As governments gear up for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP17) in Durban, South Africa, which starts today, experts are warning that among climate change's greatest consequences in developing countries such as Bangladesh are risks to the agriculture sector, including an increased risk of hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity.

Hunger and malnutrition on the rise

A Bangladeshi farmer re-transplanting his field due to flooding. Image by Flickr user IRRI Images (CC BY 2.0).

Forecasts predict that climate change could reduce agricultural production and increase food prices, raising the risk of hunger and malnutrition. A World Food Programme report says that by 2050, climate change is expected to increase the number of hungry people by 10 to 20 percent, and the number of malnourished children is expected to increase by 24 million – 21 percent more than without the effect of climate change.

Most of the increase is expected in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and Central America, as detailed in these maps. Already, the report says, natural disasters are more frequent and intense, land and water are becoming more scarce and difficult to access and it is getting harder to achieve increases in agricultural productivity.

At least ten countries are highly vulnerable to a climate-related food crisis, an ActionAid report released last month showed. Among the five most vulnerable countries, alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, South Africa and Haiti, is Bangladesh. Composed largely of low-lying land and islands with a high density population, little arable land, and frequent natural disasters, Bangladesh has been described as the “'ground zero' at the intersection of climate change and food security” by bloggers from the World Bank and Aid Data.

Mirza Galib, a lecturer at Bangladesh's Primeasia University, expands on the potential implications in The Daily Star:

Scientists tell us that the most profoundly damaging impact of climate change in Bangladesh will take form in floods, salinity intrusion and droughts, all of which will drastically affect crop productivity and food security. We will also face riverbank erosion, sea water level rise and lack of fresh water in the coastal zones. The prognosis is more extreme floods in a country already devastated by floods; less food for our country in which half our children already don't have enough to eat; and less clean water for where waterborne diseases are already responsible for 24 percent of all deaths.

Bangladesh has made progress in reducing hunger, with its number of undernourished people dropping to 27 percent as of January 2011, and its annual rice production tripling over three decades. But since agriculture is a key economic industry, making up nearly 20 percent of Bangladesh's gross domestic product (GDP) and 65 percent of the labor force according to a World Bank report, climate change threatens to erode these gains.

A blog post on Farming First elaborates:

Climate change is predicted to reduce rice production, Bangladesh’s main crop, and increase the country’s reliance on other crops and imported food grains. Crop production is potentially set to decline for at least one crop in each region…Overall, agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is projected to be 3.1 percent lower each year as a result of climate change.

Call for action

While the Bangladeshi government has some good adaptation plans in place, to further help combat climate change's impact on agriculture, the ActionAid report calls for efforts such as greater investment in small farms in poor countries, the immediate delivery of “climate cash” to help poor farmers climate-proof their agriculture, creating a system of pan-regional food reserves, and binding cuts in rich countries’ carbon emissions.

The World Food Programme report estimates that substantial international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could halve the increase of hunger from climate change.

ActionAid also wants to eliminate biofuel targets that are driving “land grabs” in developing countries. In a September roundtable session with bloggers, former United States President Bill Clinton said he also opposed countries such as China and Saudi Arabia buying and leasing land in developing countries, as this undermines long-term agricultural sustainability. Instead, he proposed a food sustainability model to improve food security and help developing countries build their own agricultural capacity. During the session he said:

The U.S. and Canada and Europe, because we have the capacity to produce big [food] surpluses, and Brazil and Argentina, the only places on Earth with 20 feet of topsoil…, we should offer longer-term contracts to the Chinese, the Saudis and others for basic grains at prices that will guarantee decent profits, but not exhorbant ones, and stop price spikes but keep prices high enough to get investment into agricultural activities in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia…Until you develop a sustainable agricultural framework in these countries, they not are going to benefit.

Shammunul Islam and M Mizanur Rahman, in a post for Bangladesh's New Age, also call for sustainable agriculture, since agriculture is a contributor to the greenhouse gas effect. Sahidul Haque, in an opinion piece for Bangladesh's The Financial Express, says more higher yielding seeds are also needed, as well as varieties that can grow in drought and saline conditions. Researcher Winston Yu, in a Q&A by Gudrun Freese on the blog earthscan, says fortunately many of the current solutions to minimize climate change's impact on Bangladesh, whether it's flood management or new crop varieties, will also benefit the country in the future.

To improve awareness of climate change issues among Bangladeshis, as well as voice their stories of climate change, gender and food sovereignty, two groups have organized a climate change caravan that is currently traveling across the country. One hope is that these stories will help motivate solutions from Western countries, which often use a much larger share of the world's food, water, energy and carbon than developing countries, according to the ActionAid report. For example, each U.S. citizen consumes an average of 260 pounds of meat per year, about 40 times more than the average Bangladeshi.

Natasha Haider elaborates on this discrepancy in her blog:

Bangladesh has one of the lowest per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the world. There are two principal reasons for such low emissions. First, Bangladesh does not have many energy intensive industries such as steel and aluminum manufacturing. Second, nearly 70 percent of the commercial primary energy comes from natural gas. Therefore, the solution to global warming is largely out of its hands and lies with developed countries or rapidly industrializing ones, mostly in the West.

In the meantime, Nazifa Islam, blogging on South Asian Generation Next, says Bangladesh has already become an innovative source of solutions:

While developed countries are scratching their heads over how to reverse climate change or how to deal with it, Bangladesh already has a head start. From growing rice in saline waters to creating mobile homes, the people of this nation are calling upon every innovative idea to assist in survival. If anything, the most terribly affected place has become a “thinkbowl” for solutions to climate change. Prone to natural disasters from what seems like the beginning of time, Bangladesh has become very good at dealing with all that Mother Nature decides to throw at her, bending like bamboo but never breaking.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (3)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

This post was commissioned as part of a Pulitzer Center/Global Voices Online series on Food Insecurity. These reports draw on multimedia reporting featured on the Pulitzer Gateway to Food Insecurity and bloggers discussing the issues worldwide.

As the Horn of Africa deals with what the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is calling the “most severe food security emergency in the world today,” experts warn that conditions in famine-stricken Somalia are likely to further deteriorate.

Over 12 million impacted

People line up for food at a camp in Mogadishu, Somalia. Image by UN Photo/Stuart Price on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Triggered by a combination of the worst drought in 60 years, conflict and high food prices, the food crisis in northeast Africa is affecting more than 12 million people, according to the FAO. While countries such as Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya have been severely impacted, Somalia has been hardest hit, facing the worst food security crisis in Africa in the last 20 years.

Five areas of Somalia are now suffering from famine, which is expected to spread to two more regions soon and even further in coming months. It has already killed tens of thousands of people, including some 29,000 children in the past three months. Another 3.7 million people across Somalia are in crisis. Of these, 3.2 million are in need of immediate lifesaving assistance.

In response, the FAO has held two emergency meetings in less than a month, the most recent of which was last week, to determine steps for dealing with the disaster.

But David Dorward, a professor at Australia’s La Trobe University, says on website The Conversation, that there is one reason why Somalia has been more severely affected by this food crisis:

While droughts are caused by weather - the failure of the rains - famines are invariably political…

Crops have failed and livestock perished for want of pasture. But the problem is not spread evenly across the drought-affected region…

The famine has affected each part of the Horn in different ways. In each port, each capital, each refugee camp, politics decides who, and how many, will starve.

Continuous conflict

Somalia has experienced ongoing conflict since its civil war began in 1991. While there is a transitional government in place in the capital Mogadishu, the Islamic militant group al-Shabaab controls large portions of southern Somalia, where much of the famine is occurring. Al-Shabaab has banned many international aid groups, alleging ulterior motives on their part, and preventing hungry people from leaving the country, according to media sources.

John Campbell, blogging on the Council on Foreign Relations' site, mostly blames al-Shabaab for the crisis:

In effect, al-Shabaab bears the most responsibility for the famine. The terrorist group continues to block Western aid workers during a drought that has displaced close to two million people, or a quarter of Somalia’s entire population. A few years ago, Shabaab dismantled a child vaccination campaign, claiming it was a Western plot; that program could have saved many children who have since succumbed to measles.

Suspected measles cases in Somalia have increased by over 660 percent compared to the same time last year, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and cases of cholera are also on the rise. But a report released last week by Human Rights Watch says all parties to Somalia’s armed conflict are contributing to the catastrophe.

An Associated Press investigation revealed last week that sacks of food meant for starving Somalis are being stolen and sold in markets. Soaring prices are also adding to the population's inability to access food. The prices of local food staples in Somalia have increased by up to 240 percent in the past nine months, exceeding the previous record high in 2008, according to media reports.

Another cause of the crisis, says Dave Algoso, an international development professional in Kenya, on his blog Find What Works is the failure to respond to the crisis early. Rebecca Sargent, blogging on a peace of conflict, also blames, among many other factors, large land lease “land grabs.”

The crisis has forced Somalis to flee to neighboring countries, including Ethiopia, Djibouti and, particularly, Kenya. The number of refugees at Kenya's Dadaab complex has reached around 400,000, even though it was built to hold 90,000, with an average of 1,300 Somalis arriving daily. In a series for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Samuel Loewenberg reports on Dadaab's “disastrously overcrowded” refugee camps.

As aid workers struggle to get food and water to those in need, some bloggers wonder what they can do. Ann Freeman, blogging on Upside My Head (Pay Attention Now), lists three ways to help, including increasing awareness. The World Food Programme has created a quiz to do just that. Cynthia Bertelsen, blogging on Gherkins and Tomatoes, wonders why more food writers and bloggers aren't discussing the famine.

Search for solutions

While emergency aid and short-term solutions are necessary, international agricultural experts who gathered at the FAO emergency meeting last week also stressed the need for long-term actions and policies to prevent future famines. Kenya's agriculture minister, for example, emphasized the need for drought-resistant seeds, small irrigation projects and infrastructure and examining the link between food production problems and climate change.

Hannah Ellison, writing for the Population Institute's blog, says for other reforms to work, family planning must also be part of the strategy. Jeffrey Swindle, blogging on USAID’s Global Broadband and Innovations site, discusses information and communications technology's potentially important role in organizing humanitarian relief efforts and preventing famines. United States professor Marion Nestle, blogging on Food Politics, says Somalia's politics must also be addressed:

We keep making the same mistakes.

