I have this idea that if an institution has at its base, principles that are environmentally sustainable and socially just, and that the main goal of that institution is truly to serve, then it won’t be able to fail when times get tough.  To put this theory to the test I went searching recently for some stock or institution that remained unscathed in the face of the recent market collapse.  It didn’t surprise me at all, as a firm believer in the idea of microcredit, to hear that the institution of microfinance indeed is not feeling any strain whatsoever these days.

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Step 1: Click once a day at TheHungerSite.com.

You’ll fund the donation of 1.1 cups of food. While you’re there, take a look at their equally worthy sister sites.

Step 2: Play at FreeRice.com.

Study for the GRE, test your English abilities, or simply bone up on your vocabulary. While you do, your clicks will generate funding for donating free rice to the hungry. Better yet, share this online game with students you know.

Step 3: Sign the petition at HelpSweden.org.

This tongue-in-cheek organization turns our concepts of poverty around and asks for a renewed commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. Read more about what makes HelpSweden a good idea.

Step 4: Put some of your paycheck into Kiva.org.

You’ll get your money back and you’ll have helped somebody to build a business or a home.

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The author wrote of Elisabeth, a 53 year old grandmother, who accompanied her daughter after she gave birth to her first child. She spoke of how, for her, if she had wanted to give birth with light, she would have to bring her own candles.

Now, in the small village of Antsahadinta, 20 kilometers to the west of Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo, the medical clinic now has its own solar generator to produce its own electricity.

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HelpSweden.org has drafted a petition to Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. It urges greater action on the Millennium Development Goals when Sweden holds the European Union presidency in the second half of 2009. The message also holds a reminder of the first world’s forgotten debt to the rest of the world for resources and labor.

Think Africa’s poor?

Not in terms of natural resources. Most diamonds and gold in the world come from Africa. With all the conflict that’s erupted over mining the abundant precious materials in the Congo, there’s a saying, “We’d be so much better off if we weren’t so rich.”

Much of the African continent is also blessed a climate far more lush than, say, Sweden. Yet with a fraction of the natural resources and more snow than you could shake a kräftskivor at, Sweden’s economy is among the top twenty largest in the world, dwarfing any African nation.

So what gives?

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CHOSA’S vision is based on the belief that every South African child is entitled to grow up in a safe, healthy and nurturing environment that will lead to uplifting the entire community. In order to achieve this, our goal is to create an organization that is based on integrity, compassion and efficiency.

CHOSA’s mission is to identify and support community based organizations (CBOs) that reach out and take care of orphans and other vulnerable children in South Africa.

CHOSA takes a holistic approach to community development. By supporting these CBOs, we help empower other marginalized people in these communities. Moreover, through community participation, CHOSA promotes local action, self-empowerment, and peer-to-peer networking as essential strategies for community-owned development.

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Video source: GreenForAllOfficial on YouTube

Despite the fact that women living in poverty are the most threatened by the dangers that stem from global warming, they also key actors in ensuring their communities’ ability to cope with and adapt to climate change.

In general, women lives are more intimitately connected to the environment more than men. Oftentimes, men tend to be away in the cities while the women look after children and work on the land in rural areas.

Many women depend on the ecosystem for food, energy, water and medicine, the very ecosystem which is threatened by the specter of climate change.

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In another few years - in 2025 to be precise - the number could swell to 3 billion driving back gains in the fight against poverty and under-development, otherwise known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

For many people around the world, safe drinking water is a scarce resource and out of necessity, they resort to what’s available - polluted water.

But contaminated water isn’t just dirty—it’s deadly. Some 1.8 million people die every year of diseases like cholera, caused by poor sanitation. Tens of millions of others are seriously sickened by a host of water-related ailments—many of which are easily preventable.

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The social and economic gap between the world’s richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at subsistence level and the richest billion are becoming wealthier with each passing year.

One way of narrowing the gap between rich and poor segments of society is by ensuring universal education. This means making sure that the 72 million children not enrolled in school are able to attend. Children without any formal education are starting life with a severe handicap, one that almost ensures they will remain in abject poverty and that the gap between the poor and the rich will continue to widen. In an increasingly integrated world, this widening gap itself becomes a source of instability. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen focuses the point: “Illiteracy and innumeracy are a greater threat to humanity than terrorism.”

