By Stephanie Parker
Jul 25 2012 (IPS)

At a time when big grocery stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are attracting scores of hungry customers, many local family-run farms are fighting to keep afloat.

Nonetheless, many products are left over from each day of sales.

City Harvest, a food rescue organisation in partnership with GrowNYC, a non-profit environmental group, uses the leftover produce to help the more than a million people in desperate need of food within the five boroughs of New York.

The scorching summer heat poses challenges for the Migliorelli family-run farm and other Grow NYC farmers selling their products at the Union Square farmer’s market.

David Hughes of GrowNYC told IPS, “The weather…is always a challenge for our producers. Many simply scale back on the volume they bring to market. They also use shade cloth, lots of ice, spritzer bottles and refrigerated box trucks to keep products cold.”

Associate Director of Food Sourcing at City Harvest Lisa Spazato said City Harvest has maintained a steady supply of produce from the GrowNYC farmers that participate in donating food that does not sell by the end of the day.

The partnership that developed between City Harvest and GrowNYC is explained by the latter’s David Sherman as a “natural relationship; obviously we have amazing seasonal produce that is perishable at the end of a long market day. What a wonderful thing for New Yorkers to give back to other New Yorkers at an end of a market day.”

In this pictorial story, IPS United Nations Multimedia Correspondent Shari Nijman shows how the food rescue process literally takes a team to happen.

The Union Square greenmarket is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

Click here to view the short video interview was filmed by Shari Nijman.

By Stephanie Parker
Jul 25 2012 (IPS)

At a time when big grocery stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are attracting scores of hungry customers, many local family-run farms are fighting to keep afloat.

“We stay in business because some people do get it,” and are prepared to invest in local produce, Jessica Migliorelli, a New York farmer, told IPS.

Nonetheless, many products are left over from each day of sales.

City Harvest, a food rescue organisation in partnership with GrowNYC, a non-profit environmental group, uses the leftover produce to help the more than a million people in desperate need of food within the five boroughs of New York.

The scorching summer heat poses challenges for the Migliorelli family-run farm and other Grow NYC farmers selling their products at the Union Square farmer’s market.

David Hughes of GrowNYC told IPS, “The weather…is always a challenge for our producers. Many simply scale back on the volume they bring to market. They also use shade cloth, lots of ice, spritzer bottles and refrigerated box trucks to keep products cold.”

Associate Director of Food Sourcing at City Harvest Lisa Spazato said City Harvest has maintained a steady supply of produce from the GrowNYC farmers that participate in donating food that does not sell by the end of the day.

The partnership that developed between City Harvest and GrowNYC is explained by the latter’s David Sherman as a “natural relationship; obviously we have amazing seasonal produce that is perishable at the end of a long market day. What a wonderful thing for New Yorkers to give back to other New Yorkers at an end of a market day.”

In this pictorial story, IPS United Nations Multimedia Correspondent Shari Nijman shows how the food rescue process literally takes a team to happen.

The Union Square greenmarket is open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

The short video interview below was filmed by Shari Nijman.

Olympic torch arriving at Tretherras School, Newquayon. Credit: Bobchin1941/CC by 2.0

By Isabelle de Grave and Stephanie Parker
NEW YORK, Jul 21 2012 (IPS)

As the 2012 London Olympics gears up to open on Jul. 27, criticism of the longstanding partnership between the Games and sponsor McDonald’s has stolen a small portion of the limelight.

It’s not only civil society activists protesting the fast food giant this year, but local politicians.

“London won the right to host the 2012 Games with the promise to deliver a legacy of more active, healthier children across the world,” the Green Party’s Jenny Jones, who recently proposed a motion to exclude McDonald’s, Coca-Coca-Cola and others from the Games, told the 25-member Labour-dominated London Assembly.

”Yet the same International Olympic Committee that awarded the games to London persists in maintaining sponsorship deals with the purveyors of high-calorie junk that contributes to the threat of an obesity epidemic.”

The McDonald’s marketing strategy means that investment in sporting education goes hand in hand with the sale of low-priced, high-calorie fast food. In the UK, the company is offering up to 117,000 dollars to local football clubs.