This is because it seems—and in the case of Somalia is—much easier to deal with the immediate demand for food aid than to address the underlying politics that caused the problem in the first place.

But if we don’t deal with the underlying politics, the same tragedies occur again and again.

Despite the dire situation, some bloggers try to remain hopeful. Somali model Iman, blogging on The Huffington Post, lists five seeds of hope for Somalia, including the strength of the country's women. Ed Carr, blogging on Open The Echo Chamber, points out that if humans have caused this disaster, we can also prevent the next one. Dave Algoso injects a little hope on his blog, Find What Works, by sharing three uplifting videos. He says:

Images of starving famine victims often reinforce pessimistic stereotypes of hopeless Africans unable to do much for themselves. Against such images, we like to inject nuance and point to the complexity of the situation, in the hope of countering the stereotypes and provoking a better response from the consumers of Western media.

But another possible antidote is to simply combat simplistic hopelessness with simplistic hopefulness.

This post is part of our special coverage Global Development 2011.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (6)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

This post was commissioned as part of a Pulitzer Center/Global Voices Online series on Food Insecurity. These reports draw on multimedia reporting featured on the Pulitzer Gateway to Food Insecurity and bloggers discussing the issues worldwide. Share your own story on food insecurity here.

The push by multinational corporations and foreign governments in recent years to obtain fertile land in African countries such as Ethiopia, Madagascar and Tanzania has spurred debate over whether the move will lead to development or is simply a “land grab” that further threatens the continent's food security.

Worku Mengiste, a farmer in Ethiopia's Ghibe valley. Image by Flickr user ILRI (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Land rush

There has been growing interest by foreign investors to buy or lease large areas of arable land in sub-Saharan Africa, either to grow food for their own countries or to export it for profit. The land rush has been triggered, says an article in South Africa's Mail & Guardian, by worldwide food shortages and food security concerns that followed oil price rises in 2008, water shortages and the European Union’s insistence that 10 percent of all transport fuel come from plant-based biofuels by 2015. Others say population growth is also a factor.

Investors say these acquisitions will fuel development, but opponents call the move a “land grab” that will threaten Africa's own food security and livelihood. Stacy Feldman, writing for SolveClimate News, elaborates on the situation:

Researchers revealed that foreign companies are buying or leasing vast chunks of land in Africa and elsewhere for their own use. In fact, up to 50 million acres have been sold off or soon will be. That's equivalent to about 25 percent of all the farmland in Europe. Much of that land is being bought by emerging nations to raise crops for their growing populations. These countries – China, India, South Korea and oil-rich Gulf states – have land and water constraints at home. They got burned by [the 2008] global food crisis and are turning to Africa as a food security blanket.

In Ethiopia, farmland is being bought or leased on an immense scale. The country has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007 and land is being leased for approximately $1 per year for 2.5 acres, according to the Mail & Guardian. The country gave out 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) to foreign entities between 2004 and early 2009, according to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Meanwhile, Ethiopia remains one of the hungriest countries in the world. Earlier this year the Ethiopian government said some 2.8 million people are in need of emergency food aid in 2011. Forty-one percent of the population is undernourished. This paradox has angered some Ethiopians, including the women behind the blog Mitmita, who compare Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, to a goat:

Look at Prime Minister trying to convince everyone that he isn’t a land hording communist—it's a land giveaway! Are you a foreigner? Do you have cash? Well Melesocracy has a stimulus plan for you! The Mitmita Girls are quite familiar with a few project finance deals ourselves; from what we understand, in these intricate transactions, Third World governments in collaboration with First World financiers orchestrate what are tantamount to beads for Manhattan deals where like the Native Americans, ordinary Ethiopians are bilked out of inheriting our land because a man with an uncanny resemblance to a goat has sold it to the Chinese.

Tabor herb farm, Awassa, Ethiopia. Image by Flickr user Yigal Chamish (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Hi-tech stimulus?

But proponents of these land deals, including the Ethiopian government, say it will bring capital, technology, agricultural knowledge, infrastructure and lots of jobs to impoverished rural areas where subsistence farmers use low-tech tools. One government official, reported Fred de Sam Lazaro in a piece for PBS Newshour that was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, says that Ethiopia has an abundance of land and barely five percent of it is being cultivated by the country's farmers.

Berhanu Kebede, Ethiopia's ambassador to the United Kingdom, said last month in The Guardian that the country must significantly develop mechanized agriculture to reach the development goals unveiled in Ethiopia's latest development plan, which aims for an average economic growth of 14.9 percent over a five-year period. A doubling of agricultural output, the plan says, will fuel that growth, and so the government has put aside 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land to be leased. The government says the country may not even need food aid within five years.

The blog Govindan Online, written by an former Indian diplomat, calls these land investments a welcome development:

Bringing in large areas of land under cultivation and building infrastructure will generate large scale employment even if these sectors are completely mechanized. Since land utilization in these continents is very low, compared to other continents, there is not going to be any ecological problems. It is also to be remembered that some European countries including Russia have sold/leased out land to foreigners with a view to increase local food grain production.

Speaking out against “land grabs”

Many farmers, land rights advocates, various reports and non-governmental organizations disagree. They call the situation a “land grab” that may lead to environmental destruction, displacement of small, local landholders, worker and resource exploitation, loss of livelihoods and food insecurity. Some say it's a new form of colonialism.

Many bloggers have also spoken out against the land grabs. Devinder Sharma, an Indian food and trade policy analyst blogging on Ground Reality, calls these foreign investors “food pirates.” Woldegb, commenting on Kebede's piece in The Guardian, says it is very unrealistic to believe that foreign investors can improve food security, and Nyikaw Ochalla, posting on Anyuak Media, refutes many of Kebede's claims.

Blog The Africanist says the deals will likely lead to violence and questions the logic of providing food aid to countries that are exporting food. Nabeeha Kazi Hutchins, blogging on The Hunger and Undernutrition Blog, points out that little has been mandated to protect the land and the interests of local communities and Ellen Albritton, blogging on CMH 365: Public Health and Social Justice, questions the ethics of benefiting from food grown in Ethiopia while Ethiopians starve.

RAH, commenting on a post on the blog Brown Condor, says there are four questions that should first be answered:

Number One: Will this adversely affect Ethiopian farmers in any major way?
Number Two: Will these foreign countries/companies abuse and or harm the land in any way?
Number Three: Will this drastically cut the water supply to downstream nations that depend on water from the Nile?
Number Four: Will all of this NEW REVENUE truly benefit the people of Ethiopia or just mainly the government?

The FAO says little is still understood about the impact of these international land deals. In response, the organization is drawing up a code of conduct to bring equitable shares for all parties in these deals. Perhaps such a code will help offset what the blog Yene Ethiopia believes is the government's shortsightedness in approving such land deals:

The Ethiopian government makes it seem as if 50 or 100 years from now everything will be as it were before the lease. After producing under highly mechanized, intensive farming, the land will no longer be productive. The sizes being given away are not benign. Is there a plan beyond selling the land that will ensure a generation from now these farmers’ children will not be landless laborers?…Why not empower these people? Help them build cooperatives? Give them favorable loans? Help them get mechanized? No, that would require actually governing and would be hard work.

This post is part of our special coverage Global Development 2011.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (13)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

This post was commissioned as part of a Pulitzer Center/Global Voices Online series on Food Insecurity. These reports draw on multimedia reporting featured on the Pulitzer Gateway to Food Insecurity and bloggers discussing the issues worldwide. Share your own story on food insecurity here.

As global food prices continue to remain high, with potential increases on the horizon because of soaring oil prices and supply concerns, experts says there is one often-overlooked solution for fighting hunger: women.

Gender gap

Woman farmer harvesting high yielding maize variety. Image by Flickr user IITA Image Library (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Women are vital to food production in many developing countries, making up on average 43 percent of the agricultural labor force. Some estimate that 80 percent of those involved in farming in Africa and 60 percent in Asia are women.

At the Envision forum last week in New York City, during a panel focused on women's roles in alleviating hunger and poverty, United Nations Development Programme Under-Secretary General and Associate Administrator Rebeca Grynspan said:

Even talking only about the rural areas, women produce 50 percent of the food of the world. They receive only 1 percent of the credit but they produce 50 percent of the food.

In addition to a lack of recognition, a report released last month from the United Nation's (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization says that while female farmers' roles may vary across regions, they consistently have less access to resources and opportunities than their male counterparts. Closing this gender gap could lift as many as 150 million people out of hunger.

Ma. Estrella A. Penunia, posting on the website of the Asian Farmers Association for Sustainable Rural Development, lists six key reasons why we should care about female farmers, including food security issues. Meanwhile, Emily Oakley, a United States (U.S.) farmer who has studied small-scale farming in dozens of countries, reflects in a post on the blog In Her Field on women in agriculture:

In most places I have visited, women are more than just supporters of agriculture; they partner with their husbands in day-to-day tasks, decision-making, and planning.  In Kenya, it is far more typical to see a woman by herself with a child strapped on her back turning up a field with a hoe in hand than it is to see her joined by her husband.  In a remote village of Western Nepal (the kind of remote that means half a day’s walk to the nearest road), the farmer everyone in town agreed was most innovative was a woman.  Her farm stood out on the hillside as an oasis of growth and diversity where other farms were experiencing soil erosion and poor yields.  I recently participated in a farmer-to-farmer project in the Dominican Republic focusing on women farmers in commercial hoop house production of bell peppers.  This is just the tiniest taste of women’s work in agriculture.

Food for the whole family

Many women work as subsistence farmers, small-scale entrepreneurs, unpaid workers or casual wage laborers. Giving these women the same tools and resources as men, including better access to financial services, technical equipment, land, education and markets, could increase agricultural production in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent, according to the UN report. These production gains could, in turn, reduce the number of hungry people by 12 to 17 percent, or by 100 to 150 million people. There were roughly 925 million undernourished people globally in 2010.

