4 in 10 Wisconsin students need school lunch assistance

A new report from a Wisconsin non-profit finds that 4 out of 10 Wisconsin students need help with affording school lunches. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism study says that the proportion of children needing free or reduced price lunches has been growing every year this decade.

Reporters Jacob Kushner and Kryssy Pease analyzed data from the Wisconsin public schools for their report. Our snippet of their story comes from the La Crosse Tribune.

The nonprofit center found the proportion of Wisconsin elementary students eligible for subsidized lunches hit 37.6 percent last year, up from 30.3 percent in 2000.

The proportion of low-income students grew at least two-fold in 47 of 411 public school districts during the period, reflecting the toll of the worsening economy and what some experts call a growing threat to education in Wisconsin.

This school year, a household of four earning $28,665 or less would qualify for free lunch. Families earning $40,793 or less qualify for reduced-price lunch.

More than 90 percent of the growth in the low-income elementary student population since 2000 occurred outside of Milwaukee, the center's analysis found.

Green Bay has the state's fifth-largest school district, but its low-income population grew by 2,398 elementary students, representing the largest increase of any school system. Districts in Madison and Kenosha also added more low-income elementary students in the past nine years than Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest school district.

Since 2000, the La Crosse School District has seen participation in the subsidized lunch program rise from 35.5 percent to nearly 43 percent.

Two million children starving in Bangladesh

The UN's World Food Program says that two million children are barely able to survive in Bangladesh. The WFP worries that another economic crisis could push more people in jeopardy, as the country is starving from the hikes in food prices last year, and the global recession.

From this AFP story that we found at The Raw Story we read more of the situation in Bangladesh.

World Food Programme (WFP) country head John Aylieff said two million children aged under five in Bangladesh are suffering from acute malnutrition, which by World Health Organization standards represents a "nutritional emergency."

"The population is beyond the razor's edge, so that any other economic shock is going to have an immediate and direct impact on malnutrition," Aylieff told AFP.

Bangladesh was cushioned from the worst ravages of the global financial meltdown, but experts warn remittances and exports could be badly hit towards the end of this year.

In addition, the WFP is facing a global funding crisis, raising only 3.7 billion of the 6.7 billion dollars needed for its food assistance programmes worldwide in 2009.

In Bangladesh, it had planned programmes to help 6.9 million "completely destitute" people this year, but Aylieff said four million fell through the funding net.

"These are the bottom of the poverty scale. These are the ones micro-credit institutions wouldn't dream of looking at," Aylieff said.

Food prices in Bangladesh almost doubled in 2008 after the country's grain production was devastated by major flooding and a catastrophic cyclone the previous year, pushing an extra 7.5 million people below the poverty line, according to the WFP.

US health Care Plan may make it harder for the poor

Criticism continues to poor in on the US Health Care proposal that has just been released from the Senate Finance Committee.

Many of the reforms are based on the Health Care plan in Massachusetts. Since enacted in the state, the government has had trouble keeping up with the increasing prices for health care, especially during the global recession. In fact, some unintended effects of the plan have made it harder for the poor to receive health care. Critics say that the problem with the federal reform bill is that is patterned after Massachusetts plan.

From the IPS, Adrienne Appel explains how the Massachusetts plan has made it harder on the poor.

All the major plans in Congress are mirrored after the reforms in Massachusetts, including the requirement that everyone purchase insurance at market rates - which grow yearly - or face a hefty fine. The fine is up to 1,000 dollars in Massachusetts.

"Once failure to buy health insurance is a federal offence, what's next?" Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard physician and member of Physicians for a National Health Programme, recently told a Congressional committee.

The Massachusetts reforms were crafted three years ago by Republican Governor Mitt Romney, the venture capitalist and presidential candidate.

"The Massachusetts plan is not sustainable. It contained no cost control and raised no new revenues. We're basically just spending money," Benjamin Day, executive director of MassCare, which campaigns for a single-payer system, told IPS.
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The Massachusetts reforms are attractive to Congress because the state outlawed abuses by insurers and cut in half the number of people without insurance, meaning that 97.4 percent of residents were insured, the highest percentage of any state.

But, "Skimpy, overpriced coverage like this left one in six Massachusetts residents unable to pay their medical bills last year," Woolhandler said.

