WASHINGTON, DC – At the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah gathered with the CEOs of Unilever and Monsanto to support the launch of WEF’s global framework titled “Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture.” The show of support emphasizes USAID’s leadership in creating synergies between the public and private sectors to meet the global food security challenge.
Championed by 17 global companies and supported by key public and civil-society leaders, the New Vision framework outlines priorities and examples to illustrate the role businesses can play in meeting global food and nutrition needs through accelerated, sustainable agriculture-led growth. Through the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative, the New Vision for Agriculture will aim to leverage private-sector investment to scale up agricultural growth in food-insecure countries. The 17 global companies that champion the initiative are: Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Bunge, Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro, Monsanto Company, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart Stores and Yara International.
“We are witnessing an unparalleled opportunity right now for innovative, large-scale private sector partnerships to achieve significant impact on global hunger and nutrition,” USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah said. “USAID is committed to creating new public-private partnerships in Feed the Future focus countries to advance their national investment plans.”
To demonstrate that commitment, Shah announced alongside President Kikwete of Tanzania that USAID is investing $2 million to Tanzania’s catalytic fund this year. The fund is devoted to delivering rapid and sustainable agricultural growth in Tanzania – with major benefits for small-scale farmers and rural communities. Results from this public-private blueprint will potentially triple Tanzania’s agricultural output, generate half a million jobs and lift two million people out of poverty, becoming a “breadbasket” for the region. USAID will join multinational companies like Yara, General Mills, Monsanto, Syngenta and others in support of the investment blueprint for years to come, and hopes to expand the blueprint in the future to at least five additional African countries.
USAID also signed a memorandum of understanding at Davos with DSM, the world’s largest manufacturer of micronutrients and vitamins, to increase the dietary quality in the developing world, starting with rice fortification in countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Mali Senegal and Tanzania.
Feed the Future is working to improve agricultural productivity, promote market development, facilitate trade expansion, invest in global innovation and research, promote equitable rural economic growth, and address child malnutrition in 20 food-insecure countries.
Source: http://www.ttkn.com
Showing posts with label Davos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Davos. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Cisco focuses on security as it plots cloud expansion
Security is being embedded in the core of Cisco's engineering efforts as the networking company looks to expand upwards and into the cloud, according to chief executive John Chambers.
Chambers, who was speaking at Cisco Live in London after a visit to the World Economic Forum at Davos, told the audience that "economists on a global basis are saying [employee] productivity can grow two, three, four, five percent a year. They’ve never said that before."
"I think the number one challenge facing the innovation and productivity opportunity we set in front of us just then is security," he said.
Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said in November that cloud-computing providers must build security into their products to tempt companies into the cloud.
For this reason, security has been placed as a keystone in Cisco's future roadmap by being made a priority of every engineering unit within the company, Chambers said, to prepare for the intersection of the cloud with security architectures.
“Security is an architecture play,” Chambers said and security should be viewed as an end-to-end entity, “almost like the human body”.
The company's current main priorities are, in order, collaboration, datacentre virtualisation and video; security architecture and the cloud; and, at the long way out, the smart grid.
"Networking… will determine our ability to participate in this global economy," Chambers said.
Source: http://www.zdnet.co.uk
Chambers, who was speaking at Cisco Live in London after a visit to the World Economic Forum at Davos, told the audience that "economists on a global basis are saying [employee] productivity can grow two, three, four, five percent a year. They’ve never said that before."
"I think the number one challenge facing the innovation and productivity opportunity we set in front of us just then is security," he said.
Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said in November that cloud-computing providers must build security into their products to tempt companies into the cloud.
For this reason, security has been placed as a keystone in Cisco's future roadmap by being made a priority of every engineering unit within the company, Chambers said, to prepare for the intersection of the cloud with security architectures.
“Security is an architecture play,” Chambers said and security should be viewed as an end-to-end entity, “almost like the human body”.
The company's current main priorities are, in order, collaboration, datacentre virtualisation and video; security architecture and the cloud; and, at the long way out, the smart grid.
"Networking… will determine our ability to participate in this global economy," Chambers said.
