A call for land reform in Nepal

From IRIN, a story on another call for land reform in Nepal.

"Drastic" land reforms that give more rights to poor families who labour on others' land are needed in Nepal to stave off hunger among the poorest and boost agricultural production, say analysts.

"No matter what technology you bring, agricultural problems will always persist if we don't address the land reform issue seriously," said Bishnu Upreti, from the South Asia office of the international NGO, Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research North-South (NCCR).

He added that a culture of feudalism, poorly enforced land distribution and an informal caste system have exploited landless tenants. The problem is most apparent in the Terai region below the Himalayas, populated mostly by Dalits, one of Nepal's poorest ethnic groups.

Landless in Terai

According to the most recent government census 1.3 million out of 4.2 million families in Nepal did not own land in 2001. With an estimated four members per family, the estimated landless population was 5.5 million people - out of a population of 21 million, or 26 percent - mostly members of the Dalit and other Terai communities.

According to local NGO Dalit Welfare Organization, 15 percent of Dalits living in the western hills of Nepal and 44 percent of those in Terai were landless, out of six million Dalits nationwide in 2009.

Almost all these families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and there is an "urgent" need to reform land laws, said Kailash Pyakhurel with the local NGO Consortium for Land Research and Policy Dialogue (COLARP) .

Small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers, and landless workers are the most vulnerable to hunger and poverty, according to COLARP. "The cost of not having land reform is very high. The agricultural productivity is not increasing," said Pyakhurel.

Until now most land decisions have been made on an ad-hoc basis with no registration, he added.

The country's first Land Act was introduced in 1964. Even after six rounds of amendments, it continues to favour landlords and does little to protect the rights of tenants, said Pyakhurel.

There is a need to replace the current land tenure system with one that constitutionally guarantees land reform - and gives the traditionally landless a chance to own the land they work; land management continues to remain highly centralized and even local government has little power to change the system, noted COLARP.

Failed distribution

Since the introduction of a land tenure system in Nepal in 1951, laws have afforded tenants scant protection other than for those with money, according to a 2009 study funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

Under current land codes, tenant farmers should be able to purchase land they cultivate through cash and collateral, but owners have been able to thwart the system to hang on to land, wrote the author's report, Liz Alden Wily, a land tenure specialist based in Nairobi.

"This is not an experience unique to Nepal; although there have been successes, on the whole redistributive farmland reform has failed [in Nepal]," she said.

Successful redistribution could change the decades-old dynamics of land ownership.

"The most important difference it makes is to shift landless tenants and workers into a situation where they are shareholders in the farming economy, not just casual pawns or beneficiaries," explained Wily.

China, Vietnam, Taiwan and South Korea have undertaken successful land reforms in Asia, she noted, and change is overdue in Nepal. "This is an insult to the tenants and workers who have been working the same land for decades," Wily concluded.

According to the local NGO,Federation of Nepal, most of the country's land is controlled by the Nepalese elite. As absentee landlords, most do not even live in the villages where they legally own land, yet they reap most of the income.

With no legal claim to the land, or registration that even recognizes them as tenant farmers, instead of receiving a 50 percent share of the harvest, labourers get at most one-third and, more often, one-tenth of earnings.

Introducing Overnight Links for December 8th

One of the struggles we constantly have with this blog is trying to do more posts than we already do. Since we do this on sort of a volunteer basis we seem to only get to three or four posts a day. That means there are some relevant stories that don't get linked to on the blog. Most of the stories that we miss are the ones that break during the overnight hours.

To try to remedy this, we will start each day with a digest form post of the overnight stories. A brief sentence will summarize the story which will accompany a link to read the entire story. We hope that by doing this, that we can become a more thorough source of stories regarding poverty. So here we go...

First, a gruesome Associated Press story that we found at KXAN-TV, deals with serial rapists stalking women in Somali refugee camps.

The Partners in Health blog has this video about bringing health care to Liberia.

Inter Press Service another story on the conflict between lack of government funding and efforts to improve health. Writer Souleymane Faye says that Senegal is facing cutbacks to a community material health program called Bajenu Gox.

French scientist confirms Haiti cholera source from UN peacekeeping base

A report commissioned by the Haitian government has confirmed the public's suspicions as to the source of the cholera outbreak. A French scientist says the source of the outbreak was from U.N. peacekeepers that arrived from Nepal. The public suspicions turned violent weeks ago as riots were aimed at the U.N. peacekeeping base that boarders the Artibonite river.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Google News, we read more about the report's conclusions.

Epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux, who studied the outbreak for the Haitian and French governments, concluded that there was no doubt that the cholera originated in contaminated water next to a U.N. base outside the town of Mirebalais along a tributary to Haiti's Artibonite river.