“McDonald’s anticipated the criticism around its junk food 30 to 40 years ago. It spent those decades building a structure and good will to deflect criticism about the health impact of its products,” Sara Deon of Corporate Accountability International told IPS, highlighting McDonald’s sponsorship of the Games as a clear example of this.

McDonald’s has been an official sponsor of the Olympics since 1976. The company recently had its contract extended by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to 2020.

Coca-Cola has also been a partner of the games since 1926. According to Benjamin Seeley of the International Olympic Committee, the company “sponsors more than 250 physical activity and nutrition education programmes in more than 100 countries”.

The Olympics rely on such commercial partnerships for more than 40 percent of revenues, and McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are two of the leading contributors.

McDonald’s did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the quality of its food in relation to the dietary needs of adults and children, and criticism of its Olympics sponsorship.

However, physicians and nutrition advocates have also expressed concern over both companies as official sponsors, particularly in the context of rising obesity in the UK.

There have been plans to boycott McDonald’s sponsorship of the games by civil society campaigners who deem it unworthy of inheriting the prestige of the Olympics as a supplier of fat, sugar and manipulative marketing initiatives.

Ceci Charles-King, an advocate for food justice, told IPS, “I worry about the message (sponsorship) sends to children and adults. McDonald’s is hydrogen, salt and empty calories. Coca-Cola is sugar, fructose corn syrup and empty calories.”

The Academy of Royal Medical Colleges recently declared that sponsorship by the fast food giant sends the wrong message to people in the UK, which has the most overweight population in Europe with 22 percent of Britons now considered obese.

When a customer goes to the U.S. McDonald’s website to look at the nutritional value associated with “happy meals” for kids, it only shows the calorie, fat and protein intake. The webpage omits saturated fat, salt, vitamin and sugar content and the user must navigate to another section to find the information.

“The food continues to be high in sugar, fat and salt…the so-called healthier options do little for people that are seeking truly healthy options,” Deon told IPS.

Selecting an example from the menu, she said that, “The fruit and maple porridge contains more grammes of sugar than a snickers (candy bar).”

“They are little more than a vehicle to sell its bread and butter products: burgers, chips and fizzy drinks,” she added.

According to Deon, McDonald’s’ investment in programmes to promote physical activity “fall well short of the meaningful change that we need to address the epidemic of diet-related disease and McDonald’s needs to address the core issue of ending its marketing to kids.”

The McDonald’s Olympic restaurant, located in the Athlete’s Village, is the largest in the world, seating up to 1,500 people. It is expected to serve around 14,000 people a day during the Games, and will be offering free Olympic-themed happy meal toys to children.

Asked how children might avoid junk food buoyed by the positive image of the Olympics, Charles-King said it may be as simple as “(showing) the child how to cook so they can make better food choices”.

As far as athletes are concerned, Jill McDonald, UK chief executive of McDonald’s, has commented on the busy location of the restaurant in the Athlete Village, stating that athletes know more than anyone what they should be eating.

Benjamin Seeley told IPS that, “The IOC only enters into partnerships with organisations that work in accordance with the values of the Olympic movement.”

In June, the London Assembly has passed a motion calling for stricter criteria to assess suitable Olympic sponsors. New rules would exclude high-calorie food and beverage producers from sponsorship roles, ending the age-old relationship between McDonald’s and the Olympics.

This year is not the first time that Olympic sponsors have come under scrutiny. In 2008, human rights activists called for a boycott to end sponsorship of McDonald’s and other restaurants.

Food retailers are not the only sponsors to face opposition this year. Indian athletes and officials will be skipping the opening and closing ceremonies to protest Dow Chemical’s involvement with the Games. Dow is the owner of Union Carbide, whose 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India killed more than 22,000 people and polluted soil and water sources for years to come.

By Stephanie Parker
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 13 2012 (IPS)

U.N. correspondent Stephanie Parker sits down with filmmaker Lieven Corthouts as he opens up about the children in “Little Heaven” orphanage, located in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

“Ethiopia has one of the largest populations of orphans in the world, with 13 percent of all children having lost one or both parents. That makes 4.6 million orphans,” the film notes.

Lydia Berhanu is the main character in the film and on her 13^th birthday she is told that she has HIV by a caretaker and is moved to the “big kid” orphanage: Little Heaven.

