challenges

Athletes in T-shirts, fans applying suncream – have these been the Summer or Winter Paralympics?

If you were to listen to American Patrick Halgren, who called the conditions at the Milan-Cortina Games “tropical” and “like surfing”, you would think the former.

Until you were told he is a skier.

Since the 1992 Games, the Winter Paralympics have always been held in March, usually starting just shy of a fortnight after the conclusion of the Winter Olympics.

That means conditions during the Games have often been more spring-like than winter, with temperatures peaking at 26C four years ago in Beijing.

While such temperatures have not been felt in Cortina, it has been warm, and until a huge dump of snow fell the night before Sunday’s final day of competition, snow had only been seen on the groomed competition pistes.

A blazing sun on several days of competition, mixed with some rain, had caused snow on the courses to turn soft and slushy, which in turns sticks to athletes’ skis and snowboards.

Last weekend a third official training session for the Para-alpine skiing downhill events was cancelled in a bid to maintain the piste conditions.

While many athletes have praised the efforts of organisers to keep the tracks in as good a condition as possible, conditions on Friday during the men’s giant slalom events were far from ideal, with British visually impaired skier Fred Warburton describing it as a “bathtub of Slush Puppie”.

His guide, James Hannan, said: “The snow surface was changing every single gate, so we never knew how the ski was going to react.

“It was almost like survival of the fittest.”

It certainly proved that way during the sitting event, which followed the visually impaired and standing races: 18 athletes from a field of 37 failed to make it to the bottom of the course.

“The organisers need to look at scheduling with obvious changes of the climate that we’re experiencing,” said Warburton.

“Both the Olympics and Paralympics want to be top spectacles of skiing and allow athletes to put their best work down.

“We need to look at the schedule and move it forward in future. That’s way beyond my pay grade, but it seems pretty logical to me.”

Warburton’s words echoed those of retired American Paralympic snowboarder Amy Purdy, who this week said in a video on TikTok: “I don’t believe that the Paralympics should be happening right now.”

Her comments came after the snowboard cross course had to be adjusted following numerous crashes in training, partly because of its design but also the warm conditions.

March 12 (UPI) — The recent, new delay in NASA’s moon landing program represents the latest in a string of technical, budgetary, workforce and public perception challenges that plague the space agency, a UPI analysis shows.

When flight officials pulled the Artemis II Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft off the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 25 after a recurrence of helium flow problems and pushed the launch back to April at the earliest, it served as another reminder of the space agency’s current assortment of formidable problems.

Those issues include a moon program whose timeline keeps slipping; recurring technical failures and cost overruns with its flagship SLS rocket; a commercial lander — SpaceX’s Starship — that has yet to demonstrate reliability; the effective grounding of the Vulcan Centaur rocket made by United Launch Alliance; the departures of thousands of NASA workers and turnover in its top leadership positions.

The agency announced March 3 it had identified the latest problem with Artemis II as a faulty helium seal in the SLS upper stage, and that it is repairing the assembly, as well as making other fixes to the spacecraft.

But meanwhile, the lag time since the last crewed U.S. spaceflight has now stretched to three full years. This lengthy drought has prompted outside analysts and NASA officials to worry about how public support for the space program is being affected.

“When missions occur every few years, it is easy for people to lose interest,” said Burt Dicht, a leader of the National Space Society, who added he backs a newly announced NASA effort to increase the frequency of launches.

The latest delay has prompted a fresh look at some of the major challenges facing the space agency’s moon effort, as well as more general problems.

Headwinds with partners, personnel issues

One of the more pressing issues with the Artemis program is its dependence on SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System, or HLS, as the initial human lander that will put the first U.S. astronauts on the lunar surface.

Elon Musk’s company signed a contract with NASA in 2021 to provide the lander, but struggled in 2025 to perfect the mammoth Starship V3 rocket necessary for a key element of the HLS mission, according to a report issued by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel and released last month.

The Starship V3 incorporates upgraded Raptor engines to provide it with the required performance for low-Earth orbit flight and on-orbit operations, and its development is deemed crucial for transferring fuel to an orbiting tanker.

How it performs will “ultimately determine the number of refueling missions required for the HLS mission,” which is now pegged at roughly 12 fueling flights, the report’s authors wrote.

“The development and test progress necessary for a version of Starship that has not yet flown in time to support a human lunar landing mission within the next few years appears daunting and, to the panel, probably not achievable,” they wrote.