"No other hypothesis could be found to explain the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in this village ... not affected by the earthquake earlier this year and located dozens of kilometers from the coast and (quake refugee tent) camps," he wrote in a report that has not yet been publicly released.

The AP obtained a copy from an international official who released it on condition of anonymity. Piarroux declined in an e-mail interview to discuss his findings.

The French Foreign Ministry confirmed that Dr. Renaud Piarroux's report has been completed and sent to officials in Haiti and at the United Nations. France commmissioned the report at Haiti's request.

The report calls for a further investigation of the outbreak and improved medical surveillance and sanitation procedures for U.N. peacekeeping troops.

Many Haitians suspect that the Nepalese troops were the source of the outbreak, and anger at the troops sparked a week of violent riots, but the French scientist's report is the first scientific study linking the base to cholera.

Bangladesh to investigate money diverting claims against Yunus' Grameen Bank

The controversy surrounding accusations a Norwegian documentary made against Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank has taken another step. The government of Bangladesh is going to begin its own investigation into the claims.

A TV documentary said that a loan made from the Norwegian government to Grameen Bank was diverted into another Grameen company. The loan was meant to aid low income housing. Grameen has other companies that serve the interest of the poor in addition to the microcredit bank.

The matter does appear to already have been settled between the Bank and Norway but the TV show has stirred the pot again.

From Monsters and Critics, we find out more about this new investigation on some old news.

Nobody is above the law, no matter how big or how honourable he or she is; finding out the truth is more important,' Foreign Minister Dipu Moni told reporters Tuesday.

Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, is founder of the micro-credit organization Grameen Bank. He was awarded the peace prize in 2006.

Norwegian state television last week reported that Yunus had diverted nearly 100 million dollars in aid from Norway, meant to support the poor through micro-credit programmes, to one of his own companies.

In Oslo, Environment and International Development Minister Erik Solheim appeared to be reassured, citing a fresh report he commissioned from development aid agency Norad.

The measures were taken in 1998, the report said.

'According to the report, there is no indication that Norwegian funds
have been used for unintended purposes, or that Grameen Bank has engaged in corrupt practices or embezzled funds,' Solheim said in a statement.

Food distribution in India is full of corruption

India has a food distribution system that gives out food at drastically reduced prices. Ration shops that dot India's countryside often become dens of corruption instead of distributors of food. The people in charge of the ration shops often turn into money lenders instead of public servants, withholding food until a payback is made.

From this Le Monde article that we found at the Guardian, writer Julien Bouissou describes the curruption within India's food distribution system.

Malnutrition in India is on the rise, despite nutrition rehabilitation centres and ration shops. "Indicators of urban food insecurity ... reveal an alarming picture," says the Report on the State of Food Insecurity in Urban India, published by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and the World Food Programme. The Congress party, which promised to lift the country out of poverty when it returned to power in 2009, is drafting a revolutionary Right to Food bill.

To achieve this goal, organisations will have to be reformed – starting with the ration shops, which are supposed to distribute rice, sugar, wheat and even kerosene at subsidised prices to anyone in need. But none of the inhabitants of Gautam Nagar are entitled to this bounty.

Munna Lal, for instance, had to give up his ration card two years ago. After a violent dispute with his cousin he was arrested by the police, who demanded $14 as bail for his release, and $50 as a bribe. "To pay, I gave my card as security to the owner of the ration shop so he would loan me the money," Lal explains. Some ration cards are no longer used to obtain food but as collateral for debt and many shopkeepers have become money-lenders.

Others do not even have a ration card, for instance the seasonal migrants who have neither a fixed address nor an identity card.

Those who do have a ration card may not be able to use it. "They can only buy their monthly allowance of food at one time. Day workers often cannot save enough to buy 20kg of wheat or 3kg of rice in one go," says Seema Deshmukh, of the Muskaan NGO, who works with Bhopal slum dwellers. According to a 2004 study by the Planning Commission, only 40% of the food allocated to the poorest people by the public distribution system reaches them. The rest ends up on the black market or rots in warehouses.

Poor government effecting poor people in Swaziland

From IRIN, a story on declining tax revenue for the Swaziland government and the hash effects it has on poor people and small farmers in the country.

Swaziland's declining revenue and a refusal to shelve prestige projects in the face of growing unemployment is exerting pressure on public health services and food production.

The government recently conceded that unemployment was running at 40 percent, despite doggedly maintaining for many years that it was 26 percent, but economists expect this to rise, pushing up already high poverty levels - about two-thirds of Swazis live in chronic poverty.

Subsistence farmers on communal Swazi Nation Land, where about 80 percent of the country's one million population reside, use government tractors for ploughing, but government fuel depots have run dry and the machines are standing idle.

"This is planting season. It is December now, and for six weeks we have not been able to get seeds in the ground," Joshua Mnisi, a farmer in the central Manzini region, told IRIN.

