Commentary and analysis to persuade people to become socialist and to act for themselves, organizing democratically and without leaders, to bring about a world of common ownership and free access. We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. We are not reformists with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism.
Friday, July 10, 2015
The Power and Impunity of the Transnationals Are Stifling the Voices of the World’s Peoples
(Harare, 9th of July 2015)
La Via Campesina strongly decries the fact that international policies and legislative processes which supposedly are decided upon democratically and by the citizens are increasingly dominated by the interests of large multinational corporations, with the connivance of the governing classes[1]. Furthermore, while existing structures allow the crimes committed by these same transnationals to go unpunished, there is a growing incidence of criminalisation of those who are struggling in defence of human rights.
At the international, regional, national, and local levels, it is more and more apparent that legislative frameworks are being designed, interpreted, and implemented so as to respond to the interests of large transnational companies - to the detriment of the common good and despite the resistance of social movements and organisations that are seeking different paths. This situation is compounded by a lack of transparency towards civil society.
For example, the international trade agreements, of which the TTIP, the TPP, the CETA, the EPAs and the TISA are some current examples - with their investment protection clauses, the deregulation of trade and production, and the jettisoning of social, health, and safety standards - respond to the requests of the transnational companies rather than to the interests of the world’s peoples.
A permanent confusion is created in the roles of the entities representing civil society and the public interest and the entities that are defending private interests. The multinationals are treated as though they were social actors, when in reality they do not represent anyone other than the shareholders for whom they seek to gain profits. Consequently there is a considerable reduction in the public space.
In addition, new mixed entities are created and accorded active support: the round tables or platforms that are composed of multiple actors such as governmental institutions, research bodies, donors, NGOs, and civil society organisations. These new spaces provide no guarantees, and even less support, for the autonomy of social movements; positions necessarily become diluted and what is really happening in the field is hidden. We can cite the example of the ILC (International Land Coalition), an organisation that has received an increase in funding in recent years and which, in an opportunistic manner, presents itself alternatively as a research body, a donor, or a representative of civil society. In fact, it calls for mitigating the negative effects of landgrabbing, rather than insisting that landgrabbing be stopped.
As a social movement of peasants and farmers, farmworkers, landless people, and indigenous peoples, we are confronting a short-sighted and ultra-capitalist vision of the world based on the paradigms of growth at any cost, the capacity of the market to control and resolve everything, and the imposition of a Western development model. This model includes the privatisation and commodification of common goods and of fundamental rights such as the rights to water and food. It includes the denigration of social movements and the cult of business as the only “useful” social actor. The quest for private profit is the dominating factor in decision making and in its vision of the world. A patriarchal, capitalist, individualistic and Western vision of well-being is being actively promoted, bringing in its train uniformity in a global market. In this way, the responsibility and the role of States are reduced and seen as obsolete. There is a corresponding reduction in the capacity for action and influence of grassroots actors.
New markets are being established, supposedly in order to resolve the problems that the market itself has created. A simple example of this are the (REDD) carbon emissions markets, which, rather than reducing carbon emissions, have led to speculation, the forced displacement of communities, and more pollution. Techno-fixes such as GMOs and fertilisers are being actively promoted, and there is a lack of analysis of the powers and interests at play as well as a lack of a long-term vision. Markets for social problems are created, for instance the social register markets involving people who have been negatively affected by dams. These show how even social problems end up by becoming markets. We must also mention the public-private partnerships (PPPs) in which companies replace states through obscure arrangements that only benefit those same companies. By means of orchestrated land and seed laws, the common goods managed by the communities, land, water, seeds, and our territories, are turned into commodities under the dictate of land titling programmes and patents on life. Thus people are dispossessed of the very rights that guarantee the future of the planet and of humanity.
Initiatives claiming to contribute to “the fight against hunger in the world", such as the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (Nasan) which is supported by the G8, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), are taking place with the complicity of Western states and through pressure on many countries. These initiatives are integrated in an insidious manner into national and subregional agricultural development programmes, in order to impose a Western model of agriculture and the introduction of GMOs and products that are prohibited in the countries concerned - and to monopolise their natural resources such as land and water.
Due to pressure to maintain the status quo or to a fear of restricting the profits of the few, there is a continuous lack of structural and sustainable solutions.
We are seeing an increase in the criminalisation of trade unionists, environmentalists, and peasant farmers who are struggling for their human rights or for the rights of Nature. In Honduras alone, hundreds of women and men peasants have been put on trial for defending their rights. In recent years, there has been a marked upsurge in incidents of violence against environmentalists[2].
We note the importance of opening up the international policy spaces to grassroots organisations, and of developing mechanisms, to be led by these same social movements, for consultation, the provision of transparency, and the dissemination of information. At this point, let us mention the positive example of the Declaration of the Rights of Peasants and people working in rural areas that is being drawn up by the United Nations Human Rights Council[3].
We need new transparent, participatory, processes of democratisation that are open and clear to all, and that, instead of oppression, allow the expression of the sovereignty of the peoples in the world of today.
We need legally binding national, regional and international mechanisms to put an end to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by transnational companies. In this sense, we welcome the initiative in the United Nations Human Rights Council, which aims to adopt a binding Treaty, and we support the Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power[4].
We recognise that the role of States is to represent the interests of their peoples. Therefore, the State has an obligation to oppose any policy or international treaty that diminishes human rights and undermines its own sovereignty. The sovereignty and responsibility of States need to be strengthened and not undermined at the international level.
We in La Via Campesina have chosen food sovereignty as a utopia in rebellion against this exploitative system. Day by day, we are building our alternatives in solidarity and from the grassroots.
[1] https://www.tni.org/en/briefing/state-power-2014#infographics
from here
The one further step we would urge members of La Via Campesina to seriously consider and promote for the benefit of worldwide worker solidarity is that of calling for the total abolition of the capitalist system in favour of one where such power and impunity as written about above will be unable to exist - that system is world socialism.
Solidarity with workers worldwide.
Thursday, July 09, 2015
Charcoal Options
In Africa alone, over 80% of the population still depends on
firewood and charcoal for cooking, and this is unlikely to change due to
population growth and rising urbanization. So rather than condemning
traditional sources of energy, what is needed are sustainable wood-fuel systems
to avoid forest degradation and generate positive development. Charcoal is one
of the most commercialized resources in sub-Saharan Africa. FAO estimates
official charcoal production for Africa to be 30.6 million tons in 2012, worth
between US$9.2 billion and US$24.5 billion annually. Despite this huge value of
production, policies to effectively govern the sector are lacking in most
African countries.
The question is: How can the sustainable use of tree-based
bioenergy be a solution to development, as well as mitigation and adaptation to
climate change?
Henry Neufeldt, the head of the climate change unit at the
World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) says “However, if managed properly charcoal can
provide a low-cost and locally available energy source that has the potential
to become sustainable and contribute significantly to poverty alleviation….Links
between charcoal production and deforestation and degradation need further
clarification so that current and future impacts on land cover, the regional
water balance and the global climate can be appropriately addressed. The
capacity of agroforestry systems, woodlots and small plantations to meet
growing demands for charcoal, and reduce pressure on forests, needs urgent
investigation,” added Neufeldt.
About 80 experts and policy makers recently convened at a
workshop organized by ICRAF in Nairobi, Kenya, to draft an agenda for action to
influence the inclusion of firewood and charcoal and liquid biofuels in energy
planning in Africa. A key recommendation of the workshop is to recognize that
improving the cooking of food in Africa requires an in-depth understanding of
the entire system, from production to end-user, and investments should
therefore be based on improving the entire cooking system rather than targeting
elements of it. In summary, the participants concluded that tree-based
bioenergy systems, ranging from firewood and charcoal to liquid biofuels and
power generation, offer great opportunities for sustainable green growth
pathways in sub-Saharan Africa. What is needed to effectively promote them is a
shift in perception to rehabilitate their negative image, a holistic approach
that considers the full production to end-user cycle, collaboration of relevant
stakeholders to overcome investment barriers and political coordination at
subnational to national and regional levels.
Search for Ever Cheaper Labour Leads to Africa
From H&M to Calvin Klein, brands look to Ethiopian factories. Ethiopia’s garment sector has no minimum wage, compared with Bangladesh, where workers earn at least $67 a month, according to the International Labor Organization. Garment workers in Ethiopia started at about $21 a month as of last year, the Ethiopian government said. On the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the government recently built the $250 million Bole Lemmi industrial park exclusively for foreign investors in the garment industry. Giant hangars occupy land where barley, peas and the local grain teff used to grow. They are drawn to the cheap labor and to the inexpensive power, which in many countries is the second-biggest factory cost after workers. The Ethiopian government is building a railway to the port in neighboring Djibouti to help exports leave the country more quickly.
Colin Browne, managing director of product supply and Asian sourcing for VF Corp., which owns such brands as Lee, Wrangler and Timberland, pointed out the past few years, rising production costs in China and several deadly factory accidents like the collapse of Rana Plaza two years ago in Bangladesh have forced apparel companies to hunt for alternatives from Myanmar to Colombia. Ethiopia was recently identified as a top sourcing destination by apparel companies, according to McKinsey & Co., which surveyed executives responsible for procuring $70 billion of goods annually. Several clothing giants are beginning to source in Africa. VF expects to start getting some of its pants sewn in Ethiopia this year. Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger parent company PVH Corp. has been making some of its clothes in Kenya for at least four years. Others with sourcing in sub-Saharan Africa include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., J.C. Penney Co. and Levi Strauss & Co.