As she grapples with the news, the viewers get a chance to see the vulnerability of a child but also the normal life she leads with the other children in the orphanage.

The viewers also get a glimpse into Lydia’s support system and her health problems as Corthouts navigates through her struggles and hopes to go on to a better school the following year.

“There needs to be more support and structure to help the African people. HIV infected people need to be better informed and to receive more material assistance, with daily access to medications,” the filmmakers note.

The film premiered on June 25^th at the Human Rights Film Festival in New York City.

IPS correspondent Shari Nijman filmed the interview.

As the United States struggles to level the racial disparities in its education system, the birth rate of minorities has been rising steadily. Experts say this confluence of statistics should compel Americans to seriously address the flaws and failures of the country’s public education system.

Public education statistics underscore an already alarming achievement gap that could widen depending on how successfully the United States addresses a host of issues, among them equal access to quality education.

Although high school dropout rates for all students between 1990 and 2010 have decreased overall, the 2010 dropout rate of African-Americans and Hispanics was nevertheless at least 50 percent higher than that of white students, according to “The Condition of Education 2012“, published by the National Centre for Education Statistics.

“Black students went from (a dropout rate of) 13 percent in 1990 to 8 percent in 2010, Hispanics went from 32 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2010 and whites went from 9 percent in 1990 to 5 percent in 2010,” the report stated.

Of children under the age of one year, 50.4 percent were minorities as of July 2011, up 49.5 percent from 2010, according to the latest census results.

Hispanics in the United States numbered 52 million in 2011. They also had the fastest growing population, boosting the Hispanic share of the nation’s total population from 16.3 percent in 2010 to 16.7 percent in 2011.

African-Americans are considered the second largest minority group, at 43.9 million in 2011. Asian-Americans numbered 18.2 million in 2011 and were the second fastest growing minority group.

Significant disparities in quality and access

“There is a twofold problem with advanced placement courses in public school system(s) because some heavily minority populated schools have limited access to advanced placement courses,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau.

“Other schools have ‘segregation’ in their advanced placement courses because the classes tend to have a majority of white students,” he noted.

States play a major role in combating education disparities in the United States, Shelton added. “It is really at the state level that we need to focus on resources,” he said. “Only 10 percent of public school funding comes from federal funds and the other 90 percent comes from the state.”

Still, the federal government remains important for changing the quality of schools and education.

Shelton advocated for the NAACP’s six-point education plan, a blueprint for public schools that calls for federal law to fund schools equally and to ensure that all students have the necessary resources and quality of teaching to achieve high standards. It also calls upon the government to “protect the voice of communities in school decisions”.

Ideally, the NAACP’s plan will evolve over time, Shelton said, because “there is enough flexibility in the plan for communities to bring in their community culture into the process….It is a blueprint for the public school.”

The organisation hopes that “the population will become more and more diverse” until eventually one “can disregard a minority group”.

The Centre for American Progress (CAP) published a report, “Increasing Education Effectiveness and Efficiency of Existing Public Investments in Early Childhood Education” on June 1 that noted “the keys to boosting program quality, efficiency, and student results rest with federal officials who already have sufficient legislative authority to continue to streamline, innovate, and improve the early learning services” throughout the country.

The report called for recognising students’ diversity and giving all students access to the same quality of education.

“We need to provide pre-school for lower income children. Right now, you have lower income children, African-American and Latino children who are disproportionately low income start school less prepared than more affluent kids and white kids who are more likely to get high quality pre-school education,” said Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at CAP.

Vanessa Cardenas, director of Progress 2050, a CAP project, said in a press statement, “The success of children of colour needs to be at the top of our list.”

The demise of ethnic studies

Yet the achievement gap is only one area of public education in which minorities are losing out.

In a controversial initiative, the community of Tucson, Arizona suspended its Mexican-American studies (MAS) program in a district with one of the largest populations of Hispanic students in country; during the 2009-2010 school year, 49.4 percent of students were Hispanic, according to the Harvard School of Public Health.

The curriculum is being rewritten and will be integrated into a general social studies program. The school board made the decision after a federal judge ruled that the program violated Arizona state law and ordered that what would amount to millions of dollars in state aid be withheld until the district complied and ended the program.

