What’s New August 2008

This page lists changes to this site for August 2008.

See below for other updates and to get notified of changes to the site.

This web site has continued to grow. From July 2007 to end of June 2008, over 16 million pages were viewed on the site (up from about 14 million the previous year). During peak periods of the year, the site was getting, on average, some 60-70,000 page views per day. This site remains a spare time effort, and as with previous years, I am finding even less time this year to spend on the site, but I am pleasantly surprised at its continued growth. Thank you so much for your continued support and please do tell your friends and colleagues about the global issues web site if you find it useful.

To mark the 10 year anniversary the global issues web site was redesigned. This is actually something that I had wanted to do for a while, but the anniversary provided a good excuse to actually do it. The purpose of the redesign was two-fold: 1) I was always uncomfortable with articles being categorized under one issue. However, changing this implied a fundamental restructuring of the web site. 2) I wanted to improve the visual design of the web site, and with the structural changes to improve categorization, this made sense to do it now. Although it took a while to do, the site has now been relaunched, with just some minor tweaks left to do over the coming days. I hope you find it useful and better than before! I wrote this page to explain this a bit further if you are interested:

Countries and regions such as the US and EU have claimed the impact of biofuels on the food crisis has been minimal and that instead demand from countries such as India and China are amongst the prime factors. However, a World Bank report finds that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% while another institute estimates an increase of around 30%. Either way, it is a lot more than US estimates of 3%. The update also includes a link to an interview I did with Radio Adelaide on this issue.

You can also