At the MAA Garment & Textile Factory in Northern Ethiopia, 1,600 workers spin cotton, dye fabric and sew it into T-shirts, leggings and other basics for international retailers like Hennes & Maurtiz AB’s H&M chain, Tesco PLC, Asda Stores Ltd.’s George label, and German clothing company Kik Textilien und Non-Food GmbH.
“In the global economy, light manufacturing is constantly moving,” said World Bank’s Guang Z. Chen, who was the country director for Ethiopia until last month and is now a director for several countries across southern Africa. “We see the possibility of this kind of industry moving away from Asia, because the labor cost is rising in China rapidly.” Chinese garment workers earned anywhere from $155 to $297 a month. Garment workers in China tend to do more sophisticated production while basic cutting and sewing goes to countries with lower wages.
Colin Browne, managing director of product supply and Asian sourcing for VF Corp., which owns such brands as Lee, Wrangler and Timberland, pointed out the past few years, rising production costs in China and several deadly factory accidents like the collapse of Rana Plaza two years ago in Bangladesh have forced apparel companies to hunt for alternatives from Myanmar to Colombia. Ethiopia was recently identified as a top sourcing destination by apparel companies, according to McKinsey & Co., which surveyed executives responsible for procuring $70 billion of goods annually. Several clothing giants are beginning to source in Africa. VF expects to start getting some of its pants sewn in Ethiopia this year. Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger parent company PVH Corp. has been making some of its clothes in Kenya for at least four years. Others with sourcing in sub-Saharan Africa include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., J.C. Penney Co. and Levi Strauss & Co.
At the MAA Garment & Textile Factory in Northern Ethiopia, 1,600 workers spin cotton, dye fabric and sew it into T-shirts, leggings and other basics for international retailers like Hennes & Maurtiz AB’s H&M chain, Tesco PLC, Asda Stores Ltd.’s George label, and German clothing company Kik Textilien und Non-Food GmbH.
“In the global economy, light manufacturing is constantly moving,” said World Bank’s Guang Z. Chen, who was the country director for Ethiopia until last month and is now a director for several countries across southern Africa. “We see the possibility of this kind of industry moving away from Asia, because the labor cost is rising in China rapidly.” Chinese garment workers earned anywhere from $155 to $297 a month. Garment workers in China tend to do more sophisticated production while basic cutting and sewing goes to countries with lower wages.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
For Ugandan Children Born Of War, The Struggle Continues
Actual combat may have ended almost a decade ago in northern Uganda, but
for many women abducted by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and the
children they conceived in captivity, the war is far from over. Sexual
exploitation, beatings, stigmatization and community rejection, lack of
medical care and education, and deprivation of land rights are among the
challenges faced by those who escaped from or were released by the LRA.
For two decades from the mid-1980s, between 10,000 and 15,000 girls and women were abducted from their homes in northern Uganda to serve as fighters, porters and sex slaves of LRA commanders. These forced unions resulted in a population group often neglected by post-war recovery programmes: children born of war.
According to a recent article published by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) “Thousands of such children exist on the margins, fathered through sexual violence by not only the LRA, but also government forces and a multitude of other state and non-state armed actors.”
A new report by the Justice and Reconciliation Project, based in the northern town of Gulu, points out that scores more women were subjected to sexual violence and exploitations in the so-called “protected villages” where most of the population of northern Uganda were forced to live during the war.
“As if the original violations were not severe enough, female victims are especially susceptible to ongoing forms of re-victimisation that extend long after initial violations occur,” says the report, titled, “Alone Like a Tree: Reintegration Challenges Facing Children Born of War [CBW] and Their Mothers in Northern Uganda.”
The consequences for the women of protracted stigmatisation can include depression and other forms of mental illness as well as increased vulnerability to future abuse and violence due to economic marginalisation. Women interviewed by the report’s authors said their new partners often “do not want to pay their [children’s] school fees, and the step-parents are reportedly a major source of insults against CBW. They are continuously ostracised and isolated in some homes.” Interviewees also reported many cases of sexual abuse of both female and male CBW by stepfathers and other relatives. Reporting such abuse was very difficult, especially when the perpetrators were members of the armed forces.
“In the new relationships, the slightest disagreement between husband and wife gets blamed on the women’s past. Even when the man is also formerly-abducted, he can stigmatize the woman, accusing her of sleeping with many men from the bush as a means of justifying his abuse,” says the report.
One 17-year-old boy born in LRA captivity told the researchers: “We are sometimes told the home we are staying in is not our home, and the person taking care of us is not our father. That we should go and look for our father. This is always said by other children in that home. This makes our lives miserable.”
According to Jackson Odong of the National Memory and Documentation Centre in the northern Ugandan town of Kitgum, the needs of such populations have been neglected.
“Children born in captivity and their mothers continue to suffer because while they were encouraged to return, there was limited support for their reintegration. Focus was largely on ex-combatants. There have been little or no specific interventions targeting surviving children and mothers,” he said.
Irene Ikomu, a human rights lawyer and the coordinator of Parliament Watch Uganda, told IRIN that the report highlighted the need to evaluate current reintegration processes in northern Uganda. “There are clearly gaps that are yet to be addressed and this explains the continued challenges despite peace,” she said.
“Successful reintegration is not just about short-term concerns and political stability, but should especially focus on the long-term strategies for economic reconstruction and development,” added Ikomu. “In northern Uganda, we cannot say we have fully addressed reintegration without dealing with the issue of land access for the former combatants and victims, especially with regard to CBW,” she said.
The chairman of Uganda’s Amnesty Commission, Peter Onega, shared this view.
“It’s a serious issue. If not addressed urgently, it’s recipe for violence and conflict. As a commission, we haven’t done proper reintegration of these people because we are incapacitated. We don’t have the resources due to low government funding,” he told IRIN, explaining that only around US$1.5 million of the $2.5 million budgeted for reintegration programmes annually had been forthcoming.
“We need to carry out community sensitization, dialogues and reconciliation meetings to create an atmosphere for the community members to fully accept and live peacefully with these children and women,” he added.
The ICTJ article noted that while rebels who surrendered “were awarded reinsertion packages of basic household items by the government, there were no additional allowances for those with children born in captivity. This trend continues today, with many governmental and non-governmental programmes recognizing formerly-abducted persons as a special category for assistance, but not children born of war.”
Even within this category, different groups have different needs, the article explained. “For instance, female and male children will face different challenges in societies in which females’ families receive dowry when their daughter marries while males are expected to inherit land and other resources when they come of age. In northern Uganda, some families and clans have rejected male children born of war to a higher extent than females because they do not want to allocate land to them on which to settle when they come of age.”
In March 2014, the Women’s Advocacy Network, a coalition of NGOs, petitioned parliament to set up a gender-sensitive reparations fund to provide free health services to women and children affected by the insurgency, and a mechanism to “identify, integrate, and regularize stateless children born in captivity.” The network also called on the government to “identify, integrate, and resettle child victims of formerly-abducted women whose clan/cultural belongings are unknown.”
Nothing came of the petition.
from here
For two decades from the mid-1980s, between 10,000 and 15,000 girls and women were abducted from their homes in northern Uganda to serve as fighters, porters and sex slaves of LRA commanders. These forced unions resulted in a population group often neglected by post-war recovery programmes: children born of war.
According to a recent article published by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) “Thousands of such children exist on the margins, fathered through sexual violence by not only the LRA, but also government forces and a multitude of other state and non-state armed actors.”
A new report by the Justice and Reconciliation Project, based in the northern town of Gulu, points out that scores more women were subjected to sexual violence and exploitations in the so-called “protected villages” where most of the population of northern Uganda were forced to live during the war.
“As if the original violations were not severe enough, female victims are especially susceptible to ongoing forms of re-victimisation that extend long after initial violations occur,” says the report, titled, “Alone Like a Tree: Reintegration Challenges Facing Children Born of War [CBW] and Their Mothers in Northern Uganda.”
The consequences for the women of protracted stigmatisation can include depression and other forms of mental illness as well as increased vulnerability to future abuse and violence due to economic marginalisation. Women interviewed by the report’s authors said their new partners often “do not want to pay their [children’s] school fees, and the step-parents are reportedly a major source of insults against CBW. They are continuously ostracised and isolated in some homes.” Interviewees also reported many cases of sexual abuse of both female and male CBW by stepfathers and other relatives. Reporting such abuse was very difficult, especially when the perpetrators were members of the armed forces.
“In the new relationships, the slightest disagreement between husband and wife gets blamed on the women’s past. Even when the man is also formerly-abducted, he can stigmatize the woman, accusing her of sleeping with many men from the bush as a means of justifying his abuse,” says the report.
One 17-year-old boy born in LRA captivity told the researchers: “We are sometimes told the home we are staying in is not our home, and the person taking care of us is not our father. That we should go and look for our father. This is always said by other children in that home. This makes our lives miserable.”
According to Jackson Odong of the National Memory and Documentation Centre in the northern Ugandan town of Kitgum, the needs of such populations have been neglected.
“Children born in captivity and their mothers continue to suffer because while they were encouraged to return, there was limited support for their reintegration. Focus was largely on ex-combatants. There have been little or no specific interventions targeting surviving children and mothers,” he said.