SpaceX announced Feb. 26 that the first Starship V3 had left its build site at Boca Chica, Texas, and had begun prelaunch testing.

In 2023, NASA selected Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to develop a second human landing system to compete with the HLS. Its Blue Moon Mark 2, to be launched aboard a New Glenn rocket, is to be tested twice and then carry a crew to the moon in late 2028.

New critical report

But NASA’s Office of Inspector General, in a report issued Tuesday, looked at both programs to carry astronauts to the moon and advised that the agency faces significant technical and programmatic risks that threaten mission timelines and crew safety.

The report said NASA is not fully adhering to “test like you fly” principles, particularly for uncrewed demonstration missions, and has not yet ensured that SpaceX’s Starship lander will meet manual control requirements for astronauts.

The inspector general also noted gaps in hazard‑mitigation planning and insufficient testing of critical systems, especially given the complexity of both SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s lander architectures.

The report also warned that NASA the capability to rescue astronauts in the event of a life‑threatening emergency during lunar surface operations, echoing limitations from the Apollo era.

And it concluded that SpaceX and Blue Origin face technical challenges likely to cause additional delays, with SpaceX’s schedule slipping beyond its earlier 2027 target and even the revised 2028 goal remaining uncertain.

The report recommends stronger risk‑management practices, more realistic scheduling and more rigorous testing to ensure crew safety and mission success.

Meanwhile, NASA’s larger operations also could be affected by problems encountered in the new Vulcan Centaur rockets made by United Launch Alliance.

Vulcan launches halted

The U.S. Space Force last week temporarily halted all national security launches using the rocket after the same booster malfunction occurred twice, according to comments made by Col. Eric Zarybnisky at a meeting last month in Colorado.

The Vulcan Centaur program was established by ULA to reduce costs and eliminate reliance on the current workhorse Atlas V Russian-supplied RD-180 engine and is primarily meant to meet U.S. military needs.

But the program benefits NASA as well, giving it greater flexibility and transport capability for launching of payloads, the space agency said.

NASA also continues to struggle with an exodus of workers, including thousands of crucial senior staff, which some analysts believe is impacting its moon and Mars exploration goals due to a loss of expertise.

Nearly 4,000 agency employees last year chose to accept “deferred resignations” as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal workforce — a move that reduced NASA’s employee roster by more than 20% to some 14,000, NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner told NPR in June.

Still, even amid all of those issues, the agency was able to dodge the biggest potential bullet of them all — a proposed 24% reduction in its budget issued by the White House, which would have been the biggest cut in agency history.

That threat all but evaporated when Congress agreed on a $24.4 billion NASA spending bill in January, representing a mere 1.7% budget reduction.

The NASA administrator’s job itself remained unfilled throughout 2025, as President Donald Trump withdrew his nomination of Isaacman. Trump ultimately changed course, and Isaacman was confirmed by the Senate on Dec. 17.

Major changes for the Artemis program

Of all the difficulties faced by NASA, the technical problems and cost overruns of the Artemis program itself have emerged as perhaps the most high-profile.

The Feb. 25 postponement was the second recent delay for Artemis II, which is to send four astronauts on a “slingshot” fly-by around the moon. Last month, NASA pushed back the launch to March after engineers discovered what they called a significant hydrogen leak during a wet dress rehearsal.

NASA said Thursday it plans to roll the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule back out to the launchpad next week, aiming for a launch in April.

The rollout wis to begin March 19, with an eye at launching as early as the evening of April 1, NASA officials said during a press briefing.

The original target date for landing astronauts on the moon — 55 years after the United States first did it — was 2024. When that was announced in 2019, many observers thought the target date was too optimistic.

The effort’s total cost after NASA recently added nine new elements now exceeds $20 billion, the Government Accountability Office reported last summer. Three of those elements have racked up a total of $7 billion in cost overruns.

NASA has made efforts to get a handle on the overruns through its Moon to Mars Program Office, the GAO said, but warned that each new delay to mission dates can create a cascading effect of increased costs across multiple programs that function independently of each other.

Clear warnings

And in its report from last month, the NASA safety panel sounded clear warnings about the “ambitious timeline” for developing the Human Landing System, given its “intricate operational design” and :complex concept of operations,” as well as other serious safety concerns surrounding the Artemis program.