Empowering women could also improve food security for their entire family, says the report, because women are more likely than men to spend additional income on food, education and other basic household needs. But Dipendra Pokharel, a researcher in Nepal, says on his blog that women's roles in the home can also mean their needs get overlooked:

Women farmers often have different priorities than their male counterparts, and this can, in many cases, be related to their direct role in feeding their family. In the rural areas of Nepal, traditionally men control the outside world and women the inside of the home. Such traditional perspectives can contribute to the lop-sidedness of ‘gender blind' information, collected by outsiders with the intention of helping a community. It is usually the men who provide information to the outsiders. This means that women’s priorities are often overlooked, unless they are specifically taken into account. This also supports the view that the female farmers receive less extension services which are needed to transform their subsistence-based farming system to a more commercial one.

Female farmers operate smaller farms than male farmers, on average only half to two-thirds as large, according to the report, and their farms usually have lower yields. They are also less likely to own land or have access to rented land. The report shows, for example, that women represent fewer than 5 percent of all agricultural holders in West Asia and North Africa.

Jane Tarh Takang, who has worked with farmers in West and Central Africa, discusses land rights issues in an interview by Edith Abilogo posted on FORESTSBlog, the blog of The Center for International Forestry Research:

In most communities in Africa, women and girls have very limited access to property and land compared with boys and men. Without land, they cannot produce resources to feed their family or generate income, and this results in extending the poverty cycle to their children. This situation is worse when it comes to widows or unmarried women…In cases where the existing farmlands have been depleted due to unsustainable agricultural practices, men would prefer to reserve the fertile areas for their own use and leave the less fertile ones to the women.

Elfinesh Dermeji, an Ethiopian female farmer who attended the Workshop on Gender and Market-Oriented Agriculture in Addis Ababa earlier this year, says in a post on the New Agriculturist that it is not always easy to get women involved in agriculture:

In some families when the men are positive and they want their wives to participate, the woman is not business oriented or she's not motivated. On the other side there are some men, when women are motivated and they want to participate, they don't want her to leave the house. They would rather not have that income than have their wife involved in an association.

A search for solutions

Still, numerous projects globally are involving female farmers, from encouraging women in Ghana to buy tractors to lobbying the Philippines government to allow the wife's name on land titles to increasing the use of information and communication technologies among Ugandan farmers.

On OneWorld South Asia, Ananya Mukherjee-Reed describes how 250,000 Kudumbashree members, a network of 3.7 million women in the Indian state of Kerala, have formed farming collectives to jointly lease and cultivate land:

‘As farmers, now we control our own time, resources and labour,' was the refrain I heard over and over again. Dhanalakhsmi, a young woman in Elappully, tells me that the change in her role from a labourer to producer has had a profound effect on her children. ‘They see me differently now. When we are at meetings discussing our farms, our incomes, or simply sharing our problems, they watch with a lot of interest.'

But bloggers say more can be done. In a post on Solutions, Yifat Susskind argues that the U.S. should buy crops from local African farmers as part of their foreign aid. Dipendra Pokharel says rural women must gain social and political space in private and public domains. Melissa McEwan, blogging on Shakesville in the U.S., challenges the misconception that only men are farmers by compiling almost 100 photos of female farmers worldwide. The report says changes are also needed at the policy level.

Whatever the approach, Ma. Estrella A. Penunia says to truly succeed it should be inclusive:

As farming in many developing countries is a family endeavor, the one important thing also that can greatly help women farmers is the support that they will get from their husbands and male leaders /members of their organizations. In households where both the man and the woman have been sensitized to the dynamics of gender and believe in equal rights and opportunities, the full potentials of a woman farmer are harnessed to the fullest.

This post is part of our special coverage Global Development 2011.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (6)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

World leaders from some 140 countries gathered at a United Nations Summit in New York from September 20-22 to discuss the best approaches for achieving eight poverty-reducing goals by 2015, including combating global hunger.

These Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted in 1990 to encourage social and economic development in the world's poorest countries. With only five years left to meet the goals, which range from slashing poverty to improving access to education and health care, the pressure is on.

The U.N. distributes bags of rice. UN Photo/Sophia Paris

The first of the goals (MDG 1) deals with poverty and hunger issues, and one of its targets is to halve the global proportion of people suffering from hunger between 1990 and 2015 from 20 to 10 percent. Some say that rapidly reducing hunger is essential for reaching the other MDGs.

Blogging for ONE, a global advocacy project for reducing poverty, Malaka Gharib writes that she appeared on the television show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon during the week of the U.N. summit and realized that most of the audience had never heard of the MDGs. She showed audience members a chart and asked them to choose which goal they found most compelling. Three out of five picked hunger. She quotes:

“Hunter, New Hampshire: “Goal 1. Hunger is something that’s been kind of a constant and hasn’t been solved yet or made any better than a few years ago. And hunger is not like a disease that can be cured.”
Liam, New York: “MDG 1. Everybody’s gotta eat.”
Michelle, Canada: “MDG 1. There’s enough to go around, so we need to figure out how to distribute food properly.”

Hunger has already been reduced from 20 percent in 1990–92 to 16 percent in 2010. Some countries, including Congo, Ghana, Mali, Vietnam, Guyana and Jamaica, have already achieved the hunger target of the goal, and others including China and Brazil are coming close. In September, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that the number of people who will suffer chronic hunger this year has fallen from last year's record 1.02 billion to 925 million.

In spite of these declines in hunger, however, there are still more undernourished people worldwide now than there were in 1990. The FAO says it will be extremely difficult to achieve the MDG 1 hunger target by 2015.

A report released by the anti-poverty organization ActionAID before the U.N. Summit, revealed that 20 out of 28 poor nations are off track to halving hunger by 2015 and that 12 are actually going backwards. And it's not even the most economically struggling countries that are doing badly ― nearly half of India’s children, for instance, are malnourished.

Devinder Sharma, a food and trade policy analyst blogging on Ground Reality, laments India's lack of progress and questions the global hunger statistics.

“By 2010, the world should have removed at least 300 million people from the hunger list. It has however added another 85 million to raise the tally to 925 million. In my understanding, this too is a gross understatement. The horrendous face of hunger is being kept deliberately hidden by lowering the figures. In India, for instance, the [hunger] map shows 238 million people living in hunger. This is certainly incorrect. A new government estimate points to 37.2 per cent of the population living in poverty, which means the hunger tally in India is officially at 450 million. Even this is an understatement.”

Several events parallel to the U.N. Summit brought attention to hunger issues. A street protest by ActionAid, for example, raised awareness of the importance of female farmers in alleviating hunger and poverty. Charlie Harris, blogging for Americans for Informed Democracy (AIDemocracy), joined the action and dressed up as a farm animal:

“We were representing the farm animals of women in developing countries, and we were there to advocate on their behalf. Women farmers, if empowered and supported, can help achieve the MDGs. They are closest to those that are living in conditions of poverty and hunger, and have the power to dramatically affect those communities.”

On the Summit's second day, a forum called “1,000 Days: Change a Life, Change the Future” highlighted child undernutrition, stressing the importance of proper early feeding in combating extreme hunger and poverty. Tonya Rawe, blogging for the humanitarian organization CARE, says the event gave her hope:

“The nutrition initiative is designed to target what CARE has called the “Window of Opportunity”: the crucial first 1,000-day period that includes pregnancy and the first two years of a child’s life. This “window of opportunity” is a critical time to address malnutrition head on – to enable a child to have the greatest opportunity for the rest of his or her life. Hunger and malnutrition kill more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. And yet, as I wrote yesterday, our efforts to tackle hunger face great challenges. It can seem daunting – but I’m encouraged.”

The Summit's final outcome document provides recommendations for each goal. For MDG 1, the document calls for addressing the root causes of poverty and hunger, pursuing job-intensive and equitable economic growth to promote full employment and promoting the empowerment and participation of rural women. However, some were disappointed that the document didn't really address how governments will increase their efforts to fight hunger. Tony Burkson, a London-based consultant who works with companies in Africa, questioned the value of the MDGs entirely on Africa On the Blog:

“The trend is quite clear, the International Development community and their friends in the NGO [non-governmental organization] world got together to hash out an over ambitious plan which they knew would most likely never be achieved. Every five years they meet to pat each other on the back and come out with the same press releases i.e. we have seen some progress but we are still far off from achieving these goals hence we need more development aid in order to achieve them…Whilst these goals are undoubtedly well intentioned they are just not practical. Different countries have different issues, and to expect more than 100 countries to achieve the same goals in a defined period seems rather simplistic.”

Blogging on End the Neglect, Anjana Padmanabhan, the social media manager for the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, says it was hard to escape the summit's passion. Still, she questions whether that energy will actually translate into action.

“What will happen when the excitement dies down? Will governments keep their financial promises?… Is Oxfam right when they said that the MDG summit was a 'mirage?' It’s hard to judge what was really achieved this week, since it seems that much of what was announced was already in the works. We all know one thing. The road to achieving the MDGs will be a difficult one…With only 5 years left, it's hard not to be cynical about what can be reasonably achieved.”

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (1)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

As the BP oil spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and its aftermath continue to make headlines, the catastrophe has also brought a little global media attention to the oil-related woes in another country—Nigeria.

Africa's most populous country, Nigeria is among the 10 biggest exporters of oil globally and the largest oil producer in Africa. Since oil was discovered off Nigeria's coast in the 1970s, it has become a major source of wealth. Oil accounts for 90 percent of Nigeria's exports and over 80 percent of government revenue.

Niger Delta Oil Disaster, Photo by Socialist Youth League of Norway on Flickr (CC-BY-ND)

But these oil riches have not been accompanied by economic prosperity nor food security for the majority of the country's population. Earlier this year, preparations took place in northern Nigeria for anticipated food shortages, due to severe water shortages, plummeting livestock prices and rising grain costs. On his blog, Nigerian Joachim Ibeziako Ezeji, a sustainable development professional, elaborates on those impacted by these types of shortages.

“Nigeria, a former agrarian nation, abandoned agriculture in the early 1980s when the government refocused the economy on oil exploration… Sadly, the bulk of this revenue is stolen by politicians and their cronies. The consequence is that today, according to the agriculture ministry, 91 million Nigerians representing 65 percent of the country's population are food insecure.”

