Use of Money or Value Transfer Services by Non-Governmental Organisations: A legitimate tool of last resort in response to bank derisking

The worsening phenomenon of bank derisking is decreasing the number of banking channels available for humanitarian financial transfers into some countries. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) now rely on value transfer services as a tool of last resort to make financial transfers into countries suffering from bank derisking but challenges exist using these mechanisms.This report is the second in a series examining potential solutions to bank derisking. It is based on the outcome of an expert dialogue held in December 2022 on the use of value transfer services by NGOs as a legitimate tool of last resort to make payments in countries suffering from bank derisking

Barriers to Afghanistans critical private sector recovery

Afghanistan has undergone a series of complex political, economic and social changes since the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021, whereby the plight of the Afghan people has deteriorated into an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. The Taliban's stance towards women, including restrictions on female education and bans on female aid workers, have posed additional challenges to the Afghan people and the country's economic prospects, as well as to international donors and aid organisations. Since the Taliban's resumption of power, international actors have pursued policies of political and economic isolation towards Afghanistan that have contributed to the current economic crisis and the populations' reliance on humaniatrian assistance. To date, most research and policy efforts have centred on the humanitarian catastrophe and the plight of women and girls. Less attention has been placed on constraints facing trade with Afghanistan, including those negatively impacting supply chains of essential goods that are neceassry to address the basic needs of Afghan people. This report seeks to fill a knowledge gap on some of the key challenges facing Afghan trade, especially relating to food and essential goods needed for basic survival. It is based on 25 anonymised interviews carried out in mid-2022 with a range of private sector, development and banking actors operating in, or with, Afghanistan. It explores challenges associated with international targeted sanctions; financial sector derisking; shifts in domestic regulations; implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022; and wider trade and economic constraints. It also aims to showcase best-practice and coping strategies employed by the private sector operating in Afghanistan and generate a series of policy recommendations based on input from Afghan companies and those operating in the wider region

Caratteristiche di qualit\ue0 e purezza degli oli d\u2019oliva tra necessit\ue0 di standardizzazione e variabilit\ue0 naturale

Abstract. The improvement of the agricultural surface devoted to olive oil production, highlighted the strong influence of environmental conditions on the oil composition. In the meantime, the establishment of shared rules and standard of composition is mandatory to improve the worldwide trade of olive oils. Rules are established as Regulations that means mandatory rules (laws) within European Union, while outside UE, the Trade Standard by International Olive Council is the reference standard and at worldwide level, the Codex Alimentarius (established by FAO-OMS) is the World Trade Organization reference. The number of members of these three levels of international organization is different and an hard work is to find an acceptable compromised between countries quite different in terms of agricultural scenarios, environmental conditions, economic conditions and social organization. Standards relate to quality and purity characteristics, this classification is very important because while quality is a ranking parameter, purity is a cutting limit, this means that it is necessary to be very careful in admitting any exception in limits. The environmental differences between \u201ctraditional\u201d geographic area of olive cultivation, that\u2019s to say the Mediterranean basin and new areas of cultivation, mainly located in the South Hemisphere, in some cases strongly influence the oil composition, even in some characteristics whose limits are an important borderline to defend olive oil purity. Nevertheless, it\u2019s an evidence that some authentic olive oils exist , that for some parameters exceed the established limits; the very hard issue is that these parameters are purity parameters and that the modification of a limit can open the door to faked oils. Linolenic acid content is an important parameter to highlight the admixtures with soybean oil, however, in some areas, the content of linolenic acid of authent ic ol ive oi ls exceeded the Codex Alimentarius limit; no agreement had been reached between main producing countries and new producing ones and nowadays the Codex Standard has no limit for this acid. Campesterol and \u394-7 Stigmastenol, too, are very useful to highlight the presence of several seed oils (the former) and Compositae oils (the latter), but some cultivar in some geographical areas where the presence of olive in the agricultural landscape is rather recent, present concentration of these sterols higher than the established limit (respectively 4,0% and 0,5%). In all these cases, the problem is not to expel from the market some production of genuine oils, in the meantime not leave any space to possible frauds. A solution had been to build some so called \u201cdecisional trees\u201d, that are based on the principle of admit selected \u201canomalies\u201d for one limit, in the meantime making the other more strictly, with the aim to avoid any possibility that the derogation of one limit can make faked oils not possible to b e distinguished by authentic ones. In this review, some of these cases will be described and critically discussed-

