Healthcare: Not just another business

Health | Ano Lobb | Friday 20th November 2009

A reader comment on a posting about electronic medical records (EMR) suggests that medicine needs to follow other industries into the digital age. This is likely inevitable: Medical record keeping is bound to become more digitized over time. The primary reasons are monetary: It facilitates the generation of bills to send to patients and payers, the jury is still out on whether it increases quali
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Leading News and Opinion

	Don't forget food in the new Climate Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Friday 20th November 2009 Sometimes, some things are so basic we forget about them - including forgetting to plan to include them in the future. We assume they will always be there. Until, suddenly, they are not. What if food was like that? Fear decades, agriculture has been on the back burner of much of the international agenda. Recently, that has changed, as some of my past posts on sustainable development and agriculture have shown. But of particular concern is the extent to which agriculture has been left out of the climate change debate. In short: it has been left out, and this is really bad. Because we gotta eat. Sustainable development and green economies need to include food security - lest we have riots, or maybe wars, famines, hunger, misery, starvation - all those things that happen to people who don't have enough food and who don't know where or how they are going to get their next meal. But climate change negotiations do not, now, include attention on agriculture. Which is why Nora Ourabah Haddad of the Internatioanl Federation of Agriculture and representing Farming First (about which I've written other posts) has been paying close attention to the Climate negotiations. I spoke to her right after she had been in Barcelona, trying to support the process of mainstreaming agriculture into the text. Read More

	What is Food Sovereignty? Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 20th November 2009 Localization has become the mantra of many people who are concerned about issues like peak oil and climate change. It's a matter of self-reliance. How can we develop communities that can better serve our needs: our need to clothe ourselves, our need to move around, our need to eat, our need to have health care. The list goes on and on. The need for food sovereignty is often bandied about. What is food sovereignty? Like the sovereignty of a nation, the idea of food sovereignty is the idea that we must do more within our own national boundaries to feed ourselves. In my world, these boundaries could also extend across nations but between communities. In Canada, we have many ties with our United States neighbors, and the ecosystem that I live in spreads across our national boundaries into Washington as well. To me, that's local too. Why support food sovereignty? Well, we're starting to rethink the distances that we ship food, the ethics and production of the food that we ship. It's not just an ethical conundrum either. As oil prices rise, we may be pushed into local eating through economic necessity, and it would be useful to have the capacity to respond. What enables a community to become more self-reliant and to develop sustainable sources of local food? First of all, community members need to develop an understanding of the land, which means developing an understanding of the general climate and the very specific neighborhood and backyard-level issues that accompany growing food. Is the area rainy much of the year? When is the first and last frost? What crops grow well in a semi-shade backyard? Read More

	Getting to the Meat of the Matter Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 20th November 2009 I am an omnivore. My teeth are an omnivore's teeth. Not so long ago, I was a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian for many, many years until I needed to limit my carbohydrate intake. I also became a locavore, and as I began to source my food from local farmers I also worked to decrease my reliance on food that grows far from my home - food like soybeans. I became an omnivore once again, and I struggle with this. As a pet owner, I have a hard time eating meat. However, the real reason that I became vegetarian was the profound sense that our bodies are meant to eat much less meat than North Americans eat today. North American economies are hurting right now, but we must admit that our societies have a very high basic level of wealth. Even those of us who are struggling financially can use the resources that other, wealthier members of society have left behind. We can shop at thrift stores that process immense quantities of unwanted items. We can find free goods through Craigslist and Freecycle. This embodied social wealth also extends to food. We can buy meat, even if that meat is a hot dog. All of this meat consumption translates into 60 billion food animals. Where do these food animals live? While some live in urban areas or in the pig pens of small farmers, eating scrap food, many of them live in areas that could support crops and they eat food that could be eaten by people. This poses an environmental conundrum for the ethical eater: is meat consumption completely antithetical to creating a sustainable food system, or is it possible to eat meat and still Read More