Nigeria had a strong agricultural base before the oil boom, but throughout the years its big farms and plantations have been neglected. Journalist David Hecht, who wrote a series on the hunger crisis in Nigeria supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, says that about 90 percent of Nigeria's agricultural output today comes from inefficient small farms. Most farmers have little or no access to modern technology like fertilizers and irrigation. As a result, Nigeria has become one of the world's biggest importers of food staples, particularly rice and wheat. Even with these imports though, more than a quarter of Nigerians younger than 5 suffer from malnutrition.

The country's oil industry, which is primarily located in the Niger Delta, has also become a source of conflict, corruption and human rights abuses. An Amnesty International report released last year examined these consequences, as well as the environmental fallout from the industry.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion earlier this year has also drawn attention to the environmental damage caused by oil spills, including spills in the Niger Delta. Some media report that more oil is spilled in the Niger Delta every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico. These spills cause pollution that severely affects surrounding communities by decreasing fish stocks and contaminating water supplies and arable land.

A post on the blog Niger Delta Unrest chronicles a protest last year against the lack of action by Shell and the Nigerian government following a large offshore spill. People from the affected community in Bodo spoke of their grievances:

“They detailed how there was widespread hunger and thirst in the community: all the fish had been killed, the water contaminated, access to the creeks blocked and the ground-soil polluted and crops poisoned. One woman presented a meager basket of cassava meant to feed her family for a week. It was only enough for one person. Another woman pushed forward and said her eight year old son had died of hunger… A higher up in the Youth Council, the same one who had been interpreting, told of his frustrations and how he felt control slipping out of his hands. He said it was getting impossible to calm the youth in the town and that he was sure some of them would slip into militancy and armed action. ‘A hungry man is an angry man,’ he said.”

Randal Maurice Jelks, blogging on The Black Bottom Blog in the United States, says that people in Nigeria and the Gulf coast of Louisiana have more in common than many would think:

“For years, the state of Louisiana has permitted oil companies to have the loosest of regulation–a wink and a nod instead of enforced laws. As result many African Americans, like the Ogoni people of Nigeria, who live in the Gulf region have been most affected by what is called Cancer Alley. The pollutants from chemical and oil production have poisoned both their lands and bodies for years, like the Ogoni people these Black and poor people were ignored. The Louisiana state government like the Nigerian government left the oil companies to their own devices–laissez faire.”

An analysis in the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard by Peter Osadalor says that the World Bank coined the term “Nigerian Paradox” specifically to describe the extreme underdevelopment and poverty in a country brimming with resources and potential. Bloggers have proposed various solutions to this paradox, from stricter regulation of oil companies to better leadership to decreasing reliance on imported crops.

Hecht, in his article series, says that even though Nigeria faces a serious food security threat, the country has enough fertile land to feed itself and much of the region if its oil wealth is invested more wisely. Afolabi Taiwo Okunola, in a post submitted for a youth essay competition on the Youngstars Foundation's blog, comes to a similar conclusion, saying that refocusing on agriculture is key:

“If the Nigerian government can be dedicated and devoted to the course of agricultural, many problems like inadequate supply of food, high expenses of the food supply will become outdated. The level of unemployment among Nigerian graduates will reduce because many graduates will be gainfully employed. In this vein, agricultural produce will increase because mechanized farming will be used and Nigerian exporting earnings will increase…The quest for power, gross looting of the national treasury by the greedy politicians will reduce to a certain extent because many people will realize that it is not only oil that can give a nation money but that agriculture too is important in that aspect. Therefore, the wicked struggle, killing and wanton destruction of lives and property in order to get to the position of authority in Nigeria will reduce. In a very short time, Nigeria will become a citadel in which other countries will have to come and learn from.”

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (1)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

A new Russian ban on grain exports, including wheat, has created a panic over how the move will impact wheat prices and food security. Russia is among the world's top five wheat exporters, but crops were devastated this summer as the country was hit with a record-breaking heatwave, severe droughts and wildfires.

Golden Wheat by Dudua on Flickr (CC-BY-NC-SA)

Hans Timmer, blogging on a World Bank blog called Prospects for Development, says Russia’s grain production could fall by as much as a quarter from last year. As a consequence, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced last month that the country will ban grain exports, including wheat, barley, rye and corn, starting August 15, as well as provide financial support for farmers.

Putin said last week that the ban will extend into 2011, in hopes of securing a reserve for next year and preventing an increase in domestic food prices. Meanwhile, international wheat prices have jumped by over 50 percent since June.

In an op-ed for the Kyiv Post, Lauren Goodrich says the ban may also ward off social and political unrest in Russia of the kind that occurred globally when food prices soared in the 2007-2008 crisis. But protests have already begun. Last week riots in Mozambique, caused by soaring bread prices, left 13 people dead and hundreds injured and there is growing anger in countries such as Egypt and Serbia. The wheat ban has also triggered panic elsewhere, fueling fears about global food shortages and further increases in wheat prices. Simon Monger, writing for the financial news website Sumfolio, elaborates on the ban's potential effect on prices:

“Russia’s ban on exporting the commodity…is expected to have a massive impact on worldwide prices. Prices hit a two-year high when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced the ban, while other countries followed suit and placed limits on their own exports.

While wheat prices have fallen marginally as U.S. farmers prepare to step up their production, a lot of uncertainty remains in the market. After all, a switch to produce wheat could lead to an oversupply of the commodity and an undersupply of other grains.”

This situation, coupled with an expected decline in wheat production in countries such as Canada, has also increased fears of further threats to the world's food security. A few days after Putin's announcement, the U.N. food agency the World Food Programme (WFP) told Dow Jones Newswires that the ban will reduce the amount of food aid they can deliver to developing countries, potentially leaving millions of the world's poorest people hungry. The WFP provided food for more than 100 million people in 73 countries in 2009. Over a third of the 2.6 million metric tons of food they bought that year was wheat; around 95 percent of this wheat was sourced from around the Black Sea.

Anatoly Karlin, a Russian-born blogger and university student living in California, compiles media stories about the Russian drought and wildfires on his blog Sublime Oblivion. He expresses concern over how the current situation may harm the world's poorest countries.

“The [agricultural] depression [in Russia] may continue for another two years, if the earth is baked too hard for sowing the winter crop… Coupled with agricultural decline in other countries (e.g. floods in China reduced its rice crop by 5-7% this year) and rising food protectionism, social welfare in poor food importers like Egypt and Pakistan will plummet. The conditions aren’t in place for a repeat of the 2008 food crisis, but this does confirm that our age is now one of increasing scarcity.”

Panic has hit Russia too, not just about wheat but also over buckwheat. Though not technically a type of wheat, buckwheat is used as a grain and is a staple in Russia. Droughts have impacted the country's buckwheat crop, creating a buzz in the Russian blogosphere as prices rise. Alexey Kovalev, writing for The Guardian, reported two weeks ago that a one-kilo packet of buckwheat that used to cost about 20 Russian rubles (USD $0.65) now costs 40 or even 70 rubles, if available.

Moscow resident and political scientist Oleg Volodin says in his blog that food suppliers are contributing to the panic [Ru]:

Понятно, что с урожаем-2010, мягко скажем, проблемы - но “продовольственная паника” их только усугубляет. Давая поставщикам и торговым сетям прекрасный повод задирать цены - вызывая новую волну истерики “видите, дорожает!”. Кстати, если статистика не врет - продажи круп, макаронов и муки за последнюю неделю (!) выросли впятеро.

Besides stirring panic, driving up prices and potentially impacting food security, some economists say Russia's grain ban will also be detrimental in other ways. Simon Black, writing on EconomicPolicyJournal.com, elaborates on these consequences:

“In an attempt to curtail this inflation, the government has decided to impose an export ban, effectively preventing Russian farmers from generating the highest profits for their produce. This sort of thing has been tried time and time again, most notably with Argentina's recent beef export ban. It always ends badly– producers go bankrupt as a result, people lose their jobs, the economy suffers, and long-term food production actually falls… but the politicians never learn. At a minimum, Russia will suffer significant damage to its reputation as a place to do business.”

Despite the panic, world wheat stocks still remain above 2007-2008 levels and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says there is currently no need to worry about a new global food crisis. In light of this, Azamat Abdymomunov, a public policy adviser from Kazakhstan blogging on KnowledgeMap, explores what all the fuss is about. Russia expert and University of Houston research fellow, Paul R. Gregory, blogging on What Paul Gregory is Writing About, says that now that market forces are directing Russian agriculture, instead of the state, there's less reason to worry:

“Consider the effect of the return to market agriculture on the Russian people. The great Soviet famine of 1932-33 saw a loss of grain output of around twenty percent – a similar figure to the predicted decline of this year. The immediate result was the loss of six million or more lives…In 2010, the worst that the Russian people face is higher food prices. Russia is part of the world economic community. In the worst case, it can import grain this year and resume exports when weather conditions return to normal.”

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization announced last week that it will hold a special meeting of member countries on September 24 in Rome, Italy, to discuss rising wheat prices and to better gauge the food supply situation.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (2)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

As the global demand for soy rises, Paraguay has become the world's fastest-growing producer of the crop. But with resulting riches have also come battles over land rights and environmental concerns.

Soybeans are used in the production of food, edible oils and animal feed, as well as biofuels. The industry has grown exponentially in recent years, in part because of increased demand for meat and cattle feed in China and a rising biofuel industry in Europe. Many South American countries, including Paraguay, have responded to this demand by boosting soybean production.

Photo by Olmo Calvo Rodríguez from a series on soybeans and campesino rights in Paraguay (see slideshow below).

Paraguay is the now world's fourth largest exporter of the crop, trailing the U.S., Brazil and Argentina, and the sixth biggest producer of soybeans. Earlier this year the country saw a record soybean crop. This growth has come at a price though, creating social disputes and land rights issues for the country's small-scale farmers, known also as campesinos, as well as environmental and health concerns.

