#AD2019 - DAY 1 IN 1 MIN

Selected experiences with GMOs in industrialized and developing countries show that the promise of bioengineering for strengthening food security cannot materialize unless and until GMOs are accepted by the vast majority of consumers as being safe and environmentally friendly. To date, the main effort has been on the supply side: bioengineered plants have desirable traits helpful to farmers, e.g., increased yields, resistance to pests, resilience to weather extremes in a warming wor ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new vulnerabilities in social, infrastructure, and governance systems. In the first months of the pandemic, there was a genuine concern about the capacity of the Global South to contain the spread of the virus. African cities were particularly vulnerable, with some experts1, including the head of WHO2, predicting a catastrophe for the continent. Despite the structural and chronic challenges that African cities face, including informality, poverty, a ...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on Africa, focusing on the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, based on information available as of October 2020. We first identify the two key long-term issues of the SSA countries before the crisis: resource dependency and slow productivity growth. COVID-19 has hit SSA countries hard, causing human and economic destruction and wiping out economic progress from the last decade. Instead of growing at 2.9% in 2020, as ...

While the economic recovery around the world remains uneven, fragile, and unbalanced across sectors, financial markets are generally doing very well, thanks! In the United States, only half of the unemployment caused by the pandemic last year has been reversed, while stock markets continued to boom. Of course, this largely reflected the extraordinary support given by monetary authorities since March last year. As in the period after the 2007-08 global financial crisis, voices have ...