	Are Interviews Effective? Responsible Careers \| Cynthia Stringer \| Thursday 19th November 2009 Think back to the worst interview you've ever had. What was happening inside yourself? From the interviewer or the situation? What were you doing that didn't work well? What did you do very well? I recommend you explore the interview for all positions whether full, part-time or contract work in three separate phases. Your interview will either secure your offer or not. I recommend that you hold in context the interview as two things: to explore whether working at that company is a good fit for you and second to have fun and clarify your offerings and your professional value and contribution. The three phases of interviewing: 1. Research 2. Reality 3. Respond Before embarking on any interviews the first step is clarity your value, what you can do for them: your accomplishments, your unique offering, and what you are looking for. Take the time to get yourself clear and focused and apply for positions which you know you have a high probability for. This increases your confidence and saves time. Find out about the company and people interviewing you. Take the time to do thorough research on the company in the paper, on Linkedin, on Facebook, Twitter and by your informational interviews. The more you know what is current the more creditable and professional you are. Remember that interviews are a process of observing, sharing, responding, and impressing. The most comprehensive way to do all of this is to do your research. Read More

	MOBILE-izing Revolution Sustainable Finance \| Johanna Hoopes \| Thursday 19th November 2009 Our world is going mobile. Cell phones have quickly evolved from high-tech toys of the rich to a staple of development in emerging markets. Phones are becoming a tool to overcome distance, connect people with each other and access information across the world. In rural areas, mobile phones allow farmers to monitor crop prices, herders to check the weather, and migrant workers to transfer funds to their families millions of miles away. According to the Economist, more than 4 billion cell phones are now in use around the globe, and 75% of them are located in developing countries. The proliferation of cell phones is creating new challenges and opportunities across the telecom value chain. Network operators, entrepreneurs, and end users are all innovating to create value and share the widespread benefits of this revolutionary technology. Network operators in emerging economies must find cost-effective ways of serving significantly lower income consumers. Indian mobile operators have made the most effective inroads to support a huge population with limited infrastructure and extremely low income by employing a "managed capacity" model. When moving to a new area, the operator requests a limited amount of calling capacity and pays for it NET 90 at the agreed price per unit of capacity. That leaves IT vendors such as IBM to manage the base station and customer service systems while running the mobile networks is handled by Ericsson and Nokia. This highly outsourced model allows them to transfer most of the risk to other parties and to focus on marketing and sales. Read More

	Beyond the Drawing Board Health \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Thursday 19th November 2009 Some days I take a look at the world, and feel an overwhelming desire to give up the superhero gig, pack my bags and wander the planet experiencing as many of its wonders as possible before the Greenland ice shelf melts and turns once peaceful nations into Mad Max styled dystopias. This does not represent the sort of cheerful thinking that the development world needs. My frustration stems not from the belief that we can't bring about the necessary changes, but rather from the reality that though there are tens of thousands of amazing ideas on how to create a sustainable planet, most of those ideas seem stuck in neutral. Meanwhile, society en masse pushes forward doing the same old unsustainable things, only faster, bringing us ever closer to the teetering edge. Take for example cleaner energy. In the places where wind works, for example, it can be price comparable with burning coal or oil when one removes the benefits of government subsidies. Yet, in the United States anyway wind is still struggling to gain a foothold. The government continues to push for continued exploitation of coal and natural gas even when extracting those resources represents the potential destruction of a habituated region (Appalachia), as in the case of coal, or when those resources means exposing a local population to radioactive water supplies (Ithaca, NY) and no clear idea on how to deal with that radioactive waste. Read More

	The Zoning Hurdles to Alternative Green Building Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Wednesday 18th November 2009 One of the biggest hurdles facing alternative green building techniques is that of building zoning and development regulations. The International Code Council (ICC) which says it 'serves to protect the health, safety, and welfare of people by creating safe buildings and communities' by 'providing the highest quality codes, standards, products and services for all concerned with the safety and performance of the built environment' is often the guiding force of many of the building regulations which prioritize standardization. In the process however, it stifles innovation, creativity and sustainable building practices. Although building zoning is often determined on the county or municipal level, supposedly to separate buildings from uses that may be incompatible (for example putting an elementary school next to a toxic waste dump), as well as to ensure that a building is safe for human habitation, the ICC's heavy influence can be felt in zoning laws that despite regional climate differences look more similar than not. How is this manifested? Many alternative house designs are designed to heat, cool and ventilate passively without external power or mechanical systems. Most building codes, however, are not designed for that technology and thus require alternative home builders to prove, that not only will the house be safe but that it will also perform within extremely narrow comfort parameters. For example the International Building Code requires that interior spaces that are intended for human occupancy need to be able to maintain a minimum interior temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit at a point 3 feet above the floor. Not 65 degrees or even 60 but precisely 68 degrees. Without such precise proof, builders are required to add backup mechanical systems (which are costly to install and maintain). Read More