Source: http://www.zdnet.co.uk
Monday, January 31, 2011
AfDB in Davos - Africa As Part of Solution to Stimulating Global Economic Growth
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The African Development Bank (AfDB), a strategic partner of the World Economic Forum in Africa, is represented at the World Economic Forum Annual Meetings from 25-28 January 2011 in Davos, Switzerland. On Friday 28 January, the Bank addressed the importance of development finance in the context of increased South-South partnerships.
During a high-level session on development finance attended by the heads of development Banks, the AfDB's Chief Economist, Mthuli Ncube, called for greater innovation in development finance. This, he said, should aim at supporting infrastructure investment, private sector promotion, SMEs promotion, economic transformation and diversification, job creation, higher education and skills development, regional integration, financial inclusion, climate change and food security, among others.
"Investment in regional infrastructure is important because it will increase trade activity within Africa. Investing agricultural infrastructure will help improve food security concerns," Mr Ncube said. Noting that innovative financial inclusion does require soft development finance, He cited mobile banking, which has gone a long way in bringing the poor into the formal economy, as one good example of development finance support to the sector.
According to the AfDB Chief Economist, "the process of disbursing development finance should begin to view Africa as being part of the solution to stimulating global economic growth." "Indeed, some of the fastest growing economies around the world currently are in Africa," he emphasized.
Participants at the session included Om Prakash Bhatt, Chairman of State Bank of India; Luciano Coutinho, President of Banco National, Brazil; Vladmir Dmitriev, Chairman of State Corporation Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs, Russia; Haruhiko Kuroda, President of Asian Development Bank, Manila; Thomas Mirow, President of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London.
Source: http://allafrica.com
The African Development Bank (AfDB), a strategic partner of the World Economic Forum in Africa, is represented at the World Economic Forum Annual Meetings from 25-28 January 2011 in Davos, Switzerland. On Friday 28 January, the Bank addressed the importance of development finance in the context of increased South-South partnerships.
During a high-level session on development finance attended by the heads of development Banks, the AfDB's Chief Economist, Mthuli Ncube, called for greater innovation in development finance. This, he said, should aim at supporting infrastructure investment, private sector promotion, SMEs promotion, economic transformation and diversification, job creation, higher education and skills development, regional integration, financial inclusion, climate change and food security, among others.
"Investment in regional infrastructure is important because it will increase trade activity within Africa. Investing agricultural infrastructure will help improve food security concerns," Mr Ncube said. Noting that innovative financial inclusion does require soft development finance, He cited mobile banking, which has gone a long way in bringing the poor into the formal economy, as one good example of development finance support to the sector.
According to the AfDB Chief Economist, "the process of disbursing development finance should begin to view Africa as being part of the solution to stimulating global economic growth." "Indeed, some of the fastest growing economies around the world currently are in Africa," he emphasized.
Participants at the session included Om Prakash Bhatt, Chairman of State Bank of India; Luciano Coutinho, President of Banco National, Brazil; Vladmir Dmitriev, Chairman of State Corporation Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs, Russia; Haruhiko Kuroda, President of Asian Development Bank, Manila; Thomas Mirow, President of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London.
Source: http://allafrica.com
Sunday, January 30, 2011
DAVOS-Lobster in the mountains, riots on the Nile
The global elite, dining on Norwegian lobster and reindeer at the end of the World Economic Forum on Saturday, felt pretty chipper despite growing concerns about the inequality of the economic recovery.
While they believe the global financial and euro zone debt crises are abating, the real world intruded with a different and much more acute crisis in Egypt that made their debates about inequality and food security less theoretical than anticipated.
This year's four-day talkfest in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos was a fragmented affair.
The issue expected to dominate discussion, the euro zone debt crisis, turned out to be a relatively damp squib, with a growing consensus among bankers and policymakers that a resolution of the issue may be near.
If there was one common strand in Davos this year it was growing divisions -- whether between fast-growing emerging markets and sluggish developed world economies, or between rich and poor within countries.