Irene Ikomu, a human rights lawyer and the coordinator of Parliament Watch Uganda, told IRIN that the report highlighted the need to evaluate current reintegration processes in northern Uganda. “There are clearly gaps that are yet to be addressed and this explains the continued challenges despite peace,” she said.
“Successful reintegration is not just about short-term concerns and political stability, but should especially focus on the long-term strategies for economic reconstruction and development,” added Ikomu. “In northern Uganda, we cannot say we have fully addressed reintegration without dealing with the issue of land access for the former combatants and victims, especially with regard to CBW,” she said.
The chairman of Uganda’s Amnesty Commission, Peter Onega, shared this view.
“It’s a serious issue. If not addressed urgently, it’s recipe for violence and conflict. As a commission, we haven’t done proper reintegration of these people because we are incapacitated. We don’t have the resources due to low government funding,” he told IRIN, explaining that only around US$1.5 million of the $2.5 million budgeted for reintegration programmes annually had been forthcoming.
“We need to carry out community sensitization, dialogues and reconciliation meetings to create an atmosphere for the community members to fully accept and live peacefully with these children and women,” he added.
Photo: Claire Kahunde/IRIN
The children born of war and their mothers performing Acholi traditional dance in Atiak sub county, Amuru district
The ICTJ article noted that while rebels who surrendered “were awarded reinsertion packages of basic household items by the government, there were no additional allowances for those with children born in captivity. This trend continues today, with many governmental and non-governmental programmes recognizing formerly-abducted persons as a special category for assistance, but not children born of war.”
Even within this category, different groups have different needs, the article explained. “For instance, female and male children will face different challenges in societies in which females’ families receive dowry when their daughter marries while males are expected to inherit land and other resources when they come of age. In northern Uganda, some families and clans have rejected male children born of war to a higher extent than females because they do not want to allocate land to them on which to settle when they come of age.”
In March 2014, the Women’s Advocacy Network, a coalition of NGOs, petitioned parliament to set up a gender-sensitive reparations fund to provide free health services to women and children affected by the insurgency, and a mechanism to “identify, integrate, and regularize stateless children born in captivity.” The network also called on the government to “identify, integrate, and resettle child victims of formerly-abducted women whose clan/cultural belongings are unknown.”
Nothing came of the petition.
from here
It's All About The Money - AID
Who holds the purse strings in the humanitarian economy?
With protracted conflicts in Syria, Iraq and South Sudan driving record levels of displacement, migrant crises in Europe and Southeast Asia, and a string of natural disasters, most recently the earthquake in Nepal, demand has never been greater.
And as a result, the rising cost of responding to these growing needs – and how to plug that funding gap – is dominating debate in the aid sector and is likely to become one of the key themes at next year’s World Humanitarian Summit (WHS).
“There are an increasing number of concurrent chronic crises and the demands are becoming unsustainable,” Mike Noyes, head of humanitarian response at ActionAid, told IRIN. “The World Humanitarian Summit will not be a success unless financing is a central part of the agenda.”
In May, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon set up a high-level panel to come up with solutions for a more timely and predictable system of humanitarian funding, and to suggest ways that resources could be deployed more effectively.
Its nine members met together for the first time in late June and they are due to report back ahead of WHS next May.
There is more to read here, but it all stresses that everything is dependent on money. Within this global economic system it couldn't be any other way. The question so rarely posited is how much better could things be managed for the vast majority of the global population without these monetary constraints?
Think Socialism!
Population Growth
In preparation for World Population Day 2015 the Population Institute last month released a report (Demographic Vulnerability: Where population growth poses the greatest challenges") that identified the 20 countries facing the greatest demographic challenges with respect to food, poverty, water, environment, and political instability. South Sudan, which topped the report's list of the 20 most demographically vulnerable countries, was rated as "severely vulnerable" in the areas of hunger, poverty, and instability. Its population is projected to increase 236 percent over the next 35 years. Somalia, second on the list, was ranked "high" for hunger and environment, and "severe" for poverty and instability. Somalia's population is projected to rise 150 percent by 2050.
Other countries in the top ten included Niger, Burundi, Eritrea, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Sudan. The population of Burundi, which sits atop IFPRI's Global Hunger Index (GHI), is projected to increase by 154 percent by 2050. The population of Niger, which ranked first in UNDP's 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index, is projected to increase by 274 percent during the next 35 years.
Monday, July 06, 2015
The Rag Trade
Europe's secondhand clothes brings mixed blessings to Africa.
In January, east African head of states suggested that Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania should stop importing used clothes in an effort to revive the local
textile industry. The thousands involved in the second hand clothes trade will
know their fate once the East Africa leaders meet for the November summit,
during which the issue is expected to come up.
Kenya alone imports around 100,000 tonnes of second-hand
clothes, shoes and accessories a year – many of which were originally donated
to charity shops in the west. According to Oxfam, more than 70% of the clothes
donated globally end up in Africa. “The items charity shops fail to sell or which they reject
are considered for resale elsewhere,” says Ian Falkingham, who manages an
Oxfam-owned outlet in Senegal, Frip Ethique. “Items which are in good condition
and suitable for warmer climates are exported to Africa.”
But if the ban goes through, Kenyans will be compelled to
buy locally produced clothes, giving textile manufacturers a chance to reclaim
the market they lost to cheap imports from abroad. The decline of Kenya’s
textile industry dates back to the early 1980s, when market liberalisation
policies spearheaded by the World Bank opened up the local economy to
second-hand clothes. Previously, they had been distributed for free among the
poor. But the superior quality and originality of the clothes soon caught the
eye of the young urban population, creating a demand that led to the collapse
of many of Kenya’s once robust textile companies, among them Rift Valley
Textiles (Rivertex) and Kisumu Cotton Mills (Kicomi).
According to local media reports, 500,000 people were
employed in the textile industry in the 1980s. Today, that number has fallen by
more than 96% to around 20,000. Banning the importation of used clothes is the
government’s latest effort to save an industry that is all but extinguished –
and is intended to try to recover some of those lost jobs.
But, paradoxically, a ban could devastate another group of
Kenyans who depend on the second-hand clothes trade to make a living. William
Ng’ong’a, who sells used clothes at Gikomba, is aware of the possible ruling
that could destroy the business his family has spent the past two decades
building. “I am in this business with my parents, I joined them 10 years ago
just after finishing university. It’s the only work I know,” he says. Ng’ong’a
says the business imports an average of two containers of clothes a month, for
which they pay £16,700 in tax. The containers are offloaded from ships at the
port town of Mombasa from where they are transported by road to Gikomba market.
Ng’ong’a says he directly employs 15 people, most of whom are casual labourers,
and is afraid that they might all be left without a source of income if the
East Africa Community goes ahead with the ban.
And paid employment of another kind is unlikely to match his current
earnings: Ng’ong’a reveals that each container imported at £38,574 brings in a
profit of over 90%.
Charles Kuria’s store is one floor above Ng’ong’a’s. It is
bigger, and filled floor to ceiling with bales of clothes. Kuria has had this
store for almost two years, but he has been in the business much longer,
starting from the bottom as a hawker selling a few pieces on the streets to a
big time wholesaler who now only sells in bales to retailers. He imports his
stock directly from the UK, the US, Canada and Belgium. Although Kuria is
reluctant to discuss his profit margins, he admits to living a comfortable life
where money has ceased to be a worry. His is a business that has a sizeable
staff, with four people employed permanently and up to 20 casuals each time new
stock comes in. He says the real casualties of a ban would be the casual
workers who depend on odd jobs to earn a living. “If these people are deprived
of an opportunity to make honest wages, they might turn to crime and contribute
to making Nairobi an unsafe city,” says Kuria.
Gikomba is the ground zero of second-hand clothes in Kenya,
and it’s from here that merchandise is redistributed to retailers all over the
country. Unapologetic for its mess of noise, dust and a confusing maze of
timber, iron sheets and cardboard stalls, clothes hang from the stalls in a
wild cacophony of colour and design. If the clothes are not on hangers, they
are bundled into giant heaps which the sellers invite buyers to burrow into to
find what they are looking for. Often, the best dresses or blouses are buried
at the bottom of the pile. Buyers and sellers jostle for space in the cramped,
often muddy, lanes, where the set price of goods is usually so low that it is
ridiculous to bargain for anything cheaper. Even so, the more industrious
sellers can be heard shouting themselves hoarse, advertising bargains designed
to lure even the most reluctant of buyers. Gikomba pulses with a spirit borne
of genuine camaraderie: conversation and laughter punctuate the exchanges between
the buyers and sellers.
Former Kenya Association of Manufacturers boss Betty Maina
is cognisant of the risk that comes with cutting off the second-hand clothes
business without a fall back plan for the hundreds of thousands it employs. In
an article for a local media company, Maina says that it is possible to grow
the local textile industry without taking jobs from the people who need them
the most. “Granted, the ‘mitumba’ sector is a source of employment and many
people earn their livelihood from the business. Measures that would shut down
the flourishing trade at a go would not be very welcome. But why not streamline
activities in the sector in such a way that the local textile industry is able
to reap the benefits of providing quality products at an affordable price and
at the same time providing thousands of jobs directly and millions more in
downstream activities?” she asks.
In the meantime, it remains to be seen how the government
will walk the tightrope of reviving the local textile industry without
annihilating Gikomba – and the people that thrive on it.
