"For the Development Law Service, FAO Legal Office."

A bold, science-based corrective to the groundswell of misinformation about food and how it's produced, examining in detail local and organic food, food companies, nutrition labeling, ethical treatment of animals, environmental impact, and every other aspect from farm to table. Consumers want to know more about their food—including the farm from which it came, the chemicals used to grow it, its nutritional value, how the animals were treated, and the costs to the environment. They are being told that buying organic foods, unprocessed and sourced from small local farms, is the most healthful and sustainable option. But what if we’re wrong? In Resetting the Table, Robert Paarlberg reviews the evidence and finds abundant reason to disagree. He delineates the ways in which global food markets have in fact improved our diet, and how "industrial" farming has recently turned green, thanks to GPS-guided precision methods that cut energy use and chemical pollution. He makes clear that America's serious obesity crisis does not come from farms, or from food deserts, but instead from "food swamps" created by food companies, retailers, and restaurant chains. And he explains how, though animal welfare is lagging behind, progress can be made through continued advocacy, more progressive regulations, and perhaps plant-based imitation meat. He finds solutions that can make sense for farmers and consumers alike and provides a road map through the rapidly changing worlds of food and farming, laying out a practical path to bring the two together.

A multilevel and comparative constitutional analysis of the impact of Euro-crisis law on the EU Constitution and its Member States.

Over the last three decades, inflation targeting (IT) has become the most popular monetary policy framework among larger economies. At the same time, its constituting features leave room for different interpretations, translating into various central banks’ institutional set-ups. Against this backdrop, this book investigates the importance of institutional arrangements for policy outcomes. In particular, the book answers the question of whether there are significant differences in IT central banks’ institutional set-ups, and—if yes—whether they influence the ability of monetary authorities to meet their policy goals. The book examines around 70 aspects related to independence, accountability and transparency of 42 IT central banks over the last 30 years. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the quality of the institutional set-ups materially affects monetary policy effectiveness. In fact, a visible improvement of institutional arrangements resulting from pursuing an inflation targeting strategy can be treated as its lasting contribution to central banking. Thus, despite the recent critique of the framework, its prospects continue to be rather favourable. Overall, for the advocates of inflation targeting, the findings of the book can be seen as identifying the sources of IT strengths, while for IT opponents, they may be viewed as indicating which elements of IT institutional set-ups should be kept even if the need to replace this strategy with another regime will, indeed, result in a change. Given the role monetary policy plays within the economy, such knowledge may have significant implications. Therefore, the book will be relevant for different audiences, including scholars and researchers of monetary economics and monetary policy, and will be essential reading for central banks already pursuing an IT strategy or those preparing to adopt one. Importantly, the book includes supplementary indices of proposed institutional arrangements that assess a range of aspects related to IT central bank’s independence, accountability, and transparency. Readers thus have access to the author’s full database, which covers individual indices for all monetary authorities investigated across the given period of analysis.