Renting a government tractor costs about US$19 an hour, but private contractors charge twice as much. The extent of the impact on food production will only be known once a food assessment survey is undertaken in 2011.

Swaziland has the world's highest HIV prevalence rate - 26.1 percent – so one in four Swazis between the ages of 15 and 49 is living with the virus, and about half of those infected, or 110 000, are on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, which can prolong a person’s life.

Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini told the National Emergency Response Committee (NERCHA) that the budget for HIV/AIDS would be cut by 10 percent in 2011, just as efforts to intensify the roll-out of ARVs gets underway.

"The ARV rollout is a big budget expense, and the focus of our efforts. What happens now that government has less money to spend on life-saving measures?" said AIDS activist Vusi Kunene.

Public worker retrenchments

A spate of company closures from timber plantations to garment factories resulted in widespread retrenchments in 2010. The government is the country's largest employer, but a drop in revenue from sources such as the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) of about 70 percent compared to 2009, led Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini to warn that the financial squeeze could lead to public workers’ salaries not being paid.

SACU - the world's oldest customs union, comprising Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland - applies a common set of tariffs and disproportionately distributes the revenue to member states and has provided an economic lifeline to both Swaziland and Lesotho.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommended that the government cut its workforce by a third, or 10,000 employees, because the number of workers on the payroll was disproportionate to the country's size. Political opposition groups have blamed patronage and nepotism for the inflated payrolls.

Government has announced a reduction of 7,000 public service jobs in 2011.

The lay-off of public workers is expected to be cushioned by retirement packages, but the impact of such a substantial number of people being retrenched will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.

"This will result in the consumption rate of our goods and services falling due to less demand, and we will be affected one way or the other," said Fikile Nkosi, managing director of a major bank.

According to the government's Central Statistics Office, one employed person supports, on average, 10 others.

"The customary method of integrating former civil servants into private life is for them to use their government retirement pensions to open small businesses," said Amos Ndwandwe, an economist at a bank in the capital, Mbabane. "It takes years to make a successful business and many fail under normal circumstances, but it is complicated now because higher unemployment means fewer customers."

Numbers of poor increasing

However, government spending on non-essential programmes has not been cut. A recent request by the finance minister for an additional $50 million towards the building of an international airport was approved by parliament and the airport's final cost is expected to be in the region of $1 billion.

Cabinet officials have also awarded themselves substantial pay rises, and have extended retirement benefits to former government officials, contrary to IMF recommendations that public sector wage raises be curtailed. Swaziland is ruled by sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III.

"For decades government has paid lip service to poverty eradication while concentrating on investment in capital projects. The result is that while a Swazi middle class has expanded, this is just inertia brought on by population growth, because the number of poor has expanded also,” Ndwandwe said.

"In terms of proportion, the numbers are the same as what the UNDP [UN Development Programme] reported in the 1990s - about two-thirds of the people live on one dollar a day - there has not been a dent really in those who live in chronic poverty,” he noted

"All indications are that the percentage is going to change - as more business shut and public sector workers are laid off, it is inevitable that more people will join the ranks of the poor."

Canadian health workers describe the Haitian cholera outbreak

Some health officials fear that we have yet to see the worst of the cholera outbreak. Cholera has not spread into City Soleil one of the poorest cities of Haiti. The fear is that cholera could spread quickly through the densely populated city.

From the Winnipeg Free Press, Canadian Press writer Bill Graveland interviews a team of helath workers on their experiences in treating the cholera outbreak.

There's a permanent smell of bleach at the cholera treatment centre in Bercy, Haiti, where doctors and nurses, many of them Canadian, attempt to provide medical aid for those who are still paying the price from January's devastating earthquake.

The tents at the 180-patient centre, run by Samaritan's Purse, are crammed with rows of Haitians lying quietly on makeshift cots, suffering from a cholera epidemic that experts predict is only going to get worse.

The alternative to the smell of bleach could be much worse considering the dirt floors are often covered with the vomit and diarrhea from patients who flock to the centre and others like it run by aid organizations in the island nation.

"I'm wearing my rubber boots and you are constantly in vomit and diarrhea," said Dr. Jeff Way of Calgary, who returned from a one-week tour at the centre last month along with his wife Mary Ann, who is a registered nurse.

"They hired local people to come around with big insecticide spray tanks filled with Clorox bleach and they are constantly spraying that on the ground," he added.

"We're going to smell like bleach for a long time," said Mary Ann.

"When they have their diarrhea and vomiting it is like someone has turned on a tap or a fountain," she told The Canadian Press. "I have never seen anything like it before in my life — how much fluid some of these guys could put out — two or three litres of fluid in one episode of diarrhea and vomiting."

Way said kneeling on the ground, especially with limited light during the night shift, proved to be an additional challenge when it came to putting in IVs because often the patient's veins have collapsed.

"We've had to pray them in."