Autenticació de cafès mitjançant mètodes de GC-MS i quimiometria. Aplicació a la detecció i quantificació de mostres de cafè adulterades Coffee authentication using GC-MS and chemometric methods. Application to the detection and quantitation of adulterated coffee samples

En les últimes dècades, tenint en compte la complexitat de la cadena alimentària, l'adulteració dels aliments va en augment i dona lloc a casos de fraus alimentaris. És per això que la determinació de l'autenticitat dels aliments és una qüestió molt important en el control de qualitat i en la seguretat dels aliments, i emergeix d'aquesta manera com un assumpte de gran interès pels consumidors, la indústria alimentària, les autoritats reguladores i la comunitat científica en general. En aquest camp, les begudes són productes alimentaris fàcilment adulterables a través de pràctiques com la suplementació amb sabors i aromes o l'addició de substàncies no especificades per augmentar-ne el volum, entre altres pràctiques. En aquest context, l'estudi desenvolupat en aquest treball es basa en la detecció de fraus en una de les begudes més populars del món: el cafè, un producte fàcilment manipulable. S'han realitzat estudis metabolòmics dels compostos volàtils en mostres de cafès (normals i adulterats) de diferents espècies (arabica, robusta, mescla arabica-robusta), mitjançant la cromatografia de gasos (amb columna polar) acoblada a l'espectrometria de masses (GC-MS) i en combinació amb els mètodes quimiomètrics d'anàlisi discriminant de mínims quadrats parcials (PLS-DA) i de regressió de mínims quadrats parcials (PLS), per fer-ne la classificació, caracterització i autenticació. Els compostos volàtils de les mostres s'han obtingut directament a partir del cafè sòlid fent ús d'una microextracció en fase sòlida d'espai de cap (HS-SPME). Les empremtes obtingudes (fingerprinting) han estat bons descriptors químics per a la classificació de les diferents mostres de cafè mitjançant el mètode quimiomètric de PLS-DA. A més, s'ha realitzat un estudi de cafè adulterat fent ús del PLS, basat en cafè arabica adulterat amb cafè robusta, que ha demostrat la bona capacitat de la metodologia proposada per a la detecció i quantificació de nivells d'adulterant fins al 15 % amb errors de calibratge i predicció per sota de l'1 % i el 6 %, respectivament

Collaborative peer validation of a harmonized SPME-GC-MS method for analysis of selected volatile compounds in virgin olive oils [intervalidazione di un metodo armonizzato SPME-GC-MS per l¿analisi di composti volatili selezionati in oli di oliva vergini]

Final version is available in open access in publisher’s site.-- This abstract is based on the published article: Ramón Aparicio-Ruiz, Clemente Ortiz Romero, Enrico Casadei, Diego L. García-González, Maurizio Servili, Roberto Selvaggini, Florence Lacoste, Julien Escobessa, Stefania Vichi, Beatriz Quintanilla-Casas, Pierre-Alain Golay, Paolo Lucci, Erica Moret, Enrico Valli, Alessandra Bendini, Tullia Gallina Toschi. Collaborative peer validation of a harmonized SPME-GC-MS method for analysis of selected volatile compounds in virgin olive oils, Food Control, Volume 135, 2022, 108756, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2021.108756.-- http://hdl.handle.net/10261/258960The evaluation of the sensory attributes in virgin olive oil (VOO) is carried out according to the standard method of panel test [1, 2]. Recently, it has been proposed as SPME-GC-FID method as the most ade- quate instrumental method to determine volatiles compounds in VOO to support the sensory panels test [3]. This method developed in the European funded project OLEUM, in which all the variables have been defined and harmonized, has been tested in three laboratories to perform an inter-laboratory validation of the quantification of the most relevant VOCs that are responsible for VOO sensory attributes. The valida- tion study was carried out for each one of the selected molecules in order to have an individual infor- mation for each analyte. With the same objective, in the present work, five laboratories, all being active partners in the OLEUM project, carried out an inter-lab evaluation of the SPME-GC-MS joint protocol. The validation was carried out by each laboratory following the same analytical conditions and on the same samples, in order to make the results obtained by each laboratory comparable in a harmonized procedure and methodology, as previously done with FID [3]