In the blog of the Brussels office of the German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Edgardo Lander in Venezuela argues that the recent growth in Latin American trade and agriculture is “predatory” and that leftist governments must seek sustainable alternatives:

“Given a rapidly growing international demand and high levels of profit, agribusiness has responded with a rapid increase of the extensions of crops in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. In addition to the negative impacts of monoculture and transgenic crops, the tremendous expansion of the soybeans has led to a greater concentration in land tenure and the displacement of peasants, affecting the production of other crops such as rice, maize, sunflower and wheat. This has also led to a strengthening of the economic and political power of the business groups that participate in the different stages of production and marketing of the soybeans. This is what Syngenta, (one of the main agribusiness corporations), cynically and arrogantly, referred to as the United Soya Republic.”

The industry has had particularly adverse effects on Paraguay's small farmers and indigenous people, many of whom have been forced off their lands.

New York City-based photographer Evan Abramson documented the social conflicts generated by industrial soy production in some of Paraguay's rural communities. In a photo essay for NACLA Report on the Americas, he says:

“The soy boom has been disastrous for small farmers, who, after living for years on government-allotted forestland, have begun to be uprooted. In the last decade, the Paraguayan government has given away or illegally sold this public land to political friends in the soybean business, pushing the peasants out. Today, about 77 percent of Paraguayan land is owned by 1 percent of the population… Since the first soy boom in 1990, almost 100,000 small-scale farmers have been forced to migrate to urban slums; about 9,000 rural families are evicted by soy production each year.”

In 2009, photographer Olmo Calvo Rodríguez, a member of the Latin American photographer's collective SUB, took the photos featured in the slideshow below. He wrote that the campesinos in the photos form part of a community of 40 families who were evicted from their land by the soybean industry 17 times in the past six years, but still have not lost hope of building their lives there. (The photos are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.)

Journalist Charles Lane, in a series supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, calls this scenario “the soybean wars.” But landless farmers are fighting back, he says, protesting and even staging armed invasions on the land of soybean producers, who have themselves also been accused of resorting to violence.

Many of these farmers had hoped Paraguay's president Lugo would bring them some relief. Lugo received nearly unanimous support from the campensinos when elected in 2008, but in March of this year thousands of farmers protested in Asunción to demand Lugo follow through on campaign promises.

Kyle Tana, blogging on the Council on Hemispheric Affairs's Web site, suggests that Lugo is caught between two polarized groups–the campesino movement and Paraguay's congress:

“While campaigning, then-Bishop Lugo characterized himself as the “bishop for the poor,” and was successful in giving hope to Paraguay’s indigenous and disadvantaged communities. However, after two years in office, comparatively little has been done to address the promised redistribution of land to landless farmers as well as the rising tensions between campesinos and large monocrop (primarily soy) producers.”

The growing soy industry has also had environmental effects, contributing to the destruction of rain forests and leading to heavy use of toxic agrochemicals. In his photo essay, Abramson says that soy cultivators dump more than 6 million gallons of pesticides and herbicides into the Paraguayan soil every year, including extremely hazardous chemicals, partly due to lax environmental law enforcement. Some fear that in addition to harming the environment, these chemicals are harming the health of local residents. To make matters worse, a post on the blog of the Union of Journalists of Paraguay (Sindicato de Periodistas del Paraguay) says the press isn't covering deaths or diseases that may be related to chemical overuse, sanitizing the image of multinationals:

Este tipo de información negativa que afecta la imagen de los poderosos sojeros no son publicados con frecuencia por los grandes medios del Paraguay, como ABC Color, que inclusive niega el poder destructivo de los “agrotóxicos”. El diario del empresario Aldo Zuccolillo prohibe a sus periodistas utilizar este término en caso de que no pueda evitar la publicación de una denuncia de intoxicación (la palabra autorizada por el diario es “agroquímico”).

Another concern, for people like Alan Raul Banda Huatay in Cancun, Mexico, is the planting of genetically modified (GM) soy. After watching a film on the subject, Huatay had this to say in a discussion board on Facebook:

Es lamentable comprobar que lo único que realmente importa es el beneficio económico, ni la salud, ni los derechos de los campesinos, todo queda en segundo término ante la soja transgénica y no se sopesa el riesgo de los alimentos transgénicos. A los campesinos sólo les queda plantar cara e intentar frenar el avance del monocultivo…

Bloggers' suggested solutions to minimizing these various consequences range from eating less meat to establishing voluntary standards for eco-friendly soy production, to alerting students in China about the issues. A post on The Socialist WebZine says the first step, however, is to recognize that we're all in this together:

“Digging our way out will necessarily entail creating a movement with the ability to link the soy consumer in the north with a Paraguayan farmer or to see how yucca, corn, beans and potatoes might produce a far greater benefit for the planet than mono-cropping. The politics of the “we” of socialism hold far more potential for addressing the dire needs of our planet than the “I” of capitalist consumption.”

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (0)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

The risk posed by a fungus that is deadly to the world's second largest crop, wheat, continues to rise. The killer fungus, called Ug99, causes stem rust disease, which can destroy entire wheat fields.

Two new aggressive forms of the fungus were found in South Africa for the first time earlier this year, raising concerns that it could spread. More than a billion people in developing countries rely on wheat for their food and income.

A close-up of stem rust on wheat crop (USDA/public domain)

As journalist Sharon Schmickle explored in a 2008 project for the Pulitzer Center, Ug99 poses a major threat because 80 percent of Asian and African wheat varieties are susceptible to the fungus. Since the fungus was discovered in Uganda in 1999 it has traveled to the fields of Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Iran.

At the 8th International Wheat Conference in June, several scientific papers about risks and possible solutions to Ug99 were presented, and the discovery of the new forms of the fungus in South Africa, as well as in Kenya, were announced. In a blog post on Philanthropy Action Tim Ogden urges global poverty philanthropists to look towards agriculture and funding for science as he elaborates on the potential consequences of this discovery:

“The new rust has become even more virulent since it emerged. Now that it’s in South Africa, the rust can much more easily spread to the Middle East and South Asia as it can hitch a ride on prevailing wind currents. As the rust spreads—killing up to 80 percent of a wheat crop—farmers around the world will have to replace the varieties of wheat that they use.”

Stem rust itself is nothing new. Controlling it was a major part of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when scientists introduced genes into wheat to make it resistant to the fungus. When Ug99 emerged in Uganda, it transformed stem rust from a disease largely under control to a major global threat.

A post by Allen Dodson on the Biosecurity Blog of the Federation of American Scientists insists it's vital to deal with this threat:

Though authorities are increasingly aware of the danger [of agricultural pathogens] – whether from naturally occurring outbreaks or intentional acts of terrorism and aggression – the rapid transport of food across agricultural regions and on to markets poses a major challenge for the detection and quarantine of crop pathogens. As global populations and food requirements continue to increase, addressing the threat to the food supply will only become even more important.”
Ug99's spores are transported by wind but can also be carried on clothes or in plant matter. As it migrates it can also mutate, sometimes into deadlier forms. In addition to the new forms of Ug99 found in South Africa, researchers at the June conference also announced two new forms in Kenya. These four mutations of Ug99 have acquired the ability to defeat two of the most important stem rust-resistant genes.

On environmental politics blog Red Green and Blue, Kay Sexton says the situation reveals how fragile our food supply is.

Monkey's Uncle blogger and biological anthropologist, James Holland Jones, says it highlights the importance of evolutionary biology.

Commenting on an article on Wired, a reader going by the name “mwilk” thinks the stem rust problem highlights the need for greater biodiversity:

Sounds like an updated version of the Irish Potato Famine. Another good reason why it is good practice to maintain genetic diversity in important agricultural crops and not to be too dependent on a single crop. Easier said than done in many poor countries, but in the US we certainly have the resources to maintain an agricultural base that can withstand the attack of this type of pathogen. If we have the wisdom is another matter.

Fungicides can be used to combat Ug99, but small-scale farmers without access to these chemicals remain vulnerable. So researchers are trying to stay one step ahead. In June, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations launched the Web site Rust SPORE to monitor the spread of Ug99 and other wheat rusts. Researchers are also working on breeding new varieties of wheat that are resistant to Ug99.

Nonetheless, Robert Winter, blogging on Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, says that both the April Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and stem rust have shown the limits of technology:

Perhaps illogically, this attitude to technology and human certainty is lodged in my mind with the recent and growing concern about the spread of the ug99 wheat fungus, a stem rust that we thought we'd dealt to with our science, but has evolved into a virulent new form in Africa and has become a very serious global threat, in part as an effect of our standardisation of wheat types. I'm not a Luddite, and am in general comfortable with many aspects of technological progress, but both these cases show the inadequacy of the risk assessments that we use when we tamper with fundamental forces. It is good to understand the margins of our knowledge.

Still, Steve Savage, blogging on Sustainablog, remains optimistic, listing four reasons why scientists will defeat stem rust:

I’ll wager that the worst potential from this disease will NOT actually occur. This is not a casual wager – the health or even survival of millions of poor people around the world is at stake. Some of my wheat breeder friends might not like me to say this (because they legitimately need more funding), but my bet is still that the breeders will prevail against all odds (and get little credit for it). I base that qualified optimism on having seen what a remarkable group of scientists called “plant breeders” have been able to achieve in the past… Will plant breeders still do their very best to protect the food supply? Yes, they will.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (1)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Sunset over farmland in South Africa by Irene2005 on Flickr

While there have been significant increases in agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America over the last 30 years, productivity in Africa has stagnated and 1 in 3 people in sub-Saharan Africa still go chronically hungry. Many solutions have been proposed to help combat hunger in Africa, but one in particular remains controversial: biotechnology.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 1.02 billion people do not have enough to eat in the world; more than a fourth of these people live in sub-Saharan Africa. The reasons for the region's food insecurity range from economic crisis to an expanding population. In a Penn State University blog on biotechnology, Dr. Terry Etherton in the United States elaborates on these challenges:

In sub-Saharan Africa, where more “ultrapoor” live, developing technologies to boost productivity is especially difficult because of greater threats from pests and diseases, poorer soil, and drought. In addition, Africa’s R&D [research and development] establishments are small compared to those of South Asia—half had fewer than 100 scientists in 2000. Compared to Latin America, Africa has less than half the rural roads per hectare, 1/40th the capital per farmer, and 1/50th the rural electricity supply per worker. Despite some success with maize [corn], cassava, and some horticultural crops, few African countries have experienced a Green Revolution.

