Karen Hansen-Kuhn
Karen Hansen-Kuhn is International Program Director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Her work has focused on bringing developing countries' perspectives into public debates on trade, food security and economic policy.
Articles by this author
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Views Sunday, May 03, 2020 Uprooting the Farm Crisis in Times of COVID-19 The COVID-19 emergency exposes numerous catastrophic failures in our economies and societies. Fragile, concentrated supply chains have broken down, leaving consumers anxious about their food and farmers forced to dump milk and produce they cannot sell or harvest. In South Dakota, one of the nation’... Read more |
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Views Saturday, February 25, 2017 USTR Nomination Highlights Contradictions in Trump’s Trade Policy Trump’s trade policy is a series of contradictions wrapped in a mystery. While advancing a boldfaced pro-business agenda, promising to gut regulations and reduce public spending on healthcare and other social programs, he has also claimed to care about American workers and jobs losses caused by... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 27, 2016 Seeds of Corporate Power vs Farmers’ Rights The consolidation of corporate power in agriculture has been in the news a lot lately, first with the proposed ChemChina-Syngenta and Dow-DuPont mergers, and now with Bayer’s proposal to purchase seed giant Monsanto. National Farmers Union president Roger Johnson testified in Congress last week... Read more |
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Views Saturday, August 20, 2016 Building Alternatives for Food Systems and Trade Public opposition to free trade agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that serve to increase inequality and concentrate corporate power has reached a loud crescendo. We got to this point through years of effort by thousands of civil society groups around the world, reaching out to... Read more |
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Views Saturday, July 16, 2016 Celebrating Common Sense? Last week, there was a bit of good news on the trade front: on July 8, tobacco giant Philip Morris lost its ridiculous case against Uruguay’s cigarette labeling laws. In 2010, the multinational company’s Swiss subsidiary—which owns its operations in Uruguay—sued the country over rules designed to... Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 26, 2016 From TPP to TTIP: Clues to New Food Trade Rules While civil society groups around the world raise a variety of concerns about the substance of free trade agreements, for the most part their criticisms begin with the lack of transparency. Instead of a robust public debate on the merits of the issues under negotiation, civil society groups are... Read more |
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Views Sunday, May 17, 2015 Trade Rules Create Obstacle Course for a Better Food System There were some decidedly Kafkaesque aspects of the Congressional debate this week on Fast Track legislation, designed to speed through the passage of secret trade deals that could have a serious impact on our food system. At first, the Senate refused to approve a bill to limit debate on Fast Track... Read more |
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Views Saturday, April 11, 2015 TTIP Global Day of Action: Take a Picture! One of the most surprising parts of my visits to Europe around trade issues has been the misconceptions people have about the U.S. And I’m not talking about generalizations about problems in our food system, but the idea that all Americans support free trade agreements. At a recent meeting in... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, January 21, 2015 We’re Fed Up! 50,000 in Berlin Say No to TTIP We are hearing more and more news from Europe that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is running into stiff head winds, and I had the pleasure of seeing this growing storm of opposition first-hand in Berlin last week. I attended a series of events culminating in the WIR HABEN... Read more |
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Views Monday, December 22, 2014 Supply But No Demand: U.S. Pushes Hormone Beef in Trade Deal One of the big sticking points in the TTIP talks has been the EU’s prohibition on imports of beef treated with growth hormones. EU officials continue to insist the issue is off the table, but U.S. officials keep pushing it right back on. Just this week, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack... Read more |