	Electronic health records: Medical miracles or digital disaster? Health \| Ano Lobb \| Tuesday 17th November 2009 Electronic medical records (EMR) are digitized versions of the paper folders where your doctor squirrels away your health information. They are increasingly being looked to as a solution to what ails modern healthcare. Ideally these digital records can be shared quickly and efficiently among providers, can be programmed to remind doctors about test results or to warn about medication interactions, and can eliminate that ever present problem of illegible handwriting. These are all good things, but it's unlikely that EMR are the solution. To begin with, evidence suggesting that EMR can increase quality and reduce costs within the US healthcare system comes primarily from studies at flagship institutions such as Intermountain Healthcare: systems that already practiced stellar care, and had the ability, motivation, finances and structure that allowed them to successfully integrate EMR into existing operations. Some of the challenges tarnishing the promise of EMR: 1. Cost: Transitioning from a paper system to an electronic one is expensive. Estimates range widely, anywhere from $20,000 to $70,000 per doctor's office, more if you are a hospital. 2. Where's the system? Let's assume that sufficient safeguards can be built in to ensure that the records are only available to those with permission (a very big assumption in its own right.) In ordered to increase care coordination by enabling quick and easy data sharing, all doctors, hospitals and clinics need to be tied into the same system. That can only happen if all EMRs are linked together. With literally dozens of systems currently available and in operation, that is not the case. Information remains squirreled away in digital silos, inaccessible to the network of providers that deliver modern care. Read More

	Putting a Price on Reputation Sustainable Finance \| Johanna Hoopes \| Tuesday 17th November 2009 Many companies account for marketing and CSR as expenditures, rather than investments. The vast majority of leading firms seem to agree that the benefits of these activities far outweigh the costs. But, arriving at the exact value of those benefits is not so simple. Brand equity can loosely be defined as the level of consumer brand awareness and the type of images consumers associate with a brand. A consistent brand image is essential to prevent brand diffusion. Internally, financial analysts often value brand as the amount of incoming cash flow that can be attributed to the brand, while accountants see it as the perpetuity value of licensing revenue. The real trick is that all employees - purchasing marketing, accounting and finance managers - must be on board with the same notion of brand valuation as an intangible asset in order to properly understand and improve a company's reputation. Interbrand, a London based firm, is changing the way corporations value their brand. Interbrand uses highly specialized economic valuation techniques. They first identify all the segments of brand. For example, when valuing Nike they look at tennis, football, and golf as unique brand elements because they appeal to various customer demographics. Then, they analyze the company's cash flows to determine what percentage of earnings can actually be attributed to each brand, thus deriving "brand specific earnings." Interbrand triangulates this approach by evaluating the brand's strength in relation to its rivals on seven dimensions - market growth, stability, leadership, trend, support, diversification, protection. Taking an even deeper look, they calculate the net present value of future earnings and predict the amount of brand risk based on the future stream of cash flows. Read More

	Big Business, Hunger, and putting farmers first Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Monday 16th November 2009 "The world faces two big challenges: how to ensure food security (including ending hunger) and how to feed a growing population." That's not a quote from an NGO - that's a quote from Howard Minigh, President and CEO of CropLife International, who spoke to me about businesses growing role in the global fight against hunger. Big business is talking about sustainable development- and it doesn't look like it is just talk. CropLife International is a collection of Big Companies engaged in plant science - that's fertilizer, biotechnology, improved seeds, and other agricultural inputs. CropLife mostly focuses on encouraging policy that supports some of these big companies - names that you are probably with even if you are not a farmer, such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Dupont. Part of CropLife has been to support the process not only of driving policy that is supportive of the plant scientists, but also in working with USAID to support farmers and communities in Latin America to train them about safe and appropriate use of pesticides to reduce the risks to those communities - a necessity if one is to take the principles of sustainable development seriously. Known in some circles as being primarily profit driven, these companies are part of the relatively new public-private-farmers-scientists partnership, Farmers First, which places the farmer at the heart of the solution to many of our developmental and food security problems. I've been impressed with - and covered - the work this coalition has been doing for the past year or so. Read More