Mass meningitis vaccination begins in West Africa

A mass vaccination is beginning West Africa to prevent against meningitis. The disease kills thousands of people a year on the continent. When a African family in poverty has to seek treatment for the disease, medical costs can take up three months of the family's annual income.

From this Associated Press article that we found at the Guardian, writer Brahima Ouedraogo details the vaccination campaign.

Meningitis, an infection of the lining that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, strikes more than 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. A new vaccine developed specifically for use on the continent was approved in June and is now being rolled out in three of the hardest-hit countries: Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

Health officials have lauded the massive campaign, saying the vaccine could stop deadly outbreaks in the region before they even begin. In Burkina Faso alone, the World Health Organization said some 10,000 health workers will vaccinate 12 million people by the end of the year.

"This is a success story and it represents the development of a product that has taken 10 years to develop and we have been so excited because we'll be introducing the new vaccine for sub-Saharan Africa," said Dr. Marc Laforce, head of the Meningitis Vaccine Project.

The new meningitis vaccine is much cheaper than ones already available in rich countries: It costs less than 50 cents per unit compared to $10 to $100 for other vaccine doses. It also offers protection that lasts a decade, compared to three years for others.

The new vaccine is the result of a partnership that began in 2001 between the World Health Organization, the Serum Institute of India, and PATH, an international nonprofit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Study says food production must double by 2050

A new report says that developing countries must double food production by the year 2050. The International Fund for Agricultural Development says that the world's population will by 9 billion by that time so total global food production must increase by 70 percent.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Sabina Zaccaro unpacks the study for us.

Rural poverty rates have dropped only slightly in the last decade in South Asia, home to the world’s largest number of rural poor, about 500 million. Most of them are considered extremely poor.

Only 11 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean are reported to live in extreme poverty, and six million in the Middle East and North Africa. But the largest percentage increases in the number of hungry people in 2009 relative to 2008 were in the Middle East and North Africa, 14 percent, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, 13 percent.

Volatile food prices, the effects of climate change, and a range of natural resource constraints will further complicate the fight to rural poverty, according to the report.

The report also points out that over the past ten years, 350 million rural people managed to escape desperate poverty, though global poverty remains a predominantly rural phenomenon. About 70 percent of the world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people live in rural areas.

The report notes that over the past decade, extreme poverty in the rural areas of developing countries has dropped from 48 percent to 34 percent. The greatest improvement is in East Asia, particularly China.

The number of extreme poor in this region fell by about two-thirds over the past decade, from 365 million to 117 million, as did the rate of extreme poverty, from 44 to 15 percent.

The study points out that changes in agricultural markets are leading to new opportunities for smallholder farmers to boost productivity.

Guest Voices: Levelling the Playing Field for Ethiopia’s Children

Continuing our series of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, Communications Officer Joan Bolger witnesses the building of a library in Ethiopia.

Though she lives just a short walk from the local school, Maza Matthews, 14, rises before dawn every morning to help take care of her younger siblings so that she can be at her school desk for 8:00 am. Like all pupils in this remote rural village of Duguna Fango, in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR), Maza’s parents have determined with the school which shift suits their family best.

Double-shift schooling was adopted in Ethiopia as a solution to the overcrowding that ensued after 2002 when the government introduced free primary education for all. In practice it serves many purposes by reducing large class numbers, doubling the number of seats available in a day; and allowing schools to operate on lower budgets.

In Maza’s case, and perhaps because, as she says herself, she was “the first to come” in her family, it means she can take the burden off her farming parents by looking after her three-year-old brother and five-year-old sister in the early mornings and afternoons without missing out on an education.

Unlike her parents, Maza says that she and her two siblings will complete primary education. Her mother, she says, got the chance to marry and left after Grade 4: “My mother says not to take the same path as her because it was a disadvantage and you can get more from going to school. She says that I must go on because it is very important.”

For four months of the year when flooding is at its worst and roads are all but washed away, the village here is completely cut off. Maza wants to be a nurse, so that she can “serve the community,” she says. For now, having a place to study is one of her biggest obstacles. She tells me that for the past number of years she has being completing her homework under the shade of a tree close to her home.

The heat here near the equator is unrelenting year-round, and there are plenty of distractions. Maza looks forward to the day when there will be a library at the school so that she can “do her homework in a silent place.” She would like to avail of books to study her favorite subjects: Science and Math, she says, and is keen to learn English.

More than 500 children attend the school here and between them share the few scarce books in the school’s existing library—a dark and poky place, that is utterly under-stocked.

In response to the need, Concern has supported its local partner the Wontta Rural Development Assocation to build and furnish a spacious two-room library that will lend books to students across the Duguna Fango Woreda area. Already supplies of books have been purchased so they can be made available to children at two local primary schools and two Alternative Basic Education (ABE) centers –serving a total of 2,100 pupils.