In the effort to achieve universal primary education, the World Bank has taken the lead with its Education for All plan, where any country with a well-designed plan to achieve this goal is eligible for Bank financial support. The three principal requirements are that a country submit a sensible plan to reach universal basic education, commit a meaningful share of its own resources to the plan, and have transparent budgeting and accounting practices. If fully implemented, all children in poor countries would get a primary school education by 2015, helping them to break out of poverty.

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Exponential increases in food prices in recent times have created enormous challenges to governments, national and international organizations, and aid agencies everywhere in the world. The World Bank has estimated that the rising food prices could push an additional 100 million people into poverty, thereby undermining the current efforts geared towards poverty reduction.

Increasing demand, decreasing supply, and the rising oil prices, which are in turn affected by numerous other factors, have been some reasons for the rise in food prices. Demand for cereal grains has been rising not only as a result of population growth, but also because of the growing middle class population in countries like China and India. Growing incomes have resulted in more demand for cereal grains directly and also more meat and dairy, which in turn has raised the demand for more grains as feed for the livestock. Another more important reason for the rise in demand for food crops is the development of bio-fuels, which have attracted a great deal of attention in recent times.

On the supply front, according to a publication by the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), droughts in Australia and Turkey and bad weather in Ukraine and parts of North America have resulted in less agricultural production which has caused food prices to rise. A more important, but often overlooked reason for the decrease in the supply of farm commodities against rising demand is that the subsidies that the developed countries have been providing to their agriculture sector have dampened world prices of those products and made the products of developing countries uncompetitive. This has had a tremendous impact in agricultural production in developing countries. In the absence of competitiveness and any other gains to be derived from agriculture, the developing countries have had less incentive to invest in agricultural infrastructure, agricultural research and development, and the like. As a result, agriculture production in these countries continually declined disrupting supply.

Then, who should take the blame of rising food prices? If we look at the demand side, we see that the demand has been rising in one part because of rising incomes in few developing countries, and on the other, because of the development of bio-fuels by the developed countries. On the supply side, drought and bad weather conditions are not something which are under human control, but less supply resulting from less production in developing countries owing to the agricultural policies of the developed countries definitely deserves attention.

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In spite of the sweltering heat, smallholder farmers in this border district of Zimbabwe can cheer about the black-eyed beans. The beans – a new crop in the area - are small, creamy white, with a black mark at the sprouting point, making them easy to recognize.

From the way they cook to the way they sell, black-eyed beans have proved a big hit among the small farmers in this district, traditionally known for growing maize, groundnuts, cotton and sunflowers.

In 2002, USAID’s Linkages for the Economic Advancement of the Disadvantaged (LEAD Program) sub-contracted VeCO, a non-governmental organization, to provide 1,250 farmers with the necessary extension support services, skills and resources to produce both black-eyed beans and Macia sorghum, crops which are drought tolerant. The overall objective was to reduce food insecurity, improve food intake with a new edible crop, and provide a new source of income for poor smallholders in drought prone regions.

Nyarai Njenge, 35, one of the beneficiary farmers, did not know anything about black-eyed beans prior to 2002. But, now, as most of the beneficiary farmers, she knowledgeably recounts the nutritional, income and food security benefits of the crop.

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And no, it’s not global warming. It’s the myriad humanitarian crises that plague the third world.

That I am writing about it here though, obviously speaks to a link to one of PlanetSave’s main topics; climate science.

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According to the report, interest in biofuels has intoxicated rich country governments to the extent that they are foregoing difficult but urgent decisions about how to reduce consumption of oil.

Sadly, the cumulative effect of the over-dependence on biofuels as a solution to the energy crisis is being felt in developing countries.

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We already know about the myriad of problems around the world caused by drought, water delivery restrictions and inadequate access to clean water. And we’ve already heard the argument that global warming is to blame for such water shortages. A report recently released by the advocacy group Transparency International provides another reason for the global water crisis: corruption.

