Ending Africa's Hunger... by funding Monsanto?

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.

But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution.

The Gates Foundation is focusing on technology, spending about a third of the $1.3 billion on promoting and developing seed biotechnologies, one of the largest recipients of which is everybody's favourite corporation, Monsanto.

However, all is not lost...

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

Read the whole article from The Nation

Previously blogged about here

Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

This is a very interesting piece:

Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

By Betsy Hartmann

The greening of hate - blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color - is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth.

Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.

This is part of what is at play whenever people in the rich countries bemoan the high birth rates of many poor countries. Once again, those with the least power (poor women of colour from the global south, in particular) make a convenient scapegoat for all manner of problems that we do not want to take responsibility for. There's also a certain paternalistic bourgeois white supremacy when we see Them as the problem and Us as the solution to all the world's problems. We just have to figure out what to do about Them before They wreck our Nature.

For example, the rush to blame China and India for the high cost of gas, food prices, and global warming. See, China is closing in on the USA as the biggest fossil fuel consumer and greenhouse gas producer. Still, the average Chinese person has around 19% of the impact of the average American. Not to mention the emissions in China have little to do with people's individual lifestyles and much to do with industrial manufacturing... mostly of crap to be consumed by Americans, Canadians and members of other wealthy nations. Not that China is a saint, but I find it interesting how we love to blame them.

The article documents the involvement of some environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Conservation International (CI) with some pretty right wing campaigns. For example:

With USAID assistance, CI and the World Wildlife Fund are promoting a conservation campaign in the region focused on identifying illegal settlements -- often Zapatista communities -- which are then forcibly removed by the Mexican army. These efforts are complemented by the government's aggressive female sterilization campaign in the region. CI's close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for.

She puts this in perspective:

Coercive conservation measures, of course, are nothing new. From colonial times onwards, wildlife conservation efforts have often involved the violent exclusion of local people from their land by game rangers drawn from the ranks of the police, military and prison guards. To legitimize this exclusion, government officials, conservation agencies and aid donors have frequently invoked narratives of expanding human populations destroying pristine landscapes, obscuring the role of resource extraction by state and corporate interests.

This is so true. For example, I was recently studying how in South Africa (but not only there!) the creation of national parks caused significant dispossession of indigenous peoples' land. The racialist ideas around pollution were often driving conservation movements.

Hartmann continues by outlining several myths that help to drive this coercive conservation: man versus nature, the wilderness ethic, the degradation narrative, and scarcity. For example, the myth of the romantic and nostalgic wilderness ethic:

The ways in which wilderness is constructed have a number of problematic outcomes. The ahistorical myth of wilderness as "virgin" land obscures the systematic forced migration and genocide of its original Native American inhabitants.

By locating nature in the far-off wild, it allows people to evade responsibility for environmental protection closer to their homes. And it is geographically parochial, blinding many Americans to the complex ways in which people relate to the land in other countries and cultures. Critiquing the wilderness ethic does not mean one is opposed to national parks and nature protection - rather, it calls for equitable and democratic processes to ensure local communities are not pushed off their lands and robbed of their livelihoods.

Also popular is the degradation narrative in which

...population pressure-induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate elsewhere as "environmental refugees," either to ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is once again set in motion or to cities where they become a primary source of political instability.
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It blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries; and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. It is a way of homogenizing all rural people in the Global South into one big destructive force, reinforcing simplistic Us vs. Them, West vs. the Rest dichotomies.

You should probably just go read the whole thing. H/T Lisa, commenting on Feministe

I Hate to say I Told You So...

But I told you so. Or to be more accurate, everyone who cares more about people than profit told you so.

From a post in 2005 about biofuels:

Not only inefficient, but "a humanitarian and environmental disaster", says George Monbiot, presenting a chilling vision, in which "most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people." He reminds us that markets respond to profit, not hunger. Those who need food the most are exactly the ones with the least amount of money to buy it, and so the monied person's car will always win out. He reminds us that even today, those who buy meat products have more purchasing power, so grain is fed to animals instead of to starving kids.

In 2006, when I blogged about the Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point, the problem was overproduction and low commodity prices driving smaller farmers out.