The requirement that all residents buy health insurance or be penalised is a centrepiece of proposals being debated by Congress, though it has proved highly unpopular in Massachusetts and surprisingly unsuccessful.

About 352,000 people in 2008 chose to be fined rather than pay 4,000 dollars or more per year for health insurance, according to figures just released by the U.S. Census.

The Massachusetts reforms were enacted two years ago to try to decrease the hundreds of thousands of people showing up at hospital emergency rooms desperate for health care and with no money to pay for it.

There was a system in place to cover this care, a tax on wealthier hospitals that was redistributed to poor hospitals that provided most of this free care, and it was working well. But the wealthy hospitals asked for reforms.

"The individual mandate is a huge boon for insurers. And hospitals got a huge rate increase," Day said.

"Patients are not an organised group and they had no voice, much less uninsured people. It's not quite the ideal political experience," he said.

"We had a free care pool for the uninsured and for many people it was better than what we have today," Day added.

The poor now have to purchase drugs that previously were free, and pay every time they see a doctor or go to the hospital.

Poor people continue to seek free care at hospitals and clinics, but under the reforms the hospitals are no longer compensated for this care. The clinics and hospitals are buckling under the stress, and have had to cut staff and programmes.

Boston Medical Centre, which treats anyone regardless of ability to pay, is reimbursed just 64 cents for every one dollar it spends, it says. It is suing the state as a last resort.

Health reform "should not and cannot be financed on the backs of the poor. We hope our suit serves as a cautionary tale to federal policymakers as they take up national health care reform," said the hospital's CEO, Elaine Ullian.

Another way to move out of the slums

Yesterday, we linked to a story about a microcredit bank in Kenya that is developing a livable neighborhood for former slum dwellers.

Today, we find a government program in Kenya that moves residents out of Nairobi's Kibera slum into a decent housing. Over half of the city's population lives in one of 100 Nairobi slums.

From this IRIN story that we found at Reuters Alert Net, we learn more about the step up the former slum dwellers receive.

"I can't believe I have left Kibera for good! My new home is so clean, we have a toilet inside the house; it is a dream come true," Pius Okello, 46, father of six, said.

Okello, who had lived in Kibera's Soweto East zone for 10 years, was one of those who moved on 16 September. The government provided trucks and workers to help the residents settle into their new homes, which they have dubbed 'Canaan', the Promised Land.

Kibera is one of the largest informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa. According to HABITAT, estimates of its population range from 500,000 to 800,000, with densities of over 3,000 people per hectare - one of the most densely populated informal settlements in the world.

The monthly rent for a room in the new flats, about a kilometre from Kibera, is Ksh 500 (US$7) and tenants pay an additional Ksh300 ($4) for electricity and Ksh200 ($2.5) for water. The kitchen, toilet and bathrooms are shared but if a family takes three rooms, they get exclusive use of these facilities.

"I took three rooms because I have six children and I take care of four other children of my dead brother when schools close; at least now my wife and I have our privacy and the children have a bedroom for the first time," Okello said.

"The only problem is that I feel that water and electricity charges are high because they are charged per room; I should be charged a single fee for the whole house."

The ongoing $300,000 Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) was mooted in 2000, and jointly funded by the government, UN HABITAT and the World Bank Cities Alliance.

New statistics from the UN

The United Nations has a new report out today that says that pledges in aid from the G-8 have not been fulfilled. The report from the Millennium Development Goal task force was put together for the General Assembly. The task force also says that there are now 1.3 billion people around the world below the poverty line.

We go to two different sources for this post as each story covers different aspects of the report. First, from this IRIN story that we found in Reuters Alert Net, we read more about the unfulfilled pledges.

The report, Strengthening the Global Partnership for Development in a Time of Crisis, by the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Gap Task Force, highlighted an annual gap of US$35 billion in the 2005 pledge made by the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries at a summit in Gleneagles, United Kingdom.

This amount includes a $20 billion annual shortfall in its commitments to Africa, even though 2008 saw the highest levels of development assistance to the continent.

In a preface to the report UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recognized that since the adoption of the MDGs in 2000 there had been "great progress" in reducing poverty and hunger, and promoting access to education and health services.

This New York Times story that we found at the Dallas Morning News has stats on the global recession's impact on the poor.