When the Concern education team and I arrived at Maza’s school more than 30 community members—the majority of them parents—were busy at work constructing the library. Dana Chebo, 70, one of the father’s present spoke about how the lack of access to books, and not having a place to study was having an effect: “Without books the children don’t have a chance to study the different subjects they are learning and can’t remember what they are being taught in class,” he said. “It is too hard for them.”

Maza’s teacher Alemu Lagase, 18, tells me that one of his biggest challenges is the lack of water. “The children have no water to drink at the school or to wash their hands after using the latrine,” he says, adding, “Children are also dropping out because of malaria.”

In the past year, 16 of his students left after they became sick with malaria. The nearest clinic is 30 kilometers away which makes immediate treatment unattainable for many, and in some cases, Alemu tells us, children simply never come back.

Teachers like Alemu are all too aware that attendance falls off at

harvest time too when children have to support their parents in the fields. Families depend on crops like teff, false banana, sorghum, peas, maize and coffee for their livelihoods and children are tasked with sharing the intensive field labor. The drought which usually hits from April through June affects families in several ways. The closest river is 20 kilometers away and pack mules provide the only form of transport suitable to the steep and unforgiving terrain.

Ayelech Lama, 30, a mother who had come to help lay the brick for the library spoke of her determination to give her children extra time at the school to do their homework: “I am willing to take on additional work during the harvest time so that my children can stay here after school to study,” she said.

There are several barriers preventing children from receiving a quality education in this remote region of the Ethiopia and villagers know that as with a lot of other things in the country, the steps towards progress can be achingly slow.

Nobody in Duguna Fango is under any illusion that because of a new library, the children around here have it all. Still, with a healthy supply of a books and a permanent place to study, one of many obstacles will have been removed for a decent number of them.

When Chelsy Pillsbury returned from a missions trip from Tanzania she found it more difficult to get back into American culture than into the lifestyle of Tanzania. So Pillsbury plans on returning and lead a team of volunteers to help out at a Tanzanian elementary school and orphanage.

From the Brattleboro Reformer, writer Jaime Cone interviews Pillsbury about her trip.

Pillsbury, a 2008 Brattleboro High School graduate who is currently enrolled at Champlain College in Burlington, spent three weeks in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, helping the local people renovate two schools and one orphanage.

"Coming back was hard," Pillsbury said. "We lived in poverty with these people for three weeks."

"I came back and nannied two little boys for the summer," she said. "It was hard to come back from being around children who had lost their parents to AIDS or malaria, who were making their own toys from tires and banana leaves, to going to a really nice house and caring for children who had more than what they needed."

She said the people living in Bagamoyo didn't have much in the way of personal possessions, placing a higher value instead on their personal relationships.

"Walking down the streets, you would see people living in dirt huts that were made out of mud and sticks, literally," she said. "But, when it would rain, they would see us walking by and invite us in for shelter, and be super open and nice... even though they do not have nearly so much, they are in tune with each other. It was really refreshing."

Pillsbury enjoyed her time in Tanzania so much that she's planning to back again next May as a group leader.

"I've been keeping in touch with the owners of the organizations (we volunteered with), and we'll get to pick up where we left off, or where they're still headed," she said. "Though it's difficult for these organizations to move forward without a good jump start from volunteers because their resources are so limited, I think we gave them a lot to work with."

She and her fellow students traveled to Africa with two suitcases-- one full of personal belongings and another stocked with donated supplies.

The group arrived with additional money it had raised as well, which amounted to a total of $2,000 for each of the three organizations the students worked on-- one art school for older students, one elementary school and one orphanage.

The art program is designed to gives students a safe place to learn drumming and take dance lessons, Pillsbury said.

"It's totally free for them," she said. "Basically, it's a way to get youth off the street."

Video: India's microcredit crisis

From Bloomberg, this video helps to explain the recent controversy over microcredit in India's Andhra Pradesh.

Video: Haiti election hampers cholera prevention efforts

From Al Jazeera, this video shows how the recent election in Haiti has hampered cholera prevention efforts.

How best to feed Africa, Part 2

As mentioned in our previous post on this topic, Africa has an untapped potential in agriculture. Many believe that the continent can grow enough food to feed itself, yet the continent has lagged behind all the others in food production.

Asia has seen explosive growth in the amount of food it grows since the 1970s, but that same type of expansion has not reached most of Africa. The country of Malawi has proved that it is possible to grow a surplus of food, and ever since the international community has changed their thinking on how to best aid Africa.

Despite this knowledge there is still debate on how to best move forward, scientists believe new technologies in in bio-tech can help, yet many environmentalists are reluctant to use them. From the Guardian, writer Madeleine Bunting examines this debate.

