Show on Global Agriculture and Trade Policy

December 25, 2012
Podcast

This show featured noted Indian Journalist P. Sainath and International Program Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Karen Hansen-Kuhn. We speak about rural agriculture and poverty and the real effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies. Subsidies and trade policies have led to failing farms around the world and farmers committing suicide in India at alarming rates, over 275,000 suicides so far. Karen speaks about efforts to include the views and needs of farmers in trade negotiations and what fair trade looks like.

Guests:

Palagummi Sainath:

Palagummi Sainath is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts, is an award winning Indian development journalist – a term he himself avoids, instead preferring to call himself a ‘rural reporter’, or simply a ‘reporter’ – and photojournalist focusing on social problems, rural affairs, poverty and the aftermaths of globalization in India. He spends between 270 and 300 days a year in the rural interior (in 2006, over 300 days) and has done so for the past 14 years. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu, and the website India Together has been archiving some of his work in The Hindu daily for the past six years. Amartya Sen has called him “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger”. He is also published in Counter Punch. He is the author of “Everybody Loves a Good Drought.”

Karen Hansen-Kuhn:

Karen Hansen-Kuhn joined IATP in September 2009. She has been working on trade and economic justice since the beginning of the NAFTA debate, focusing especially on bringing developing countries’ perspectives into public debates on trade, food security and economic policy. She has published articles on U.S. trade and agriculture policies, the impacts of U.S. biofuels policies on food security, and women and food crises. She writes for the Think Forward Blog. She was the international coordinator of the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART), a U.S. multisectoral coalition promoting just and sustainable trade, until 2005. After that, she was policy director at the U.S. office of ActionAid, an international development organization. She holds a B.S. in international business from the University of Colorado and a master’s degree in International Development from The American University.