On a global scale, Africa uses the least fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid or genetically modified (GM) seeds of any continent, although many experts suggest that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could help ensure food security by increasing crop yields, producing hardier crop varieties, enhancing a crop's nutritional value, and improving storability. Others claim there are numerous risks associated with adopting GMOs in Africa.

Bloggers following the debate alternately wonder whether Africa is being bullied into accepting biotechnology, or whether Africans are being needlessly scared off by anti-GMO activists.

Journalist Gregory Simpkins in Washington D.C outlines the debate in his personal blog Africa Rising 2010:

Those who don’t trust what they see as Big Science and capitalists, believe GM agricultural products are “Frankenfood.” Those alarmed by the rise in both malnutrition and food prices see a crisis that may be alleviated by using science to jump-start the Green Revolution in Africa. The problem is that there is not enough evidence that these products are either unjustifiably dangerous or completely safe. Africa’s brain drain doesn’t make this situation any easier since many of the scientists who could ensure that their homelands don’t use unsafe agricultural products or take advantage of existing technology to prevent starvation live and work in other countries.

Resistance to GMOs is high. Currently South Africa is the only country on the continent to have approved GM seeds for planting.

Reporter Philip Brasher traveled to South Africa and Kenya to chronicle the role of biotechnology in an article series for the DesMoines Register sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He says more than 70 percent of South Africa’s latest corn crop, the country’s largest in decades, is biotech. While some African countries have allowed imports of this GM corn as food aid, others, such as Zimbabwe have rejected these products despite the need.

The U.S. government and American biotech companies say Africans should drop their opposition to GM crops in order to help feed the continent. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also jumped on board, by helping to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and more recently by funding research to engineer more drought-resistant corn. Some agriculture experts in Africa are also calling on Africans to embrace agricultural technologies to boost food production. The blog GMO Africa also believes Africans should be able to take advantage of biotech:

“An open-door policy to new technologies, especially in the field of agriculture, is what Africa needs. When activists intimidate Africa, through fear, into not exploring potential benefits of GM foods, the continent suffers. They stymie a rational debate about whether GM foods have any relevance to Africa.”

However, many bloggers are weary of widely introducing GMOs in a continent comprised mostly of small farms. An article on the progressive pan-African website Pambazuka News by Nidhi Tandon outlines the concerns:

The risks to Africa of fully adopting industrial agriculture in general and GM seeds in particular include:

- transferring its food and farming decisions to global corporations

- losing ecological and agricultural diversity as genetically modified crop varieties spread, and driving small- and medium-scale family farmers off their land because they cannot afford the expensive inputs, including genetically modified seeds, that industrial agriculture demands.”

In South Africa itself, reactions to GMOs also remain mixed. On the blog of a South African family that cultivates “heirloom” and open pollinated seeds, called Livingseeds, Sean Freeman says there isn't enough evidence to support GMOs even though they were “forced onto the South African public”:

‘All the evidence’ shows that GMO is the best thing since sliced bread, however the problem we have is that all of the evidence is slanted and prepared by a) GMO houses b) Scientists that have their research grants supplied by GMO houses or c) Universities that are sponsored by GMO houses. All impartial evidence is wiped sorry forced sorry explained away and serious anecdotal evidence is discredited as not having any scientifically credible weight, as it’s not…… scientific. However here is some anecdotal evidence that is pretty indisputable.

Freeman links to a news story about widespread crop failures in South Africa in 2008/9 due to “a breeding error” in genetically engineered seeds sold by the global corporation Monsanto. An online petition initiated by the African Center for Biosafety says Monsanto compensated commercial farmers who lost their yield but banned them from speaking to the media, and made no mention of whether they compensated resource poor farmers who were given the seed and lost their yield as well.

Most agricultural experts do agree that GMOs alone won't solve Africa's hunger issues. Other solutions suggested by bloggers include organic farming, growing your own food, and promoting social change. Whatever the solutions, on Africa Rising 2010 Simpkins argues we need to openly consider all options, including biotechology:

The behind-the-scenes debate over GM foods needs to be brought into the open and examined carefully. Promoting products that may be dangerous is unacceptable. However, in the face of growing hunger in Africa, we owe it to the hungry to explore every possibility for meeting their needs while they still live.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (5)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Since 2003, when the fighting began between rebel groups and Sudanese government forces in Darfur, the U.N. estimates as many as 300,000 people have died. During this time, more than 2.7 million Darfuri people have also been displaced, forced into refugee camps in Sudan and Chad. A study released last month shows that more than 80 percent of the deaths during the conflict were the result of disease, not violence, suggesting that many people remain at risk even though the fighting has decreased. To make matters worse, last year the Sudanese government evicted many international humanitarian groups after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur; the government continues to expel foreign organizations.

The situation has been especially hard on the country's young people, as an estimated 1.8 million children have been affected by armed conflict, many exposed to health concerns, a disruption in education and other services and brutal violence. In Darfur, 700,000 children have grown up knowing nothing but the conflict and an estimated 4,500 children are believed to be associated with armed forces and groups. These young people, however, are not the majority, as youth both within and outside of Sudan have been vital in raising awareness and funds and trying to bring change to the region.

Over the past several years, Darfuri children's experiences during the conflict have been chronicled via their drawings. Some of these drawings are being used as evidence submitted to the International Criminal Court as part of the investigation of war crimes. In 2005, two Human Rights Watch researchers went to the Chad-Sudan border, during which time schoolchildren offered them hundreds of drawings. Many pictures showed bombings by Sudanese government forces, shootings, rapes and the burning of villages. Ethan Zuckerman, a co-founder of Global Voices Online, blogging on My Heart's In Accra, said the images were powerful:

“When I was at Human Rights Watch a week ago, there was a pile of these sketches on a conference room table, along side a pile of photographs from Janjawid militamen. What amazed me was how details in the children’s drawings echoed details from the photos – the stocks of the automatic rifles, the round shape of the houses, the posture of two gunmen riding on horseback. It was immediately clear to me that these drawings weren’t of weapons imagined by children, but eye witness accounts.”

A Waging Peace researcher collected similar drawings in 2007, some of which are shown in this video. Drawing is also being used as a way to help children heal, shown in this video, as are other forms of art. The documentary Darfur Plays shows a group of two dozen young people in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, who are using street theater to spark discussion and increase awareness. Tambay, blogging on Shadow and Act, comments on the film:

“Love this!

Art makes a difference in Darfur, where a troupe of self-taught young actors take theatre into the streets and refugee camps.

Their medicine for ailing Darfur is theatre, drama, song and dance – a testament to the power of art to heal!”

Young people outside of Sudan are also working to raise awareness and improve conditions for Sudanese youth. In addition to a host of celebrities, youth in many Western countries have been drawn to the situation in Darfur. Youth initiatives over the years have varied greatly, from creating poetry and organizing rallies to podcasting student voices and finding fundraising programs.

And the initiatives continue. In Canada, the youth-led group STAND Canada has developed a campaign called ‘Stand For The Dead.' Beginning this month, Canadians will be encouraged to wear t-shirts bearing one Darfuri victim’s name and the group will be showing a film called Darfur. Lori L. Tharps, blogging on My American Meltingpot, came across a different Darfur t-shirt-campaign years ago and at first questioned its effectiveness:

“Throughout the day in New York City, I kept seeing more and more teenagers with Darfur t-shirts on. Like it was a fashion statement. Like supporting Darfur was cool. At first I was amused, then a little perturbed, like ‘did these wealthy White kids have any clue what modern-day genocide really meant?” But then I reasoned, even if they didn't, they were increasing awareness with their simple black & white t-shirts…

…Black teens, White, Asian…I'm seeing a multicultural mix of young people up in arms for not only the victims of Darfur but for people around the world who are suffering, caught in the crossfire of violence. I stumbled onto the website Teens4Peace and was overjoyed to see that American teens have more to care about than MySpace, Ashlee Simpson and the latest iPod manifestation.”

Meanwhile, a high school in Long Island City, New York, organized a fundraiser in December to help youth in Nyala. The blog Stories From Darfur elaborates on the event:

“I received an email from a friend and activist in Nyala Darfur. He works with a group of youth who are trying hard to preserve and nurture Darfur’s musical and cultural heritage. The youth write and perform their own songs and develop theater pieces based on issues their communities care about the most. Some of the pieces are nostalgic and speak of life before armed militias violently displaced them, others are purely entertaining while others are calls for justice, freedom and peace. For war affected youth and their audiences this group is a great forum for expression, community building and healing. My friend asked us to help them start a mini orchestra…Our youth at Long Island City High School decided to support their effort and packed their school’s auditorium last Thursday for a Talent Show fundraiser. From Hip Hop dance performances to an impersonation of Lady Gaga, they put together a 30 act show that raised over $800.”

Other strategies are being used to engage even more youth. A few years ago, a free, online, student-developed video game called Darfur is Dying was released. In the game, players learn about the conflict and must keep their refugee camp functioning despite possible attacks. The game has led to at least 50,000 people taking action to help end the violence. Steve Rothman, blogging on The Social Media Soapbox, critiques the game:

“To play the game, you first select from one of several Darfurian avatars, but they are no more than cartoon figures.  Perhaps if a fictional profile for each of the figures had been provided, it might have had that effect. I also wondered if transforming such things as foraging for water or hiding from the militia into game objectives could potentially backfire and desensitize people to the plight of Darfurians…

…Nobody will be spending hours playing Darfur is Dying in order to “keep their camp functioning,” the stated goal of the game.  But of course that isn’t the point.  I imagine the greatest value of this game, and others like it, will be to engage a mass audience of young people in social issues and causes — an audience that is less accessible through more traditional communications channels.”