Other grim statistics:

• As many as 222 million workers run the risk of joining the ranks of the working poor.

• Remittance flows, which reached $328 billion in 2008, will drop by 7.3 percent in 2009, the World Bank says.

• Hunger rates are up in every region in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Great examples of volunteerism

Too many times people who get into volunteering are looking for what they can get out of it, instead of what they can put into it. We found a couple of great examples of volunteerism in a story from Mississippi's Clarion Ledger.

The story profiles a trio of college students who went overseas to help. Some of the duties they did over the summer were just simple chores, or long walks to village to village.

We will focus on two of the students for our snippet. Writer Galen Holley introduces us to Ben Long, and Sally McDonnell.

"It was probably the most challenging and most rewarding experience of my life," said Ben Long, a sophomore in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi.

What started as a language immersion trip for college credit turned into a life-changing experience for the Corinth native.

Long spent a month learning Spanish with friends in Costa Rica but when his time was up he felt restless. Since nothing back home demanded his immediate attention he hoped a plane to Guatemala. Despite being pretty much alone, Long threw himself headlong into helping at hospitals and orphanages.

"I didn't really have a plan," he said, recalling how his shaky Spanish and willingness to do whatever was needed helped him navigate the native culture for almost two months.

"I just trusted God was leading me in the right direction," he said.
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Maria Presley of Shannon started the summer in Mozambique working with AIDS patients. A grant from Emory University, where she's enrolled in divinity school, allowed her to help destitute women and to study ethnic and religious conflicts. After a month of working with native people, Presley set out alone across western Africa.

"I just tried to engage in as many conversations as I could and to learn as much as I could about how people talk about conflict and how they deal with it," she said.
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Presley's motivation stemmed from her belief that everyone is "called to place ourselves outside ourselves and to push beyond what makes us comfortable."

The World Bank tries to influence the G-20 meeting

Whenever a meeting of industrialized nations approaches the World Bank usually issues a report to nation heads, with suggestions on what the leaders should discuss or decide. The G-20 will gather in Pittsburgh next week, so the World Bank is asking the leaders to not forget the poor nations.

The bank says it sees signs that the global economic crisis is over, but warns the under developed world will be the last to recover. The Bank is also calling on an increase in agricultural assistance which the G-8 promised to aid earlier this year.

From the Wall Street Journal we find out more about what World Bank has to say. Reporter Tom Barkley recieved some quotes from the Bank's president Robert Zoellick.

In a report prepared for G-20 leaders meeting in Pittsburgh next week, the bank warned that the global crisis is poised to push an additional 89 million people into extreme poverty by the end of next year if additional help isn't provided.

"The poorest countries may not be well represented on the G-20, but we cannot ignore the long-term costs of the global downturn on their people's health and education," World Bank President Robert Zoellick said.

The bank said recent developments suggest the global recession "may be coming to an end," including signs that the slowdown in production and trade may be over.

But low-income countries that were the last to get hit by the global slump are expected to take longer to emerge, still suffering from a drop in the capital, trade and remittance flows their economies depend on.

"With the world economy still fragile and signs of global recovery tentative, low-income countries face a long and muted recovery," the report said.

Low-income countries as a group are expected to face an external financing gap of $59 billion this year. With private financing flows on the decline, these countries will become even more dependent on external aid, the bank said.

Exports of low-income countries are poised to fall 5% to 10% this year, with remittances expected to decline 5% to 7%. Private capital flows are expected to drop to $13 billion this year from $21.4 billion in 2008, according to the bank.

Canada receives a grade on poverty

A new report shows that Canada has shown a little improvement on poverty levels since last year, compared to other wealthy nations. However, Canada ranks near the bottom on a scale of all the developed nations, with only the U.S. and Japan ranking lower.

From this story in the Canadian Press hosted at Google, we learn more about this new report.

A Conference Board of Canada ranking says with more than 12 per cent of the working age population in poverty, Canada ranks 15th out of 17 developed countries, ahead of only Japan and the U.S.

The annual report also suggests more than one in seven Canadian children lives in poverty, resulting in a 13th place ranking.

Conference Board president Anne Golden says considering how wealthy Canada is, "these rates of poverty are unacceptable."