Multianalyte analysis of volatile compounds in virgin olive oils using SPME-GC with FID or MS detection: results of an international interlaboratory validation

13 Páginas.-- 6 tablasThe organoleptic assessment (Panel test) is the only procedure within the official methods for determining the quality of virgin olive oils that involves an expert panel. There is an urgent need for analytical methodology that can reliably measure volatile compounds in virgin olive oils that is capable of supporting and anticipating the official Panel test. For this reason, a new method based on solid-phase microextraction–gas chromatography with the choice of two possible detectors (FID or MS) was subjected to a large international interlaboratory validation study. The study involved a two-stage process: first, a pretrial phase in which 7 participants were exposed to the method for the first time to identify any initial problems with the methodology; then, a formal validation stage (trial proper), which involved 20 laboratories from Europe, USA, Japan and China. The performance of the different detectors was investigated. While both methods have advantages, the method using FID provided better results for 11 compounds, in terms of reproducibility, compared to MS. This information will allow to implement the method with accurate information of the method performance depending on the detector used. Practical applications: This study provides information from an interlaboratory validation of a method for measuring volatile compounds in virgin olive oils conducted with laboratories (from industry and academia) working in the olive oil sector. The information on the expected analytical errors in the determination of each volatile compound is necessary to apply this method for supporting the official Panel test (sensory analysis). The SPME-GC-MS/FID methods proposed in this work can be used for the internal quality control of a company/distributor/quality control laboratory and could also be used in cases of difficult/contradictory organoleptic assessment, or to confirm results from sensory panels in cases of disputes/disagreement (Reg. EU 2022/2105).Horizon 2020 European Research European Commission within the Horizon 2020 Programme (2014–2020). Grant Number: 635690Peer reviewe

Instrumental GC-MS analysis of virgin olive oils already subjected to sensory evaluation

The aroma plays an important role in the olive oil consumer preference and it is one of the parameters used to classify olive oils. The oils of lower quality have an aroma very different rather than that of an extra virgin olive oil, due to the presence of metabolic pathways different from the Lipoxygenase (LOX) one. Depending on the relevant pathway, different odorants are produced giving rise to unpleasant sensory perception whose intensity is related to the amounts of some aroma components. The sensory evaluation, also called \u201cpanel test\u201d is the only normed method to assess the quality of the oils relying on their aroma, but this procedure, although carried out by a trained assessor, has some drawbacks. The use of analytical techniques consists in an objective approach, able to identify and quantify the odorants in the volatile fraction of both extra virgin and virgin oils. In this work, 77 olive oils were analyzed; 21 were extra virgin while 56 were virgin olive oils characterized by different sensory defects with different intensities. SPME-GC-MS techniques and the \u201cFind by Chromatogram Deconvolution\u201d algorithm were applied, in order to extract the most compounds as possible. The results obtained were subjected to some statistical analysis, from the simple Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to the more complex Partial Least Square (PLS) regression, to find some correlations between sensory evaluation and chemical composition, with the final aim to develop a method suitable to verify the results of the panel test. The PCA was not so useful to reach the goal, so the PLS regression was applied. The models obtained highlighted the compounds characterizing the defected samples analyzed, each one with a specific importance. The models developed have been composed by a high number of variables because, instead to consider the compounds concentration, the variables subjected to this analysis have been the chromatographic signal detected at each time of the analysis. To simplify, only the relevant variables were taken into account and some relations between the specific compound content and the median of the defects have been foun

Afro-Cuban religion, diaspora ethnobotany and environmental change in post-Soviet Cuba

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