gas emissions to mitigate climate change efficiently. By employing a program that addresses a significant culprit of climate change on a fundamental level, the EU is establishing itself as a key player in GHG emission reduction and climate change mitigation.

The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) utilizes the cap and trade system, requiring industries to only emit their allotted amount of GHG’s while offering the ability to trade excess emission allowances between companies. By employing this program, industries functioning within this system will reduce the amount of emissions expelled in 2005 by 21% in 2020. As the cap provides a limit for all industries within the EU ETS, each company receives an allotment of emissions and is able to trade them amongst each other. Should a company emit less- emissions than were provided, they are able to sell their allowances to companies who need more allowances or keep them for security of future emission needs.  If a company exceeds their emission allowances, they are obligated to pay significant fines, which discourage them from exceeding their limit. This aspect is key to ensuring that carbon emissions are valued and regarded cautiously.

As this system establishes carbon as a commodity, it requires fundamental aspects of industrial systems to change. Climate change mitigation is now institutionalized within company’s daily operations and demands that industries operating within the EU ETS to decrease emissions and encourages a shift towards utilization of clean technologies. By leading the movement towards clean technology investment, low-carbon emission practices, and climate change mitigation, I would argue that the EU ETS is setting a global precedent.

Key elements that make this policy highly effective are its flexibility, long-term goals, and efficient implementation. By providing flexibility within the trading element, over allocation is inherently regulated which speaks to the fundamental efficiency of the system. The cap and trade system is key to diminishing the effects of GHG emissions and efficiency in alleviating the development of climate change. The long-term element allows for companies to invest wisely and take developing clean technologies into consideration while effectively reducing GHG emissions exponentially. While the EU ETS should be commended for its efforts, it should be noted that it will take a global approach to have an effective impact on climate change. I believe that it’s crucial for cap and trade systems to be employed globally, demanding industries to be aware of their emissions and impact while promoting clean technology adaptation.

Sources:

The European Union Emissions Trading System: A Succinct Review

Climate Action: The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) (http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/index_en.htm)

 

Comments Off on EU ETS (Sustainability Policies) / 16 Feb 2013 por Cianna Walker Carrillo
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EU ETS: The Positive Externalities of Cap & Trade

The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the largest and most aggressive climate change mitigation strategy the world has ever seen. Not only does it represent an actionable policy model that can stimulate and regulate regional emissions, but it also has sparked a series of other positive trends such as investment in low-carbon technologies, engagement with the developing world, and widespread structural change to some of the most traditional and polluting sectors of our contemporary economy (i.e. mining, airlines, and transportation). In this post, I will outline the key features of the EU ETS policy and then move into a discussion of the positive externalities that this climate action has had on other key activities for true climate change mitigation.

The EU ETS covers more than 11,000 power stations and industrial plants in 31 countries, as well as many airlines. The central principle is based on a regional “cap-and-trade” system, which has been phased in since 2005 with the ultimate goal of reducing emissions by 20% by 2020. The legislation has given way to a complex and comprehensive emissions trading scheme, enabling corporations and countries to receive or buy allowances in order to meet emissions standards.

This year marks the beginning of the third phase of the legislation, which includes a series of new features that are distinctive from the first and second phases — mainly a single EU-wide cap (rather than the former 27 national caps); an auctioning system for 40% of the allowances; and the inclusion of more sectors and types of gases. A key focus of the legislation is on gases that can be accurately measured and reported, thereby resulting in the policy’s strong focus on C02, some nitrous oxide emitters, and perfluorocarbons from the aluminum industry. As such, the full range of global greenhouse gases is not yet included in the legislation. Despite some relative shortcomings, the legislation has been an international model for climate action and has had ripple effects on other core activities toward a sustainable future — namely investment in low carbon technologies, engagement with the developing world, and widespread structural change to major polluting sectors.

The EU ETS policy has inspired corporations to invest in low carbon technologies in their own production lines, as well as boosting research and development to drive innovation. Although these trends are not yet widespread or mainstream, the effects of the EU ETS policy are encouraging a small segment of polluters to seriously redefine their business to suit long-term sustainability.

