Millions of people have found a lifeline in the illicit cannabis economy in these past decades, but traditional cannabis farmers in the South are confronted with huge obstacles to participating in the emerging legal markets. The rapidly expanding legal cannabis markets for medical and adult use are increasingly captured by corporate businesses. Cultivation is more and more shifting from the South to the North, from small farmers to big companies, and from outdoor to indoor, with negative impacts on sustainable development goals. This first TNI Cannabis Policy Brief argues that it is vital that the socio-economic needs and rights of traditional cannabis producers are not overlooked and that ‘no-one is left behind’ in this historic transition.
Across the world, the state of environmental stress is unprecedented. As scholarship and activism on ‘environmental justice’ points out, poorer and marginalised communities face particular exposure to environmental harms. This holds particularly true for populations in the global South. The role of illicit drugs in relation to these environmental stresses is an underexplored terrain. Yet, as this report will argue, drugs, as well as the policy responses to them, are an environmental issue.
Satoko Kishimoto, Programme Coordinator for TNI’s Public Alternatives programme, has been elected mayor of Suginami City, a ward of 500,000 people in Tokyo. Satoko's colleagues at TNI are very happy for her.
The Caribbean region’s Informal Drug Policy Dialogue that was held in Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), in December 2021, at the initiative of Transnational Institute (TNI) in close collaboration with the Medicinal Cannabis Authority (MCA) of SVG highlighted several challenges to the establishment of a legal medical cannabis industry currently being faced by countries in the region. These issues include international banking restrictions; access to laboratory, research and testing facilities; complying with EU GACP and GMP to meet the standards for exports, the Seed-to-Sale System; securing access for patients and getting doctors to prescribe; the structure of the licensing system; guarantees for the Rastafari community for ceremonial ganja usage, and most importantly, how to envisage traditional cultivators inclusion in the regulatory framework and practice being developed. Around the table seven (7) countries were represented from the region: Barbados, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, St Lucia and of course St Vincent and the Grenadines.
While most of us probably rarely think about it on a daily basis, the handful of transnational corporations that dominate the mining industry play a key role in providing inputs for goods we use every day – from smartphones to food. Their profits stem from their role in the production of these goods: control of extraction of minerals at the starting point of the vast global supply chains that stretch from Chilean and Congolese mineral landscapes to – in the case of smartphones – our pockets.
En pocos días será la segunda vuelta de las votaciones para elegir al próximo presidente de Colombia. Rodolfo Hernández y Gustavo Petro ganaron en primera ronda con promesas de cambio, que también incluyen una política de drogas distinta, que se desmarque de varios años de prohibición y criminalización ineficaz. Mientras Hernández no tiene una política de drogas concreta y reduce el narcotráfico a un tema de oferta y demanda, Petro basa su política de drogas en principios de justicia social y regulación para el campesinado. De las propuestas, sólo uno de los candidatos realmente propone un cambio al paradigma prohibicionista mientras que la ambigüedad del otro puede perpetuar la fallida guerra contra las drogas.
Fish auction markets, or ‘halles à marées’, are fundamental public players on French coastal areas. They enable small-scale and industrial fishing professionals to sell and buy the day's catch. Some of them, such as the one in the French port city of Quiberon, Brittany, have adopted their own strategy to compete with larger fish markets. The Quiberon fish market has chosen to distinguish itself by selling live fish and applying the Japanese slaughtering method called ikejime. Initially implemented for economic reasons, this strategy now seems to offer some of the key characteristics of more sustainable fishing.
El presente documento explora el origen y desarrollos de los modelos de Erradicación Manual Forzosa EMF, en el marco de su uso para garantizar la implementación de la estrategia de reducción de la oferta de drogas referida especialmente a los cultivos de uso ilícito, ámbito donde se desenvuelve con mayor intensidad los costos humanos, pero también la afectación de la legitimidad estatal por la guerra contra las drogas en Colombia.
This close examination of investment arbitration lawsuits against Spain reveals that the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) is benefiting only transnational investors and specialized law firms at the expense of Spain’s solar dream.
We can no longer ignore the role of Big Tech in entrenching global inequality. To curtail the forces of digital capitalism, we need an ecosocialist Digital Tech Deal.
TNI is an international research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable world. We work closely with progressive social movement partners and a large network of activist-scholars across the world.
The privatisation of public services is a long-standing global trend. But in the wake of the pandemic and through the introduction of contact tracing apps, Big Tech has gone one step further: Large corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are now set to control the very infrastructure that underlies our public health system. In this eye-opening discussion, Arun Kundnani interviews Dr Seda Gürses about the dangers of a system in which we depend on profit-oriented companies for receiving basic health services. How did we get to this point, and how can we imagine a different future?
This report shows the EU’s plan to drastically increase imports of renewable hydrogen from North Africa is not realistic from a cost or energy perspective, and instead diverts renewable electricity away from local needs and local climate targets.
Multistakeholderism, a specific form of corporate capture of multilateral institutions, has become increasingly determinant in the formulation of national public policies, with direct effects on access to and quality of health services provided worldwide.
This article focuses on the role that the Colombian state’s land titling programme has played in helping their communities substitute their illegal drug crops with legal alternatives. The author interviewed over 80 farmers in former coca leaf farming communities, in Putumayo, Caquetá, Cauca and Nariño, and carried out 30 elite interviews.
As conflict and crisis continue in the aftermath of the SAC coup, political instability and uncertainty have swept many parts of the country. In this commentary, Khun Say Lone examines a dramatic succession of events in Shan State that have seen the RCSS, an NCA-signatory, forced to retreat by other ethnic armed organisations in the territory. Amidst allegations of “divide and rule”, he argues that unity is needed if the people are to end the cycles of conflict and build a better future.
Martin Jelsma, David Bewley-Taylor, Tom Blickman, John Walsh
29 ဧပြီလ 2022
Article
Cannabis policy developments have arrived at an important moment where the treaty issue needs to be confronted in an honest manner, and not by hypocritical denials or fantasy interpretations that undermine basic principles of international law and cannot stand the scrutiny of ‘good faith’ treaty interpretation.