Whatever the method, Emily Holland found that increased awareness is exactly what some youth in Darfur want. Blogging for the International Rescue Committee, she talked to about 50 young people in a refugee camp. When she asked them, “What is your message to young people your age around the world?,” they said:

“We want them to know about our activities and our problems.

We want them to support us. To understand that we need education and healthcare.

The individuals whom people from outside Darfur are exposed to are not always necessarily from the camps. We want youth from all over the world to see what life is like here. To hear the real story.”

Photo of Darfuri girl in red by wanderingzito on Flickr, Creative Commons.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (2)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Up to 3 million people are estimated to need aid following the January 12 earthquake. The situation is particularly critical for youth, says UNICEF, since nearly half of all Haitians are under 18 years old and almost 40 percent are under 14. Of the survivors, many thousands of children have been orphaned, lost or separated from their families, leaving them open to health risks, abuse and exploitation. However, young people aren't passively watching the catastrophe unfold. Those within and outside of Haiti are contributing to efforts to raise aid and awareness.

In Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast, the film school Ciné Institute continues to provide Haitian youth with film education and technical skills training. Despite losing film equipment and having their school reduced to rubble, the students have been documenting the quake's aftermath through photos, Twitter and eyewitness accounts. Here's an account from student Marie Lucie Dubreuse:

“This is the first time I am seeing the damages of an earthquake. I was at Ciné Institute when everything started rolling under our feet. Thank God I wasn’t alone on this unforgettable day. One of my classmates took my hand and ran to the streets with me. That’s when I understood what happened.

I ran home to get my daughter that was home at the time. This has traumatized everyone. We are all alive at Ciné Institute and we are doing our best to inform you of the situation in Jacmel.”

The students are also posting videos. The blog Barking Robot, by Derek E. Baird, calls the captured stories and images “heartbreaking and hard to watch.” This video, for example, compiles the students' earthquake coverage:

After the Earthquake: A Compilation of Ciné Institute Coverage from Ciné Institute on Vimeo.

The blog Go Green Toolshed discusses another initiative called Nouvelle Vie *Haiti,* an ongoing project of the International Association of Human Values. The project plans to mobilize 50 Haitian youth who will commit to serving their country for two years. During this time, they will develop skills in trauma relief, food and water security, as well as technology and construction. Meanwhile, Rick Perera, blogging for the humanitarian group CARE, shares stories of how the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Girl Guides have been helping in the city of Léogane. In this post, he talks about a 22-year-old named Joanie Estin:

“Joanie was enjoying the early evening socializing with neighbors outside, as was the custom on the Rue de la Liberté in Léogane, when the unthinkable happened.

Her father was the only one inside the house when it collapsed. They never saw him again. The surviving family members – Joanie, her mother, and six siblings – have been living at a local school, the Écôle des Frères, ever since.

“I was so overwhelmed at first. My mother and I stood still in the middle of the road for about 15 minutes, until the earth calmed. Then we went home, and our house had been completely destroyed.”

Joanie coped the way she always has: by getting down to work. As soon as she could, she found her way back to Ste. Rose de Lima and, with some 50 boys and girls who had survived the earthquake, started rallying.

As many of the local Scouts and Girl Guides who could find each other in the aftermath – 94 in all – began volunteering their services to humanitarian groups, including CARE, that bring critical supplies to survivors in central Léogane.”

Outside of Haiti, youth are also taking steps to help raise money and awareness. In Los Angeles, “Youth Run 4 Haiti” brought together around 3,000 people, youth organizations have posted tips on how to help, youth are being encouraged to send text messages to raise funds, and numerous multimedia initiatives are connecting young people with ongoing relief efforts. Another example: venezuelanalysis.com says that the youth wing of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela is showing solidarity:

“The youth wing of Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) has set up a collection point in central Caracas, for donations of food, medicine, clothing and shoes to send to the people of Haiti.

Heryck Rangel from the PSUV youth said, “We young people want to deepen the internationalist character of the Bolivarian Revolution and highlight solidarity as a socialist value. The Venezuelans have to understand that Haiti is a country that has suffered much and now needs our urgent support.””

Even fashion is playing a role in helping Haitians. The Teens for Jeans drive in the U.S. and Canada is expanding its mission to help homeless Haitian teens. Once the jeans arrive in Haiti, the YMCA Haiti in Port-au-Prince will distribute them, as well as provide other services. The blog Fashion Fling elaborates:

“Want an easy way to help out the teen victims of the Haiti earthquake? Aéropostale and Do Something are teaming up to donate jeans, and you can join them! For every pair of gently worn jeans you donate to the Teens for Jeans program, Aéropostale will donate a brand new pair of jeans to Haiti victims (up to 100,000 pairs). This initiative is part of Do Something's “Teens for Jeans” campaign that's going on now, which raises awareness about the youth homelessness epidemic.”

Various writers and bloggers caution, though, that while short-term relief efforts are important, there must also be an eye towards long-term solutions and rebuilding efforts. Still, Steven Culbertson, blogging on The Huffington Post, says that youth should be acknowledged for their efforts so far:

“Students in schools and universities immediately planned fundraisers in order to send money and supplies to charities providing aid to the earthquake victims. They became a wealth of knowledge, helping to spread the word about ways to provide support through social networking sites. They helped set a new record for money raised by mobile phones…

…We sometimes forget when planning our professional lives around engaging and supporting youth in service that, when the moment comes, children and youth are already poised for action. Thank you to all of the amazing youth out there, around the world, who continue to answer the call to serve.”

Photo of Girl Surveys the Damage by newbeatphoto on Flickr, Creative Commons.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (1)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Children have increasingly become victims of the conflict — Afghanistan Rights Monitor recently showed that about 1,050 children died in 2009 in war-related incidents and there were at least 2,080 cases of grave violations of child rights, such as recruitment of kids as suicide bombers and foot soldiers and forced labor. Three decades of conflict has also had long-term repercussions on the country's youth, many of whom are disfranchised and lack educational and employment opportunities. Literacy and secondary school enrollment rates are also low. The situation for Afghan girls and women is particularly concerning; a December report shows that they suffer high levels of violence and discrimination and have poor access to justice and education. Afghan girls are also under traditional pressures to enter early marriage and early pregnancy.

The Youth Parliament blog, based in India, elaborates on the situation:

“Possibly one of the biggest roles in the process of restructuring Afghanistan can be played by the youth of Afghanistan. 68% of the Afghan population consists of people who are under the age of 25 years. However, the long period of war has deprived many of them of their youth and childhood. Categorized as the ‘lost generation’ of Afghanistan, the socially imposed silence and lack of education has suppressed large sections of the Afghan youth. Moreover, the youth is hardly seen as a direct mechanism for peace building, but only as possible recruits for various terrorist organizations.”

Despite the circumstances, efforts are being made nationwide by and for youth to maintain their health and education and to empower them. The Youth Parliament blog continues:

“The youth has been able to overcome some of these barriers in the recent past to play a more active role. This is evident from the existence of a number of youth organisations spread over the entire country which have undertaken the task of promoting non-formal education, increasing awareness, promoting volunteerism for peace and development of the country and most of them have got integrated in the government or working of other NGOs.”

Examples of youth involvement range from a teen training to be midwife to help combat the country's high maternal mortality rate to young women protesting against a law restricting their rights to a young woman nurturing Afghan girls through soccer. In Kabul, another sport is being used to get kids off the street and stay active — skateboarding. Skateistan teaches boys and girls how to skateboard, among other skills such as skateboard instruction, literacy and computer skills. Skateboarding offers a rare opportunity for Afghan girls to participate in a public sport, helping break down traditional barriers, as this video documents. The blog I Skate, Therefore I am provides background on the initiative:

“Skateistan started two years ago in a dried-up fountain in the heart of the Afghan capital, when two Australians with three skateboards started teaching a small group of fascinated kids. It is now Afghanistan’s (and the world’s) first co-educational skateboarding school. The school engages growing numbers of urban and internally-displaced youth in Afghanistan through skateboarding and provides them with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment programs.”

The bright lines discusses the opening of Afghanistan's first indoor skateboarding park and its significance:

“On October 29, 2009, Skateistan will be opening the largest indoor sports facility & skate park in Kabul. It’s incredible how this team of instructors is engaging young folk in the art of skateboarding, in a place where the social opportunities for them, especially young girls, is limited because of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The goal is to bring indoor & outdoor skateboarding facilities to Afghanistan. There’s going to be separate classes for young girls.”

Some young women are also finding an outlet for self-expression, healing and outreach via writing. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is a blog started by novelist Masha Hamilton that connects Afghan women, between the ages of 18 and 28, with writing instructors in the United States. Its goal is to allow Afghan women to have a voice that isn't filtered through male relatives or the media. The young women's writing covers issues ranging from the joy of playing basketball to death threats from the Taliban to breaking the silence. In this post, an anonymous blogger talks about how she is being forced into a marriage and in desperate need of solutions:

“After my father died, the responsibility for me fell to my brothers, who grew up under the Taliban government and were influenced by it. Now I live with three Talibs and I must obey what they say. I am not like a girl in the house, but a slave. When I was at third year at the university, the owner of our house demanded higher rent. My family decided they would leave Kabul and go to a province where housing was cheaper. But I didn’t know how I would continue my studies in that case, so I gave up my transportation money to help pay for our rent, and I go to the university on foot.

Still, at the beginning of this year, my brothers said: “It is time for you to marry.” They arranged a marriage to my first cousin, my mom’s brother’s son, who lives in a province where most of the people are Talib. My cousin is about 40 years old and uneducated. His family has a business and a big house. Their women are required to wear burqas and are responsible for cooking, cleaning and caring for the animals. Most have eight or nine children. They can’t go outside the house—even when they are sick, they aren’t allowed to go to the doctor.”