The second major effect has been the engagement of heavy polluters with the support of low-carbon projects in the developing world, essentially buying low carbon credits by supporting the sustainable development of developing and emerging economies. Not only is this benefitting the corporation’s needs to meet annual caps, but it is also inspiring worldwide shifts in the traditional notions of development (that economic growth requires dirty technology and aggressive conventional industrialization) toward a more sustainable and environmentally viable agenda.

Finally, the EU ETS climate action legislation is fundamentally changing business as usual — a shift that has otherwise been generally ineffective by soft law policies from international governing bodies (i.e. the United Nations) and global compacts (like the USA’s negation of the Kyoto Protocol requirements). Sectors such as the metal industry, mining, oil refineries, cooling and heat generation, and commercial aviation have had to radically reconsider their practices in order to reduce emissions and comply with the phased regulations.

If the EU ETS legislation continues to phase in as expected, the European Union will be home to one of the most aggressive and transformative climate change mitigation initiatives in human history. The present success of the legislation proves the cross-country potential for widespread mitigation and should pave the way for other key regional blocs (North America, South America, and the Middle East). However, the major threat to this strategy is China’s emission practices — despite the work of the rest of the world, the battle for climate change mitigation will assuredly be won or lost in Asia.

 

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Comments Off on EU ETS: The Positive Externalities of Cap & Trade / 16 Feb 2013 por Kelly Elizabeth Behrend
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I am leaving for..

I am leaving for one of the fastest growing countries of the world.
I am leaving for the country where one of my favorite Italian writers, Tiziano Terzani, lived for many years.
I am leaving for the world’s most populous country (more than 1.3 billions people).
I am leaving for a country that is the biggest CO2 emitter.
I am leaving for a developing country that owns the debts of the developed countries.
I am leaving for a country that is the worldwide leader investor in renewable energy technologies, but also the worst polluter.
I am leaving for a country that is losing its traditions for a fast economy expansion.
I am leaving for a country that will probably lead the global economy soon.

I am curious, excited and ready to see you CHINA!

 

 

As part of my Master program I will spend two weeks in Shanghai at Jiao Tong University, one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in China and also one of the biggest.

I am going to attend classes in the morning and visit companies in the afternoon.

Big expectations..my next post..from Shanghai!

Bye or maybe 再见!

 

Comments Off on I am leaving for.. / 15 Feb 2013 por Veronica Recanati
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Innovate, learn to cook tofu, or die!

Blog post for the subject Rural Development and Food Justice.

Innovate, learn to cook tofu, or die from starvation – these are the three general options I propose we will have in the 21st century with regards to the way we design our food systems and the way we eat (or don’t eat).

I will start with the most undesirable of the options. Option 1: food shortages, land conflict, famine, malnutrition and death from starvation for potentially billions of people. There is an old Chinese proverb that says “if you do not change direction you may end up where you are heading”. And according to the Oxfam Grow Report, we are heading into the perfect storm scenario for increasing world hunger: massive population growth, natural resource scarcity, environmental destruction and to top it off increasing threats from climate change, which will further undermine our already failing global food system. A food system which, at last estimate, already leaves nearly a billion people facing hunger as a daily reality. The current food system is inherently wasteful and environmentally destructive. Nothing has ravaged the earth’s natural environment (land, water, air) like modern industrial agriculture. For example, it is estimated that across the Latin America region, rainforest is cleared at a rate of 11 acres a minute in order to grow crops, like soy.