But if there is widespread agreement on the causes of the problem, there is an extraordinarily polarised debate about the best strategy to tackle the problem. On one side there is a powerful lobby which argues that biotechnology, massive investment in irrigation and mechanisation are the way forward, and on the other side are those who argue that these kinds of investments are usually tied up in big corporate deals in which local smallholder subsistence farmers lose out – either they lose their land or access to water, and often both.

Juma and his prestigious panel of international experts have attempted to pick a politically feasible path between these two positions. His report, A New Harvest, is being launched with the backing a clutch of presidents, including those of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

Inevitably, his enthusiasm for biotechnology will trigger anxieties among that alliance of European and African activists who believe that this entails Faustian pacts with multinational corporations. Another constituency will also be doubtful on the grounds that this kind of emphasis on biotech and science as the way forward in Africa lacks understanding of how development is largely a political process and crucially depends on the effectiveness of institutions – it is a weakness of westerners to believe that clever technology can sort any problem out.

One old hand in the field told me the other day that, on average, it takes 46 years for agricultural innovations to get from the laboratory to widespread use in the field in Africa; it's not lack of technology that is the problem but effective means to disseminate practical solutions. Technology might be able to achieve quick fixes in health on the continent, but they might be elusive in agriculture because it entails much more complex issues of land rights and power.

But what will delight these very critics is Juma's championing of the smallholder farmer – not as an encumbrance to development but as central to its achievement. At the very beginning – the first page of chapter one – he throws his weight behind the example of Malawi, which in 2005 defied USAid (and initially the World Bank) to put major investment into subsidised fertiliser and improved seeds in an attempt to boost maize production. Yields doubled and Malawi was meeting domestic need and exporting surplus maize within a year. Malawi became a poster-girl for western NGOs because it successfully challenged the best part of two decades of a consensus on aid in Africa – namely that the state should not subsidise smallholder agriculture.

How best to feed Africa, Part 1

A new book says that Africa should make agriculture at the center of every government policy. Calestous Juma says that by doing this Africa will be able to leave poverty behind. Juma says the amount of food grown in Africa can improve with investment into paved roads, irrigation and more training.

From the Chicago Tribune, writer Robyn Dixon interviewed Juma on the new book.

Juma's prescription, laid out in his new book, "The New Harvest, Agricultural Innovation in Africa," seems almost as optimistic as the Millennium Development Goals set down by world leaders in 2000, which call for halving hunger and extreme poverty worldwide by 2015. (At the current pace, most of the goals will not be met.)

Juma's book is being launched Thursday by Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete at a summit of East African leaders in Arusha, Tanzania, to discuss food insecurity. The recommendations of the book, which is published by Oxford University Press, were adopted this year by Africa's largest trading bloc, the 19-member Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
...

Juma identifies knowledge, infrastructure and technology as key to developing African agriculture.

At the heart of his book is a sense that African governments have underestimated the importance of farming and how much knowledge and technology it requires.

"We thought we would leave it to the peasants and they would feed themselves," Juma said. "Agriculture has been one of the lowest areas of priority for African countries until recently, when they realized you could not just rely on food aid and, secondly, we realized that the peasants weren't feeding themselves."

His book says an agricultural revolution would transform the economies of Africa and calls on governments to put agriculture at the center of all policy decisions. The only way to rapidly train the army of engineers and scientists needed to drive growth in agriculture, he contends, is to set up new technical academies outside the university system.

Juma's optimism that Africa's agricultural failures can be quickly turned around is based on the continent's vast untapped resources. Only 4% of cropland is irrigated, and most farmers are too poor to buy fertilizers, high quality seeds or machinery without a helping hand. But he says there's room for vast improvement if governments provide investment in infrastructure, technology and education.

Rural Haiti is seeing the worst of the cholera spread

The cholera outbreak in Haiti seems to be hitting the rural areas the hardest. It is because those in the country are further away from medical clinics from clean water. Cholera is a bacteria spread along contaminated water, so the open defecation prevalent in Haiti's rural areas has helped the outbreak along.

From this Associated Press article that we found at Google News, we recieve this latest update on the epidemic.

Many feared Haiti's growing epidemic would overwhelm a capital teeming with more than 1 million people left homeless by January's earthquake. But, so far, it is the countryside seeing the worst of an epidemic that has killed nearly 1,900 people since erupting less than two months ago.

Rural clinics are overrun by a spectral parade of the sick, straining staff and supplies at medical outposts that could barely handle their needs before the epidemic.

At the three-room clinic near Limbe, in northern Haiti, a handful of doctors and nurses are treating 120 people packed into three rooms.

"It's really attacking us," Guy Valcoure, grandfather of the 16-month-old, says of the cholera. He piled on the back of a motorcycle with the baby and her mother to make a 40-minute ride in pre-dawn gloom to reach the clinic.