"Many Canadian and U.S. farmers are going out of business because crop prices are at their lowest in nearly 100 years," Qualman said in an interview. "Farmers are told overproduction is to blame for the low prices they've been forced to accept in recent years."

However, most North American agribusiness corporations posted record profits in 2004. With only five major companies controlling the global grain market, there is a massive imbalance of power, he said.

Now, here we are in 2008, and the UN's food aid programme is in serious trouble, due to the astronomical increase in the price of food.

What is the problem?

In the three decades to 2005, world food prices fell by about three-quarters in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Economist food prices index. Since then they have risen by 75%, with much of that coming in the past year. Wheat prices have doubled, while maize, soya and oilseeds are at record highs.

Why are food prices rising?

The booming world economy has driven up prices for all commodities. Changes in diets have also played a big part. Meat consumption in many countries has soared, pushing up demand for the grain needed by cattle. Demand for biofuels has also risen strongly. This year, for example, one third of the US maize crop will go to make biofuels*. Moreover, the gradual reform and liberalisation of agricultural subsidy programmes in the US and Europe have reduced the butter and grain mountains of yesteryear by eliminating overproduction.

*Note, because of the high cost of food, the "US, the biggest single food aid contributor, will radically cut the amount it gives away."

Again, I recognize that there are many problems with the food aid system, because it does nothing to help the economic structural problems that are to blame for hunger and malnutrition (food aid can in some cases even harm local food producers, say by undercutting them) but this is certainly not the answer.

Economic Growth Creates Poverty In The World

There is a "mystery" we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?
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It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don't adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few. (From Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti)

Even though most Americans believe the poor are to blame for their own problems, the truth is inequality is the inevitable result of capitalism. "Wealth" is moved from those who have little money or power to those who already have a lot of both. Increasing the pace of economic growth does little to combat poverty, because it is a problem of distribution, not production. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most fertile places in the world, yet it also boasts the highest rates of poverty, hunger and malnutrition.

In The End of Economic Growth, Adam Parsons points out:

If one billion dollars in overseas aid truly lifted 434,000 people out of extreme poverty... then the world would be an altogether different place.
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The 'trickle-down theorists', in no short number, argue with the same few hackneyed metaphors to illustrate their obsession with economic growth, like the rising tide that lifts all boats, or that, rather than share the cake more evenly, it is better to bake an even larger one... What this complacent premise fails to account for is the billions of people earning less than two dollars a day who are fortunate to own a corrugated shelter, let alone a 'cake' or a 'boat' to rise in. Poverty eradication is a nice enough idea, the lesson seems to be, so long as it remains consistent with the assumption of the rich getting richer.

As of May 2005, the three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 47 poorest countries. Wow, Bill Gates' personal net worth is higher than the GDP of more than half of the world's countries. (Crossed out because the comparison isn't valid - see comments)

To plead for a redistribution of wealth, even for a one percent redistribution of the incomes of the richest 20 percent to the poorest 20 percent, is tantamount to asking for a magic wand so long as the existing macroeconomic polices drive international politics... Another rudimentary metaphor to add to the trickle-down theorists limited repertoire, in this sense, might be the description of a cancerous tumour.

In other, related news, the UNDP says the brain drain costs the African continent over $4 billion annually. Canada's immigration policies do nothing to help, by the way. Our immigration policy favours the wealthy and professionals, such as doctors and lawyers - although once they get here, they are often unable to practice.

The Problem with Bill Gates' Philanthropy in Africa...

...Is that it appears to help, but in the end does more damage.

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, on Friday delivered a snub to the ethical investment movement by saying his foundation should concentrate on grant giving, rather than judging the social impact of businesses in which it invests. (FT)

Now Gates is investing in a project called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which seeks to fix the problem of hunger by promoting high tech farming.
But promoting technological solutions that have done so much damage (like GM Crops) is simply irresponsible. Besides, there is a an abundance of food in the world, it is just distributed unfairly. Things like unfair trade policies and subsidies are a huge part of the problem. Monocultures and environmental degradation in vulnerable regions is another.
From Stuffed and Starved via zmag

The Gates solution ends up exacerbating the problems facing the poor, shoring up institutions and companies that scalp poor farmers. And then they offer a band-aid, one that helps the wound go septic.