Sunday, July 05, 2015
NTDs
Many developing countries still lack the infrastructure to
dispense drugs against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Neglected tropical
diseases comprise various conditions that are prevalent in poor countries
around the equator, but receive little international attention due to their limited
spread. They include leprosy, river blindness, Chagas' disease and sleeping
sickness. Nearly 1 in 6 people worldwide requires treatment for at least one
NTD.
Drug delivery remains a crucial problem. Many NTDs are
easily tackled by preventive chemotherapy and transmission control (PCT), a
process that combines large-scale drug administration programmes with efforts
to improve sanitation and raise awareness of how the diseases are spread. 5
million deaths could be averted.
"We have an abundance of cure," said Desmond
Swayne, the United Kingdom's international development minister, during the
report's launch last week (25 June) in London. "The problem isn't our
ability to provide a cure. It's our will to provide the infrastructure that can
deliver it to the sufferers."
Saturday, July 04, 2015
Wildlife Before People
The international reputation of Boston-based Thomson
Safaris, a sister company of the long-established Thomson Family Adventures,
has soared. The outfitter and its trips have won almost a dozen recent awards
and accolades, including a citation in the National Geographic Best Adventure
Travel Companies on Earth list, Condé Nast Traveler's World Savers Award,
Outside magazine's Active Travel Award, and for Wineland, Thomson Safaris'
director, a lifetime-achievement award from the Adventure Travel Trade Association.
The company is a three-time honoree of the Tanzania Tourist Board: 2001's Tour
Operator of the Year, 2005's Humanitarian of the Year, and 2009's Tanzania
Conservation Award.
The company's website includes a promotional video for a
12,000-acre tract called Enashiva, a Maasai word for "happiness"owned
by an American couple named Rick Thomson and Judi Wineland, who paid $1.2
million for the property's lease under the name of their Tanzanian-registered
company, Tanzania Conservation Ltd.—leasing it because Tanzania does not allow
foreigners to own property, only extended land titles and where now at the
property's luxury tent complex tourists pay $535 a night for an all-inclusive
safari package, shows smiling Maasai dance and sing as they give thanks for the
community projects—including building classrooms and a medical dispensary—that
the company has enabled. It was set on the doorstep of Serengeti National Park,
and human encroachment had driven away what had once been a rich wildlife
population, including giraffe, wildebeest, and big cats. Thomson and Wineland
were enticed by the challenge of bringing the animals back. Their first step
was to put limits on grazing for the health of the environment, to control
overgrazing and grazing was prohibited during much of the year, particularly
during tourist high seasons—which happened to be when most grazing there
occurred. Some local residents in the area obeyed. Many did not. Tourist
development and droughts, made more intense by the effects of climate change,
have left his villagers with few viable options for their herds. The Thomson
land was the best, and only, reasonable option. For pastoralists, there is no
need more fundamental than sufficient land to feed their animals—cows and,
recently, sheep and goats—which function both as an economic foundation and as
a social system (in crude terms, the Maasai with more cows have more power).
The wilful trespass drew consequences: frequent dispersal or
temporary confiscation of herds by Thomson guards, beatings and arrests,
prolonged detention in the local jail, and two shootings to date, according to
locals' testimony. Residents speaking out against Thomson Safaris were
routinely called in for police questioning. Journalists and aid workers who
went to Loliondo to investigate started getting kicked out by local
authorities. In 2009 and again in 2011, the UN Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination ordered the Tanzanian government to look into
human-rights-abuse allegations on the property, but the requests went nowhere.
Rumors of a conspiracy between Thomson Safaris and the Tanzanian government
began to circulate. In 2008, a New Zealand reporter was murdered under
suspicious circumstances, shortly after investigating the company's operations
in Loliondo.
Loliondo elder Tulito Olemguriem Lemgume’s boma was just
inside the property newly titled to Thomson Safaris. According to Lemgume,
local authorities told him and a handful of neighbors that "the land now
belonged to an investor and we could no longer live there. We told them we have
nowhere to go. We said, 'This is our place. This is our home.'" So the
police arrived with gasoline, he said. The bomas went up in flames. Then
"the police shot at us," Lemgume recalled. "It's like we were
the animals and they were chasing us away."
Tourism was also touted as the best way for Maasai to
benefit economically from the land without "harming" it any longer.
They could sell handicrafts and charge for tours through their homes or for
performing traditional dances. In Loliondo, tour companies arrived in the early
1990s with their own objective of luring zebras, rhinos, and lions back to the
areas where pastoralists had once lived. The region had appeal for developers
because by setting up just outside the Serengeti there was access to wildlife
populations—which don't respect park boundaries—but with lower fees and fewer
bureaucratic hassles than operating in the park would have entailed. The
Ortello Business Corporation (OBC), an ostentatious Dubai-based outfitter that
flies in Arab royalty to hunt and kill rare cats for pleasure, was apportioned
vast "hunting blocks," giving the company the right to conduct its
expeditions throughout virtually the entire Loliondo territory. OBC, the
largest tour operator in the area, had been under fire for years for land
grabbing and political corruption. Maasai resistance and foreign attention
helped to thwart a bill that would have turned 40,000 square miles of Maasai
land into a protected "wildlife migration corridor," with the company
as its new lease holder.
A little while later, Wineland and Thomson read a newspaper
ad for a plot of land with a title for sale. They were enticed not only by the
possibility of reestablishing wildlife populations but also by the property's
proximity to the Maasai themselves. Pioneers in the global-adventure-travel
business, the couple had been specializing in "community-based
tourism" for decades in more than a dozen countries. Rather than
attracting business with exotic animals, Wineland said, they had always placed
"pictures of people on the front cover of [our] brochures." They had
done some charitable work in other Maasai areas of Tanzania and were excited to
bring their business model to Loliondo. For Wineland and Thomson, making their
business benefit the local Maasai was a prime objective. "We believe in a
symbiotic relationship," Wineland has said. "Tourism has to benefit
us, our guests, the wildlife, and the communities." They hoped this land
would be the newest jewel in the company's emerging ecotourism empire, "a
beautiful thing for us and our mission."
"The problem is not tourism," Ndekerei said
"That can be OK. Sure, let women sell jewelry to foreigners. Build a
school. The problem is when others make decisions without including us. If someone
comes to your land and there is no conversation and they didn't get the land in
the right way, that man cannot fit into your society. It's not right that they
decide what is right for everyone."
In 2010, three villages adjacent to the Enashiva property
filed a case arguing that the land's former titleholder, TBL, the state brewing
company, abandoned the property so long ago that it legally reverted to village
land long before the sale to the safari outfitter. Since Maasai villagers had
not been consulted regarding the sale, this would make the 2006 transaction
invalid under Tanzanian law. The case is based on a legal principle known as
adverse possession. If an owner of a land does not prohibit someone coming in,
doesn't do anything to dispute them using the land for a certain period of
time—in Tanzania it's twelve years—then that piece of property reverts to that
person. It's like squatter's rights, but much stronger. They argue that the brewery that sold the title to
Thomson Safaris' owners abandoned the property 16 years before Wineland and
Thomson ever saw the ad in the newspaper. The sale was therefore illegal, they
argue, and the land title should be returned to its rightful owners, the
villages.
"We are victims of our own conservation," Maanda
Ngoitiko explained. Ngoitiko is the founder of Pastoral Women's Council (PWC),
a Maasai women's organization that provides scholarships for girls and
organizes women's rights groups nationwide. But the arrival of tourist
operators in Loliondo has pulled her into the land struggle.
An expert in Arusha on land issues. "There is no
question the government is on the side of Thomson Safaris," he told me.
"The government gives a kind of respect to investors so long as they pay
taxes and bring in tourist dollars. For the public, the government uses the
reasoning of putting the environment above all else. Investors can even violate
human rights and the government is not going to look into it or punish them for
it."
The court battle holds significance far greater than the
fate of 12,000 square acres in the geographic center of Africa. "This is
not an exceptional story of evil conservation," said Ben Gardner, an
anthropologist who chairs the African studies program at the University of
Washington. What's unique, he said, is that the plaintiffs are arguing in favor
of the most controversial idea in conservation politics: giving the land back
to its original owners. "If something is for sale and you buy it, how
could you possibly be culpable of wrongdoing? Investors get a veil of moral
cleanliness. You don't have to account for any history of dispossession or
colonialism or the consequences of conservation work."
There are community-based tourism models in Tanzania and
elsewhere in the world in which locals retain land rights so that they can
negotiate whatever matters most to them, be it grazing rights or farming
acreage or fishing access. ‘&Beyond’ leases acreage from a local community
on which they operate tours. Members of the community limit their herding and
police themselves. It's not a perfect arrangement, the company and villagers
told us, but both sides benefit from a peaceful coexistence. There are also
conservation models in which native groups administer their own business
projects—touristic or otherwise—on protected land. Success of these projects
will be essential for the health both of natural environments and indigenous
communities in an era of climate change and growing populations.
Friday, July 03, 2015
A Tool For Foreign Takeover Of Ghana's Agriculture
By
seizing intellectual property rights to Africa's seeds, western
corporations are attempting one of the greatest thefts in human history:
the theft of the entire agricultural base of all the countries of
Africa.