Holding a plastic cup in case his granddaughter gains enough strength to drink some water, Valcoure watches anxiously as a nurse tries without success to find a vein to give her intravenous fluids. Eventually, a doctor manages to get an IV into the baby's foot. "She's going to be OK," the nurse tells Valcoure.

Not everyone is so fortunate. It was too late to save an old woman carried to the clinic on a door over the weekend, says Dr. Benson Sergiles, a doctor from Cap-Haitien on loan to the clinic. "It's getting worse by the day," he says, his eyes bleary from being up all night.

And experts say the disease has not yet reached its peak.

The Health Ministry says there have been more than 80,000 cases since cholera was first detected in late October and the Pan-American Health Organization projects it could sicken 400,000 people within a year.

A makeshift clinic run by the aid group Doctors Without Borders in Cap-Haitien is seeing 250 patients a day and expects two or three times as many in coming weeks, said Dr. Esther Sterk, a physician from the Netherlands in charge of the treatment center in a crowded gymnasium.

The cases are also rising further into the countryside, as at the little clinic near Limbe.

"I don't think we're anywhere near the end of this," said Dr. John Jensen, a Canadian doctor volunteering with his wife, a nurse, for nearly a month at the clinic about 12 miles (20 kilometers) west of Cap-Haitien.

Why family planning is needed in the Philippines

From IRIN, a story on why family planning is "urgently" needed in the Philippines.

Population and sustainable development experts warn that the Philippine population could reach levels that will prevent the country from ever breaking free from a cycle of poverty.

"We need to lower birth rates to 2.2 percent, which is just the sustainable replacement rate," Malcolm Potts from the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability, told IRIN, warning that at current fertility rates of 3.03 percent, the Philippine population of 94 million could reach 150 million in just 10 years.

Citing Department of Health studies indicating that women in the poorest quintile have 5.9 children while those in the richest quintile have 1.9 children, Potts said, "It's very simple; poor people cannot separate sex from child-bearing. We must give the poor access to family planning and contraception to give them choices."

The Guttmacher Institute, a US-based reproductive health think-tank, released a study in 2009 showing that 35 percent of poor Filipino women aged 15-49 accounted for 53 percent of the unmet need for contraception.

Highest unemployment rate

The Philippines has the highest unemployment rate in the Southeast Asian region at 8 percent compared with Indonesia at 7.9 percent, Vietnam at 4.6 percent, Malaysia at 3.7 percent and Thailand at 1.5 percent.

According to the World Bank, poverty incidence rose from 30 percent in 2003 to 32.9 percent in 2006.

"Having fewer children will allow the poor to invest more in education and health for their children to improve their lives when they grow up," Ernesto Pernia, a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics said, citing the correlation between family size and poverty incidence.

Urgent need for legislation

There is no national legislation on the standardization of budgets for family planning and reproductive healthcare services for the poor.

The Reproductive Health Bill aims to address this by providing a full range of contraceptive options, including the pill and condoms, as well as natural birth-control methods.

However, the bill is staunchly opposed by the influential Catholic Church that only approves of natural family planning methods requiring periodic abstinence.

The Bill has been wildly debated for the past 15 years.

"Natural family planning, also known as the rhythm method, has never played a role in fertility decline in any country, whether Catholic or not," Potts said.

Martha Campbell, president of Ventures Strategies for Health and Development, which studies reproductive healthcare strategies for developing countries said, "Other Catholic countries like Mexico and Brazil have already decided that the Vatican doesn't need to step into their reproductive lives. The Philippines is the only remaining country where the Catholic Church has a stranglehold on women's health."

"Population growth is a public welfare issue that affects the poorest of the poor. Other poverty containment efforts will never be sufficient until we can curb population growth," said Congresswoman Kaka Bag-ao of the Akbayan Citizen's Action Party, which is pushing for the passage of the Bill.

On 8 December, the UN Population Fund and the International Council on Management of Population Programmes (ICOMP) will hold a regional consultation on family planning in Bangkok.

The goal of the three-day meeting is to gain support from governments and civil societies to prioritize family planning programmes and increase investments in family planning to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and particularly, universal access to reproductive health.

Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank accused of diverting money

A Norwegian documentary on microcredit has made some allegations of diverted money within Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank. Money that the Norwegian government gave to Grameen Bank for housing loans was instead diverted to another arm within the Grameen Family of companies. Grameen has other branches including medical care services, developing other microcredit banks and more. Grameen counters that the money was diverted only for tax purposes.

From this NewsCore story that we found at Fox News Detroit, we learn more about the allegations.

But letters obtained by a Norwegian filmmaker suggest that Oslo’s embassy in Dhaka was furious to discover that cash donated to his micro finance vehicle, Grameen Bank, for housing loans was diverted to another company without its knowledge or permission. The arrangement, which Yunus claimed was made for tax reasons, was not mentioned in Grameen Bank’s annual report.

