Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The Corruption/Hunger Chart
Here’s a little chart I put together to highlight the connection between corruption and hunger in Africa. While the FAO and World Food Program end up asking for tens of millions of dollars in Western aid to feed Africa every year, estimates of money lost to corruption in Africa every year are in excess of US $100 billion.
|
Country
|
Corruption
|
Food Insecurity Problems
|
| Angola | US $1 billion in 2001 oil revenues “missing”(FAO appeals for $5.2 million aid) |
1.4 million people need “urgent assistance” (FAO) |
| Malawi | Corrupt government officials sold 160,000 tons of grain last Fall; $8 million in European Union aid diverted — EU demanded return of the money in July 2002 (FAO appeals for $1.6 million aid) |
168,000 families at risk (FAO) |
| Swaziland | $2 million aid diverted for down payment on $55 million presidential jet (FAO appeals for $1.4 million aid) |
21,000 families at risk (FAO) |
| Zambia | Ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency International; hundreds of millions stolen in the 1990s (FAO appeals for $2.6 million aid) |
62,000 families at risk (FAO) |
| Zimbabwe | President orders seizure of white-owned farms, causing food crisis; millions $ US aid money missing (FAO appeals for $16 million aid) |
600,000 families at risk (FAO) |
Tags: Uncategorized
UN: 300,000 People Could Starve in Africa
According to the United Nations, the ongoing food crisis in southern Africa could kill as many as 300,000 people in the next six months.
Dr. David Nabarro of the World Health Organization told the Associated Press,
There is now a severe humanitarian crisis. … Our calculations suggest that the crisis in this region could result in up to 300,000 ‘excess deaths’ during the next six months. This is a conservative estimate.
Of course this is the same WHO that, in the middle of this regional crisis, took time out to devote its resources to studying whether or not potato chips might slightly increase cancer risks in the developed world based on a single study that has yet to be peer reviewed.
As usual, the United Nations certainly has its priorities clearly defined.
Source:
UN says African food crisis could kill 300,000. Alexander G. Higgins, Associated Press, July 10, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Is Organic Agriculture Viable? Probably Not
Ronald Bailey took a look at the inconvenient parts of a Swiss study that the media largely covered as offering proof that organic farming was viable and efficient. A close look at the study, however, finds that it is neither.
First, it is important to note that organic crops are not efficient at all when it comes to land use. The crop yields the Swiss researchers found were significantly lower for organic crops than for intensive modern farming. Bailey notes that the study found that organic “cereal crop yields in Europe typically are 60 to 70% of those under conventional management.”
This simply confirms what has been obvious for a long time — any wholesale switch away from intensive farming to organic farming would mean converting massive amounts of land to agricultural purposes.
The Swiss researchers maintain, however, that organic farming is more energy efficient. Their study claims that organic farms use only half the energy that conventional farms do. The difference is mainly due to the use of fertilizers and pesticides in intensive agriculture. By the time that the higher crop yields of intensive farming is factored in, though, this 50 percent energy savings is lowered to 19 percent.
But does organic farming really save energy? Not according to Bailey,
Secondly, the researchers declare that they found nutrients “in the organic systems to be 34 to 51% lower than in conventional systems, whereas mean crop yield was only 20% lower over a period of 21 years.” But — to ask the organic advocates’ own question — is organic agriculture sustainable over the long run? Again, the fine print says no. As their research confirms, organic farming is mining the soil of its vital minerals, particularly phosphorus and potassium. Eventually, as these minerals are used up, organic crop production will fall below its already low level. Conventional farming, on the other hand, restores mineral balance through fertilization.
So much for sustainable agriculture.
Source:
Organic Alchemy: Organic farming could kill billions of people. Ronald Bailey, Reason, June 5, 2002.
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As Many as 27 Million Forced Into Slavery Worldwide
A report published ahead of this month’s meeting United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery claims that as many as 27 million people worldwide are held in one form of slavery or another, most of them children.
The report, put together by Anti-Slavery International, highlights the plight of bonded agricultural workers in Pakistan, slavery in the Sudan, and the worldwide problem of child domestic servants and the sexual exploitation of children. Other countries cited by the report as tolerating slavery included Brazil, Mauritania, and the United Arab Emirates.