Ghanaian citizens have so far prevented the passage of the Plant Breeders Bill, a UPOV-91-compliant law that would strip Ghanaian farmers of their rights to their own seeds. But there is worse coming from the African Regional Intellectual Property Association (ARIPO). To Ghana’s great credit, and despite determination and pressure from the G7, USAID and its contractors, despite the willing and enthusiastic cooperation of Ghana’s ministers, Attorney General, and both major political parties, Ghana has refused to pass a farmer destroying, sovereignty busting, UPOV law.
Ghanaian farmers and citizens are not falling for the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) con. The G7, USAID, Big Agribusiness, and Ghana's government and academic elites intend to go around the democratic process and force an end to Ghana's agricultural sovereignty.
If they can't pass a UPOV law within the country, they will impose it from outside. At the African Regional Intellectual Property Association (ARIPO) Diplomatic Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, this coming Monday, 29 June to 1 July 2015, ARIPO plans to adopt the highly contested draft ARIPO Plant Variety Protection Protocol (ARIPO PVP Protocol), based on UPOV 1991.
This is clearly an undemocratic attempt to smuggle the obnoxious UPOV-compliant Plant Breeders' Bill through the back door! Ghana’s farmers and citizens demand seed sovereignty, and clearly oppose GMOs and the deadly chemicals that are an integral part of commercial GMOs. The agribusiness corporations are chemical corporations. So they breed seeds that require you to buy and use their chemicals. This is unhealthy and piles debt on farmers. It takes money from the hands of poor farmers, takes it out of Ghana, and gives it to western corporate shareholders.
If the draft ARIPO PVP Protocol is to be adopted without changes, ARIPO and any ARIPO member that ratifies the Protocol can join UPOV 1991. This means that any member state of ARIPO can simply side-step national consultation processes and ratify the ARIPO Protocol, and in doing so, give up its national sovereignty to a centralized decision-making authority, and further, become a UPOV 1991 member, all in one foul undemocratic swoop. It is unconscionable that Ghana’s government should have any part in this despicable subversion of democracy.
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, AFSA, is of the view that the whole process of developing the draft Protocol is fundamentally flawed, has been extremely un-transparent, and thus lacks credibility and legitimacy. Farmers and civil society groups have been cut out, and denied participation.
The principal aim of the ARIPO PVP Protocol is to create a harmonized regional plant variety protection system within the region in order to give prominence to breeders and place restrictions on seed/varieties protected under such a system. Such protected varieties are bred and sold to farmers through seed companies and other private entities and government/private led subsidy agricultural programmes. The main goal is to facilitate the capturing and control of all seed so that private companies can make profits by forcing farmers to buy seed and pay royalties.
By seizing intellectual property rights to Africa's seeds, taking African seed DNA, manipulating it in a laboratory, then claiming all rights to the seeds and their successive generations, western corporations are attempting one of the greatest thefts in human history, the theft of the entire agricultural base of all the countries of Africa.
read on here
Ghanaian citizens have so far prevented the passage of the Plant Breeders Bill, a UPOV-91-compliant law that would strip Ghanaian farmers of their rights to their own seeds. But there is worse coming from the African Regional Intellectual Property Association (ARIPO). To Ghana’s great credit, and despite determination and pressure from the G7, USAID and its contractors, despite the willing and enthusiastic cooperation of Ghana’s ministers, Attorney General, and both major political parties, Ghana has refused to pass a farmer destroying, sovereignty busting, UPOV law.
Ghanaian farmers and citizens are not falling for the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) con. The G7, USAID, Big Agribusiness, and Ghana's government and academic elites intend to go around the democratic process and force an end to Ghana's agricultural sovereignty.
If they can't pass a UPOV law within the country, they will impose it from outside. At the African Regional Intellectual Property Association (ARIPO) Diplomatic Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, this coming Monday, 29 June to 1 July 2015, ARIPO plans to adopt the highly contested draft ARIPO Plant Variety Protection Protocol (ARIPO PVP Protocol), based on UPOV 1991.
This is clearly an undemocratic attempt to smuggle the obnoxious UPOV-compliant Plant Breeders' Bill through the back door! Ghana’s farmers and citizens demand seed sovereignty, and clearly oppose GMOs and the deadly chemicals that are an integral part of commercial GMOs. The agribusiness corporations are chemical corporations. So they breed seeds that require you to buy and use their chemicals. This is unhealthy and piles debt on farmers. It takes money from the hands of poor farmers, takes it out of Ghana, and gives it to western corporate shareholders.
If the draft ARIPO PVP Protocol is to be adopted without changes, ARIPO and any ARIPO member that ratifies the Protocol can join UPOV 1991. This means that any member state of ARIPO can simply side-step national consultation processes and ratify the ARIPO Protocol, and in doing so, give up its national sovereignty to a centralized decision-making authority, and further, become a UPOV 1991 member, all in one foul undemocratic swoop. It is unconscionable that Ghana’s government should have any part in this despicable subversion of democracy.
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, AFSA, is of the view that the whole process of developing the draft Protocol is fundamentally flawed, has been extremely un-transparent, and thus lacks credibility and legitimacy. Farmers and civil society groups have been cut out, and denied participation.
The principal aim of the ARIPO PVP Protocol is to create a harmonized regional plant variety protection system within the region in order to give prominence to breeders and place restrictions on seed/varieties protected under such a system. Such protected varieties are bred and sold to farmers through seed companies and other private entities and government/private led subsidy agricultural programmes. The main goal is to facilitate the capturing and control of all seed so that private companies can make profits by forcing farmers to buy seed and pay royalties.
By seizing intellectual property rights to Africa's seeds, taking African seed DNA, manipulating it in a laboratory, then claiming all rights to the seeds and their successive generations, western corporations are attempting one of the greatest thefts in human history, the theft of the entire agricultural base of all the countries of Africa.
read on here
Building Homes or Selling Property?
Known as Vision City and financed by the Rwanda Social
Security Board, or RSSB, the country’s pension body, the project will begin
with an initial phase of 504 units, due to be completed next year. It will
eventually scale up to 4,500 homes. In line with Kigali’s ambitious master
plan, which seeks to transform the city of 1.3 million into a “center of urban
excellence,” the site’s developers promise a community “tempered with a tinge
of elegance and subtle nobility” that will be a “reference point for
contemporary Rwandan living.” In addition to the houses, there will be
restaurants, hotels, offices, schools, a sports complex and a Wi-Fi-connected
town center. It’s all part of a citywide mixed-use strategy meant to
decentralize key business and recreational activities and minimize road
congestion.
There’s just one nagging detail. According to RSSB, the most
affordable Phase 1 Vision City units, two-bedroom apartments, will cost 124
million Rwandan francs ($172,000), more than 100 times the city’s median annual
household income. The most expensive — five-bedroom luxury villas with exteriors
of marble and granite — will run close to 320 million francs.
Vision City is only one of several forthcoming Kigali
housing developments, some of which, officials say, will deliver more
affordable units. But the project is emblematic of a conundrum facing cities
across sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s most rapidly urbanizing region. Buoyed
by a decade-and-a-half of robust economic growth, Africa’s cities are home
today to unprecedented concentrations of wealth. They’re also seeing endless
streams of impoverished rural migrants, typically young people in search of
jobs who see no viable future in the small-scale farming of their parents’
generation. These dual phenomena have led to striking degrees of inequality.
According to the United Nations Human Settlements Program, U.N. Habitat,
Africa’s urban areas are now collectively the most unequal in the world, having
surpassed the cities of Latin America sometime in the century’s first decade.
Nowhere is this widening gap more visible than in Africa’s
radically divergent standards of housing. While upscale developments, which are
more attractive to investors, have sprouted on all corners of the continent,
governments across the region have largely failed to spur development of modern
formal housing that’s accessible to ordinary urban residents. Today, according
to U.N. figures, 62 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums. These
are typically tightly packed, haphazardly planned settlements that do not
adhere to basic building standards nor allow for proper sanitation. Cities with
a high prevalence of informal, single-story houses generally face extensive
public-health challenges and lack the population density needed to become
cost-effective hubs of manufacturing, therefore hindering job creation.
Kigali, which only became Rwanda’s capital during the
country’s 1962 independence, is at an earlier stage of development than many
African cities. It’s also largely free of the extreme degrees of squalor
present in many of the continent’s urban areas. An estimated 80 percent of
Kigali’s population lives in informal settlements, most of which were erected
as the city swelled in size in the years following the 1994 genocide. But
Kigali’s slums tend to be far less densely populated, and better equipped with
amenities, than those of Nairobi, Kenya; Kampala, Uganda; or other major cities
in the region. Kigali’s formal built environment has also blossomed. Today,
modern office buildings sprout from the hilltop city center, highlighted by the
20-story blue-glass-paneled Kigali City Tower. In quiet suburbs, connected to
town by roads so impeccably manicured they feel sterile, local elites and
expatriates dine on Neapolitan-style pizza, sushi or steak au poivre and
conduct business over cappuccinos at one of some two dozen upmarket coffee
shops. Save the occasional waft of unpleasant odors — a reminder that Kigali
still lacks a central sewage system — much of city would be barely recognizable
to someone who left in the midst of the 1994 carnage.
Kigali’s rapid development, however, has also ushered in a
host of challenges. Chief among them is the shortage of adequate housing. With
a population of just over 200,000 in 1990, the city has grown sixfold in the 25
years since. That rate is expected to slow only slightly in the coming years.
Kigali’s master plan, prepared in 2013 by the Singapore-based firm Surbana,
projects the city will be home to 4 million people by 2040, at which point
Kigali’s planners intend it to be transformed into a regional hub of finance,
education, logistics and other value-added services. The housing scale-up
required to support this growth is difficult to overstate. According to a 2012
City of Kigali study, the projected population increase and inadequacy of much
of the city’s current housing stock mean Kigali will require 344,000 new
housing units by 2022. That’s an enormous number given that the supply of new
houses in the formal market has historically been fewer than 1,000 units per
year. Moreover, the majority of these new houses, like those soon to be on sale
at Vision City, have catered to the city’s elites. Yet as outlined in the
city’s study, two-thirds of all new housing demand will come from families
earning less than 200,000 francs per month.
As in many African cities, Kigali land prices are highly inflated,
the result of speculation by elites who lack the range of vehicles for
investment that savers have in more advanced economies. An underdeveloped
financial sector also means that mortgage rates are high, typically 17 or 18
percent, putting home ownership out of reach for many otherwise well-off
families. Rwanda’s limited industrial capacity and location 1,000 miles from
the coast also make the cost of construction, despite an abundance of low-wage
labor, abnormally high. According to Wang, the Vision City site manager, his
company is forced to import 70 percent of the materials used in the project’s
construction. That includes cement sourced from Uganda and Tanzania and
finishing products from Turkey, Dubai and China. “If we buy materials from
China, the transport to Kigali from the port will be twice the cost of
transport in the sea,” he says. “Materials are the No. 1 expense.”
Kigali officials say the city’s first affordable formal
housing units are currently in the pipeline. According to Fidele Ndayisaba,
Kigali’s mayor, construction on several new mass housing developments is due to
begin in the next few years. Unlike high-end projects such as Vision City,
which typically generate adequate returns without the need for state support,
these developments will benefit from government subsidies for roads, water,
electricity, sanitation and other basic infrastructure. The idea, Ndayisaba
explained, is that this will attract reluctant investors. The first of these
projects, a 600-unit “low-cost” development known as Batsinda Estate, to be
financed by RSSB and built by the military-affiliated contractor Horizon, will
soon be under construction on Kigali’s northern outskirts. According to Daniel
Ufitikirezi, the pension body’s director general, Batsinda will be an
“experimental project” meant to prove the viability of the concept and help
lure private-sector interest in similar state-supported projects in the future.
Units, most of them three-bedroom apartments, will cost approximately 20
million to 25 million francs. RSSB, Ufitikirezi said, will help connect buyers
to sources of finance, which, in theory, will offer more-favorable lending
terms than are currently available on the market. “We wanted something that
would be affordable to the majority of our own employees,” he said.
Even if Batsinda proves to be a viable model, however, such
prices are still far beyond the means of most Kigali residents. Despite
economic growth that’s averaged 8 percent per year over the last decade, only a
minority of Rwandans have income beyond what’s required for day-to-day
survival. Today, in many informal settlements, rental units are available for
as little as 15,000 francs per month — a segment of the market that is only
expected to grow with continued migration from the countryside. One explicit
goal of the master plan, however, is to move toward a slum-free city,
eradicating these settlements over time though a mix of demolition, upgrading
and the unfurling of the planned mass-housing strategy. To many critics,
including Tomà Berlanda, director of the School of Architecture, Planning and
Geomatics at the University of Cape Town and co-founder of the Kigali-based
studio Active Social Architecture, these realities simply do not match up.
Although slum life may be far from ideal, he argues, authorities’ insistence on
a top-down push toward formal housing risks causing unnecessary hardship for
the city’s-lower income residents while increasingly excluding them from much
of the urban fabric. “My sense is that there is a kind of naïve optimism that
what is affordable is actually way too expensive for the average population,”
Berlanda said. “Kigali is still richer than other parts of the country, but by
and large it’s poor. And that message is difficult to discuss with government,
because it’s not something that Rwanda wants to portray.”
Past slum eradication efforts, including the razing of
hundreds of homes near the city center to make room for yet-unrealized
commercial development, have only made life more difficult for the majority of
affected residents. According to a 2014 study by Vincent Manirakiza, a Rwandan
researcher at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain, families removed from
the city’s informal settlements have typically had “little chance to reclaim
their former standards of living.” That’s mainly because compensation, which is
guaranteed under Rwandan law, is “often too low, not fairly calculated, and
only paid after lengthy delays,” he writes in the study. Manirakiza’s research,
based on interviews with members of 360 Kigali households, found that only 20
percent of relocated families had managed to build “improved homesteads.”
Sixty-five percent, meanwhile, had purchased houses in other informal
settlements. Others were pushed to peripheral areas, in many cases far from employment
opportunities. Residents seeking to construct new informal houses, his paper
notes, also face daunting bureaucratic challenges due to strict regulations
intended to limit informal development. Often, residents are compelled to
undertake “illicit” building strategies. These include the construction of
small rooms at night or during the weekend, when inspectors are absent, or the
building of new homes based on permits for renovations. Such structures are
often discovered — and demolished. “So many houses built like this are
destroyed,” Manirakiza said. “It’s very risky.”
Transforming ‘beasts into men’: colonialism, forced labour and racism in Africa
Transforming ‘beasts into men’: colonialism, forced labour and racism in Africa
European colonisers maintained their workforce with forced labour after slavery was abolished, claiming work would do Africans good. This opened up new dangers to an already vulnerable population.
The idea of the ‘white man’s burden’ dates from our grandfather’s time, or earlier. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was used to both justify and attack imperial endeavours. Today, the white man’s burden lives on in ideas of guilt or responsibility for inequalities made more visible in a globalising world. Activists exploit these feelings to mobilise support for their causes, one of the most visible being the drive to end ‘modern-day slavery’. In my effort to uncover the history of forced labour in colonial Africa, I searched out letters and reports written by observers and agents of empire to grasp how these practices affected African life and how these individuals viewed colonial labour. In tracing this history, it is the views of Africans themselves that reveal the depth of depravity and height of hypocrisy woven into the fabric of ‘modern slavery.’
And work shall set you free
Having taken much of the nineteenth century to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the rulers of Europe’s African ventures found themselves in need of a workforce at the dawn of the twentieth. Building empire—for gold, God and glory—was hard work, and few Europeans were willing to go to Africa and bend their backs under the tropical sun. At the same time, Europe had just justified wars of conquest and colonisation under the guise of eliminating slavery. European colonies could thus hardly return to the slaver’s whip. How, then, could Africans be made to work in the service of empire?
Colonial rulers across the continent came to the conclusion that Africans would be forced to work anyway. The specific laws authorising this varied, but they were all undergirded by a general agreement that Africans lacked the intellectual and moral capacity to appreciate the value of labour. According to this self-serving, racist ‘paternalism’, European colonisers were obliged to force Africans to work for their own good. Yet even as colonisers claimed Africans would be ‘saved’ by European civilisation, colonisers made them vulnerable to new forms of servitude.
Portugal’s laws expressed this move most explicitly. Africans had a “legal and moral obligation” to work and, if they did not, colonial authorities could and would force them to do so. The chief architect of the law made clear the role race played in his thinking. For him, Africans were “big children”. Work, meanwhile, was a form of education that could “transform beasts into men”. As such, the state would impose “up to the state of extermination, as many other obligations as might benefit” what he called, “those backward negroes of Africa, those ignorant outcasts of Asia, those half-savages of Oceana”.
Under Portuguese colonial rule, Africans were compelled to grow rice and cotton, among other crops, and forced to sell to state buyers at fixed prices. Others were taken to work on road-building and other infrastructure projects, for which they were paid little or nothing. Still others were forced to work for white settler-farmers or large gold and sugar companies, where their work was dirty, dangerous, and disagreeable. What all these types of labor shared was a tedious toil, frequent exposure to violence and premature death, and a level of pay that barely met the needs of existence.
Believed by many, but not by all
No less a figure than Frederick Lugard, who was knighted for his service to the British empire—‘service’ which included institutionalising forced labour in colonial governance—recognised that Africans might regard forced labor as a “white man’s slavery”. Indeed, the words that Africans used to condemn colonial labour made clear just how vile this labour was, and how little it differed from the slavery of the past. On encountering a group of seven Africans who had been taken for contract labor, an African man in central Mozambique warned that the man who had taken them would beat them, feed them less than their bodies required for sustenance, and ‘sold blacks as if they were chicken or goats’. To the great frustration of the agent who had contracted them, they then took to their heels, he reported.
While Africans had the clearest view of such practices, some settlers or visitors were skeptical of a ‘civilising mission’ that seemed more like a “veneered barbarism”. One such traveler, Henry Nevinson, visited Portugal’s colonies and saw the inhumane treatment African workers suffered while cultivating cocoa destined for Cadbury, the British chocolate maker. He reported in his book Modern Slavery that few of these workers received payment and even fewer managed to escape bondage, positing that forced labor in Portuguese-ruled Africa was no different from the “slavery of our grandfathers’ time.” He meant that colonial forced labour, regularly justified as part of the so-called civilising mission, was no different from the racially-justified chattel slavery of generations past.