Philanthropy isn't meant to be like sausage-manufacturing - yet every step of the way in the Gates plan for Africa, from endowment investment to the agricultural spend, induces nausea. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Microsoft's chief software architect has spent a career developing technological patches, and then patches for those patches, and so on. If one were uncharitable, we might see the Foundation itself as a patch for his falling personal stock in the 1990s. It does rather seem that Gates' generosity is charity in its worst form, a mode of self-aggrandizement. Such is the narrow vista, and greatest tragedy, of the world's richest man. (The Rest)

There is a major flaw in the Gates vision; the solution to major third world problems like hunger is not charity - it is justice. Imagine the benefits if Gates put his considerable money and influence behind programs for justice instead of these controlling, damaging acts of "charity".

New Studies Show How Violence Against Women Can Be Stopped

A new United Nations Population Fund report released today in New York does more than simply chronicle the extent of worldwide violence against women. It offers 10 case studies that show how carefully targeted and planned interventions can successfully reduce gender-based violence. Check out the cool online exhibition.

"We tried to form pressure groups within the community to discourage violence. Not only that, we also created opportunities for the community to plan their own programmes, and in that way the community began to own the project."
- National Programme Officer, UNFPA-Bangladesh

The UNFP Handbook Ending Violence Against Women, which is based on the report, summarizes specific "good practices" from the case studies. It includes points like:

• Understand the local context, and recognize that culture is dynamic and people are willing to change. Identify and build upon positive cultural values.
  
• Gather evidence and solicit expert opinion. Evidence is the most powerful tool to convince people that a change is needed.
  
• Adopt a rights-based approach, empowering women to claim their rights. Also target men (especially men who have influence in the community), whose participation is key.
  
• Allow space for community involvement, especially when tackling culturally sensitive issues. Involve people at a personal level. Tap the strength of community organizations. Engage local power structures, including faith based organizations.
  
• Separate the values underlying a harmful practice from the practice itself. This is important because it means respecting the function of traditions that may be harmful and remembering traditions can evolve. Encourage change from within.
  
• Work on legislative action, but follow up with advocacy to ensure enforcement. Use the health sector as one entry point. Build institutional capacity and forge alliances across sectors - for example, linking health services with legal services.
  
• Expand women's options overall - for example economic self-sufficiency is important
  
• Reach young people through education, in order to prevent the violence among the next generation
  
• Caring for women and girls in need means considering the whole person, preserving confidentiality and establishing trust, and also protecting service providers
  
• Be creative in raising awareness. They suggest using popular culture, like local celebrities as spokespeople, and trying to educate the media.
  

All of these points are supported with examples from the case studies. Via AllAfrica.com.

What is conspicuously absent is a recommendation for forcing women (against their will) to change their style of dress. Or bombing a country to liberate its women.

Free Education Isn't Always Enough

But it's a start.

When I was in Mexico last month, I saw lots of kids that were not in school on weekdays. I asked a local why these kids aren't in school and was told that although Mexico has good universal public education, these kids can't afford to lose the few pesos they can make selling oranges and handkerchiefs to tourists.

Even when education is free, many kids simply can't afford to go to school. Their income may be essential to the family, frequently they have to care for younger siblings, sometimes they are just trying to stay alive, not to mention there are often additional expenses (such as books, transportation, and uniforms) incurred even at public school.

Nearly 300 000 children in South Africa can't go to school because they don't have wheelchairs, hearing aids, crutches or even spectacles to make their lives easier. (more)

It is clear that the logical solution to this problem is to help these children with their particular needs. A Right-wing think tank's solution, however, would be to replace public education with private education, and hope that private charity can help send the poor kids to school.

The Fraser Institute believes because universal free public education is not providing the kind of results we'd like to see, it is a failure of the concept of public education.

This week, the United Nations 2005 World Summit in New York will address the lack of access to education for the lowest-income families around the globe. Its admirable goal is to achieve “universal primary education by 2015,” through increased international funding and government administration. The educational plight of the world’s poor seems inevitably to result in calls for such responses.