However, at the heart of this destructive agriculture drive is not our demand for tofu (soy) but it is our increasing global demand for meat and other animal products. There is a lot of talk about waste in the food distribution system…for example, tomatoes or apples being thrown out either because they have gone bad or because they don’t look pretty enough for supermarket shelves. While this is an important issue to be reconciled, I will argue that this is nothing compared to the scale of systematic misapplication of food resources wasted in the design and culture of our current food system. For example, a staggering 97% of the world’s soy crop is now fed to livestock. In other words, we are clearing our rainforests in Latin America to either graze animals or grow food to feed to animals…not to mention some other alarming facts about livestock productions in terms of air and water resources:

1)Amount of water required to make a hamburger: 2,400 litres

2)Contribution of livestock production to the greenhouse effect of climate change: 18% (transportation sector: 13%)

So on one hand, we have nearly a billion people living in hunger, and on the other hand we are feeding almost half of all the grain produced in the world to livestock? Animals are terribly inefficient converters of plant protein. For example, it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. During this conversion, not only do we have a net loss of food calories, we also waste our precious land and water resources, and this process contributes more to climate change than all our cars, trucks, boats, trains and planes.

So, if we could continue with this option into the future, it will be a race to the bottom of our natural resources, and it will be those at the bottom who will be hit the hardest. Therefore, how our food is produced is arguably as great of an environmental concern as the type of car we drive.

This bring us to Option 2: significantly decreasing our meat consumption, learning to cook tofu and adopting a mostly plant based diet. What has made humans such a successful species over the course of history is the ability to adapt our diet to our environment in order to survive. If ever there was a time when we needed to adapt our diet for our survival, the time is now. However, there is an old English proverb that says “you can’t teach an old dogs new tricks”. And our eating habits are deeply embedded in our culture and difficult to change. Unfortunately, I am increasingly skeptical about the ability of the current population to voluntarily quit eating meat – over the last 50 years, meat consumption per capita has grown exponentially. Even if the world’s meat consumption per capita stagnated, population growth alone would keep the absolute consumption steadily rising. The only thing that will seemingly stop this devastating trend is involuntary measures as a result of resource depletion. That is, it has been estimated that by 2050, if the world’s population wanted to eat the same amount of meat as the world’s rich countries now consume, using current production methods, we would need 67% more land than the earth has. Surely, we will want to avoid this forced diet change and catastrophic situation where we have destroyed our natural environment for the sake of steak.

To this effect, we now need to to start exploring new methods of meat production and this brings us to Option 3: innovation – meat without the cow and without the environmental impact. What has also made humans such a successful species over the course of history is our ability to innovate through technology in order to break the status quo and resolve our impending challenges. There is an old African proverb that says “when the music changes, so does the dance”. For example, 19th century cities depended on horses for transportation. A growing population and urban development meant more horse. More horses, meant more manure. Moreover, there was also increasing demand for valuable land to stable the horses and also increasing demand for hay to feed the horses, which required more farm land devoted to feeding horses instead of people, which in turn meant more horses coming into the cities to deliver the food and therefore more manure. At the end of the 19th century, it was predicted that by 1950 cities like New York and London were doomed to be buried alive in horse manure. However, thanks to the invention of the automobile, The Great Horse Manure Crisis never happened.

It is therefore our ability to innovate and embrace new technology that I believe will resolve our impending food/meat system crisis. Using the latest in stem-cell technology, scientists in the Netherlands have already grown the world’s first strips of cow muscle tissue, without the cow, with the goal of cooking up the world’s first lab-grown hamburger in the coming years. If this production method becomes commercially viable, what gives me the confidence that consumers will accept it, is the fact that if consumers really cared where their meat products on the supermarket shelves came from, why would we be increasingly consuming meat the way it is currently produced through industrial factory farming?

 

 

Comments Off on Innovate, learn to cook tofu, or die! / 13 Feb 2013 por Daniel Salter
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A History that Repeats itself: Issues of Land Ownership & Control

The classic American folk song of Woody Guthrie sings, “This land is your land, this land is my land… this land was made for you and me….” Though somewhat taken out of context for the purpose of my blog, I can’t help but wonder if our need for ownership has been so rooted within our western culture, that it is inevitable for problems to arise within land use development.

The basic needs of every human being consist of: water, food and shelter. Often added are clothing, education, sanitation and healthcare, however I believe when looking at many of the issues that humanity faces today such as food scarcity, energy accessibility, water sanitation & poverty; the root of the problem can be traced back to land use. I would propose in this case that an additional basic need of humanity is adequate land use management.