Nevinson’s reference to slavery can be best understood as political rhetoric, since colonial forced labour was different from earlier forms of servitude in Africa. Slave masters at times treated slaves with great brutality but, having invested much capital in their purchase, regarded them as valuable property. In contrast, white settlers in Africa often treated forced labourers “much worse than any ass or ox they possess”, because if an African worker fell ill or even died, the settler suffered no loss. As one colonial governor in Mozambique put it in 1910, “with the death of an ox or an ass they are out the money it cost them”. Or, in the words of an elderly African in Angola, who in the early 1920s could recall a time when slavery was still legal, “the slaves were better fed then we forced labourers are for we are not property”.
Portugal’s colonies: unexceptional in their brutality
The plight of Africans in Portugal’s colonies received the most attention, both because the Portuguese did less to camouflage their coercion and also because poor Portuguese settlers depended more heavily on state-imposed labour. That said, by virtue of being born black all those living in colonial Africa were legally vulnerable for state-sanctioned bondage. Vulnerability was the rule to which tenuous exceptions existed: women, children, the elderly, soldiers, African chiefs, and the infirm were often exempt from forced labour. These categories offered some protection, but they were elastic. It was not always clear whether one qualified, and the exceptions were inconsistently applied according to the whim of European officials. Indeed, colonial officials and colonists routinely ignored these and other regulations, and Africans were quite normally left without the protection of the law. In the words of historian Gregory Mann, colonial practices could generate a ‘black hole’ that obscured their very nature. The colonial powers also took their time in abolishing forced labor in Africa, which saw no real demise until the years after world war two.
If Africans had long known that colonial forced labor was little more than a new form of servitude, it was ideas of sovereignty and rights new to the post-war world that made plain to all the contradictions inherent to the colonial system. African activists turned such ideas on the system itself, making it impossible to ignore its antiquated nature, and used them to advocate for a new and more just social order.
Latter-day abolitionism
Activists today again use the language of ‘modern slavery’ to inflame moral sensibilities, suggesting that we co-exist with the evil of slavery in both time and space. It permeates our electronics, clothing, and even our food. One challenge remains the same: how should those advocating change make their case without calling into question the capacities of those whose rights they champion?
From the website Open Democracy by Eric Allina who is Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Ottawa. His research examines histories of labor and the state in southern Africa, especially colonial and independence-era Mozambique. He is author of Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique.
Thursday, July 02, 2015
Land Grabs In Liberia: The People Rise Up
The Liberian government’s refusal to recognize and respect rural people’s customary land rights is marginalizing and destabilizing local communities. The state has handed out millions of hectares to investors in recent years. Now emotions are flaring into full-scale conflict.
The recent violence by community members against the Malaysian oil palm company, Golden Veroleum, in the presence of state officials in Butaw, Sinoe County, has once again thrown the spotlight on the violence between communities and concessionaires. One interesting take-away from the incident is that tensions between communities on the one hand and government and concessionaires on the other hand are growing, creating what has the potential to become a ticking time bomb.
Since 2010, serious incidents of community-investor land-related violence necessitating armed state security force’s involvement have erupted in many concession areas. Maryland, Nimba, Cape Mount, Sinoe, Grand Bassa, Margibi, Rivercess, Monsterrado, Bong – ten of the fifteen counties – have all reported violent land related conflicts (destruction of properties worth millions of dollars, allegations of torture by community members against state security forces, false imprisonment and other human rights abuses, and death), between communities, investors and the state. To put it more bluntly: growing tension stemming from large-scale land concessions indicates that violence and community anger may become an increasing consequence of bad faith concession operations in host communities and murky land transactions.
One of the central causes of this community anger and violence is state denial of communities’ and families’ customary land rights. (The vast majority of Liberians rely on land held, managed and used according to customary norms and practices for their livelihood.) The state’s failure to protect and defend communities’ customary land rights stems from an age old practice, mixed with an appetite for quick, cheap land and resource rental fees, that the state – and by this I mean those in charge of administering affairs of the state – has an unaccountable control over the country’s resources, including its citizens.
Firestone’s land deals and the Fernando Po crisis are good historical examples to draw from. Importantly, in recent times, between 2005 and 2013 alone, the government has ratified or signed into agreement several land based concessions, ceding away to concessionaires almost half, about 4 million hectares of the country’s land, often without proper consultation with the people and communities living and making their livelihoods from the land being handed out. The Liberian government’s refusal to recognize and respect rural people’s customary land rights is marginalizing and destabilizing local communities. It has also contributed to poor working and living conditions and weak protection for workers and their families in concession enclaves, brewing distrust between communities and investors. Indeed, it is within these four million hectares that we are now seeing emotions flaring into full scale conflict and violence. .
Furthermore, over a century of elite privilege has built in the state a patronage system to support an elite welfare system that rewards friends and families of the powerful, thus personalizing the state. One area this can be easily seen is around state processed private land claims. Laws like the now suspended Public Land Sale Act and accompanying instruments like Tribal Certificates and Presidential Signature to personalize public land (into private deed) have favored a few elites with close proximity to state power. Most large-scale public-to-private land transfers have tended to favor government actors. The recent infamous Private Use Permits (PUPs), which claimed almost a third of the country’s land space, is an extreme example of what is already unfolding all over the country. It is quite common to see members of the executive (president(s), ministers, directors of state-owned enterprises, county superintendents), representatives and senators, and members of the judiciary, along with their friends and family members, laying claims to huge tracks of lands all over the country.
from here
Feeding Ourselves
Vegetables rich in protein and essential vitamins and
minerals, perfectly adapted to Africa's soils and changing climate exist in
Africa. They exist thanks not to the genius and beneficence of a foreign
company, but rather through millennia of interactions between Africa's farmers
and its landscape. And while their popularity waned in recent decades as
urbanization has swept through the continent, they're gaining renewed interest
from food-security experts. Unlike "exotic" (i.e., non-native to
Africa) vegetables like kale and cabbage, these crops are adapted to Africa's
soils and growing conditions. African vegetables like the leaves of amaranth,
pumpkin, and cowpea (black-eyed pea) plants outshine rival western greens that
have been introduced into African agriculture over the past century. Then
there's the leaves of the moringa tree, native to Africa and parts of Asia,
which deliver three times more vitamin A than carrots, seven times more vitamin
C than oranges, and twice the protein of cow's milk, per 100 grams.
Of course, spiderplant and cowpea leaves are a long way from
solving Africa's nutritional problems. As of 2013, indigenous vegetables
accounted for just 6 percent of Kenya's total vegetable market. Despite growing
demand production is constrained by the same factors that haunt African food
security broadly: poor infrastructure (roads, rail, etc.) for bringing fresh
food from farm to market, along with a dearth of investment in research and
development. There are no simple answers, no silver bullets, to the problem of
ensuring a robust food supply on a warming planet with a growing population.
But it's important to remember that the best, cheapest solutions aren't
necessarily the ones that emerge from patent-seeking laboratories.
Wednesday, July 01, 2015
Millenium Development Goals Missed For 2.4 Billion People
As most developing nations fall short of meeting their goals on
sanitation, the world’s poorest countries have been lagging far behind,
according to a new U.N. report released here.
The Joint Monitoring Programme report, ‘Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment’, authored by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO), says one in three people, or 2.4 billion worldwide, are still without sanitation facilities – including 946 million people who defecate in the open.
“What the data really show is the need to focus on inequalities as the only way to achieve sustainable progress,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, head of UNICEF’s global water, sanitation and hygiene programmes.
“The global model so far has been that the wealthiest move ahead first, and only when they have access do the poorest start catching up. If we are to reach universal access to sanitation by 2030, we need to ensure the poorest start making progress right away,” he said.
Pointing out the existing inequities, the report says progress on sanitation has been hampered by inadequate investments in behaviour change campaigns, lack of affordable products for the poor, and social norms which accept or even encourage open defecation.
Although some 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world has missed the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target by nearly 700 million people.
Today, only 68 per cent of the world’s population uses an improved sanitation facility – 9 percentage points below the MDG target of 77 per cent.
Still, the world has made “spectacular progress” in water, Jeffrey O’Malley, Director, Data, at UNICEF’s Research and Policy Division, told reporters Tuesday.
In 2015, 91 percent of the global population used an improved drinking water source, up from 76 percent in 1990, while 6.6 billion people have access to improved drinking water.
The total without access globally is now 663 million, almost a 100 million fewer than last year’s estimate, and the first time the number has fallen below 700 million.
As the MDGs expire this year, the goal on water has been met overall, but with wide gaps remaining, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The goal on sanitation, however, has failed dramatically. At present rates of progress it would take 300 years for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa to get access to a sanitary toilet, said the report.
Tim Brewer, Policy Analyst on Monitoring and Accountability at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS the MDG goal on water was met largely because of those who were easiest to reach.
“The poorest are often still being left behind. What we need to do in the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now under negotiation, is to make sure that progress for the poorest is made the headline figure.”
“We cannot have another situation where we appear to be succeeding because the situation of the comparatively wealthy has improved, even as millions of people are still falling ill from dirty water or from environments that are contaminated with faeces,” he noted.
Brewer said monitoring is key: “We need to measure basic access for the poor, as well as measuring other indicators such as whether water is safe and affordable, and whether wastewater is safely treated.”
“This is the only way to make sure we reach everyone, everywhere by 2030 and hold governments accountable to their promises,” he argued.
taken from here
The Joint Monitoring Programme report, ‘Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment’, authored by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO), says one in three people, or 2.4 billion worldwide, are still without sanitation facilities – including 946 million people who defecate in the open.