Though the big stick* of government intervention seems like a powerful tool for good, in the field of education its results have been disappointing and suggest that government interference in education is part of the problem, not the solution.

Evidence suggests that free, state-run education has not resulted in anywhere near the universal educational outcomes its advocates have promised. In many parts of the Western world, that failure is still evident after more than a century of concentrated effort, in Africa after many billions of dollars in international aid grants. These are humanitarian tragedies indeed and we must consider seriously the reasons for the failure.

Does the educational failure of the world’s poor reflect the impossibility of achieving lofty educational goals, or does it reflect misguided reliance on public financing and provision? Increasingly, the evidence suggests not that poor families are impossible to educate, but that free, state-run schools may not be the best way to deliver education to them.

Groundbreaking research by the University of Newcastle’s Dr. James Tooley in the slums of Africa, India and China reveals that a perhaps majority of students not enrolled in public schools in these countries are being educated in unregistered private schools, paid for by their parents.

Tooley’s research indicates significantly higher achievement among private-school students even after controlling for factors such as parental education and income. His fieldwork findings also show that when visited unannounced, fewer public-school teachers were engaged in teaching activities than their private-school counterparts were.

A recent BBC documentary provided vivid anecdotal evidence of this when it showed footage of teachers sleeping in African public-school classrooms and chatting on their cell phones, while students were left to their own devices.

Though governments in the developing world do not recognize the existence or contribution of private schools, their value is fully acknowledged by parents, who make great personal sacrifices to pay the tuition. One parent explains, “If you were offered free fruit in the market, you would know it was rotten. If you want good fruit, you have to pay for it. The same is true of education.”

Here in Canada, private schools are equally unsung heroes of education for our poorest citizens. An OECD report released this week reveals that even after accounting for parental education and income, private-school students in Canada do much better on mathematics tests than their public school counterparts. Statistics Canada tells us that 29 percent, nearly a third of children who attend private schools in Canada, are from families with incomes of less than $50,000. This suggests that many poor parents in Canada also value private education, despite the financial sacrifices it requires of them.

In fact, there is reason to believe that private schools may offer lower-income families better value for money than public schools offer taxpayers. Evidence of this comes from Children First: School Choice Trust, a greatly over-subscribed program in Ontario that offers grants to lower-income families. The program pays up to 50 percent of tuition at independent elementary school for 800 children whose household income is less than twice the poverty line. The average household income of Children First families is less than $28,000 while the average tuition of their schools is $4,400, about 56 percent of what is spent per student in the public system.

Why are these poor families choosing private schools that will cost them dearly, when public schools are available free of charge? Some want relief from bullying, others religious education, others cite smaller schools with greater academic emphasis and respect for teachers, while yet others help for a special education need. Each family seems to agree with the African parent’s analogy of the free fruit and that educational value offered by private schools is more than worth their financial sacrifices.

Chinese officials told Tooley’s research team private schools for the poor were “logically impossible.” Like those officials, government bureaucrats* will continue to deny the existence and potential of educational entrepreneurs, despite the cost of their denial to those poor families they purport to serve. And while they do, the admirable UN targets for universal education will prove continually elusive.
My Emphasis
* Note the bogeymen: "big stick of government intervention", "government bureaucrats". Can't you just HEAR the venom dripping from their mouths?

What planet are they on? The FI's solution would make sense only in a world in which poverty means not being able to afford both education and an iPod. Yes I'm still annoyed about this.

Related

The Gapminder World Brings Vital Global Data to Life

Really Cool!

Video via TED Blog
This very entertaining and informative 20 minute talk by Hans Rosling (public health expert) brings vital global data to life. He showcases a lot of powerful data in a very easy-to-understand visual moving display. And for sports fans, it features instant replays.

The best thing is, you can play with the incredible graphing software he uses for FREE! Try the incredibly easy to use Google Tool or the full thing at Gapminder.org.

As discussed in an earlier post of mine, when you map the fertility rate with women as a percentage of the labour force (hit "play" to see it change over time) there is some correlation. The correlation with contraceptive use is even stronger, as expected. A reduction in Child mortality, improvement in income and girls' education are also strong predictors of lowered fertility rate.