Sources:
United Nations Meets On Global Slavery. Anti-Slavery International, May 2002.
Millions ‘forced into slavery’. The BBC, May 27, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
Poverty Is the Real Pollution
This web site has stayed out of the controversy over Bjorn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, though from the reviews and discussion, there is much it would agree with as well as some parts it would disagree. We wholeheartedly agree, however, with Lomborg’s comments to the BBC about the United Nations’ recent Global Environment Outlook-3 report which complained about the increasingly negative impact that humanity is having on the world’s ecosystems. The BBC quoted Lomborg as replying,
We think things are getting worse and worse but actually if we look at the facts we see that fewer and fewer people are starving, we’re better able to handle pollution in the developed world (for instance, air pollution) and in the developing world, it will be the same when they get sufficiently rich.
What we need to realize is that the real pollution problem is the pollution of poverty; when people are poor they cannot take care of the environment 10 or a 100 years down the line.
Eliminate the sort of abject poverty present in the developing world and many of the environmental problems would correct themselves as those societies were able to devote more of their resources to environmental protection.
Source:
Poverty is ‘real pollution’. The BBC, May 22, 2002
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United Nations Hopes to Eliminate Iodine Deficiency Worldwide by 2005
Iodine deficiency was eliminated a long time ago in the developed world through fortification of common foods such as milk and salt. In the developing world, however, iodine deficiency has been a major health problem until the last decade. Now, an offshoot of the United Nations General Assembly on Children — the Micronutrients Initiative — hopes to eliminate iodine deficiency worldwide by 2005.
While use of iodized salt is almost universal in developed countries, in many parts of the developing world is not so common. As recently as 1990, for example, only 20 percent of households used iodized salt.
This tends to result in iodine deficiency, which can lead to children having IQs 10 to 15 points lower than they otherwise would be. That poses a serious problem for countries already wracked by poverty and a lack of economic development.
Today, however, 70 percent of households in the developed world use iodized salt, and the Micronutrients Initiative hopes to make that all but universal by 2005.
Currently parts of Eastern Europe and India have relatively low rates of iodized salt use (in central and Eastern Europe, only about 25 percent of households use iodized salt). The Micronutrients Initiative will be concentrating on those regions to try to achieve the sorts of gains seen in China, which went from 50 percent of households using iodine to more than 95 percent today.
As UNICEF’s Werner Schultink told the BBC, “From start to finish, the global effort to eliminate iodine deficiency by universal salt iodination will have taken only 15 years to achieve, making it one of the most effective international public health campaigns in history.”
Source:
Iodine health campaign success. The BBC, May 11, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
High Yield Conservation Coalition
A coalition of individuals involved with global food issues has issued a declaration calling for more research into high-yield farming and forestry methods in order to provide better food security for the developing world as well as avoid cultivation of environmentally-sensitive ecosystems.
Nobel Peace Prizes winners Norman Borlaug and Oscar Arias have joined with former U.S. Sen. George McGovern, former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, James Lovelock and others in support of the “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-yield Farming and Forestry.” The declaration reads, in part,
Therefore, we, the signatories to this declaration, hereby declare that additional high-yield practices, based on advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology, are critically needed in agriculture and forestry not only to achieve the goal of improving the human condition for all peoples but also the simultaneous preservation of the natural environment and its biodiversity through the conservation of wild areas and natural habitat.
We invite all organizations and individuals concerned with human welfare and the conservation and preservation of our planet’s rich biological heritage to join us in support of high-yield agriculture and forestry by adding their names to this declaration.
Center for Global Food Issues director Dennis Avery writes in a column for TechCentralStation.Com, that the alternative to high-yield agriculture and forestry is environmental destruction,
The leader of the new coalition is Dr. Norman Borlaug, the Iowa plant breeder who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Green Revolution. He and his fellow researchers saved a billion people from starving during the 1960s. But Borlaug was also the first to note (in 1986) that the higher crop yields saved billions of acres of wildlands from being plowed down for low-yield food. Today, the total of wildlands saved by high yield farming has risen to at least 12 million square miles (not acres), equal to the total land area of the United States, Europe, and South America. (Or 3,400 Yellowstone National Parks.)
