Featured News

All Eyes on Agriculture

“Emerging nations have great hunger and meeting this growing demand for food will require great investments to strengthen agriculture and make it more productive.”

Marc Garrigasait, President and Director of the Panda Agriculture and Water Fund, 2016

The growing demand for food across emerging economies is a point of great interest for the world’s largest institutional investors. Sovereign wealth funds are expected to drive a four-fold increase in agriculture investments over the next decade to a total of $240 billion.

A study of the world’s most lucrative Sovereign Wealth Funds by the Esade Business School, KPMG and Icex-Invest found that the current trends in the agricultural investment space point towards an impressive rise in asset allocation from $60 billion to $240 billion in the last decade. …

“Through a move towards stable or declining populations, denser and better-managed cities consuming fewer resources, and greater equity and use of technology, we can bring peak waste forward and down. The environmental, economic and social benefits would be enormous.”

Dan Hoornweg, Perinaz Bhada-Tata and Chris Kennedy, Authors of “Waste Production Must Peak This Century”

The habits of consumers and the rising demand for new products is becoming a serious problem due to the ever-increasing amount of waste that is polluting and degrading the planet’s ecosystems.

A new report from the World Bank’s Urban Development department forecasts a 70% global increase in urban solid waste by 2025, rising from more than 3.5 million tons per day in 2010 to more than 6 million tons per day by 2025.…

Why Zika’s Emergency Status Downgrade is Bad

In a declaration of defeat, the World Health Organization (WHO) no longer considers Zika a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Although this may seem like good news, this decision in fact reflects the severity of Zika’s rapid transition from obscurity to a permanent threat to human health. The disease now joins the ranks of HIV, XDR-TB, Ebola, Marbug, Dengue and an exhaustive list of other killers that have spread around the world in record time.

The escalation in severity has been remarkable. First documented nearly seventy years ago, Zika was originally considered harmless. 80% of those originally infected demonstrated no physical symptoms.…

Alarming Levels of Glyphosate Found in Popular Foods

Towards the end of the 19th Century Ireland’s vast potato fields became infected by an invasive fungal disease and caused the death of one million people. Another two million were forced to leave the country.

We avoid such agricultural catastrophes today with the help of pesticides, a range of synthetic and natural chemicals that control insects, weeds, funguses and bacteria that have that ability to threaten global food security. Now an essential part of our food production system, breakthroughs in synthetic crop care enabled us to sustain our growing populations with increased efficiency and at a lower cost. Only now are we discovering how food and global health has become more vulnerable as a result.…

Beyond the US Election

On January 20th 2017, Donald J. Trump will be the new President of the United States of America. After years of intense campaigning and an election result met with both jubilation and disappointment at home, global financial markets quickly went into a frenzy of volatility and uncertainty. This is to be expected while the world determines whether the US President-elect’s policies match his often-divisive campaign rhetoric.

An extraordinary time for global financial markets, Trump’s victory saw investors flee to and return from safe haven assets as they considered the implications of such a historic event. Overnight traders from New York to Hong Kong were caught off guard by a result that defied all odds and polls.…

A Better Future is Within Our Reach

After one of the most controversial and cutthroat election campaigns in US political history, which saw the prospective ‘leaders of the free world’ debate policy with an unprecedented lack of respect and decorum, today is the day that will reverberate for generations. Or so many of the world’s news and political organizations will have you think.

As voters walk into voting booths, and as the world watches from the edge of their seats, the normal sense of uncertainty nurtured and propagated by the mainstream media has been catalyzed by presidential campaigns that take advantage of our most fundamental fears. The reason is simple – this is an incredibly effective campaigning strategy as it taps into one of our primal defense mechanisms.…

Secrets of the Exponential

Evolve or die. Certainly a harsh way to perceive the world around us but make no mistake this maxim is more appropriate today than ever before. With the relentless rise of populations, the rapid degradation of our environment and an unprecedented depletion of our most vital resources, such driving pressures are testing the frontiers of mankind and catalyzing innovation in the very way we live and do business.

A new commercial reality is emerging. In order to succeed, create true value and build the new world order in this new economic age we must achieve exponential progress in four key domains – sustainability, efficiency, integrated information systems as well as circular production and consumption.…

Earth Overshoot Day

We are now living in an age of new challenges that require innovative thinking. This week’s mayhem in global markets, sparked by the Chinese Yuan’s devaluation on August 11th, has seen Shanghai’s Composite Index drop by 7.6%, Germany’s Dax and London’s FTSE drop 4.7% and the S&P 500 drop 3.8% – all in a matter of days. Although global stocks are now rebounding, investors have been reminded of how equity and bond market volatility can flip into dangerous territory with very little or no warning.

One of these new challenges is mankind’s increasing rate of consumption, whether equity related (US stocks saw their highest trading volume in four years on Monday) or our population’s growing need for sustenance.…

Brazil – Responding to Emerging Markets Uncertainty

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”

– Winston Churchill

It’s not a view widely held and even less in evidence, but we believe that Dilma Rousseff deserves a lot of sympathy from the Brazilian electorate. Seven months into her second term, during which time the global environment for emerging markets has softened quite rapidly, the irony is that this technocrat ‘gets it’, and is making many of the tough financial decisions that investors demanded during much of her first term in office and which will accelerate a return to growth for the country.…

Divergent Paths Open Up in the Commodity Sector

A report just released by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology states 2015 sea-surface temperature anomalies in the central Pacific will be the highest in 19 years, are continuing to rise and may surpass the record temperatures set in 1997. El Niño influenced sea surface temperatures are currently 2.9F above normal and are forecast to climb by an additional 4.9F in total by the end of December 2015 and start of 2016.

In response, investors have been fast increasing their exposure to agricultural investments, through indices or exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These saw net inflows of $800m during April and May 2015, in marked contrast to the net outflows of $2.4 billion during Q4 2014.…

Category: Featured News