My only criticism is that I think it should be possible to map Income Inequality as an indicator against all the other indicators. Also I'd like to see Median Income rather than income per capita, which flattens disparities. BTW, if anyone can help me find those indicators on this software, please let me know it in the comments. Also on my wish list, I'd love to be able to map things like "minimum wage" with "economic growth".

Microcredit and Women Empowerment

Are the microcredit programs that everyone is abuzz about overrated? Apparently this is a hotly debated issue.

My first inclination is to dismiss microcredit because it doesn't change the structural causes of poverty. Microcredit brings poor people into the existing global system of exploitation, and might even mask that very real exploitation, putting even more onus on the poor to get themselves out of the hole others have dug them into. It doesn't speak to social justice at all.

BUT, as I was reminded by The Rebel Sell, something that actually works shouldn't necessarily be dismissed so quickly, for solely ideological reasons. It is important to also look at the real and measurable results. Our fight for justice can, and does, occur in parallel to all sorts of development activities; indeed, as people rise out of the most devastating of poverty, they may have more resources and power with which to fight.

So microcredit needs to be examined on a functional basis: does it work? Does it help alleviate poverty? Does it empower women financially and/or within the family?

The answer is not so clear.

Increasing the burden of debt is one potential problem. As long as microcredit is managed by NGOs like Save the Children, this is a fairly small risk, as there are a whole host of additional helpful programs that accompany the actual money lending transaction. Unfortunately with high interest rates, especially when the private sector gets involved for profit, there can be grave consequences.

If not necessarily effective at improving poverty levels, what about the situation of women? Improving women's equality is vital to so many other progressive goals, that this alone might validate microcredit. If it could improve women's economic position, reduce the birth rate, and improve health, then there might be something to it.

Proponents of these micro-loans list the ways they help women, but results are mixed. According this journal article, "the effects of interventions such as microcredit loan programs—which empower women economically and socially—on domestic violence are ambiguous. Participation in such programs can, on the one hand, reduce a woman's risk of domestic violence by making her life more visible and by increasing her perceived value in the family; on the other hand, if the woman's economic empowerment results in her acting more assertively, her husband may respond with violence."

There does seem to be some preliminary evidence that involvement in one of these microcredit programmes does improve contraceptive use by women, which is a fairly significant marker of progress. There are a lot more articles here.

I can't claim to make a definitive conclusion. Although I would prefer to see the end of the disastrous SAPs and an expansion of important social programs, if microcredit energizes a discouraged development sector and elicits more money for the groups on the ground, then for that reason alone, it is worth pursuing.

More on Poverty and Women's Issues

Grab Bag - From Iran to the "Dark" Continent

Interesting articles in the Toronto Star this week.

Iran's unseen art:

"Tabibzadeh pointedly satirizes the hypocrisy of an outwardly Islamic society wracked by sexual promiscuity and heroin or opium addiction. In one painting, a completely nude figure is covered by a headscarf — mandatory for women in Iran in all public spaces." Here's more art by Golnar Tabibzadeh and other Iranian artists.

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Despite AIDS, Africa endures by James Travers:

The great kaleidoscope of lands, languages and peoples sweeping north and east from Cape Town to Cairo is now synonymous with Stephen Lewis's pandemic, the corruption of kleptocrats and the mad, jumped-up generals who fight their wars with stolen children.

It's true that much of that is true. Most of the 49 years since Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa to independence were lost to suffering, Big-Man greed and boundless hostility over limited resources.

That's Africa's history, not its present or future. And it's certainly not the continent's character.

Beneath all the horrors roils a remarkable spirit. Despite the death and palpable despair, Africa is bursting with energy, the determination to turn nothing into something and, yes, hope.

Outsiders usually miss it. Overwhelmed, they see slums, not rudimentary industry, huge failures, not small successes, and victims, not the resilient.

"The fact that they survive on a $1 a day makes them the greatest entrepreneurs in the world," says Farouk Jiwa.

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The `development of underdevelopment': Excerpt, How Western progress created African misery:

How do we talk about how to develop a meaningful political process in societies that have been fractured by colonialism and violence? What, indeed, does progress mean in societies that were systematically dismantled by the West in the pursuit of progress?

More on Art, and Africa