Sally Rusk, a MAS teacher in Tucson, Arizona explained why the program is important and why students, activities and teachers are fighting hard to bring it back.

“If young people do not see the contributions of their ancestors or see themselves as part of the fabric of this country this marginalisation is hurting society. It is desperately hurting society. It is making young people and adults not participate. It is just horrible. Killing these classes now, (when) instead they should be expanded.”

“They made me drink my own urine,” said one former detainee, Addam Ayedh al-Shayef, describing his experiences in detainment in Yemen. “When I refused to drink it, they electrocuted me. After I came home, I would dream I was still being tortured and I’d wake up screaming.”

Shayef and nearly two dozen other former detainees told their stories to the rights group Human Rights Watch, which released a news report today on the illegal detention of opposition protestors, fighters and sympathisers, and opponents of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh since protests began in February 2011.

Since that time, Human Rights Watch found, people were detained for days, weeks and even months by security forces and usually denied access to attorneys, with no ability to visit with relatives and without adequate food and shelter.

During detainment, prisoners were subjected to beatings, electric shock, death or rape threats, and long periods of solitary confinement.

The organisation spoke with both former detainees and relatives of protestors and opposition fighters. Its report incorporated vivid accounts by former detainees of their experiences in detainment after the group documented 37 cases of arbitrary detainment.

Shayef, 21, said that men he believed to be from the government’s National Security Bureau grabbed him from a street in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, on March 4 of this year. In prisons in Sanaa and Aden, a port city in the south of the country, they repeatedly tortured him for a week.

How many more accounts are similar to Addam Ayedh al-Shayef’s story? According to Human Rights Watch, that fact is difficult to ascertain, due to limited accessibility to public information and little to no access to detention facilities, even though a new transition government is in power.

Security forces and intelligence agencies have even prevented government officials, including Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashhour, and lawyers from accessing detention centers, according to the report. Mashhour said she believed that dozens are still being held in arbitrary detainment, including by opposition forces.

Lip service

In January, Yemen’s transitional cabinet and a military restructuring committee headed by Abdu Rabo Mansour Hadi, who was the sole candidate for and winner of the presidency in February, ordered the release of those arbitrarily detained.

Yet even after this order, about 100 detainees still need to be released. “I honestly think many sectors of the government do not know how many people are being held,” Human Rights Watch spokesperson Letta Tayler told IPS.

Human Rights Watch still managed to gather information and accounts from former detainees, finding that detainees had been kept from a few days to ten months by security and intelligence units that were run by relatives of former president Saleh and even now generally remain outside of the government’s control.

Meanwhile an immunity law enacted on January 21, under the transitional government, gives amnesty to former president Saleh for his political crimes as well as those who served under him during his 33- year rule.

“The law violates Yemen’s international legal obligations to prosecute serious violations of human rights and does not shield officials from prosecution for offenses committed since its enactment,” said the report.

Furthermore, when Human Rights Watch visited Sanaa earlier this year, many local human rights groups and officials said that people were still being detained and kept out of communication, by both government and opposition forces, even as both sides denied doing so.

In the news report, Human Rights Watch called for “the United States, the European Union, and the Gulf states (to) call for the transfer of all detainees to judicial authorities so they can be freed or charged and prosecuted in impartial and fair proceedings”.

“I think many countries around the world want to see stability in Yemen,” said Tayler.

However, Tayler noted, the problem is that there are security concerns, which tend to come first. “What you see happening is there is less focus on human rights because of security issues. Yemen has a very active branch of Al-Qaeda and if there is ever reason for concern, human rights and security can go hand in hand.”

The typical person detained is considered to be from one of four broad categories, said Tayler. These categories include foes of the fallen government, opposition protestors or fighters, or members of government forces; sympathizers, even if they are not protestors; those people who hailed from cities or towns that were flash points of opposition to the government; and fighters from opposition forces.

Fifteen million babies, or more than one in 10 infants, are born prematurely each year. Over one million die soon after birth, or survive to face a lifetime of health complications, says a new report by the World Health Organisation and co- sponsors.

Preterm births are rising in almost all countries and are now the single most important cause of neonatal deaths. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Preterm births, defined by 37 weeks of completed gestation or less, are rising in almost all countries and are now the single most important cause of neonatal deaths of babies under 28 days.

“Being born too soon is an unrecognized killer. Preterm births account for almost half of all newborn deaths worldwide and are now the second leading cause of death in children under five, after pneumonia,” Joy Lawn, co-editor of the report “Born Too Soon: The Global Action Report on Preterm Birth,” and director of Global Evidence and Policy for Save the Children, said in a press release.

“The numbers of preterm births are increasing. In all but three countries, preterm birth rates increased in the last 20 years. Worldwide, 50 million births still happen at home and many babies die without birth or death certificates.”

Fifteen countries account for two-thirds of the world’s preterm births, with India and China in the lead. Out of all live births, preterm births account for 11.1 percent, 60 percent of which occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. On average, 12 percent of preterm births occur in low-income countries compared to nine percent in high-income countries.

“What I found shocking is (the difference) geographically and within countries when we look at the rates of preterm birth in Asia and sub- Sahara Africa… What really struck me is the equity gap of preterm birth,” Christopher Howson, co-editor of the report and head of Global Programs for March of Dimes, told IPS.

“You take a baby that is less than 28 weeks, if the baby is born in a rich country, it has a 90 percent chance to live. If born in a poor country, it only has a 10 percent chance to live.”

However, the problem is not confined to the developing world. The United States and Brazil both rank among the top countries with the highest number of preterm births. In the U.S., at sixth place, more than one in nine births, about 12 percent, are preterm.

There are disparities within groups in the U.S. too. In 2009, the preterm birth rate for white citizens was 10.9 percent, while it was as high as 17.5 percent for black citizens. The age of the mother also mattered, with the birth rate between 11 and 12 percent for women aged 20 to 35 and over 15 percent for women under 17 and over 40.

The report links a number of factors to the increase in preterm births, which in general remain unexplained though a number of risk factors have been identified such as a prior history of preterm birth, underweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, genetics and pregnancies spaced too closely together.

In high-income countries, causes include older women having babies, increased use of fertility drugs resulting in multi-fetal pregnancies, and medically unnecessary inductions and Cesarean deliveries before full-term.

Main causes identified in low-income countries include infections, malaria, HIV, and high adolescent pregnancy rates.

Preterm births have been a largely overlooked and neglected problem, health experts admit. This report is the first ever to provide comparable country-level estimates for preterm births.

“Ten years ago, I was working as a pediatrician in Ghana and it was very obvious every day…I was in charge of the baby nursery with about 11,000 births a year and there were babies dying every day of things that they did not need to die of. I started looking around and at the time there were no U.N. estimates of death or clinical guidelines of what to do or donors interested in it,” Lawn told IPS.

According to the report, two-thirds of premature births could be prevented with “feasible, cost-effective care.” Prevention is the key to reduce preterm numbers, and an estimated three-quarters of babies born too soon could survive if only a few proven and inexpensive treatments were more widely available.

Empowering and educating girls, family planning, screening women for known medical conditions, assuring good nutrition before and during pregnancy, and better access to healthcare are effective measures in reducing premature births.

Essential and extra newborn care, including feeding support, neonatal resuscitation, and Kangaroo mother care, a method involving infants being carried with skin-to-skin contact, could help in reducing the number of premature deaths.

The report also recommends that healthcare providers collaborate with businesses and civil societies to advocate, invest and provide funding to reduce preterm births. Even adding a dollar for each woman in prenatal care can make a difference, Lawn told IPS. “There are a couple of things that people can do to make the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) reachable. Even if the countries just picked two methods, like Kangaroo care and prenatal steroid shots, that can be a major game changer.”

MDG 5 aims to reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio, as well as achieve universal access to reproductive health care.

There’s an action gap in what is being done, Howson said. Civil society groups, for example, are an untapped resource that can be powerful in the community.

“We all have a role to play. I think in particular that groups like parent groups are so incredibly important in really creating noise. They are able to advocate from the ground up and that can be much more effective than trying to change from the top down,” he said.

*Stephanie Parker reported from United Nations headquarters in New York.