In the overall society category - which measures 17 indicators - Canada ranks ninth, an improvement of one place from last year.

A microcredit way to move the poor out of slums

This is a story from last week, but it's a great one about moving people out of the slums of Nairobi. The microcredit firm Jamii Bora Trust is the subject of this Seattle Times article.

One of the products that the Trust offers is a low interest mortgage program. Payments are kept at about the same levels as paying rent in the slums. Once they escape the slums, the people can also easily escape poverty.

Writer Jim Simon visited the village that the Jasmii Bora Trust has built.

On the second night in her new house here, Jane Ngoiri told one of her children to get something out of the kitchen.

Then she started laughing.

"I told them, 'It is us talking about a kitchen. A kitchen!' " recalled Ngoiri, a former prostitute who moved with her four children earlier this year from a rented, one-room shanty in the Nairobi slum of Mathare.

"It's unbelievable."

Kaputei represents an audacious leap for both Ngoiri and the Jamii Bora Trust, a Kenyan microfinance organization that began a decade ago lending 50 women beggars money to start their own businesses.

About 22 miles outside of Nairobi, rows of cinder-block houses topped with red tile roofs spread across the plains — the first stage of a new, self-contained town that Jamii Bora hopes will someday be home to 10,000 people, schools, shops and small industry.

Ngoiri paid 350,000 Kenyan shillings — about $4,500 — for her two-bedroom house with a kitchen, toilet and bath. Her mortgage is around $40 a month — not much more, she says, than what she paid to rent the cramped room in Mathare.

To keep costs down, Jamii Bora is manufacturing the building materials on site, providing jobs to its members and others living nearby. Kaputei is also an eco-town of sorts, with houses powered by solar panels and an ambitious plan to recycle 70 percent of the wastewater through man-made wetlands.

"It's really beyond the wildest imagination of what most microfinance organizations are thinking about," said Ed Bland, who heads Seattle-based Unitus, which provides business and technical expertise and helps raise capital for Jamii Bora and other microfinance groups.

"They are taking on things that others just complain about."

An update on the hunger in Sudan

This is a story we meant to link to last night, but tractor repairs got in the way. From the IRIN, an update on the humanitarian and hunger situation in Sudan.

Recent assessments found that up to 1.3 million people were food insecure - an increase of 20 percent on earlier projections. Most of these were in Jonglei and Eastern Equatoria states where needs have tripled and doubled respectively, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fews Net) said in a September update.

Current food insecurity, it added, would persist until late October, when harvests were expected. Despite predictions of a high probability of normal to above normal rainfall between September and December, delayed crops were at risk of flooding - something which is common in Southern Sudan.

"Persistent inter-clan and inter-tribal cattle raiding conflicts since last year, and last year's crop shortfalls caused by June-August dryness followed by floods, have been the main causes of food insecurity," it noted.

"Below average rains from May through August have now dampened the prospects for recovery that were expected with the onset of the September-October harvest, which has now been delayed."

More on the life of Dr. Norman Borlaug

The recent passing of Dr. Norman Borlaug was probably the first time many Americans heard of one of their countrymen. However Dr. Borlaug's life work was so important that it resulted is saving over one billion lives.

From the Wall Street Journal, commentator Gregg Easterbrook tells us how important Dr. Borlaug was.

In the mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged for a convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to discover that war had broken out between the two nations. Sometimes working within sight of artillery flashes, Borlaug and his assistants sowed the Subcontinent's first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

"Without high-yield agriculture," Borlaug said, "increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion." Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

In the late 1980s, when even the World Bank cut funding for developing-world agricultural improvement, Borlaug turned for support to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a maverick Japanese industrialist. Sasakawa funded his high-yield programs in a few African nations and, predictably, the programs succeeded. The final triumph of Borlaug's life came three years ago when the Rockefeller Foundation, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a major expansion of high-yield agriculture throughout Africa. As he approached his 90s, Borlaug "retired" to teaching agronomy at Texas A&M, where he urged students to live in the developing world and serve the poor.

Often it is said America lacks heroes who can provide constructive examples to the young. Here was such a hero. Yet though streets and buildings are named for Norman Borlaug throughout the developing world, most Americans don't even know his name.

