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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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 foodaid.)
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 foodaid 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.
“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 foodaid.
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.
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.
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.