As residents in Cairo and Alexandria counted the cost of a further night of clashes between protesters and police on Saturday, politicians and business leaders urged Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to start a dialogue with his people.
The corporate world is nervous.
Egypt has, after all, been one of the darlings of African and Middle Eastern investors, and the world is stepping into unknown territory with the rapid spread of unrest from country to country, propelled by the Internet and mobile technology.
LESSON OF EGYPT
"The lesson from Egypt is clear: people will no longer accept oppression, particularly when oppression is married with rising food prices, a lack of employment and the destruction of hope for a young generation," Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, told Reuters.
Yet the mood among 2,500 business leaders and policy-makers in Davos was still predominantly positive, albeit tempered with caution after the worst economic slump in 75 years.
"Compared to last year and the year before, there is certainly much greater confidence about stability, more optimism about the global economic outlook," said the International Monetary Fund's first deputy managing director John Lipsky.
For many CEOs and bankers, there is simply the reassurance of having put yet another year's distance between themselves and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which brought the world economy to the brink.
As a result, the panicky mood evident at the last two annual meetings in Davos has evaporated and business bosses are starting to look again at spending the trillions of dollars of cash sitting on their balance sheets.
"It is quite obvious that the mood has changed. Everybody is much calmer," said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg.
"You see it in the meetings, without people speaking on their telephones or leaving the room or having to stand in the corner, having very difficult conversations."
As ever, this year's Davos was an eclectic mix, covering everything from macroeconomics to geopolitics to management theory to science.
But there was no single, dominant theme -- and Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, reckons that, perhaps, is the most encouraging sign of all.
"It is a thoroughly good thing because when the world gets gripped by one big theme it usually either means there's a big disaster or else people are getting in the grip of some new irrational exuberance," he said.
Source: http://www.reuters.com
While they believe the global financial and euro zone debt crises are abating, the real world intruded with a different and much more acute crisis in Egypt that made their debates about inequality and food security less theoretical than anticipated.
This year's four-day talkfest in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos was a fragmented affair.
The issue expected to dominate discussion, the euro zone debt crisis, turned out to be a relatively damp squib, with a growing consensus among bankers and policymakers that a resolution of the issue may be near.
If there was one common strand in Davos this year it was growing divisions -- whether between fast-growing emerging markets and sluggish developed world economies, or between rich and poor within countries.
As residents in Cairo and Alexandria counted the cost of a further night of clashes between protesters and police on Saturday, politicians and business leaders urged Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to start a dialogue with his people.
The corporate world is nervous.
Egypt has, after all, been one of the darlings of African and Middle Eastern investors, and the world is stepping into unknown territory with the rapid spread of unrest from country to country, propelled by the Internet and mobile technology.
LESSON OF EGYPT
"The lesson from Egypt is clear: people will no longer accept oppression, particularly when oppression is married with rising food prices, a lack of employment and the destruction of hope for a young generation," Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, told Reuters.
Yet the mood among 2,500 business leaders and policy-makers in Davos was still predominantly positive, albeit tempered with caution after the worst economic slump in 75 years.
"Compared to last year and the year before, there is certainly much greater confidence about stability, more optimism about the global economic outlook," said the International Monetary Fund's first deputy managing director John Lipsky.
For many CEOs and bankers, there is simply the reassurance of having put yet another year's distance between themselves and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which brought the world economy to the brink.
As a result, the panicky mood evident at the last two annual meetings in Davos has evaporated and business bosses are starting to look again at spending the trillions of dollars of cash sitting on their balance sheets.
"It is quite obvious that the mood has changed. Everybody is much calmer," said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg.
"You see it in the meetings, without people speaking on their telephones or leaving the room or having to stand in the corner, having very difficult conversations."
As ever, this year's Davos was an eclectic mix, covering everything from macroeconomics to geopolitics to management theory to science.
But there was no single, dominant theme -- and Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, reckons that, perhaps, is the most encouraging sign of all.
"It is a thoroughly good thing because when the world gets gripped by one big theme it usually either means there's a big disaster or else people are getting in the grip of some new irrational exuberance," he said.
Source: http://www.reuters.com
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