When his actions were challenged in formal correspondence, Yunus wrote to the head of an aid agency, Norad, asking for its help.

“This allegation will create a lot of misunderstanding within the government of Bangladesh. If the people, within and outside government, who are not supportive of Grameen get hold of this letter, we’ll face real problem[s] in Bangladesh,” he wrote.

Yunus was ordered to return the money but while about £17.6 million was repaid, the rest of the funds were used for other social causes including victims of cyclones, according to the Norwegian government.

The chain of events -- which took place between 1996 and 1998 -- came to light this week after the letters were aired as part of a documentary on micro finance that was shown on Norwegian television.

Although it said that there was no suggestion of tax fraud, a minister in the current Oslo administration said that it was “totally unacceptable” that aid was used for purposes other than what was intended. A report into the matter has now been ordered by the International Development Minister after questions in the Norwegian parliament.

Ill health and marriage keep Afghanistan's people poor

From IRIN, a story on the how the combination of poor health and marriage can keep Afghanistan's people poor.

Uncertain harvests are a perennial risk for rural Afghans, but two events stand out as exacerbating poverty - ill health, and the high cost of getting married, according to a new report.

“While health expenditures placed considerable financial strain on households across different wealth groups, they hit the poor particularly hard,” says research by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU).

A household of seven spends an average of US$252 a year on health costs which can be devastating for poor families, according to the report based on interviews with representatives of 64 households in three provinces - Badakhshan, Kandahar, and Sar-i-Pul.

“Ill health in general is damaging,” Paula Kantor, the report’s author, told IRIN, adding that the ill health of a male worker was particularly detrimental to his household.

Major health crises often led to high debts and asset sales, while many poor families said they were unable to pay for a complete course of treatment as recommended by doctors.

“Poor households have to decide which ill member to treat, a trade off that ideally no family should have to face,” she said.

The situation is particularly grim in rural areas where access to healthcare services is limited.

Free of charge basic health services, financed by donors and delivered jointly by the government and NGOs, reach almost 80 percent of the country, but many Afghans prefer the better quality services provided by the private sector.

“There is misinformation that state hospitals lack capacity and offer bad or low quality services which prompt people to go to private hospitals. The reality is quite the opposite - state health centres are far better than private ones,” Abdullah Fahim, an adviser to the Ministry of Health, told IRIN.

Fahim acknowledged, however, that there was a lack of professional health workers, especially female health workers, at government health centres in rural areas. “In some areas female patients don’t go to a male doctor due to cultural restrictions.”

Poverty itself is considered a major cause of ill-health.

“Poor people who don’t have access to adequate food, water, sanitation and shelter and those who lack an appropriate sense of psycho-social security, are highly vulnerable to diseases,” said Fahim.

Expensive weddings

While marriages strengthen social relations, they are a significant financial outlay. The costs of a wedding feast - ranging from US$3,000-30,000 - can be devastating for a groom and his family, experts say.

“In many instances, financing a wedding led households to mount considerable debts and sell off productive assets,” said AREU’s research which noted that some poorer families were unable to marry off their sons due to prohibitively high bride prices.

In addition to wedding expenses, some families, particularly in rural areas, demand large sums as `Mahr’ (money paid by the groom to the bride at the time of marriage) and as a dowry. Such costs can threaten a family’s future livelihood security, experts say.

Religious scholars and officials say high marriage costs, though proscribed by Islam, are dictated by custom and practice in some areas.

“Unnecessary spending and profligacy at weddings and other parties are illegitimate in Islam,” Mohammad Seddiq Muslim, an official of the Supreme Court, told IRIN, adding that wedding costs were leading to poverty and corruption.

“There is a lot of personal, familial and tribal emulation, competition and rivalry associated with extravagant wedding parties,” said Ahmad Rasoul, a lecturer at the faculty of sociology at Kabul University.

Imposing spending limits from outside will not work, said the AREU report: “To properly counter the pressures of competition, conformity and pride that push bride prices higher, a local consensus on the benefits of spending limits must be built.”

41 million Latin American people have escaped poverty since 2002

A new study says that Latin America has lifted 41 million people out of poverty since 2002. The report from Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean gives a breakdown on the amount of progress each country within Latin America made in cutting the poverty rate. The study sites Argentina, Venezuela and Peru as the front runners.

From Monsters and Critics, we find out more of the study's contents.

In Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Panama the reduction was around 10 per cent, where income distribution was also greatly improved.

'There is a generalized trend towards the reduction of poverty, with the exception of Costa Rica,' ECLAC's executive secretary Alicia Barcena said.

The progress, which still leaves Latin America with some 180 million poor, was accomplished by countercyclical fiscal and social policies.

'This is the first time in history in which Latin America managed to reduce poverty immediately after an economic crisis like that of 2008-9,' Barcena noted.