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Millennium Development Goal #3: Promote gender equality and empower women
The MDGs represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world’s main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases.Set for the year 2015, the MDGs are an agreed set of goals that can be achieved if all actors work together and do their part. Poor countries have pledged to govern better, and invest in their people through health care and education. Rich countries have pledged to support them, through aid, debt relief, and fairer trade
In search of $3 a day, a woman and her young son sort through a dump in Phnom Phen, Cambodia
Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice The Role of Gender in Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger, 2008
Jensine Larson, founder of PulseWire is amazed how prescient the UN was when they engineered the MDGs back in the 1990s how they foresaw the significant role women would play in addressing equality and poverty in developing countries around the world. At a recent talk at Bioneers 2009, Larson, speaks of the staggering gender imbalances which existed globally when the MDGs were introduced: in the media women are only the center of stories about 10% of the time; 1% of wome were editors; today, women do 2/3 of world’s work, make 10% of its income, and control 1% of world’ financial assets.
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“Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Pleases tell me I am not lost…”
The call for help comes from an impoverished, 6-foot-tall, tall, 90 pound HIV positive 43-year-old-woman. The mother of five lives in rural Kenya living in rural Kenya, an i She has traveled to an internet cafe and logged on to the PulseWire community.
She lacks access to anti-virals and has a burning desire to live, to take care of other women dying of AIDS.
“She attends more funerals in a week than I have in my life,” says Larson. “She would skype me at night because she knows I stay up late: ‘Jensine, don’t worry I have the pulse wire flame, I will carry it for you.’”
(insert info on this woman here)
Worldpulse Magazine<Jensine Larsen founded WorldPulse Magazine in ….. to take and publish the pulse of women's voices around the world. The publication expanded beyond just a printed publication with the debut of PulseWire in ….. An interactive community which engages women in solving global problems by addressing them as they manifest as local issues.
Jensine Larsen
The organization C.A.R.E. calls women our most vital yet neglected and underused resource in the world.
As a freelance journalist seeing firsthand the plight of women in South America and Southeast Asia, Jensine Larsen had a vision of listening to and broadcasting the unheard voices and innovative solutions of women worldwide. And at age 28, Jensine (Yen-See-Nah) founded WorldPulse Magazine — a way to get the pulse on women’s and youth voices around the world.
Jensine and WorldPulse have expanded beyond the printed publication to create PulseWire, an interactive community where women can speak for themselves and connect with one another to solve global problems by solving local issues. “Pulsewire means that a woman anywhere in the world with access to a cell phone or the internet or an internet café could connect to others. Right now, PulseWire has women reporting from over 140 countries ……
In their book Half the Sky, Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn propose that unleashing the potential of women’s potential is the key to economic progress: China’s emergence as an economic leader, they suggest, is a direct consequence of introducing women into the formal economy. Unleashing the female, they assert, is undoubtedly the best strategy for fighting poverty.
Gender, Climate Change & Copenhagen
Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) reports that this December’s Copenhagen agreement ‘may be the first to recognize the gender dimensions of climate change, saving the lives of millions of women and children and taking a major step toward addressing the human impacts of climate change.”
“The women of the world are demanding a paradigm shift that ensures their participation and leadership on decisions that affect their very survival and that of their families and communities,” said Lorena Aguilar, Senior Gender Advisor for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on the occasion of the UNFCCC negotiations currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain, ahead of the Copenhagen session this December.
UNFPA and WEDO have created a resource kit dealing withgender equity, population, and climate change. Information gender equality role in reducing vulnerability to climate change impacts and the unique role women will play in mitigating the devastating impacts of the climate crisis.
The Madre report, in conjunction with other organizations, details the disproportionate impact of climate change on women: (e.g., mounting food insecurity and intensifying natural disasters) while empahsising that it is the women who have the solutions. We have also emphasized this crucial fact: women have the solutions. Link
Women as Small Scale Farmers
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), In many parts of the world, agriculture is the first sector of employment for women
Women make up the majority of small-scale farmers worldwide and possess invaluable expertise in sustainable means of local food production. More and more, people are recognizing the grave danger presented by the current food system’s reliance upon industrial agriculture. Estimates compiled by GRAIN show that the links in the chain of industrial agriculture—including chemical fertilizers, destruction of natural biodiversity, transportation, processing, storage, and more—are responsible for nearly half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the World Food Program, over 60% of the world’s chronically hungry people are women; in many places, women constitute the bulk of the farming population. African women produce between 60% and 80% of the continent’s food. Generally, they receive less than 10 percent of the financial credit awarded to smallholder farmers. (International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD))
Success Stories:
* In Guatemala, Indigenous Ixil women established small chicken and pig farms that generate income and promote food security
*In Nicaragua, Indigenous Miskita women have organized a seed bank to cultivate, save, and share local, organic seeds. And in Sudan, women organic farmers have organized into a union to gain access to better tools and resources. <a href="http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/idrw/#contribution
“>Link.
Over 40 billion work hours are lost each year in Africa specifically to the long-distance gathering of drinking water
“We developed an infrastructure channel where the wisdom of women living in midst of the earth’s greatest challenges could find a voice, so we can hear their agenda in their own words. Women ARE driving the global community: 85% of spending in the western world is controlled by women. This is an urgent task at a time when there is no nation on earth where women have an equal voice. As women receive the support they need to meet their own challenges, they are free to engage in communication. An information revolution is galloping across the developing world. More and more women are gaining access to speak to the world. Even in the most remote areas, impoverished women are using information technologies. They are walking to cybercafes, using their cellphones to access information …. we hear from them all the time ‘I hadn’t heard about situation in Iraq, the Holocaust in the Congo, the drought in Ethiopia, the refugees in Palestine … ‘Solutions are coming from women, from us!she We receive emails all the time bout small projects in remote places, the jungles rural parts of Africa, asking us to write about their work, pleading for visibility. They want to do more, want to connect. Today, in Rwanda, women hold positions in over 50% of Parliament. In the United States, one of the primary determinants the government uses in determining the security of a region is whether or not schools for girls up and running. Nothing more important than the building of a multifaceted dynamic communmunity vehicles, powerful grassroots global womens' networks with in cell in my body thatt the creative huan potential i women and girls is the greatest untapped resource on earth.
Jensine Larsen.Bioneers 2009.
“Women and young girls have to allocate large amounts of time to the collection of firewood, compounding gender inequalities in livelihood opportunities and education. Collecting fuelwood and animal dung is a time-consuming and exhausting task, with average loads often in excess of 20kg. Research in rural Tanzania has found that women in some areas walk 5–10 kilometres a day collecting and carrying firewood, with loads averaging 20kg to 38kg. In rural India, average collection times can amount to over 3 hours a day. Beyond the immediate burden on time and body, fuelwood collection often results in young girls being kept out of school.”
Source: UNDP Human Development Report 2007/2008
Women cultivate more than half the food that is grown in sub-Saharan Africa, but generally receive less than 10 percent of the financial credit awarded to smallholder farmers, according to the
A fund of 1 billion euros distributed by the European Union Food Facility to nearly 30 of the world’s poorest nations, however, will grant women involved in small-scale agriculture essential resources to boost their food production, while ensuring long-term sustainable strategies for continued growth and success.
The projects will benefit men, women, and children, but the tenuous nature of women’s land ownership lends them focus and priority in some of the initiatives.
“We have refocused strongly on food security, and by doing that we have to talk about the women who are producing the crops…the ones who manage household food security,” said Annina Lubbock of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, one of the United Nations organizations that has been granted part of the donation. “We are talking about creating frameworks to recognize the role of small-holder agriculture, where women play an enormous role, as compared to commercial farms. This is key.” Link
MADRE supports women farmers so that they can grow the food their families need to survive. Unlike emergency food aid, Women Farmers Unite gives women the tools, resources, and technical assistance they need to sustain their families for the long haul. The program, conducted with MADRE’s Sudanese partner organization Zenab for Women in Development, provides women farmers with seeds and supplies, including donkeys and plows. The women’s greatest hope is to obtain a tractor, which will enable them to do three month’s work of turning the soil in just half a day.
Relief Web report on MADRE and Zenab for Women in Development Link
The Results
Participants in this program work together to grow crops, sharing resources to boost their economic status and begin improving their economic status and a sustainable model which improves conditions well into the future. To date, reports on the efficacy of the project reveal that improving the economic status and organizing skills enhances their power to make decisions within their communities and their ability to demand human rights for themselves and their children. Additionally, supplying women with organic seeds to grow traditionally nutritious foods strengthens community food sovereignty is strengthened.
Women & Water
Sub-Saharan Africa has the greatest need for safe water due to large vulnerable populations, such as those debilitated by HIV/AIDS, displaced refugees and communities with destabilized infrastructures resulting from civil unrest. MWA is undertaking this challenge with initial programs in Ethiopia and Kenya, which are being funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department, foundations, businesses and MWA members. MWA operating principles common to all programs include:
• Improvement of access to safe water, sanitation and health and hygiene training within the community.
• Partnerships with local NGOs to create program models that can be replicated.
• Empowerment of women and other marginalized groups so that their interests are heard and respected.
• Decentralized project design, training and implementation involving communities, organizations and government at the local level.
• Long-term improvement of communities’ capacity to sustain integrated solutions for water, hygiene and sanitation using contextually appropriate technology.
• Educational curriculum that takes into account wider water resource issues such as conservation and pollution. Millennium Water Alliance
In Kenya, http://www.peacecorps.gov/wws/educators/enrichment/africa/countries/kenya/managingwater.html
<
a href=”http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/black_women_gender_and_families/summary/v003/3.1.lewis.html”>Project Muse: An Issue of Environmental Justice: Understanding the Relationship among HIV/AIDS Infection in Women, Water Distribution, and Global Investment in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa
By Nicole Itano
WEnews correspondent
Friday, September 6, 2002
At the World Summit on Sustainable Development, an agreement was reached to promote clean water and sanitation facilities throughout developing nations, a pact that could have a profound impact on women’s lives.
new water meters
JOHANNESBURG (WOMENSENEWS)–For Betty Sgawuka, water is life, but it’s also backbreaking work. As a young child, she rambled after her mother with a small bucket; half a century later, now a grandmother several times over, she still makes multiple trips a day to a nearby stream.
Much has come to Sgawuka’s village during her 54 years: apartheid, freedom, AIDS. But eight years after South Africa’s first free, multi-racial elections, the only water that flows through Luphisi is the stream that nature put there.
Earlier this week, more than 100 world leaders met in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. At the top on the agenda during the 10-day meeting were clean water and sanitation and how they could be brought to places like Luphisi. At the end of the summit Wednesday, leaders reiterated their commitment to halve the number of people without water by 2015, and set a new goal to try to halve the number of people without access to sanitation by the same year. Hundreds of millions of dollars from the developing world were also pledged to the effort.
More than 1 billion people around the world lack access to clean water and another 2 billion to sanitation. Waterborne diseases are estimated to kill more than a million adults annually and enough children to fill a jumbo jet each day.
Women Often Spend One-Third of Their Lives Fetching Water
But for millions of women like Sgawuka, clean water and access to sanitation also mean increased freedom and dignity.
“It’s women and girls who bear the brunt of the lack of clean water; it’s women and girls who are intimidated and humiliated by the lack of sanitation,” said Sir Richard Jolly, head of a new United Nations campaign called WASH–Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for All, speaking in Johannesburg. “Remember, the amount of water the African or Asian carries on her head is roughly equivalent to the amount of luggage most of us will bring home from Johannesburg, roughly 20 kg.” link
The future is a beautiful thing women’s voices will come out of the shadow
Gobal decision makers will no longer be able to ignore us. We will reign in the halls of Congress, This is not about charity this is about women
The Walk for Water
Some of the most shocking water statistics in all of Sub-Saharan Africa are found in Ethiopia. More than 80 percent of Ethiopians live in the country’s rural regions, where as few as 24 percent of the population enjoys safe accessible drinking water.
Throughout southern Oromia I saw armies of women and girls with heavy barrels lashed to their backs with homemade rope. They lined the roads in the early morning and again as the heat of the day ebbed, falling in line with millions of women across the African continent seeking this most fundamental resource.
It is estimated that on an average day women in poor countries walk four miles and carry approximately 44 pounds of water back to their families. The World Health Organization reports that over 40 billion work hours are lost each year in Africa specifically to the long-distance gathering of drinking water, and Ethiopia is no exception.
“They walk all this way for water that may not be by any means safe or drinkable,” said Meselech Seyoum of Ethiopian NGO Water Action. “This really affects development in the country because there are so many other things could be focusing on instead of working so hard to secure water.”
One thing all of the walks have in common is that they are almost exclusively done by women and girls, and the water they return with is often contaminated by disease.
“Connecting fashion with both environmental and social responsibility, Fashionable Earth is committed to human rights and social justice. We focus our T-shirt Revolution on a specific global issue and channel awareness and raise money for that nominated “Cause of the Season.”
Our current Fall/Winter 2009 cause focuses on Iran. We have created two limited-edition T-shirts to be sold to support the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a non-profit organization promoting accountability and the rule of law in Iran through the documentation of human rights abuses; and Women for Women International, a non-profit organization helping women survivors of war rebuild their lives. The intention is to allow each individual to contribute to a more eco-friendly world by buying clothing that would otherwise be trashed, while becoming more aware of global issues and being able to support change.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09252009/transcript2.html
I would say that I just have simply stopped using that term “women’s issues.” I really don’t know what that is. What issues should 51 percent of the world check out on? Do we not care about peace and security? Do we not care about health and education? Do we not care– I think what we are talking about is the right of every human being, including the 51 percent that hasn’t had much voice for the past millennia, to be at the table to make decisions about the changes that we want to see in the world. And in that sense, I think women have everything to do with national security and safety and, you know, a future in which we really are all more secure.
MELANNE VERVEER: One of the problems has been that we look at women’s issues as women’s issues. Soft, nice, check the box on the side. We have got to integrate these issues in everything we do. We’ve got a major food security initiative that the United States is putting forward. Women are going to be a pillar of that initiative, because the great majority of the small holder farmers, 60 to 80 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, are women.
Photo Credits
Brazil3English by UNDP, MDG
Women fetch water by ketooo
USHINDI WOMEN – UGANDA – Fetching water to survive by camatlarge.
the garbage dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Poverty, Developement and Women in Pakistan by *abro*
Steung Meanchey 17 by ¡anna].
alt=”lluvia desde el coche by llanosom.”
Entoto – women carrying firewood by ngari.norway
Iranian women by “موج سبز by مریم سبک خیز.
“The Path by FartashPhoto.com.”
EcoJustice series discuss environmental justice, or the disproportionate impacts on human health and environmental effects on minority communities in the U.S. and around the world. All people have a human right to clean, healthy and sustainable communities.
Almost 4 decades ago, the EPA was created partially in response to the public health problems caused in our country by environmental conditions, which included unhealthy air, polluted rivers, unsafe drinking water and waste disposal. Oftentimes, the answer has been to locate factories and other pollution-emitting facilities in poor, culturally diverse, or minority communities.
Please join EcoJustice hosts on Monday evenings at 7PM PDT. Please email us if you are interested in hosting.
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Mon père, ce héros
My father is a Bayridge, Brooklyn, boy, who spent many summers in Coney Island's Luna Park.
A SF Rally protesting the elections in Iran. July, 2009.
He is a consummate historian, who has stood at the root of the Arvand Rūd, where the Tigris meets the Euphrates. He has run, not long after dawn, alone through the Vatican, to view the Sistine Chapel, disturbing a cardinal in solitary prayer. He has dined (as water from a leak in the roof dripped into a silver pot across the room ) at the old Ritz Hotel in London in the room where Churchill regularly took his meals, and walked afterwards down to the Thames to share a cup of tea with Cockney cabbies at an ancient taxi stand.
He flew to Hong Kong in the ’70s to meet my older brother on R&R from Vietnam; he took my little brother at age 12 on a Pan Am Trip to explore the world, and, years later, took me along on a business trip to England, where he went off on a day trip to Stonehenge while I searched for Mick Jagger’s house on Kings Road. His favorite charity is Médecins Sans Frontières ,and for the past few years, his passion has been addressing hunger and education in Addis Ababa.
Dad began his career scheduling concrete truck runs to sites throughout NYC. and moved on to become president of one of the largest construction companies in New York. He has negotiated with the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia and moved many of his finest workers to the Middle East to work on housing projects in Tehran and Riyadh.
He recalls sitting in a small cafe downtown Tehran when a small article on one of the back pages of the government run newspaper announced some fighting with Islamic rebels and realizing the end was near for Pahlavi. He testified before the World Court when, after the overthrow of the Shah, the Iranian government refused to pay their bills. He still thinks the Shah was a good man and probably doesn’t believe that the United States had anything to do with the overthrow of Mossadegh.
- His company won the contract to pour the concrete for the World Trade Center. His grandchildren, driving across bridges into and out of New York City, loved to look at the skyline and say “Grandfather built that building!”
- When I was 3, I recall so well, sitting on the stairs, struggling to buckle my black patent leather shoes. My father knelt down to help me and said, “Don’t you know there’s nothing daddy’s can’t do?” In my heart of hearts, I have always believed that.
- Dad used to tell the story about me fighting with the garbage men as they tried to haul away our Christmas Tree. To have him tell that story, one would think I had the strength of some 50 men that morning.
- I have always credited him for my (at times ferocious) convicctions; to hold fast and strong to the magic of dreams and to fight and rally for the underdog, the disenfranchised, the homeless, the hungry, those who lack access to educational opportunities, who sometimes need an extra push to realize their potential. Admittedly (and I don’t belive he would wish it otherwise) we don’t always see eye-to-eye on the passions which define the meaning of my life.
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. Le Petite Prince,Antoine de Saint Exupéry. (Tranlation: "Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.") Photo by Lizzy Phelan
"There is an art, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." ~Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: CARE, farm bill, monetization, Project Censored, US Food Aid
CARE: Farmers in Guatamala
The American charity CARE refuses to accept US Food Aid for developing countries, claiming the policy, which requires the bulk of resources be produced and shipped by heavily subsidized American companies, is detrimental to addressing the solutions to world hunger.
The ‘news story,’ Care Rejects US Food Aid, is included in Project Censored Top censored stories of 2009.
CARE’s decision aligns the program with the policies of The UN World Food Programme and European agencies which oppose monetization, recognizing the policy undermine local agriculture, destablizing the food production systems aid organizations are attempting to strengthen.
Two Congressional efforts to change US policy to donation of funds have been unsuccessful. Archer Daniels Midland, one of the major suppliers of food aid, is one of the major lobbyists impacting the structure and contents of the US Farm Bill.
A Business Week article earlier this year revealed that 2/3 of the $2 billion allocated in the Farm Act for international food aid does not pay for food, but for costs associated with processing, shipping and organizing the program. According to Business Week, Congress this year passed the same food aid package, despite President Bush’s request that the bill be modified to allow up to 25% of food aide be allocated to purchasing food from other countries as opposed to shipping it from the US.
Project Censored, a media research program at Calfornia’s Sonoma State University, publishes its list annually, as part of an annual yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action. The books are published in Spanish, Italian and Arabic. National judges, who read through hundreds of stories researched and compiled by University sociology and media students, have included Noam Chomsky, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally, Frances Moore Lappe, Michael Parenti, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, Mike Wallace and Howard Zinn.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: addis ababa, agribusiness, archer daniels midland, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, bore holes, Cargil, education, Elizabeth Dole, famine, food aid, MDGs, millennium development goals, OLPC, One laptop per child, Patricia Woertz, sustainable developent
Ethiopia
Ethiopia: Solar power, sustainable farming, rainwater harvesting and bore holes, fish ponds, etc.
Rema Village, Ethiopia
The Solar Energy Foundation, a German charity has wired the homes in this remote Ethiopian village of 5,5000 with 1,100 solar panels. of 5,500 people here with 1,100 solar panels. Only 1% of rural Ethiopians have access to electricity. The solar panels make it possible for residents to have lights and radios in their small huts, provides refrigeration in the village’s health clinics, fuels water pumps, and creates local jobs for electrical technicians, who are trained by the Foundation.
Solar Paneling Co. – Addis Ababa
the government should put emphasis on integration of fish culture with other activities. Extensive polyculture (stocking two or more species) in small lakes and artificial water bodies is also recommended as a means to increase productivity per unit area. Simultaneous production of fish in ponds combined with livestock, poultry and horticultural crops in urban and pre-urban is also suggested as one of the most productive culture system.
water in ethiopia
Boreholes: Drilling for water in Ethiopia
Ethiopia School
funding a school in ethiopia
MDGs: Universal Education Goal #2: 2015
Every human being should have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves. Unfortunately, too many children in the world today grow up without this chance, because they are denied their basic right to even attend primary school. A sustainable end to world poverty as we know it, as well as the path to peace and security, require that citizens in every country are empowered to make positive choices and provide for themselves and their families.
OLPC
The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege.
G1G1 News blog: beginning in Nov. thru Amazon partnership.
The Digital Rainforest: Role of Information & Communication Technologies in Addressing Global Digital Divide
Addis Ababa: Ideas for Bethlehem School
Jimma Times – Independent newspaper in Ethiopia
ethiopian restaurant
Where the diner is an altar of thanks: a NY Times guide to Ethiopian dining
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Sowing Seeds of Famine in Ethiopia
“The “economic therapy” imposed under IMF-World Bank jurisdiction is in large part responsible for triggering famine and social devastation in Ethiopia and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, wreaking the peasant economy and impoverishing millions of people.
With the complicity of branches of the US government, it has also opened the door for the appropriation of traditional seeds and landraces by US biotech corporations, which behind the scenes have been peddling the adoption of their own genetically modified seeds under the disguise of emergency aid and famine relief.
Moreover, under WTO rules, the agri-biotech conglomerates can manipulate market forces to their advantage as well as exact royalties from farmers. The WTO provides legitimacy to the food giants to dismantle State programmes including emergency grain stocks, seed banks, extension services and agricultural credit, etc.), plunder peasant economies and trigger the outbreak of periodic famines.”
Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:24:09 GMT
The United States sends most of its aid in the form of food. By law, 75 percent of U.S. food donations must be produced, processed, and shipped by U.S. companies.7 Some of the food is given to organizations or to governments that sell the food to make money for development projects. (This is called “monetization” of food aid.)
In recent years, the United States has bought more than half the food for its aid programs from just four agribusinesses and their subsidiaries: Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge and Cal Western Packaging, the Agriculture Department said.
Some researchers and advocates said that it was time to rethink the U.S. approach to fighting world hunger.
“Are we committed to eradicating hunger because it’s feasible, not terribly expensive and our moral obligation as the richest society in human history?” asked Christopher Barrett, a Cornell University economist and the co-author of “Food Aid After Fifty Years.” “Or are we just trying to placate a few agribusiness, shipping and NGO constituencies with a handout?” referring to nongovernmental organizations.
In contrast, Europe and almost every other country provide most of their food aid contributions in the form of cash grants. The donor country or the World Food Programme can then purchase food from within the region or country where it will be consumed.8 Cash grants allow the donor or WFP to respond quickly to events––such as crop failures or natural disasters––at a lower cost and deliver food where it is needed most.
US Aid Serves Agribusiness, Not the Hungry
“The United States contributes more food aid than any other country in the world, enough to feed about 55 million people in 2006.5 Unfortunately, the way in which the United States provides food aid is extremely inefficient and does little to help the recipients break free from their dependence on aid. Most U.S. food aid money is spent on logistics, not food.“
“Certain types of food “aid” (when not for emergency relief) can actually be destructive. Dumping food on to poorer nations (i.e. free, subsidized, or cheap food, below market prices) undercuts local farmers, who cannot compete and are driven out of jobs and into poverty, further slanting the market share of the larger producers such as those from the US and Europe.”
“The IMF and World Bank will be hard-pressed to agree their supposed sins committed in developing countries over the past two decades with out any regard for the far reaching consequences that are truly hard to correct, in the form of concrete steps to undo the harm caused by its policies that have led to the dismantling of systems put in place to protect farmers, mainly in Africa and the third world.”
Cargill
- Top U.S. company in grain exportation and flour milling.24
- Products and services include: seed, grain, genetically engineered crops, and flour milling.
ADM
- Top U.S. company in ethanol, soybean crushing, and shipping by barge.
- Products and services include: seed, crops, ethanol, biodiesel, flour milling, storage, and shipping food aid.
ADM: Contributions to Political Campaigns (2008)
| Dole, Elizabeth (R-NC) | Senate | $9,200 |
| Baucus, Max (D-MT) | Senate | $6,500 |
| Coleman, Norm (R-MN) | Senate | $6,250 |
| Durbin, Dick (D-IL) | Senate | $5,500 |
| Pomeroy, Earl (D-ND) | House | $5,500 |
| Emanuel, Rahm (D-IL) | House | $5,000 |
| Hare, Philip G (D-IL) | House | $5,000 |
| Harkin, Tom (D-IA) | Senate | $5,000 |
| Peterson, Collin C (D-MN) | House | $5,000 |
| Roberts, Pat (R-KS) | Senate | $4,500 |
The American River Transporation Company (ARTCO) is a subsidiary of the Archer Daniels Midland company.
ARTCO manages the transportation of ADM products along the Mississippi River, Ohio River, and Illinois River in the United States. ARTCO also manages transportation of Cocoa along the Madeira River in Brazil near Bolivia.
ARTCO owns 2,000 barges, plus dozens of towboats and harbor tugboats [2].
ARTCO ships many of ADM’s products, including as grain and oil seed, ethanol, and corn gluten meal.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
A sampling of the Gates Foundation’s largest investments:
Between $100 million and $1 billion
- Abbott Laboratories
- Archer Daniels Midland
Related Articles
Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2007 with an introduction by Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center
Bill Gates: Philanthropist or Profiteering Polluter?
“The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that it is paying for inoculations to protect health, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe. A sampling of the Gates Foundation’s largest investments between $100 million and $1 billion: Abbott Laboratories, Archer Daniels Midland, British Petroleum, Canadian National Railway, Exxon Mobil, Freddie Mac, French Government, Japanese Government, Merck, Schering Plough, Tyco International, Waste Management…Indeed, local leaders blame oil developments for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.” – Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders, Robyn Dixon, LA Times
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has more than $60 billion at its disposal – an amount higher than the gross domestic products of 70 percent of the world’s nations – is reportedly financially backing corporations which pollute the same areas of Africa that are targeted for vaccines made by companies that Gates also funds. A report in the LA Times points out that:
The Gates Foundation endowment had major holdings in:
- Companies ranked among the worst U.S. and Canadian polluters, including ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical Co. and Tyco International;
- Many of the world’s other major polluters, including companies that own an oil refinery and one that owns a paper mill, which a study shows sicken children while the foundation tries to save their parents from AIDS;
- Pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat.
Filed under: Africa | Tags: addis ababa, Africa, boreholes, Colonial Africa, Ethiopia, famine, food soverignity, New Orleans, oil, oil tankers
- Famine in Ethiopia
As local media report on the drought and famine in Ethiopia … oil tankers return without cargo to Africa … meanwhile, in the US, forty to fifty per cent of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten.
Hunger Stats
- More than 862 million people in the world go hungry.
- In developing countries nearly 16 million children die every year from preventable and treatable causes. Sixty percent of these deaths are from hunger and malnutrition.
- In the United States, 11.7 million children live in households where people have to skip meals or eat less to make ends meet. That means one in ten households in the U.S. are living with hunger or are at risk of hunger.
Source: Bread for All
Food waste
A proposal to address famine in Sub-Saharan Africa
- coordinating with grassroots and NGO organizations in sustainable agriculture projects in the US and in Africa
- investigating and developing best practice use of agricultural waste for alternative-fuel development
- education: coordinating with NGOs working in sub-Saharan Africa to train in regionally appropriate careers: rainwater harvesting, solar engineering, sustainable farming, technology, health care
- employment of microfinance and promotion of social entrepreneurship
US Food Loss
US Food Waste
Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, has spent the last 10 years measuring food loss, including the last eight under a grant from the US department of agriculture (USDA). Jones started examining practices in farms and orchards, before going onto food production, retail, consumption and waste disposal.
What he found was that not only is edible food discarded that could feed people who need it, but the rate of loss, even partially corrected, could save US consumers and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars each year. Jones says these losses also can be framed in terms of environmental degradation and national security.