Many of the young women also express their sentiments through poetry. In these segments of a poem, Shogofa shares her story:

“I am from long line of women who have walked alone …
From a land that smells of the blood of innocent people
From a people who have lost everything in war – sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers
From a people feeling hopeless

…

I am from long line of women who have walked alone…

I know now how to enter society

And find my answers though I’m alone

Learn from my experience though I have failed many times

I never give up

I find my way and learn nothing is impossible to achieve

I ignore those things that destroy my mind

I learn that no one can help me except me

I accept reality and I’m ready to face any problem

Now I have ambition to achieve my goal

To help my people bring peace to the next generation”

Others also remain hopeful about the future of Afghanistan and the role youth can play in bringing peace and security. Mozhdah Jamalzadah, blogging on Afghanistan Through My Eyes, says:

“One thing that impressed me very much about the younger generation in Afghanistan, at least from what I’ve seen so far, is that they are so eager to learn, and they strive for success. Even with the lack, and low standard of education these kids try to gain as much as they can. They are incredibly intelligent. In North America where education system is absolutely amazing, most kids will do only what they have to in order to get to the next level. Most are not passionate. I believe if you give the same opportunities to these Afghan youth who are so hungry for knowledge, who knows how far they can take it. The sky is the limit.”

Photo of Afghan children by isafmedia, U.S. Air Force TSgt Laura K. Smith, on Flickr, Creative Commons.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (2)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

Suicide rates have declined in Canada through the years but not in Aboriginal communities, though there is great variation among communities. Suicide rates are five to seven times higher for First Nations youth than for non-Aboriginal youth, and rates among Inuit youth are among the highest in the world, at 11 times the national average. Some spectulate that the problem is actually worse, as stats don't usually include all Aboriginal groups.

Many factors may be contributing to these high rates, including isolation, poverty and lack of adequate housing, health care, social services and other basic amenities. The blog Sweetgrass Coaching, written by Richard Bull, also blames the pain and helplessness that resulted from colonization:

“You can’t understand Aboriginal suicide without looking at colonization. We, as Indigenous people, must realize that we did not have sky-high suicide rates before the European invasion (contact is too clean a word for what actually happened).

When Canadian society says we’re sick that’s like a psychopathic killer complaining to someone he’s tried to strangle repeatedly that she should do something about the marks on her neck and see a psychiatrist about her recurrent nightmares and low self-esteem.”

Specifically, some bloggers point to Canada's residential schools, a federally-funded system run by churches that removed Aboriginal children from their families and communities to help them assimilate into Euro-Canadian cultures. From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were required to attend these Christian schools. It was later revealed that many of these children endured physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of the Canadian government and its citizens for the residential school system.

Anishinawbe Blog by Bob Goulais says the multi-generational effects of residential schools must not be underestimated.

“Many residential school survivors and their families have no identity beyond their church and what they learned in school. With no identity and without acceptance, they are banished to the margins of society. Although this generation might be more accepting – with access to more social programs and numerous political, legal and rights-based victories – the damage from the past generations has been done. Parents don’t know how to be parents. Families don’t know how to Love…

…For far too many youth, suicide is the ultimate way out. We’re seeing that more in more in remote, northern communities. This is truly the saddest commentary. I can’t imagine how bad life must be for a twelve year-old Cree boy to hang himself at the recreation centre swing-set. To not have the Love he needs… to not have hope. To know that he hasn’t been the first and he won’t be the last.”

To help combat suicide among Aboriginal youth, the Web site Honouring Life Network, funded by Health Canada, was launched in April 2008. It contains resources for youth and youth workers, a blog and personal stories from Aboriginal youth, among other things. In this personal story a young man talks about how his older brother's death led him to contemplate taking his own life.

“On the second anniversary of his death, I just couldn’t feel like missing him anymore. I got up really early in the morning and was walking to the picnic shelter by the lake. This other guy had hung himself there not long before. I felt like I wanted the lake to be the last thing I saw.

My neighbour was out though and started talking to me and I guess he could tell something was wrong. He kept talking to me and talking to me and then he woke up my parents. I never actually told them what I was going to do but they knew somehow. It was a big shock to all of us and it woke us up.

We started to get into the traditional healing; like my dad and I will do a sweat lodge with the other men. I’m not going to talk about that because it’s private. And my mom does the whole thing with burning sage and sweetgrass, which kind of stinks up the house but that’s okay I guess because she’s more like my mom again.”

Last fall, the Honouring Life Network announced a video contest, where Aboriginal youth were encouraged to submit a short video related to suicide prevention and awareness. The entries can be viewed on their YouTube channel; the winning entry is entitled “Choose life”:

Other youth are also working to help fight this growing problem. In 2006, Steve Sanderson, an Aboriginal youth cartoonist, wrote and illustrated a comic book called “Darkness Calls” to highlight suicide among Aboriginal youth. Revolving around a teen named Kyle, the story is also available as a video. In the blog Stageleft, the blogger discusses 12 other Aboriginal youth who are making a difference, and were rewarded for doing so, including his daughter Charlotte:

“I feel very safe in saying that not one of the 12 people on the stage lived the lives they have lived, or did the things that they have done, so they could get an award…Charlotte has been concerned with Aboriginal youth suicide rates, the rate of suicide in the Aboriginal community is many times higher than the national rate, and the rate of suicide within the Inuit community is the highest in Canada. To help bring attention to this she, and 4 other Aboriginal youth, walked from Duncan BC to Ottawa speaking at community centres, youth detention facilities, friendship centres, municipal councils, and to every politician that would listen to them.”

A 2009 UNICEF Canada report on Aboriginal children's health states that suicide intervention and prevention can only be successful by taking into account the interconnected relationships between culture, community and environment. Whatever the approach, the blog Rebel Youth says Aboriginal youth, like all Canadian youth, deserve a future.

“Over 50% of Aboriginal people are under 23. Canadian youth justified by being deep enraged by treatment of Aboriginal peoples by the Canadian ruling class; the attack on Aboriginal youth is an attack on all youth.

Aboriginal youth need a future. A future free from racism, a future with a good paying job, a future with land or proper compensation for land use. A future with rights to universal education right up to and including post-secondary education. A future with good housing. A future without racist police brutality and racial profiling. A future with a dream. A future that is a reality.”

Photo of Inuit Child by wili_hybrid on Flickr, Creative Commons.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (7)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

There has been progress in combating the disease since it was first identified in the early 80s, but HIV/AIDS remains a major public health issue. Over 33 million people are currently living with HIV worldwide, almost 70 percent of who live in sub-Saharan Africa. People with HIV are living longer though, in part because of the beneficial effects of antiretroviral therapy. To highlight the need for universal access to HIV/AIDS treatment, care and prevention, the theme of this year's World AIDS Day is ‘Universal Access and Human Rights.'

Bloggers globally have used World AIDS Day as an opportunity to share their thoughts on not only this disease, but the significance of this day. Many of these blogs are included on Global Voices Google map of HIV-positive bloggers and groups who blog about the disease, which has been updated for World AIDS Day. Charlie Dale, blogging on My Journey with Judy… from the United States, reflects on the significance of World AIDS Day.

“Somehow over the years I guess I have grown complacent to what this day really means, if in all honesty anything to the masses. In the beginning it was in all the news stories, papers and events that this day was approaching and awareness and attention was brought to this monster killer.

Over the years though the media like the rest of us I guess has grown overly weary of a problem that is still fairly rampant and in the minds of the media VERY old news sadly to say…Long term survivors like myself I guess have grown weary, worn and tired. Many of us are just trying to survive day to day and make something of ourselves and our lives.”

But Claire Keeton, blogging for South Africa’s Sunday Times, says there is still an important role for World AIDS Day.

“It’s that time of year when Christmas decorations flood the shops and red AIDS ribbons come out. Tuesday is World AIDS Day.

Some people with HIV/AIDS and activists object to World AIDS Day – essentially saying it allows people to ignore the epidemic the rest of the year, as long as they remember it for a single day.

Paying lip service. Window dressing. Look at the Onion cover in that light.

From my side, World AIDS Day does have advantages. It’s the one time of the year that all media make space for HIV/AIDS stories.”

Many bloggers have done just that, made space on their blogs to share their experiences about this disease. Aderyn Verwood from Germany, blogging on Vintage Verwood, says that until her good friend was diagnosed with HIV, she didn’t pay much attention to it:

“Like most people, I knew about HIV, but the role it played in my life was too insignificant to ever become more than a distant, abstract threat that seemingly did not belong to my environment. Now, no day goes past that I don’t think of it consciously, that I don’t hope for improvement of already existing therapies or for a breakthrough in scientific research, so that a cure might be found…To my friend, I’d just like to say: I hope that many decades from now, we will sit together, old and wrinkly, laughing about the times when we were young. I love you.”

Others took a less personal approach and blogged to raise awareness and spread the facts. Jessica Joseph, blogging on Alien in The Caribbean from Trinidad and Tobago, wrote a three-part exploration of sex and sexuality in the Caribbean in the days leading up to World AIDS Day. In this first part, she looks at where the shame and secrets regarding sex come from:

“Some of the questions I would like to investigate are: Where exactly did our prudery and hypocrisy come from? What are the elements of sexual attraction? What are the dynamics of gender and sexual orientation? Some of the resolutions I would to make are: Sexuality and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. Good sex is also safe sex. HIV/Aids is a viral representation of a deeper syndrome and its cure lies in a holistic approach to sexuality even it means the painful re-breaking and re-setting of a bone (no pun intended) that was badly cast for a very long time.”

Some bloggers used art to express how they feel on World AIDS Day. Last year Richard Kearns, blogging on HAVVACC, wrote this poem in honor of the day and says he plans to write a new poem this year. Sinthalunda, a poet in Malawi, posts this poem:

“Here from this musty village
Come golden stars
Who dance the same rhythm
From far beyond the horizon;
Their light sound gets louder
As they walk to school
For the beat of lessons
Round the circle of subjects.

From this forgotten compound
Come complex joys
From children whose nose-dust
Has been cleaned by wind's awareness.
For now, the way of knowledge
In the world of education
Has taught them to sense
The voice of silenced victims.”

To encourage more bloggers to write about HIV/AIDS on all 365 days of the year, not just World AIDS Day, this past summer Rising Voices released “Blogging Positively,” a collection of case studies, interviews and best practices about citizen media related to HIV/AIDS. The guide highlights leaders in the HIV-positive community, contains tips for workshop facilitators and teachers and provides resources to help new bloggers get started.

Written by Juhie Bhatia · comments (9)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper