The global food system is unsustainable. While it is worth approximately USD 8 trillion annually, its negative impact is valued at roughly USD 12 trillion. And this is not the system’s only contradiction.

The upsurge of Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations, and deaths in the United States serves as a bitter reminder that the pandemic is not over. The global economy will not return to normal until the disease is under control everywhere.

It is far from clear why President Joe Biden deserves the obloquy heaped on him for the US evacuation from Afghanistan.

It has been one year since the international community gave its backing to the Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility to lead a worldwide effort to end the acute phase of the pandemic.

The Tokyo Olympic Games are over, and the Japanese people and government have heaved a sigh of relief that the spectacle passed without a major Covid-19 outbreak in the athletes’ village or other disasters.

After months of negotiations, the United States Senate recently passed a USD 1 trillion infrastructure bill. Passed by a vote of 69 to 30, it was an impressive display of bipartisanism at a time of deep polarisation.

The world has finally awoken to the existential imperative of securing a rapid transition to a green economy.

Presidents, generals, dictators, and ordinary people take big risks when they have nothing to lose, similar to a quarterback in American football throwing a so-called Hail Mary pass.

For nearly a decade, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been promising to deliver “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” This promise—which he dubbed the China Dream—took a clearer form with the introduction of the two centenary goals: building a “moderately prosperous

Most of the “geopolitical” threats, real or confected, that capture headlines in the West nowadays are exogenous—emanating from China, Russia, Iran, and so forth. But others lie within the world’s democracies. Among these are the US Republican Party’s embrace of Trumpian

The extraordinary global effort to develop safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines in record time highlights the power of vaccines to bring us closer to our loved ones and to a more prosperous,

Even as rich countries begin to glimpse the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, developing countries are still struggling to contain Covid-19. But there are important lessons from the past year that can help governments to devise more effective policies and programmes to support their poorest residents amid continued outbreaks and lockdowns.

During their June 16 Geneva summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly offered US President Joe Biden the use of Russian military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in order to coordinate actions vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

From 1990 to 2019, the number of people living in extreme poverty (according to the World Bank threshold of USD 1.90 per day) plummeted, from 1.9 billion to 648 million. Covid-19 has reversed much of this progress. By the end of 2021, the pandemic will have pushed approximately 150 million people back into extreme poverty.

The year 2020 was unforgettable for all of us, and tragic for many. No one had imagined that a lethal virus originating in horseshoe bats could spread so fast and upend our lives so thoroughly.

One in four. That’s the proportion of American women who are considering downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce due to the impact of Covid-19.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created a laboratory for testing different governance systems in the face of a public-health crisis, ultimately revealing massive variance in country performance.

In a recent essay on Samantha Power, President Joe Biden’s new administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times writes, correctly,

When will the world have vaccinated 80 percent of all adults (the level presumed by scientists to produce herd immunity against Covid-19)? Most people’s answer is 2023 or 2024, which suggests deep pessimism about the progress of vaccinations outside the rich world.

As Bangladesh turns 50 this year, the country has much to celebrate. Its human-development progress has been exceptional compared to that of its South Asian neighbours.