News headlines in October 2011, page 19

'Humanity is the only desert-making species and we’ve been degrading usable land at one percent per year,' says Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Responding to pressure from civil society and members within their own ranks, the Group of 20 industrialised and emerging countries on Saturday said they were committed to reforming the financial sector and were examining innovative methods to fund development.

In a new project that has tackled one of the most divisive issues plaguing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a diverse group of academics, architects, urban planners and Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups are examining how the right of return of Palestinian refugees can be implemented on the ground.

In his latest military intervention overseas, U.S. President Barack Obama announced Friday that he is dispatching about 100 'combat-equipped' military personnel to East Africa to help track the fugitive Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its top commanders.

Aggressively repressed and forced underground by the recently deposed dictator Zine Abadine Ben Ali, the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahda is poised to become the dominant force in Tunisian politics.

When Jaydee Hanson, then-bioethics director for the United Methodist Church, spoke out publicly against gene patents over 15 years ago, some in the biotech industry compared his stance to the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo, the 15th century astronomer who discovered the moons of Jupiter.

'If we can manage it, we buy something at the butcher's every 15 days, even if it's only a bone, although we normally just eat maize and beans,' says Marvin Fajardo, a small-scale farmer and father of three from the southern Guatemalan province of Escuintla.

The global food crisis, which threatens to aggravate hunger and poverty, makes it necessary for agriculture to diversify, adapt to climate change and raise productivity, say FAO and experts.

Fourteen-year-old Shafat Ahmad works as a domestic helper in the house of a Srinagar-based government employee in Kashmir. His younger sister embroiders shawls in an unregistered textile venture in her native village of Beeru.

When Sara Gutiérrez began working her land, she knew a lot about hairdressing, her first profession, but nothing about agricultural techniques. 'The first crops were really bad, until I learned how to get good yields even in difficult conditions,' she said.