Large amounts of land that is currently wilderness will have to be put into production if yields should taper off. It is good to see somebody fighting to avoid that possibility.
Source:
Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-yield Farming and Forestry. Center or Global Food Issues, 2002.
High yield heroes. Dennis Avery, TechCentralStation.Com, April 30, 2002.
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Vaccine for West Nile Virus Scheduled for Monkey Tests
The BBC reported in March that researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and INfectious Diseases and the Walter Reed Army INstitute of Research have developed a potential vaccine for West Nile virus which they will begin testing on monkeys this month.
West Nile virus occurs in many parts of the world and in 1999 found its way to New York where it was responsible for seven deaths.
West Nile virus is closely related to the virus that causes dengue fever, and researchers created a virus that is a hybrid of weakened versions of both viruses.
The vaccination was first tested on mice and produced a potent immune system response. Next up are tests in monkeys scheduled to begin sometime in April.
If the vaccine proves successful at creating an immune response in monkeys, the movement to clinical trials in human beings will likely begin very quickly since the weakened dengue virus used in the vaccine has already been clinically tested in human beings and shown to be safe. Human trials of the vaccine could begin before the end of the year.
Source:
Vaccine developed for West Nile virus. The BBC, March 5, 2002.
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Rice Genome Draft Will Boost Food Research
The draft sequences of the rice genome were published this month, providing a window into one of the world’s most important food crops that will help increase the pace of advances in traditional breeding and genetic engineering of rice and other crops.
Obviously the decoding of the rice genome has a lot of implications for rice, but it will also yield important information about other grasses such as wheat, maize, barley and sorghum. According to researcher Stephen Goff,
There are about 1,000 traits that are mapped by breeders already to specific chromosomes. Now, we have the genes associated with those traits. We can speed up breeding in rice and all the other grasses.
Knowing which gene codes for resistance to bacterial pathogens in rice, for example, will also tip off researchers about which gene does the same thing for wheat, hopefully leading to advances across the board in improving food security.
Source:
Rice data to boost food security. Johnathan Amos, The BBC, April 4, 2002.
Tags: Uncategorized
The Developing World’s Water Crisis
A conference is underway in Ghana looking at Africa’s water management problems. This follows a United Nations report that highlights the intense problems faced by those in the developing world in obtaining adequate water supplies.
The report, No Water No Future, notes that today an estimated one billion people lack sufficient access to safe drinking water. Half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation.
One of the interesting things in that report is how private sector, for-profit initiatives have arisen where government policies have failed to provide clean water.
For example, the report notes the “astronomic growth” in bottled water sales in the developing world,
Firstly, where piped municipal water supply is unavailable or of inadequate quality, the provision of bottled drinking water is a very significant economic activity that has seen astronomic growth rates in countries ranging from Mexico to India to Thailand. In fact, the success of this domestic private sector has in recent years motivated multinational companies to develop near-global brands of drinking water that compete with local brands. For consumers in developed countries ‘bottled water’ refers to high-priced mineral water. For consumers in developing countries bottled water often refers to reliable, filtered water in 20-litre reusable containers, used for drinking, cooking or other uses that really require drinking water quality. Provision of affordable drinking-quality water in bottles or containers also relieves the piped-water system of the need to produce drinking water quality that is largely used for lower-grade purposes such as toilet flushing. Innovative public-private partnerships that devise alternative ways of providing water supply and sanitation services at various scales deserve more attention.
Similarly, in agricultural use, it has been private farmers — not governments — who have largely made investments in improving groundwater development. According to the report,
Secondly, in agriculture, private farmers have been largely responsible for the major investments in groundwater development in recent decades. This groundwater use has contributed significantly to food production and the creation of wealth in rural areas. But governments have largely failed to elaborate rules and mechanisms that ensure that groundwater is used in a way that minimises the risks of over-use and protects groundwater quality.
Perhaps one of the best things that developing countries could do to promote access to water is set basic, transparent rules and then get the heck out of the way.
Source:
No Water No Future. Report to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002.
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