Undervalued and underestimated I will take two examples of the importance of land management at the macro level and then at the micro-level.

Land Grabs Today

As the world searches for solutions to solve problems as I mentioned above; a new issue arises, that I believe is a new model or form of colonialism, called “land grabs”. Land grabs, defined by Oxfam International as:

when governments, banks or private investors buy up huge plots of land to make equally huge profits…land deals are happening so quickly and on such a large scale that poor people are more vulnerable to the injustice of land grabbing than ever before.

What does this mean for rural communities in developing countries? For the people living in the areas it means they are displaced and left without land that provides them their basic needs.

Are we in the business of creating a problem for few but solving the problem for many? I don’t see this as the answer. We need to encourage proper land protection and management by governments against multinational corporations or developed countries, which do not create further inequalities.

Land Grabs in Hawaiian: The Great Mahele

I want to talk about the issues of land and agriculture facing Hawai’i today, but I think it would be unfair not to mention the history of land ownership in Hawai’i in order to get a complete picture of the ongoing struggle over land today.

As we speak about “land grabs” of this century, we can look back in history in many countries and areas and discover that this is not a new concept. In Hawai’i it was in 1848 that the Great Mahele occurred.

The Great Mahele of 1848, a division of the land into four categories: land belonging to the king, land belonging to the alii or chiefs, land that could be purchased by the foreigners who lived in Hawaii, and land worked by the commoners or makaainana.

It was divided and common Hawaiian people had the opportunity to file for their family land in order to obtain it. The catch? An idea pushed by foreign advisors to King Kamehameha III was a western way of thinking about land, to the people of Hawai’i, who did not hold the same values of land as they did, failed to meet the requirements in order to obtain the land in which their family had lived on for generations. Most of the land of Hawai’i was then snatched up by what we refer to today as, “The Big 5” wealthy corporations of that time that still to this day control much of Hawai’i because of this division.

Now, back to the present day: Hawai’i faces a challenge. Land is limited and highly valued and no longer exclusively by agricultural corporations, but by developers that if not protected against, they will happily replace agricultural lands with time share and hotels.

Can we have hope within our government?

According to the Hawai’i Department of Agriculture, 90,000 acres are designated as Important Agricutural Lands. Great news, right? Well, if we have learned anything from our past it is that history repeats itself, and as we have seen large conventional agricultural businesses dominate Hawai’i before, we need to be careful in what our state defines as good agricultural practices.

In fact, Hawai’is State Constitution mandates that

“The State shall conserve and protect agricultural lands, promote diversified agriculture, increase agricultural self sufficiency and assure the availability of agriculturally suitable lands.”

An amazing, progressive mandate within the constitution that foresaw the need for diversified agriculture and self-sufficiency of the state but what has been overlooked is who the transfer of the 90,000 acres of ag lands goes into. My fear is that without strict language in defining diversified agriculture and without adding sustainable practices, we will fall victim to the Big 5 of the future that not only Hawai’i should fear, but the world: Monsanto, Pioneer, DuPont, Dow & Syngenta.

In conclusion, I believe we would have to tell Woody Guthrie, that this land no longer belongs to ‘you and me’, but to the players of the game and it’s important for civil society to play in role in making our governments accountable and the transactions of land transfers transparent.

 

Bibliography & Links of interest:

Star Bulletin Archives: Profiles of the Big 5, then and now

Hawai’i State Legislature: Senate Bill 590 Relating to Agriculture

Mother Jones: The Top 5 Land-grabbing Countries

Honolulu Weekly: Farming the Future

 

Comments Off on A History that Repeats itself: Issues of Land Ownership & Control / 13 Feb 2013 por Ivory McClintock Kealani Pan
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Fighting Hunger is Much More than Promoting Cash-Transfers

Brazil has been considered a success case in reducing poverty, food insecurity and hunger. The World Bank’s report Declining Inequality in Latin America in the 2000s: the cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico released last October presents interesting findings on Brazil’s path in fighting poverty.