Taken together, the issues posed a “high safety risk,” the panel concluded, which “casts doubt on the current Artemis III timeline and the feasibility of the Artemis III mission goals.”

In the wake of the latest issues, Isaacman announced a major revamp of Artemis under which the expected moon landing was pushed back from Artemis III in 2027 to Artemis IV in 2028.

“We have to rebuild core competencies,” he told reporters Feb. 27, blaming the repeated delays on too-infrequent launch schedules (known as the “launch cadence”), which he said causes “muscle memory” to “atrophy.”

“This is just not the right pathway forward,” he asserted, while revealing that a moon landing with Artemis III in 2027 has been deemed too ambitious and will instead now be attempted with Artemis IV in 2028.

Artemis III will instead now serve as a mission to perform tests on connecting with lunar landers in low-Earth orbit, as well as to test equipment that will go on Artemis IV.

Meanwhile, to bump up the launch cadence to once every 10 months rather than every three years, Isaacman announced a standardization of the SLS rocket fleet to “essentially near ‘Block-1’ configuration.”

The idea, he said, is to reduce the complexity of the massive rocket and to “accelerate manufacturing, pull in the hardware and increase launch rate, which obviously has a direct safety consideration to it, as well. You get into a good rhythm launching with greater frequency, you get that muscle memory.”

To do that, he added, “we need to rebuild and strengthen the workforce here at NASA. … We have to rebuild core competencies. The ability to turn around our launch pads and launch with frequency greater than every three years is imperative,” he said, pointing to the histories of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle programs, when “the average launch cadence was closer to three months.”

The decision to simplify and standardize the SLS starting with Artemis IV also means the agency will no longer need to use the $1.5 billion Mobile Launcher 2 at Kennedy Space Center, which is still under construction and has faced its own cost overruns and delays.

Experts’ reactions

Experts who have been closely following the development of Artemis expressed a range of opinions about whether the latest moves are the right ones for the moon program and the U.S. space program generally.

Kenny Evans, a fellow in science, technology and innovation policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, told UPI the glitches and the resulting negative perceptions of the program are indeed tied to the drawn-out launch cadence.

“The extended periods between SLS launches have given NASA fewer chances to test out hardware — and less cover for when things go wrong,” he said. “That has long been a valid criticism of the SLS program and a source of bad press — for example, the fueling issues in prior wet dress rehearsals.

“Working out kinks, as visible and expensive as they are, should be seen as net positives rather than programmatic failures,” he said.

“Frankly I’m relieved to see the timeline revamp,” Evans added. “The Artemis schedule Isaacman inherited had absolutely no chance of meeting its prior targets, and I’ve been impressed by his willingness to address the hard truths about the program.

“In terms of safety, making Artemis III a system test will provide NASA a much needed opportunity to remove as much risk as possible before attempting a lunar landing for Artemis IV,” he said while noting he is “particularly enthusiastic” about the NASA leader’s stated commitment to strengthening its workforce, “especially in light of cuts to agency staff.”

Meanwhile, the National Space Society’s Dicht, said his interactions with students, engineers, long-time space advocates and the public have shown him there is “real enthusiasm for progress in the space program,” but that new momentum is needed.

“I believe NASA Administrator Isaacman’s proposals to improve launch cadence, strengthen the workforce and standardize the SLS are positive steps that can help stabilize the Artemis program and move it toward a sustained return to the moon,” Dicht said.

“Whether it is SLS or any other rocket, these are extraordinarily complex machines,” he said. “Increasing the cadence of launches and ensuring the workforce is well-trained and consistently engaged helps build the operational experience, or ‘muscle memory,’ that improves reliability and the likelihood of mission success.”

While there is steady and palpable excitement over humankind’s first return to the moon since 1972 among committed enthusiasts, “there remains a segment of the public, including some social media influencers, who interpret technical issues as a sign that the program is failing,” he said.

“When missions occur every few years it is easy for people to lose interest,” Dicht said. “If the program can move toward a more regular rhythm, possibly two flights per year, it will attract attention and reinforce the sense that progress is being made.”

Similar to Apollo 9

Spaceflight historian and science author Amy Shira Teitel, creator of The Vintage Space YouTube channel, said the revamp “doesn’t particularly surprise me,” noting the decision to change Artemis III’s moon landing mission into a test flight is reminiscent of Apollo 9 in March 1969.

