In recent years there have been a number of claims of “biopiracy” where a company seeks patent coverage over inventions, which others feel would be an unjust “appropriation” of traditional or sacred knowledge. The SbMATE patent which was filed in 2007 (and granted in the US in 2009),...

The paper provides the first large-scale survey-based evidence on the impact of the global food crisis of 2007-08 using an indicator of self-assessed food security from the Gallup World Poll. For the sampled countries as a whole, this subjective indicator of food security remained the same or...