In a press release issued by the global coalition against corruption, Chair Huguette Labelle was quoted, “Water is a resource without substitute. It is paramount to our health, our food security, our energy future and our ecosystem. But corruption plagues water management and use in all these areas.”

The organization’s report which was published last month, entitled Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector, argues that corruption plagues all segments of the water sectors, from water resources management to drinking water services, irrigation and hydropower. The report’s analysis of corruption in 35 countries from different world regions cites examples, such as bribery in water delivery and procurement-related looting of irrigation and hydropower funds, and focuses on the gravity of the situation and urgent need for reform.

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Early in the morning, Mary Kanyaire, 33, collects water and firewood, and then prepares a meal for her two school-going children before she heads out to the fields, approximately 3 kilometers away from her homestead. Alone, under the hot sun, she weeds groundnuts in a sandy field with a hoe.

Although she knows she will not get a good yield, she strives on, buckets of sweat pouring down her face.

For Kanyaire and millions like her, subsistence farming is the only source of survival and is practiced with absolutely no support from the government.  In recent years, climate change, which has resulted in an inconsistent rainfall pattern, has dealt a heavy blow to the prospects of subsistence farming. Yet in Zimbabwe, as in many parts of Africa, the government offers little or no support to subsistence farmers, leaving them to the vagaries of the elements and economic and political shake-ups.

Agriculture in Africa is primarily a family activity, and the majority of farmers are smallholders who own between 0.5 and 2.0 hectares of land, as determined by socio-cultural factors.  Women provide about half of the labor force and produce most of the food crops consumed by the family.  Many of the men leave for urban areas in search of better opportunities, and when they make it in the city, they invest little in their rural areas.

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Due to lack of information and access to markets, the poor farmer, like many others in his village, is left with little choice but to part with his crop.

Most likely, he will not be able to afford healthcare, or send his children to school, and all his sweat will go to fattening the purse of a huge conglomerate in the global north. The conglomerate will process the cotton (or whatever product it is) into a good that the poor farmer can only dream of purchasing.

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This past weekend, a major summit was held in Lima, Peru between leaders of European Union countries and also Latin American and Caribbean countries. Numerous agenda items were on the table, but the overall focuses of the meetings were upon the global food crisis, climate change, poverty, and potential trade agreements. Of course, what would an international summit be without some

1. good, old-fashioned name-calling to put everyone on edge before hand
2. a President attending a “rival summit” and taking time to go play some football! (Soccer for Americans.)
3. and an uninspiring finish where seemingly little got accomplished, but yet we can hold onto hope because there are plans to keep the conversation going.

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   ]]> http://ecoworldly.com/2008/05/20/highlights-from-the-eu-lac-summit/feed/ http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2008/05/11/a-different-sort-of-school-lunch-program/ http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2008/05/11/a-different-sort-of-school-lunch-program/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 04:18:41 +0000 Meredith Melnick http://eatdrinkbetter.com/2008/05/11/a-different-sort-of-school-lunch-program/ When the World Food Program (WFP) introduced free breakfasts to public schools in impoverished communities around the world, teachers immediately noticed a difference in their classrooms. Not only were students more alert and focused, they attended more regularly and were never late so as not to miss breakfast time. The quality of the students changed, but so did the quantity. The percentage of female students - most likely to be forced to stay behind to help earn income - sky-rocketed and the age of attendance fell. Four year olds began to attend school with their older siblings, sitting obediently in classes just for a free bowl of rice in the morning. In many impoverished families, children are forced to earn their keep in place of going to school. In addition to eradicating hunger, WFP made school attendance a central part of their goal for the breakfast program.

   The WFP school feeding program has become a touchstone aspect of both the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the G8 action pact of 2002. Between the program’s inception in 1999 and its last data recorded in 2005, the number of children served has grown by 82%, which amounts to 21.7 million schoolchildren in 74 countries.

   Now, despite its success and widespread acclaim, the International Herald is reporting that the WFP program will not continue in Cambodia - the first of many predicted shut-downs as rising food costs threaten the profoundly poor.

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