In that mission, a three-astronaut crew carried out vital tests while in low-Earth orbit to prepare for the historic Apollo 11 moon landing four months later.

“The plan to land Artemis III while still not having the lander ready or even chosen, from what I could tell, seemed like trouble waiting to happen, so the idea of going back to Apollo 9 and testing the hardware/mission in Earth orbit seems both safe and like it should have been the first step before going to the moon,” she told UPI in emailed comments.

The author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA has questioned the overall purpose, cost and broader implications of the moon-to-Mars effort, contending it lacks a compelling justification other than “going for the sake of going” while the highly successful and popular International Space Station is scheduled to be scrapped in 2030.

All of the Artemis changes, Teitel said, are “emphasizing how hard it is, and how insane it is to be looking at canceling the ISS without a replacement and just focusing on the moon-to-Mars pipeline without any kind of long-term infrastructure or planning.

“And the endless issues with SLS — why are we adding more launches?” she asked. “We know this system is flawed. It feels like retrofitting a mission into the hardware to justify the … launch cost.”

California’s landmark single-use plastic law is slowly being eroded by pressures within the state. Now legal attacks from outside threaten to kneecap it entirely.

Earlier this month, a federal district court judge in Oregon put parts of its single-use plastic law, which is similar to California’s, on hold while he decides whether it violates antitrust and consumer protection laws.

At the same time, 10 Republican attorneys general sent letters directly to companies that are taking part in plastic reduction campaigns, telling them to stop.

They threatened legal action against Costco, Unilever, Coca-Cola and 75 other companies for participating in the Plastic Pact, the Consumer Goods Forum and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. These efforts all include industry as an active partner in reducing plastics, but the letters say the companies are colluding against consumers “to remove products from the market without considering consumer demand, product effectiveness, or the cost and impact on consumers of a replacement product.”

Charges of corporate collusion and conspiracy are central to both cases.

Anti-waste advocates and attorneys well versed in packaging say the lawsuit and the letters to Costco and the other companies highlight vulnerabilities in several of California’s waste laws, including the seminal Senate Bill 54 — the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act. At issue are what are known as Extended Producer Responsibility laws.

These put the cost of cleanup and waste disposal on the companies that make materials — plastic, paint or carpet — rather than on consumers, cities and municipalities.

In 2024, a report from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta estimated that collectively, the state’s cities spend more than $1 billion each year on litter management. In 2023, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic (or 171.4 billion pieces) were sold or distributed, according to one state analysis.

These producer responsibility laws emphasize the idea of “circular economy”: that the producer of a material must consider its fate — making sure it can be reused or recycled, or at least reduced.

The laws organize companies into entities, called Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs), that generally oversee the management of the laws, set fees and collect them from members.

In the Oregon lawsuit, the National Assn. of Wholesaler-Distributors alleges a state-sanctioned product responsibility organization levied fees on trade group members that were onerous and opaque.

“Their fee structure was designed in secret by board members of the PRO,” said Eric Hoplin, president and chief executive of the group.

“Oregon is attempting to build a statewide recycling system by granting vast authority to a private entity to impose what amount to hidden taxes on businesses and consumers,” said Brian Wild, chief government relations officer for the wholesalers. “This law raises prices, shields decision-making from scrutiny, and advantages large, vertically integrated companies at the expense of smaller competitors.”

The group he references, the Circular Action Alliance, is the same one that oversees California’s single-use plastic law. Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills and Procter & Gamble are part of it.

Others, however, say California’s laws are strong.

People shop at Costco in Glendale, Calif., on April 10.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

“Extended Producer Responsibility laws are public policies passed by legislatures and implemented with government oversight,” said Heidi Sanborn, the executive director and CEO of the National Stewardship Action Council, which advocates for the laws and a more circular economy.

She helped craft many of California’s waste laws, including SB 54 and was also involved in Oregon’s law. “They create clear, consistent rules so all producers contribute fairly to the cost of recycling and waste management,” she said.

Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica), who wrote SB 54, said California’s plastic bill was designed to avoid violating antitrust laws.

CalRecycle declined to comment.

Some advocates actually hope the California laws fall. They include Jan Dell, of Last Beach Cleanup, an anti-plastic group based in Laguna Beach.

Extended Producer Responsibility “programs are based on the false premise that plastic is recyclable and are counterproductive because they green wash plastics and preempt proven solutions like strategic bans on the worst forms of plastic pollution (e.g. single use bags, six pack rings),” Dell wrote in an email.