Political prisoners in Burma double in two years

Human Rights Watch released a report today that says that the number of political prisoners in Burma has doubled in only two years. Many of the prisoners were arrested after peaceful demonstrations in 2007, or for helping in the relief efforts after Cyclone Nargis in 2008.

The press release of the report from Human Rights provides more information of the cirumstances of the imprisonments. You can download the full report titled "Burma's Forgotten Prisoners," from their website.

Political opponents, activists and others with the courage to speak out against military rule or criticize government actions or policies have been routinely locked up in Burma's prisons for years. There are 43 known prisons holding political activists in Burma, while more than 50 labor camps where prisoners are forced to perform hard labor.

Repression increased after the popular uprising led in part by monks in August and September 2007 was crushed by the government. Closed courts and courts inside prisons have held unfair trials and sentenced more than 300 political figures, human rights defenders, labor activists, artists, journalists, comedians, internet bloggers, and Buddhist monks and nuns to lengthy prison terms. Some prison terms have been for more than 100 years. The activists were mainly charged under provisions of Burma's archaic penal code that criminalizes free expression, peaceful demonstration, and forming of independent organizations. More than 20 prominent activists and journalists, including Burma's most famous comedian, Zargana, were arrested for having spoken out about obstacles to humanitarian relief following Cyclone Nargis, which struck Burma in May 2008.

The world was reminded of the brutality of the military government after the arrest, protracted and unfair trial and conviction of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in August after an American intruder broke into her house. Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party won the last Burmese elections in 1990, has been in prison or house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years.

"Gaining the release of Suu Kyi is important not just for her own well-being, but because it could facilitate a process that allowed the opposition to fully participate in elections and Burmese society," said Malinowski. "But Suu Kyi is not the only person facing persecution for her political beliefs. People like the comedian Zargana, imprisoned for criticizing the government's pathetic response to Cyclone Nargis, or Su Su Nway, a brave woman activist who led street protests, also deserve the world's attention."

"Burma's Forgotten Prisoners" spotlights the cases of political prisoners including:

* Zargana: In November 2008, a Rangoon court sentenced prominent comedian and social activist Zargana to 59 years in jail - a sentence later reduced to 35 years - for disbursing relief aid and talking to the international media about his frustrations in assisting victims of Cyclone Nargis. Zargana was previously detained for a year following the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma, and jailed for four years in 1990-94 for making political speeches. Police rearrested Zargana in September 2007 for publicly supporting the protests by monks, and detained him for 20 days. Zargana is serving his sentence in a prison in Myitkyina, Kachin State, in northern Burma, which is known for its bitterly cold winter and is difficult for relatives to reach. His mother Daw Kyi Oo died in March 2009, while Zargana was in prison.
* U Gambira: On November 4, 2007, Burmese authorities arrested 28-year-old U Gambira, one of the main leaders of the All-Burma Monks Alliance, which had spearheaded the September 2007 protests. On the day of U Gambira's arrest, the Washington Post published an opinion piece in which he wrote: "The regime's use of mass arrests, murder, torture and imprisonment has failed to extinguish our desire for the freedom that was stolen from us so many years ago." On November 21, 2007, U Gambira was sentenced to a total of 68 years in prison (since reduced to 63 years), including 12 with hard labor. His brother Aung Ko Ko Lwin received 20 years in prison for hiding him, and was sent to Kyaukpyu prison in Arakan state, while his brother-in-law Moe Htet Hlyan was also jailed for helping him while he was being pursued by the authorities.
* Su Su Nway: In 2005, labor rights activist Su Su Nway became the first person to successfully prosecute local officials for the imposition of forced labor, a common human rights violation in Burma. Su Su Nway, who suffers from a heart condition, was subsequently sentenced to one and a half years of imprisonment in October 2005 on charges of "using abusive language against the authorities." In 2006, she was awarded the John Humphrey Freedom Award by the Canadian human rights group Rights and Democracy. She was rearrested in November 2007, after leading peaceful protests earlier that year. In November 2008, she was sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison after being charged with treason and "intent to cause fear or harm to the public."

The US health insurance bill unveiled

The compromise health bill that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee worked on is to be unveiled today. Some compromises have been achieved on the health insurance bill, and that seems to give the bill only more opponents. More Democrats are citing concerns that the bill will be too costly to middle income Americans.

For some of the nuts and bolts within the bill, we turn to this article from the Wall Street Journal. Writers Greg Hitt and Janet Adamy give us the details.

The Baucus bill would provide federal subsidies to individuals and families with incomes as high as 300% of the federal poverty line. For people whose incomes fall between 300% and 400% of the poverty line, the bill would cap premiums at 13% of income.

Critics complain the 13% cap is too high and would impose unreasonable costs on middle-income family budgets. But Finance Committee aides argue that tens of millions of Americans would still benefit from the cap.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been seeking other changes to the bill. In private negotiations led by Mr. Baucus, Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) made a push this week to drop the proposed mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance. Instead, he has proposed creating a new "reinsurance pool" to help spread the risks associated with high-cost patients.

In a statement released late Tuesday, Mr. Grassley complained the Senate Democratic leadership is imposing an "artificial deadline" on the bipartisan talks led by Mr. Baucus, but vowed to "continue to work with" the chairman.

Health Care for America Now, a liberal advocacy group, estimates that a family of four earning $77,175 a year could pay as much as $10,033 a year for health insurance under Sen. Baucus's proposal. That is about $2,000 a year more than they would pay under a health bill passed through the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as under two of the three bills passed through House committees.

Mr. Baucus's bill would also place higher caps than other versions on the amount consumers would pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses. It would allow insurance companies to charge older customers premiums that are as much as five times as high as those for younger customers, a provision sought by insurance companies. The other bills would restrict them from charging older customers more than twice as much.

Oxfam warns against raiding funds for climate change

Oxfam is warning against diverting funds away from poverty fighting to pay for climate change funding.

A new report from Oxfam estimates that 4.5 million children could die if funds are raided from poverty fighting measures, and are used instead for global warming. Oxfam is calling for the international community to raise another $50 billion dollars a year for environment measures.

From this Press Association article that we found at The Guardian, we read more of Oxfam's warning against aid "raiding".

And it says the money must be provided in addition to the 0.7% of GDP developed nations have pledged as aid to improve the lives of people in some of the world's poorest countries – or efforts to tackle poverty will stall.

A report by Oxfam warns that diverting $50bn from existing aid pledges to fund climate measures would lead to the death of 4.5 million children, while 75 million fewer youngsters would be likely to go to school and 8.6 million fewer people would have access to HIV/Aids treatment.

It could prove a major setback to efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals which aim to end hunger and poverty and boost education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability by 2015, the report warns.

Oxfam said it was already seeing people going without food, pulling their children out of school or selling livestock to pay for debts caused by failing crops and other climate-related problems.

According to the aid agency, just three countries including the UK are in favour of additional funding for climate measures – and the issue could prove to be a deal breaker in the upcoming crunch talks aimed at agreeing global emissions cuts in Copenhagen in December.

A failure by developed countries to address the problems surrounding adaptation funding has led to distrust between the two sides and could undermine efforts to secure a deal to cut emissions.

2009 World Development Report from the World Bank

This year's Global Development Report from the World Bank has a lot to say about global warming. The Bank is calling on the world to act differently in regards to climate change and begin to put development money into green energy sources. The Bank says that the effects of climate change through higher temperatures, flooding and natural disasters will be felt first by under-developed nations.

However, the Bank does this while admitting it funds coal-fired plants for development. This enters the Bank onto a double edged sword of development. Sometimes, coal-fired plants could be the most viable option for development. When the costs of bringing green energy to an under-developed nation are too great, and the need for energy by those who don't have it is even greater. However, the coal plants could do harm to developing nations if they do contribute to climate change.

From The Times analysis of the report, writer Ben Webster looks into coal projects the World Bank funds. For the full report, you can download it from the World Bank's website.

The 260-page report advises against “locking the world into high-carbon infrastructure” but makes no mention of the bank’s plans to subsidise coal power plants in India, South Africa, Botswana and other developing countries.

Last year the bank and its partner, the Asian Development Bank, approved $850million in loans to finance a coal-fired plant in Gujarat, western India.

The Environmental Defence Fund, a US lobby group, said that the plant, the first of nine planned in India, would be one of the biggest new sources of greenhouse gases on Earth, emitting 26.7million tonnes of CO2 a year for the next 50 years.

The bank is also contributing $5billion towards South Africa’s power generation expansion plan, which includes six coal plants.

Marianne Fay, the bank’s chief economist for sustainable development, said that coal was the cheapest and most secure way to deliver electricity to the 1.6billion people without it. She said: “There are a lot of poor countries which have coal reserves and for them it’s the only option. The [bank’s] policy is to continue funding coal to the extent that there is no alternative and to push for the most efficient coal plants possible. Frankly, it would be immoral at this stage to say, ‘We want to have clean hands, therefore we are not going to touch coal’.”

Tim Jones, policy officer of the World Development Movement, which campaigns to reduce poverty, said: “The World Bank is acting in the interests of Western countries and companies and not in the long-term interests of the world’s poor.

“It is an absolute disgrace that money meant for clean technologies will actually be used for building new coal power stations. Every pound of green aid that will be spent on funding coal power through the World Bank is money that should be spent on supporting renewable energy in developing countries.”

The bank said that it had lent $5billion for fossil fuel projects in the past three years and $11billion for “low-carbon” alternatives.

WFP stops feeding Somalia

The World Food Programme has decided to close feeding centers in Somalia. In most cases it's the only access that people there have to food. The WFP says they have run out of money and blame a lack of funding from governments throughout the world.

The WFP is also out of food for Kenya, who is experiencing their worst drought in decades. WFP feeding programs in Ethiopia and Uganda have also had cutbacks.

From the BBC, reporter Martin Plaut explains this sad development.

The decision has been made despite the ongoing crisis in Somalia, and the WFP says the reductions are now hitting people across east Africa.

Despite the depth of the need, the WFP says the international community has failed to rally round with the funding it requires.
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The cuts could hardly have come at a more serious moment - the conflict in Somalia has driven tens of thousands to flee from their homes.

And the country is also suffering from a severe drought.

As a result the UN estimates that more than three million Somalis need food aid - half the total population.

Put another way, one child in five is acutely malnourished, yet the WFP is having to close the services on which they depend.

Canada tries to give Haiti "everything"

Canadian aid is very important to Haiti. Canada will give more than a half a billion dollars to Haiti in the span of five years. It's a lot, but Haiti is a country that needs "everything" and very few Canadians are aware of the great amount of work that is done there.

Writer Laura Payton has a long piece in the Canada's Ottawa Citizen tries to explain the work of aid to Haiti.

Outside government circles, few people are aware of the work Canada is doing in Haiti, says Carlo Dade, executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL). "Without us, a lot of children wouldn't get fed every day."

Without Canada, there are a lot of things that wouldn't get done.

Brazil, the U.S. and other countries in the Americas are also benefactors to the troubled island nation.

Last week, in a status report on the country, the UN Security Council expressed "cautious optimism." Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a UN envoy, said, "I am convinced that Haiti has a remarkable opportunity to escape the chains of its past."

Everyone interviewed about security, aid and development work in Haiti agrees on one thing. Asked what the country needs most, their response was unanimous and emphatic: "Everything."

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Its population is just more than nine million, crammed into an area roughly one-third the size of New Brunswick. Per capita GDP was only $1,300 U.S. last year (Canada's was $39,300 U.S.). Eighty per cent of Haitians live below the poverty line, more than two-thirds of the population don't have a formal job, and just more than 52 per cent can read. Without proper sanitation, infectious disease rates are high. Food is so scarce there were riots in 2008 when prices rose.

While it was once rich, that wealth was built on the backs of slaves. The French who colonized Haiti brought in nearly half a million slaves, who overthrew them in a revolt in 1804.

Two hundred years later, Haitians are still waiting for stable, democratic government.

Haiti is perched on the western third of Hispaniola Island, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. When planes fly over, passengers can see the border: the Dominican side is lush and green, while the Haitian side is dull and brown. Rampant deforestation — to make charcoal so people can cook without electricity — worsens the natural disasters that hit the island every year, allowing flooding and landslides to flow unabated. In 2008, for example, four hurricanes killed 800 people, left thousands homeless and caused $1 billion in damage.

Corruption in Bangladesh

In a country where 40 percent of the population lives less than a dollar a day, corruption is keeping the Bangladesh economy from improving. People have to pay bribes to get jobs, shop keepers raise their prices to keep up with bribes they have to pay and there are many more examples. Foreign investment dollars will not come into the country until corruption is cleaned up, but do government officials really want to clean it up?

From this great analysis from Reuters, reporter Anis Ahmed details how corruption keeps Bangladesh's economy from moving up.

Global watchdog Transparency International rated Bangladesh the world's most corrupt nation for five consecutive years from 2001. Subsequently the rating improved, to 10th in 2008, after a military-backed interim government took tough anti-graft steps.

However, TIB says its latest research confirms widespread corruption remains, and some others say it is getting worse again. The authories deny that, saying the monitors base their judgment mainly on often inflated media reports.

But people struggling day in and day out to make a living blame corruption for many of their problems.

"You will face it everywhere," said Shahadat Hossain, a teacher at a government primary school.

"I had to pay 100,000 taka ($1,430) as bribe to get this job. But the poor salary I get covers only a part of my expenses," he told Reuters.

"Grocery sellers ask higher prices every next day, doctors at government clinics won't treat my child without money or give me medicine supposed to be a free handout."

The government admits efforts to contain prices and introduce graft-free practices have largely failed, even though populist Prime Minister Hasina, who took office in January following a widely acclaimed democratic election, promised to address them.

"Corruption has spread like cancer in our country and society," said Mahabub Hossain, executive director of Bangladesh's biggest NGO and leading micro-credit agency, BRAC.

Hotline to Zuma

Fiveteen years after apartheid ended the lives of many South Africans have not improved. During the summer, the poor of the country took to the streets in violent protest over the lack of basic services.

Reacting to the protest, recently elected President Jacob Zuma has started a hot line to his office. The purpose of the hot line is so people can complain about the lack of water or electricity or any thing else.

From Reuters Alert Net, we read more about Zuma's efforts to reach out to the rioters.

Zuma, who took office in May, has pledged to do more for the poor, but financial woes in Africa's biggest economy have limited his ability to carry out the main plank of his party's election manifesto.

"You may receive calls from very angry people," Zuma, who took calls himself as the hotline opened, told call centre staff.

"They will say there's no water, there's no electricity," Zuma was quoted by government news agency BuaNews as saying.

Vusi Mona, head of communications in the president's office, said 2,420 calls to the toll-free number were being handled each hour.

States who already having trouble paying for Medicaid

Proposed plans in the U.S. Congress to expand Medicaid have some state governors worried. They fear the proposals could force the states to help pay for the expansion.

State government budgets are already being stretched due to more and more people applying for Medicaid benefits, especially during the recession. Some states are already over budget with their Medicaid programs, and fear an expansion will bust their budgets.

From this story that we found at the Press of Atlantic City, we see some examples of states that having trouble paying for all the people who need insurance.

In New Mexico, 18.4 percent live below the poverty level, well above the national average of 13.3 percent. Medicaid enrollment there has increased nearly 10 percent since mid-2008, and Human Services Secretary Pam Hyde said the program could overspend its budget by $35 million to $40 million this fiscal year.

_ In Michigan, where unemployment hit 15 percent in July, Republicans who control the state Senate propose saving money by trimming 8 percent from the Medicaid reimbursement rates for physicians, hospitals and other health care providers in the state fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

_ In Georgia, Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue ordered 3 percent funding cuts for Medicaid and public schools and 5 percent cuts for most other state programs because of weak state tax collections in late July, just three weeks into the new fiscal year.

"If we're asked to pick up on state increased costs in health care, it's going to take away from infrastructure, it's going take away from environment, transportation, education, public safety _ all the other things that we as states do," said Perdue, who leads a state where 14.5 percent of residents live below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census.

In Mississippi, where 21.1 percent of residents live in poverty and 20 percent are enrolled in Medicaid, paying for health care has long been a struggle. Barbour said a mandate to cover more people could lead to tax increases.

Barbour won the Mississippi governorship in 2003 after criticizing a 33 percent growth in Medicaid enrollment in four years under his Democratic predecessor. Enrollment has grown 5 percent since Barbour took office in January 2004. Mississippi saw an unexpected hiccup in Medicaid numbers in March, when enrollment jumped by 21,620. It was the largest single-month increase the program had seen since April 2001.