“What the data really show is the need to focus on inequalities as the only way to achieve sustainable progress,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, head of UNICEF’s global water, sanitation and hygiene programmes.
“The global model so far has been that the wealthiest move ahead first, and only when they have access do the poorest start catching up. If we are to reach universal access to sanitation by 2030, we need to ensure the poorest start making progress right away,” he said.
Pointing out the existing inequities, the report says progress on sanitation has been hampered by inadequate investments in behaviour change campaigns, lack of affordable products for the poor, and social norms which accept or even encourage open defecation.
Although some 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world has missed the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target by nearly 700 million people.
Today, only 68 per cent of the world’s population uses an improved sanitation facility – 9 percentage points below the MDG target of 77 per cent.
Still, the world has made “spectacular progress” in water, Jeffrey O’Malley, Director, Data, at UNICEF’s Research and Policy Division, told reporters Tuesday.
In 2015, 91 percent of the global population used an improved drinking water source, up from 76 percent in 1990, while 6.6 billion people have access to improved drinking water.
The total without access globally is now 663 million, almost a 100 million fewer than last year’s estimate, and the first time the number has fallen below 700 million.
As the MDGs expire this year, the goal on water has been met overall, but with wide gaps remaining, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The goal on sanitation, however, has failed dramatically. At present rates of progress it would take 300 years for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa to get access to a sanitary toilet, said the report.
Tim Brewer, Policy Analyst on Monitoring and Accountability at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS the MDG goal on water was met largely because of those who were easiest to reach.
“The poorest are often still being left behind. What we need to do in the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now under negotiation, is to make sure that progress for the poorest is made the headline figure.”
“We cannot have another situation where we appear to be succeeding because the situation of the comparatively wealthy has improved, even as millions of people are still falling ill from dirty water or from environments that are contaminated with faeces,” he noted.
Brewer said monitoring is key: “We need to measure basic access for the poor, as well as measuring other indicators such as whether water is safe and affordable, and whether wastewater is safely treated.”
“This is the only way to make sure we reach everyone, everywhere by 2030 and hold governments accountable to their promises,” he argued.
taken from here
Tanzania's Land-Grab
Tanzania is the poster boy in a push by Western donor
agencies like the World Bank and United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) for what they call the "African Green
Revolution". In 2012, Obama launched the New Alliance for Food Security
and Nutrition (New Alliance) at the G8 Camp David Summit. It was to be a
partnership of G8 (now G7) countries who would work along African governments
and some of the biggest transnational companies in the world, including
Monsanto and Cargill, with the stated aim of lifting 50 million people out of
poverty in a decade. Tanzania was among the first 10 countries to sign up. The
African governments involved made promises about how they would ensure a
healthy business climate, while multinationals made commitments to start
investing. The UK, which held the leadership of the G8 in 2013, and with it the
New Alliance, committed at least £63m of British aid money to the initiative in
Tanzania alone. As part of this push, the Tanzanian government has pushed for
investments in what it calls the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of
Tanzania (Sagcot), an initiative unveiled by President Jakaya Kikwete at the
World Economic Forum in 2011. It was meant to streamline investment into the
most attractive agricultural regions in the country, stretching from the
eastern coast near the capital Dar es Salaam to the western border with Zambia.
But in the rush to attract investors, many say that local communities are
having their lands grabbed and have not been properly compensated or consulted
over mega-projects, as in Bagamoyo.
The Razaba Farm in north-eastern Tanzania is the site of a
proposed 5,000-hectare industrial sugarcane project by Swedish-owned company
EcoEnergy. The new project was announced in 2011, and there was excitement at
the time within the community as the villagers were promised a long list of
sweeteners, which never materialized.
Siasa Kasanura, the community chairperson, says "When
the project came, we were told many things about how our lives would improve. But
now it's like we are living on this land as refugees because we have been told
we don't belong here." Four years after what is called the "Bagamoyo
project" was announced, many of the 1,300 inhabitants who need to be
resettled to make way for the plantation still do not know how much they will
be compensated, where they will be resettled, or when the project will happen.
The Bagamoyo project is one of the flagship initiatives in
Tanzania's drive to industrialise and commercialise its agricultural sector. The
original 'Green Revolution' saw productivity gains across post-war Asia and
Latin America by a huge process of industrialisation and new commercial inputs
including seeds and fertiliser. But critics point out that increased yields did
not always increase food security for the people of those regions. "It
failed once and they're trying it again," said Michael Farrelly, who works
for the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement.
"Tanzania is an emblematic case," added Doug
Hertzler, senior analyst on land rights issues at ActionAid. "All the aid
agencies point to Tanzania as being a big case for them. I would say in this
whole model, Tanzania and Ethiopia were really the starting points because
there wasn't a lot of private sector there." Interest in the 'African
Green Revolution' among multinational corporations picked up after the world
food price crisis of 2007-08 when prices for agricultural commodities spiked.
It is also backed by influential groups like the Gates Foundation.
One of the major problems is that land titling in Tanzania,
as in much of east Africa, is rudimentary, so farmers often have no legal
backing to hold on to land they may have lived on communally for generations. Smallholder
farmers complain that the Tanzanian government in their rush to commercialise
agriculture takes the sides of the investors instead of the people they are
meant to represent. Timothy Paul, who works for Mviwata, a network of
smallholder farmers in the country, put it simply: "The government is
always on the side of the investor."
The Sagcot center, which is primarily funded by American aid
agency USAID, has been called a de facto Chamber of Commerce which lobbies the
government on the part of foreign investors. One company operating in the
Sagcot region they often point to is Agrica, which is registered in tax haven
Guernsey but run by London-based social entrepreneur Carter Coleman, and has a
6,000 hectare rice project in western Tanzania. "The most value Sagcot has
been to date is advocacy to improve the business environment. When the
government's done certain things that have been damaging to agricultural
investors, Sagcot lobbied them to stop."
Western governments are complicit, too, say civil society
groups, which complain that public funds are being filtered through aid
agencies to help already-rich corporations penetrate new markets. "The
unfortunate reality is that many aid agencies, whether it's USAID or DfiD, have
become the handmaidens for the corporate sector," said Anuradha Mittal,
executive director of the Oakland Institute, a think-tank in the US. "They
have become the handmaidens for privatising and the commodification of
resources in the developing world. They come in cloaked in the language of
development and poverty eradication but if you look at the impact of the
projects that they are investing in, they are eradicating the poor
themselves."
Another place this tension is obvious is the bustling city
of Morogoro which sits in Tanzania's southern highlands. The farmers, many who
have lived in the area for generations, are in the middle of a dispute with a
local investor, Mgolole Agro, who bought the land in 2005. The government have
given 600m Tanzanian shillings ($300,000) in loans from its development bank's
"Special Window for Agriculture" to help the project along. But,
since the new investor took over, there have been attempts, some successful, to
evict the farmers who were residing there. "After this investor took this
land, many things have happened," Saif Litei, head of the farmers group at
Kidago Farm, told us. "Firstly, no one is now allowed to live inside this
area, and no production is taking place by the farmers, because the investor
has taken over all the land. And then the houses which were inside, he just
burnt them."
Many of the farmers said, consequently, that they did not
feel supported by their elected representatives, pointing to alleged corruption
all the way up the chain, from the local councillors to the national
administration, which meant that their concerns were not heard. They also
claimed that a lack of literacy and legal knowhow among the community had been
taken advantage of by investors, alongside their government, to trick them into
signing disadvantageous agreements.
Feeding the World
One in every nine people on the planet - 795 million in all
- still goes to sleep hungry yet a quarter of all the food in the world is lost
each year, owing to inefficient harvesting, inadequate storage, and wastage in
the kitchen. Halve that waste and the world could feed an extra billion people
- and make hunger yesterday's problem.
In the rich world, the focus is on food wasted by the
consumer. This makes sense: more than half of the rich world's losses take
place in its kitchens (basically because we can afford it). By contrast, the
world's hungry poor waste very little, simply because they cannot afford to. In
Africa, daily food waste averages 500 calories per person - but consumers
account for only 5% of this loss. More than three-quarters of the waste occurs
well before the kitchen, in inefficient agriculture, because birds and rats eat
crops during harvest, for example, or pests spoil grain stores.
There are many remedies for this kind of waste so why aren't
these technologies - widely used in richer countries - adopted in the
developing world? Economists from the International Food Policy Research
Institute estimate that the overall cost of approximately halving post-harvest
losses in the developing world would be US$239 billion over the next 15 years -
and would generate benefits worth more than US$3 trillion, or US$13 of social
benefits for every dollar spent. By 2050, better infrastructure could mean that
57 million people - more than the current population of South Africa - would no
longer be at risk of hunger, and that about four million children would no
longer suffer from malnutrition. Most of these gains would be in Sub-Saharan
Africa and South Asia, the world's most deprived regions.
We can achieve three times the economic benefits, and even
larger reductions in the number of people at risk of hunger, if we focus on
improving food production rather than just on preventing food losses.
Today, only US$5 billion is spent annually on research to
improve the seven major global food crops, and just one-tenth of that is
targeted to help small farmers in Africa and Asia. Investing an extra US$88
billion in agricultural research and development over the next 15 years would
increase yields by an additional 0.4% each year. That might not sound like very
much, but the improvements in food security would help almost everyone. It
would be worth nearly US$3 trillion in social good - yielding an enormous US$34
of benefits for every dollar spent.
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