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	Don't forget food in the new Climate Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Friday 20th November 2009 Sometimes, some things are so basic we forget about them - including forgetting to plan to include them in the future. We assume they will always be there. Until, suddenly, they are not. What if food was like that? Fear decades, agriculture has been on the back burner of much of the international agenda. Recently, that has changed, as some of my past posts on sustainable development and agriculture have shown. But of particular concern is the extent to which agriculture has been left out of the climate change debate. In short: it has been left out, and this is really bad. Because we gotta eat. Sustainable development and green economies need to include food security - lest we have riots, or maybe wars, famines, hunger, misery, starvation - all those things that happen to people who don't have enough food and who don't know where or how they are going to get their next meal. But climate change negotiations do not, now, include attention on agriculture. Which is why Nora Ourabah Haddad of the Internatioanl Federation of Agriculture and representing Farming First (about which I've written other posts) has been paying close attention to the Climate negotiations. I spoke to her right after she had been in Barcelona, trying to support the process of mainstreaming agriculture into the text. Read More

	What is Food Sovereignty? Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 20th November 2009 Localization has become the mantra of many people who are concerned about issues like peak oil and climate change. It's a matter of self-reliance. How can we develop communities that can better serve our needs: our need to clothe ourselves, our need to move around, our need to eat, our need to have health care. The list goes on and on. The need for food sovereignty is often bandied about. What is food sovereignty? Like the sovereignty of a nation, the idea of food sovereignty is the idea that we must do more within our own national boundaries to feed ourselves. In my world, these boundaries could also extend across nations but between communities. In Canada, we have many ties with our United States neighbors, and the ecosystem that I live in spreads across our national boundaries into Washington as well. To me, that's local too. Why support food sovereignty? Well, we're starting to rethink the distances that we ship food, the ethics and production of the food that we ship. It's not just an ethical conundrum either. As oil prices rise, we may be pushed into local eating through economic necessity, and it would be useful to have the capacity to respond. What enables a community to become more self-reliant and to develop sustainable sources of local food? First of all, community members need to develop an understanding of the land, which means developing an understanding of the general climate and the very specific neighborhood and backyard-level issues that accompany growing food. Is the area rainy much of the year? When is the first and last frost? What crops grow well in a semi-shade backyard? Read More

	Getting to the Meat of the Matter Sustainable Food \| Tricia Edgar \| Friday 20th November 2009 I am an omnivore. My teeth are an omnivore's teeth. Not so long ago, I was a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian for many, many years until I needed to limit my carbohydrate intake. I also became a locavore, and as I began to source my food from local farmers I also worked to decrease my reliance on food that grows far from my home - food like soybeans. I became an omnivore once again, and I struggle with this. As a pet owner, I have a hard time eating meat. However, the real reason that I became vegetarian was the profound sense that our bodies are meant to eat much less meat than North Americans eat today. North American economies are hurting right now, but we must admit that our societies have a very high basic level of wealth. Even those of us who are struggling financially can use the resources that other, wealthier members of society have left behind. We can shop at thrift stores that process immense quantities of unwanted items. We can find free goods through Craigslist and Freecycle. This embodied social wealth also extends to food. We can buy meat, even if that meat is a hot dog. All of this meat consumption translates into 60 billion food animals. Where do these food animals live? While some live in urban areas or in the pig pens of small farmers, eating scrap food, many of them live in areas that could support crops and they eat food that could be eaten by people. This poses an environmental conundrum for the ethical eater: is meat consumption completely antithetical to creating a sustainable food system, or is it possible to eat meat and still Read More

	Are Interviews Effective? Responsible Careers \| Cynthia Stringer \| Thursday 19th November 2009 Think back to the worst interview you've ever had. What was happening inside yourself? From the interviewer or the situation? What were you doing that didn't work well? What did you do very well? I recommend you explore the interview for all positions whether full, part-time or contract work in three separate phases. Your interview will either secure your offer or not. I recommend that you hold in context the interview as two things: to explore whether working at that company is a good fit for you and second to have fun and clarify your offerings and your professional value and contribution. The three phases of interviewing: 1. Research 2. Reality 3. Respond Before embarking on any interviews the first step is clarity your value, what you can do for them: your accomplishments, your unique offering, and what you are looking for. Take the time to get yourself clear and focused and apply for positions which you know you have a high probability for. This increases your confidence and saves time. Find out about the company and people interviewing you. Take the time to do thorough research on the company in the paper, on Linkedin, on Facebook, Twitter and by your informational interviews. The more you know what is current the more creditable and professional you are. Remember that interviews are a process of observing, sharing, responding, and impressing. The most comprehensive way to do all of this is to do your research. Read More

	MOBILE-izing Revolution Sustainable Finance \| Johanna Hoopes \| Thursday 19th November 2009 Our world is going mobile. Cell phones have quickly evolved from high-tech toys of the rich to a staple of development in emerging markets. Phones are becoming a tool to overcome distance, connect people with each other and access information across the world. In rural areas, mobile phones allow farmers to monitor crop prices, herders to check the weather, and migrant workers to transfer funds to their families millions of miles away. According to the Economist, more than 4 billion cell phones are now in use around the globe, and 75% of them are located in developing countries. The proliferation of cell phones is creating new challenges and opportunities across the telecom value chain. Network operators, entrepreneurs, and end users are all innovating to create value and share the widespread benefits of this revolutionary technology. Network operators in emerging economies must find cost-effective ways of serving significantly lower income consumers. Indian mobile operators have made the most effective inroads to support a huge population with limited infrastructure and extremely low income by employing a "managed capacity" model. When moving to a new area, the operator requests a limited amount of calling capacity and pays for it NET 90 at the agreed price per unit of capacity. That leaves IT vendors such as IBM to manage the base station and customer service systems while running the mobile networks is handled by Ericsson and Nokia. This highly outsourced model allows them to transfer most of the risk to other parties and to focus on marketing and sales. Read More

	Beyond the Drawing Board Health \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Thursday 19th November 2009 Some days I take a look at the world, and feel an overwhelming desire to give up the superhero gig, pack my bags and wander the planet experiencing as many of its wonders as possible before the Greenland ice shelf melts and turns once peaceful nations into Mad Max styled dystopias. This does not represent the sort of cheerful thinking that the development world needs. My frustration stems not from the belief that we can't bring about the necessary changes, but rather from the reality that though there are tens of thousands of amazing ideas on how to create a sustainable planet, most of those ideas seem stuck in neutral. Meanwhile, society en masse pushes forward doing the same old unsustainable things, only faster, bringing us ever closer to the teetering edge. Take for example cleaner energy. In the places where wind works, for example, it can be price comparable with burning coal or oil when one removes the benefits of government subsidies. Yet, in the United States anyway wind is still struggling to gain a foothold. The government continues to push for continued exploitation of coal and natural gas even when extracting those resources represents the potential destruction of a habituated region (Appalachia), as in the case of coal, or when those resources means exposing a local population to radioactive water supplies (Ithaca, NY) and no clear idea on how to deal with that radioactive waste. Read More

	The Zoning Hurdles to Alternative Green Building Sustainable Development \| Kendra Pierre-Louis \| Wednesday 18th November 2009 One of the biggest hurdles facing alternative green building techniques is that of building zoning and development regulations. The International Code Council (ICC) which says it 'serves to protect the health, safety, and welfare of people by creating safe buildings and communities' by 'providing the highest quality codes, standards, products and services for all concerned with the safety and performance of the built environment' is often the guiding force of many of the building regulations which prioritize standardization. In the process however, it stifles innovation, creativity and sustainable building practices. Although building zoning is often determined on the county or municipal level, supposedly to separate buildings from uses that may be incompatible (for example putting an elementary school next to a toxic waste dump), as well as to ensure that a building is safe for human habitation, the ICC's heavy influence can be felt in zoning laws that despite regional climate differences look more similar than not. How is this manifested? Many alternative house designs are designed to heat, cool and ventilate passively without external power or mechanical systems. Most building codes, however, are not designed for that technology and thus require alternative home builders to prove, that not only will the house be safe but that it will also perform within extremely narrow comfort parameters. For example the International Building Code requires that interior spaces that are intended for human occupancy need to be able to maintain a minimum interior temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit at a point 3 feet above the floor. Not 65 degrees or even 60 but precisely 68 degrees. Without such precise proof, builders are required to add backup mechanical systems (which are costly to install and maintain). Read More