The report states that “depending on the poverty line, between 50 and 60 percent of the decline in extreme poverty can be attributed to the reduction in inequality.” From 2002 to 2009, the level of income among the bottom 10% of the Brazilian population increased by 7% per year, while the national average was 2.5% and the richest 10% of the population had an income improvement of 1.1% per year.

The most important conclusion regarding the inequality decline is that about 52% of it is the result of the enhancement on families’ labor income, while 32% of it come from donations or non-labor income. Although some conservative critics of the Bolsa Família Program could take the opportunity to highlight the ineffectiveness of governmental conditional cash-transfer policies, I consider these results very positive since they draw attention to the fact that Brazilian performance is not only based on one program, but it is a consequence of a much more comprehensive and sustainable approach called Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) Strategy.

Launched in 2003, the Fome Zero aims to secure universal access to food. It recognizes that food security and nutrition are the most basic requirements for social inclusion and citizenship. It tackles hunger and food insecurity through cross-governmental articulated policies resulting in more than 50 programs divided in 4 axes:

1) Access to Food – it includes the Bolsa Família, which is world’s largest conditional cash-transfer program providing income for more than 12.7 million families and benefiting more than 50 million people. It also comprises school meal programs, low-priced restaurants, community gardens, vitamin distribution and nutrition education.

2) Income Generation – it provides social and professional education, microcredit, and community organization.

3) Smalholder’s Agriculture – it offers low-interest microfinance, agricultural insurance and crop guarantees for family-based agriculture.

4) Social Articulation, Mobilization and Control – it involves social capacity building and multi-stakeholder partnerships.

I agree with Oxfam’s report Fighting Hunger in Brazil which explains that the main reasons behind Fome Zero’s strategy success are: “high-level political commitment, economic growth and labor reforms, managing powerful oppositional interests, external support and active civil society” So what is it missing for the country to be able to meet its target to eradicate extreme poverty by the beginning of 2014? What is necessary to improve the livelihood of 16.2 million people (8.5% of country’s population) who survive with less than USD 1.30 per day?

According to the Brazilian government, the answer is the Brasil Sem Miséria (Brazil Without Misery) Plan. In the first phase, the government intends to amplify the scope of Bolsa Família program, reaching 800 thousand more families who qualify to the benefit but due to lack of information, geographical isolation, or bureaucracy do not receive it. In the second phase, it plans to improve access to public services, especially education, health, running water, electricity and sewage. The third phase focuses on capacity building, broadening Fome Zero’s Income Generation program.

It is very important to notice that this plan strengthen the basis of sustainable development by introducing the environmental aspect. Through Bolsa Verde (Green) families who occupy priority areas for environmental conservation and live in extreme poverty receive a complementary conditional cash-transfer for employing sustainable use of natural resources.

 

Taking into account the Brazilian government’s recent track-record, I believe there shouldn’t be any skeptics.

 

Comments Off on Fighting Hunger is Much More than Promoting Cash-Transfers / 12 Feb 2013 por Andrea Mara Hanai
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Struggling with Undernourishment & Food Security

Continue developing my blog. I have a new post to share; it is an issue of rural development.

In the recent times many countries are being making progress in the fight against undernourishment all over the world.  We realize that according to some data published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), about 900 million, 14% of the world population stills having problems linked to malnutrition, and difficulties to have proper access to food markets.  The reasons of this situation is link to problems to meet a right level of food security.

Meanwhile the situation hits different regions of the world; the actions performed to battle this situation are link to some of the millennium developed goals announced some years ago, with the goal to promote the actions against these problems.

So, the main question that we have now is. ¿Does the efforts will allow cut the amount of people who are not able to reach the of food security?

The answer of this is quite complex because we have to take into account other factors who plays a strong role in this fight.  Poverty, Inequality and Food System are other facts that make us think that the situation is pretty complicated.

So, while I was thinking to write a post on this topic, I ask myself.  What are the key actions that we should adopt to improve the situation.  So I start to do some research to understand what will the path for the next years and after reading many articles. I found an idea that in my point of view will be significantly important, if we want to enhance the food security level around the world.

