Join PLAAS for a webinar on “What do you mean ‘we’? Activists, academics and NGOs in civil society coalitions”. Many activists have argued that the crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic also presents an important opportunity for change, and that now is the time that movements of poor and marginalised people, progressive activists, and critical social theorists…
Category: Blogs
timely and short writing samples, opinion pieces, review and reflections, etc.
The COVID-19 pandemic and complex effects on farmers and food-supply chains: an early dispatch from India.
R. Venkat Ramanujam and Amit John Kurien Agriculture’s contribution to the Indian economy is critical and complex. It contributes 16% of India’s GDP but supports between 50-60% of the labour force and up to 70% of all rural households (see a quick overview here). Livelihoods in agriculture have been stressed for some time now due…
How Ghana’s COVID-19 measures locked down ‘food for the working poor’
Ghana announced its first two imported cases of COVID-19 on the 12th of March 2020. By the 7th of May, the cases had shot up to 3,091 with 18 deaths. Accra, the capital city has become the epicentre of the outbreak. To contain the spread, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) shut down and fumigated all markets…
In Paraguay, COVID-19 exposes the problems of land concentration: food imports and the limits of policies for peasant support
The government of Paraguay adopted preventive sanitary measures on March 10th, prohibiting activities that gather many people, and, later, on March 28th, adopted stronger measures for isolation. On March 13th, the government announced an increase in the value of the cash transfer programs to the vulnerable and senior population (Tekoporã and Adulto Mayor). There were…
Essential work but not essential workers?
Chile is in the WHO’s stage 4 of the pandemic, meaning the transmission of the virus among the community has become uncontrolled and widespread (WHO, 2009). Santiago’s metropolitan area, where nearly half of the Chilean population reside, was the seed of the infection in the country, as the middle and upper class returned from Europe…