	Electronic health records: Medical miracles or digital disaster? Health \| Ano Lobb \| Tuesday 17th November 2009 Electronic medical records (EMR) are digitized versions of the paper folders where your doctor squirrels away your health information. They are increasingly being looked to as a solution to what ails modern healthcare. Ideally these digital records can be shared quickly and efficiently among providers, can be programmed to remind doctors about test results or to warn about medication interactions, and can eliminate that ever present problem of illegible handwriting. These are all good things, but it's unlikely that EMR are the solution. To begin with, evidence suggesting that EMR can increase quality and reduce costs within the US healthcare system comes primarily from studies at flagship institutions such as Intermountain Healthcare: systems that already practiced stellar care, and had the ability, motivation, finances and structure that allowed them to successfully integrate EMR into existing operations. Some of the challenges tarnishing the promise of EMR: 1. Cost: Transitioning from a paper system to an electronic one is expensive. Estimates range widely, anywhere from $20,000 to $70,000 per doctor's office, more if you are a hospital. 2. Where's the system? Let's assume that sufficient safeguards can be built in to ensure that the records are only available to those with permission (a very big assumption in its own right.) In ordered to increase care coordination by enabling quick and easy data sharing, all doctors, hospitals and clinics need to be tied into the same system. That can only happen if all EMRs are linked together. With literally dozens of systems currently available and in operation, that is not the case. Information remains squirreled away in digital silos, inaccessible to the network of providers that deliver modern care. Read More

	Putting a Price on Reputation Sustainable Finance \| Johanna Hoopes \| Tuesday 17th November 2009 Many companies account for marketing and CSR as expenditures, rather than investments. The vast majority of leading firms seem to agree that the benefits of these activities far outweigh the costs. But, arriving at the exact value of those benefits is not so simple. Brand equity can loosely be defined as the level of consumer brand awareness and the type of images consumers associate with a brand. A consistent brand image is essential to prevent brand diffusion. Internally, financial analysts often value brand as the amount of incoming cash flow that can be attributed to the brand, while accountants see it as the perpetuity value of licensing revenue. The real trick is that all employees - purchasing marketing, accounting and finance managers - must be on board with the same notion of brand valuation as an intangible asset in order to properly understand and improve a company's reputation. Interbrand, a London based firm, is changing the way corporations value their brand. Interbrand uses highly specialized economic valuation techniques. They first identify all the segments of brand. For example, when valuing Nike they look at tennis, football, and golf as unique brand elements because they appeal to various customer demographics. Then, they analyze the company's cash flows to determine what percentage of earnings can actually be attributed to each brand, thus deriving "brand specific earnings." Interbrand triangulates this approach by evaluating the brand's strength in relation to its rivals on seven dimensions - market growth, stability, leadership, trend, support, diversification, protection. Taking an even deeper look, they calculate the net present value of future earnings and predict the amount of brand risk based on the future stream of cash flows. Read More

	Big Business, Hunger, and putting farmers first Sustainable Development \| Sara Wolcott \| Monday 16th November 2009 "The world faces two big challenges: how to ensure food security (including ending hunger) and how to feed a growing population." That's not a quote from an NGO - that's a quote from Howard Minigh, President and CEO of CropLife International, who spoke to me about businesses growing role in the global fight against hunger. Big business is talking about sustainable development- and it doesn't look like it is just talk. CropLife International is a collection of Big Companies engaged in plant science - that's fertilizer, biotechnology, improved seeds, and other agricultural inputs. CropLife mostly focuses on encouraging policy that supports some of these big companies - names that you are probably with even if you are not a farmer, such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Dupont. Part of CropLife has been to support the process not only of driving policy that is supportive of the plant scientists, but also in working with USAID to support farmers and communities in Latin America to train them about safe and appropriate use of pesticides to reduce the risks to those communities - a necessity if one is to take the principles of sustainable development seriously. Known in some circles as being primarily profit driven, these companies are part of the relatively new public-private-farmers-scientists partnership, Farmers First, which places the farmer at the heart of the solution to many of our developmental and food security problems. I've been impressed with - and covered - the work this coalition has been doing for the past year or so. Read More