First of all, if we understand that the food security and nutrition is a basic human need, we should put this in the centerpiece of the post-development agenda.  Right now The Post 2015 Framework should include the objective of the Food Security and Nutrition for everyone, considering the four pillars that make sure availability, access, use and supply stability food.

Food systems are an essential element to understand the concept of sustainability. We have to think about that we cannot surrender to the current situation.  Therefore, it is necessary an innovative approach, that guarantee and promote in a consistent and complementary way to take aboard all actions in all sectors.  The struggle focused on other topics to as extreme inequality in different regions but the important thing is to make solid actions.

If we look to the potential benefits to do so, we will find that wealth, property and natural resources can be better distributed between and within countries, with special attention to the rights and needs of most marginalized groups.

What we need to do all this? In my point of view, we should guarantee that these topics must be in the center of the Millennium Development Goals and post-2015 Development Agenda, with the idea of motivate political action need to make sure the right to food to everyone and the inequities of the global food system.

Once, we can reach a global commitment on this matter we have to think about the structure that supports all this, the food markets and the structural problems of the global food as post-harvest losses due to waste, which now account a strong margin of global food production.

Finally, I would like to point out that markets and the international food trade have a special role on to help on this matter.

The moment to enhance the regulations has come, the increase in speculation and financing of markets agricultural has to be controlled, if we want to make real improvements.

Thanks for reading…

Comments Off on Struggling with Undernourishment & Food Security / 10 Feb 2013 por Carlos Omar Garcia Pascual
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Project Management: Why do projects fail?

Project management is based on planning, monitoring, motivating and managing resources in order to achieve an objective in a specific time frame with a specific budget.

It is quite challenging to achieve a goal accomplishing all the requirements and deliver results in time and within the forecasted costs. For these reasons the chance a project fails is quite high.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers research, only 2.5% of 200 companies in 30 different countries fully completed their projects.

Another research published in the Harvard Business Review (1.471 IT projects analyzed), showed that only 27% of projects was completed but 1 project every 6 had 200% over costs and 70% schedule overrun.

The Opera House in Sydney, Euro Disney, the Channel Tunnel are some examples of projects that ended up costing almost the double of the initial estimation.

So..why do  projects fail?

Here some reasons:

1) Stakeholders. The causes of a possible failure are often related to the stakeholders expectations. A proper stakeholder analysis is therefore essential during the project management in order to understand the needs, the constrains, the commitment, the perception and the authority of all the people actively involved in the project.

2) Governance and senior management commitment. The project manager needs to have a high knowledge of project management and needs to understand the business and technical areas related to the project while having a cross collaboration/communication with the management in the company. In order to have an effective role the PM needs to have the full commitment of the senior management and a clear governance structure. Responsibilities, roles and expectations need to be defined at the very beginning and respected during all the process.

3) Communication. Sometimes a very well planned project doesn’t guarantee the success. It is necessary to keep a fluid and transparent communication across the teams involved and it also essential to listen to the people involved in order to understand their motivations, problems, doubts or needs. There are several techniques to improve the communication in project management. During a workshop I attended I have seen the Scrum, an agile development methodology, applied to social projects. The daily scrum sessions are effective tools for keeping an open and transparent communication across all the team members and to track the progress of the project. Answering to simple questions like:

• What have you done since yesterday?
• What are you planning to do today?
• Any impediments blocks?

could be a useful instrument in order to keep a clear communication and proceed toward a successful project accomplishment.

4) Resources. A lack of resources represents many time a reason of failure. Very often companies decide to reduce the internal costs in terms of human resources while keeping the initial goals and without resizing and re-distributing the workload. The consequences are overwork, lack of skilled people, lack of motivation, stress and a possible failure. I know, for example, a case of an IT company that wanted to deliver a new hardware product. Due to the overall financial crisis the company was not able to hire new people or to allocate extra resources to the specific 3-year project and the product entered the market later than expected facing the aggressive competitors that managed better the project and entered the market earlier.

5) Requirements. A lack of  clear requirements represents very often a project management failure. Poor requirements mean poor development and poor results. The stakeholders expectations and deliverables have to be carefully analyzed in order to understand the specific requirements.