Even those, however, can be problematic if they’re not enforced. Dell pointed to SB 54’s de facto ban on polystyrene, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.

“There is still Styrofoam stuff sold in 250 Smart and Final stores across the state!” she said. “It is totally noncredible and outrageous to claim that CalRecycle will ever enforce regulations on thousands of types of packaging when they can’t enforce the regulations on JUST ONE!”

President Trump headed into Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech projecting confidence in his personal power to “Make America Great Again,” despite the woes he says he’s been saddled with by his Democratic predecessors.

He also stood in a uniquely precarious position — facing some of his lowest approval ratings ever, plummeting support on his signature issue of immigration, unrelenting pressure from the slow rollout of the Epstein files, a sluggish economy, mounting international tensions and looming midterm elections in which Democrats appear poised to make gains, possibly even retaking control in Congress.

Trump remains popular among his base and remarkably infallible in the eyes of his loyalist administration and still commands extraordinary deference from many leaders in his party. Many of his supporters share his confidence and suggest polls showing slipping support are bogus.

“This is what ‘America first’ looks like,” said Paul Dans, former head of the conservative Project 2025 playbook, which Trump has largely adopted. “The last year has been phenomenal. He has done more in one year than most presidents would accomplish in a whole term.”

Nonetheless, political observers see a landscape of vulnerabilities for the second-term president heading into the 2026 elections.

“He stands at a moment of rapidly declining political capital,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant in California. “From a historical perspective, a president in year six, heading into what looks like a rough midterm, is probably not going to rise any higher again, in terms of their political equity — so he’s probably past his peak of power.”

Trump is in “about as weak a position” as any president heading into a State of the Union address in recent memory, agreed Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic strategist and director of the Dornsife Center for the Political Future at USC. “I don’t think the country sees Trump as the solution to anything at this point.”

At the same time, however, Trump is not acting like other weakened presidents, Shrum noted.

Instead of taking stock and turning away from unpopular policies, including on immigration and the economy, he is signaling that he simply won’t accept major midterm losses for his party — which leaves the nation in “completely uncharted waters,” Shrum said.

“We have a president who by all traditional standards has been weakened seriously, but who acts as though he had maximum strength,” he said. “We have a president who is deeply unpopular, who by every measure should see his party do very poorly in the midterms, but who seems determined to interfere in the midterm elections in any possible way that he can.”

In the polls

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday showed 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, with 39% saying they approve. The last time Trump fared so poorly in that poll was shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A CNN poll by SSRS released Monday found that Trump’s job approval rating stood at 36%, with a 19-point drop in approval among Latinos in the last year, an 18-point drop among Americans younger than 45, and a 15-point drop to just 26% approval among political independents — the lowest it has ever been during either of his terms.

Shrum said such sharp declines in support among Latino and independent voters do not bode well for Trump or for other Republicans on the ballot in November — especially given that the president, who often dismisses polling not in his favor, does not appear inclined to alter his policies.

Dans, who is running for Senate in South Carolina against Republican incumbent Sen. Lindsey Graham, dismissed Trump’s slumping polling numbers as “fake or engineered,” and said if anything, the president should “go full Trump” — doubling down on his agenda.

On immigration

Trump has polled well on immigration in the past. But his heavy-handed crackdown — with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents arresting people without criminal records, detaining U.S. citizens and legal immigrants and killing U.S. citizens in Minneapolis — has shifted that. The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found 58% of adults disapprove of his handling of immigration.

Stutzman said Trump and his team obviously realize their approach has rubbed voters the wrong way, which is why they recently shuffled the leadership team in Minneapolis. But the broader policy has remained in place and “the numbers are still cratering on them,” he said.

Shrum said that if Trump “were intent on improving his situation, he would change the way ICE behaves, and might put some different faces on the effort that he’s making, and might focus on people who are actually convicted criminals,” but instead, he and other administration officials “seem determined to plow ahead.”

Dans said Trump received “a clear mandate in 2024 with respect to the mass migration, and it was to reverse and end that flow,” and that’s what he’s doing. “Everyone is going back home.”

On Epstein

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing involving the late disgraced financier and convicted sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime acquaintance. However, questions about Epstein’s ties to Trump and other powerful men have persisted as evidence from multiple investigations into Epstein’s abuses continue to be released.

