By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli

An internally displaced person in Congo carries rations distributed by the World Food Programme.

Credit:U.N.

ROME, Oct 4 (IPS) – “From a current 6.5 billion population, a billion don’t get enough to eat right now. Extrapolate that to 2020, and you begin to recognise why this is not just a moral problem, [...]

By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli

A farmer harvests sorghum seeds in Sudan. The price of the seeds has doubled over the last two years.

Credit:U.N.

ROME, Oct 3 (IPS) – It was once true that all roads led to this ancient capital. Today it is the furrows of maize, wheat and rice fields that take you to [...]

By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli

The prevailing machismo in politics discourages women’s involvement

Credit:Italian government

ROME, Sep 22 (IPS) – Angelica Mucchi-Faina, psychology professor at the Perugia University, thinks that “in Italy you cannot even talk about equal opportunities for women in politics.”
However, Italy signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [...]

By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli

Luisa Capelli: Italian feminism “has been marginalised”

Credit:Oriana Boselli/IPS

ROME, Sep 22 (IPS) – Four ministers out of 21; 193 parliamentarians out of 952 (upper and lower houses); no party leaders. Why are there so few women in Italian politics?“The feminist movement in Italy has been strong… But in order for women [...]

Miren Gutierrez* interviews HAZEL HENDERSON

Hazel Henderson
 

ROME, Sep 18 (IPS) – Hazel Henderson is a futurist, an economic iconoclast, founder of Ethical Markets Media, and author of the books Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship, and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. Her main focus is exploring the “blind spots” in conventional economic theory.She [...]

Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli interview filmmaker ERIK GANDINI

A poster of the film.
 

ROME, Sep 15 (IPS) – Something new is appearing on the Italian screen. About time, some may say.A documentary titled Videocracy by Erik Gandini shows the face of Italian television, about 90 percent of which is controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi through [...]

Blogging about women…

I have started to blog on women’s issues at Gender Masala. My latest comments are about Il corpo delle donne, a documentary about the manipulative, humiliating image of women in Italian television, and about how the latest version of Star Trek reproduces the utdated sexual prejudices of the sixties. I am fascinated by how media portray women. Maybe it [...]

Paolo di Croce
Credit: Miren Gutiérrez/IPS

Miren Gutiérrez interviews PAOLO DI CROCE, head of Slow Food International – IPS/IFEJ
“The day we all decide to eat fresh and local, to eat less meat… we will have a revolution,” says Paolo di Croce, secretary-general of Slow Food International.
BELLAGIO, Italy, Jul 27 (Tierramérica).- Slow Food, obviously, is the opposite of [...]

Recently I participated in a conference at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, hosted by Bioversity International, on how to create global awareness of the value of agricultural biodiversity to people’s lives in the run up to 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity. The Bellagio Center absolutely gorgeous, by the way.

In the picture I am [...]