6) Planning. Sometimes time and money constriction push the project to the execution phase too early. Jumping into the action without a bottom-up, top-down analysis and without a meticulous planning and evaluation of all the variables bring very often the project to a failure. in addition the impact of an error individuating during the planning phase is much smaller than the impact of a problem during the execution phase, in terms of time, costs and resources.

 

 

7) Risk management. Risk identification and management sometime are underestimated.
It is not possible to consider all the possible variables and the unexpected problems that may occur, but the more a project includes an accurate adaptation and mitigation plan, the better.

 

Comments Off on Project Management: Why do projects fail? / 10 Feb 2013 por Veronica Recanati
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Subsidies, Trade, and the Broken Food System

You have probably heard about it before: The Broken Food System. Our world’s ability to produce a surplus of food, juxtaposed with our inability to feed all the world’s people.

Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world every year intended for human consumption gets lost or wasted.

If just one-fourth of the food currently wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed the 870 million hungry people in the world.

How does this happen?

In a recent report, Oxfam has laid out several reasons. These include the intense pressure on agriculture from climate change, ecological degradation, population growth, rising energy prices, rising demand for meat and dairy products, and competition for land from biofuels, industry, and urbanization.

Yet one specifically interesting reason for structural hunger and inequality in the food system comes from its design.  The unfair trade rules and domestic protectionist policies have “rigged” the rules of the game in favor of the rich, at the expense of the poor.  These unjust policies have brought the food system to its breaking point.

Trade:

According to the neoliberal policies supported by organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, developing markets have been pressured to open their agriculture sectors to international trade by removing import tariffs. This policy opens small farmers and markets up to the volatile global prices, increasing their vulnerability. This forced liberalization of trade in developing countries allows foreign companies to enter these small markets and compete with local suppliers and farmers.

If that weren’t unfair enough, many “rich” countries, like the US and the European Union, have continued to maintain very strong domestic subsidy programs in order to protect their agriculture businesses from competition in the global markets.

A bit ironic, don’t you think?

Subsidies:

When “rich” countries heavily subsidize domestic agriculture, companies produce large surpluses of food stocks; the more they produce the more subsidy money they receive from the government. Often, the surplus of food is then “dumped” onto the global markets, bringing down the price of food in developing countries, and pushing local farmers out of a job. The price of the competing food coming from “rich” countries is too low for local farmers to make a profit. So, local farmers go out of business and become consumers of food, rather than producers.

Therefore, developing countries become increasingly dependent on food stocks from their “rich” neighbors. So, when the global food supply gets low – as it did in 2008 – and prices begin to rise, poor communities cannot afford to pay for basic food.

Add in the additional factors affecting food insecurity (bad weather, land degradation, increasing energy prices, population growth and competition for land) and poor communities can find themselves in a real state of vulnerability.

But, these policies have to be helping the “Rich” Countries, right?

On top of the fact that these subsidies and trade policies destroy food systems and security in developing countries, they are not actually benefiting many people in developed countries, either.

Citizens in the US and the EU are paying for these subsidies – twice. They first pay through their taxes, and then through higher food prices. According to an Oxfam report, in 2009 “the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) added €79.5bn to tax bills and another €36.2bn to food bills. According to one calculation, it costs a typical European family of four almost €1,000 a year.”

So who is benefiting from this system?

In Europe, about 80% of government direct income support goes to the top 20% of the agricultural sector – mainly big landowners and agribusiness companies. In the USA, 4% of farm owners collectively own about half of the farm land. “A few hundred companies – traders, processors, manufacturers, and retailers – control 70% of the choices and decisions in the food system globally, including those concerning key resources such as land, water, seeds and technologies, and infrastructure.”:

The future success of our global food system relies on our ability to correct these systemic issues and set the rules of the game so that everyone plays on a level playing field.

Without systemic change, the future will likely look very similar to the present.

Comments Off on Subsidies, Trade, and the Broken Food System / 06 Feb 2013 por Amy Blyth
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