Republicans in Congress broke with the president and joined Democrats to pass a bill requiring the records’ release last year. Justice Department officials have slow-walked the release by redacting and withholding records, further dragging it out.

The records contained unproven accusations of wrongdoing by Trump, which he has denied. Democrats and Republicans alike have argued more records need to be released.

On the economy

Trump was dealt a blow last week when the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a sweeping set of tariffs he’d imposed on international trading partners.

Trump has said his administration will use other legal authorities to impose similar or even stiffer tariffs, despite polls showing his tariffs are unpopular.

The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, which was taken before the court ruling, found that 57% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s managing of the economy, and 64% disapproved of his handling of tariffs.

Dans said that Trump has already tempered inflation and that “the economy is ready to take off like a rocket ship,” especially if Congress gives the president the space to continue rolling out policies aimed at returning jobs to the U.S. that long ago went overseas.

“We’re really focused on reindustrialization,” Dans said. “This isn’t going to happen overnight, but all the building blocks are being put in place.”

Looking ahead

Stutzman said there is already evidence that Trump “doesn’t quite have a grip on Congress” like he used to, given recent votes on the Epstein files and tariffs, and that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court is still willing to rule against him, as it did on his tariffs.

If Democrats win back control in the midterms, Trump will see his influence wane even further as “the next two years turn into a quagmire,” with Democrats stymieing his agenda and launching one investigation after another, Stutzman said.

Dans said people standing in Trump’s way, including in Congress, need to clear out, because they’re “flouting” the will of the electorate. “It’s always about what the people want, and that’s what he’s going to deliver.”

Shrum said Trump trying to avoid losing power by interfering with the vote, including through the handling of mail-in ballots, is a major concern, as is Trump entering the U.S. into an armed conflict overseas in a “Wag the Dog” move — a reference to a 1997 movie of the same name in which an unpopular president uses a foreign war to salvage an election.

However, Shrum said he doesn’t think the latter would actually benefit Trump — “I don’t think that at this point another foreign incursion would make any president more popular” — and that, interference or not, a Republican drubbing in November is likely.

Trump, then, “will just try to govern by executive order,” will get sued and will have his agenda mired in court battles straight through the end of his presidency, Shrum said — a product, in part, of his confident despite all indications, “my way or the highway” approach to governing.

Natalia Burdynska Schuurman defended her MsC thesis at the University of Edinburgh on Venezuela’s struggle for food security and food sovereignty amid wide-reaching US-led unilateral sanctions.

See below for the abstract, research questions, and the full text.

Abstract

As global development actors grapple with mounting pressures to feed the world population, growing enforcement of unilateral coercive measures jeopardizes efforts to advance Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG-2, “Zero Hunger”). This dissertation examines efforts to achieve food security in Venezuela, a state currently targeted by over 1,000 unilateral coercive measures, since its incorporation as a constitutional right in 1999 and how such processes have been shaped by economic sanctions targeting its oil industry introduced by the United States in 2015. It employs a literature review, secondary data analysis and archival research, adopting a political economy and world systems lens as well as a historical, relational and interactive approach to food sovereignty research, centering the perspectives and experiences of Venezuelan communities. This dissertation argues that unilateral sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil industry triggered the collapse of a political economy of food security structurally dependent on Venezuela’s macroeconomic stability within a dollarized international trade and financial system, catalyzing efforts to rebuild Venezuela’s food and agricultural system that transformed the landscape of national food sovereignty construction. It is hoped that this dissertation yields new insights into challenges and prospects facing national efforts to construct food sovereignty and global efforts to achieve food security today.

[…]

Research questions

This dissertation answers the primary question: How have unilateral sanctions
targeting Venezuela’s oil industry shaped efforts to achieve food security in
Venezuela?

It addresses the following contributory questions: What was the state of affairs characterizing Venezuela’s food and agricultural system prior to 2015? What advances and setbacks have been identified concerning the national goal to achieve food security, as enshrined in Venezuela’s Constitution of 1999? How have financial and trade sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil industry introduced by the United States in 2015 correlated with macroeconomic and food security trends in Venezuela? How have financial and trade sanctions targeting Venezuela’s oil industry impacted food production, distribution and access in Venezuela? How have state and societal actors engaged in efforts to achieve food security in Venezuela responded to these consequences?