Khetsiwe Tofile a small-scale vegetable farmer in her garden in Malkerns, Eswatini. Even during the COVID-19 lockdown she has been able to get her produce to market and continues to earn an income. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MALKERNS, Eswatini, Apr 28 2020 (IPS)

Nobukhosi Cebekhulu (68) and Khetsiwe Tofile (64) are small-scale vegetable farmers who are producing from their permaculture home gardens in Malkerns, Eswatini.

Proud that they are able to make a small contribution towards a healthy nation during the COVID19 pandemic, both women say they are happy that they can still continue to produce and sell vegetables without leaving their homes.

IPS found them waiting for transport outside Tofile’s home with basins of lettuce to be collected by the Guba Permaculture Training Centre.

“We don’t go to the shop to buy inputs but we use seedlings that we produce and share among ourselves,” Cebekhulu told IPS adding: “Our produce is collected from our homes and taken to the market.”

According to Cebekhulu, they are part of the Guba programme which introduced them to skills of producing food in a way that is rebuilding and strengthening the physical ecology around them. Guba is based in Malkerns – a small bustling town of farmland nestled at the heart of Eswatini’s middleveld – and promotes a regenerative lifestyle.

Run on a 100-percent solar system, Guba harvests rainwater for sanitation and irrigation, produces its own compost and seedlings. Guba runs a 12-month permaculture training programme building practical skills and knowledge for improving homestead food security and crop resilience.

Cebekhulu and Tofile were part of the 2014 class of 25 farmers who learnt to build a fence using scrap material and alien evasive plants. They were also taught to produce their own seeds, make compost and pesticides (they make the latter by mixing wild garlic, chillies, onion, soap and warm water) that are not harmful to the environment.  

“This doesn’t kill the pests but it chases them away,” Cebekhulu said. “Pesticides aren’t good for our health and the environment. They’re also expensive.”

While Guba initially supported the farmers to produce enough for their families, Tofile told IPS the centre later trained them on business management so that they could sell and generate an income. The farmers come from 10 chiefdoms within a radius of 20 kilometres from the centre.

“Guba collects the produce and sells it on our behalf,” Tofile said. “That’s why we don’t have to worry about leaving home during this period (COVID19 partial lockdown).”

Guba director, Sam Hodgson, said the year-long permaculture adult training programme is a response to the nutrition and poverty challenges in Eswatini. Credit: Mantoe Phakathi/IPS

Eswatini’s nutritional challenges

According to Guba director, Sam Hodgson, the year-long permaculture adult training programme is a response to the nutrition and poverty challenges in Eswatini.

Although 20 percent of Eswatini’s rural population experienced severe and acute food insecurity according to the 2019 Vulnerability Assessment Committee Report,  the country is making progress in meeting its nutritional needs. According to Musa Dlamini, the monitoring and evaluation officer at Eswatini Nutrition Council, children under five years old with stunting stands at 25.5 percent.

“This is still high because we have to be less than 20 percent in terms of the WHO [World Health Organisation] standards,” Dlamini told IPS. “We’ve made progress though because the figure dropped from around 30 percent in previous years.”

In the same age group, children with wasting are at about 2 percent and underweights are at 5 percent, which is acceptable in terms of WHO standards.

“We use children under 5 to measure nutrition in the country,” said Dlamini.

He said COVID19 might reverse progress though following the fact that people might lose their source of income during the partial lockdown period. Already, 63 percent of the total population of 1.3 million are poor, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Guba participants spend two to three days a month at the centre after which they apply what they have learnt at their homes. They acquire skills to harvest water, make compost, mulching, plant perennial species of trees and design their production cycle according to the four seasons. 

“We encourage the farmers to use material that they already have at home,” Hodgson told IPS. “That’s why we don’t expect them to buy new fencing material or tools. We’re adding value to the agriculture they’re already practising.”

Adapting to climate change

Hodgson said this programme is helping farmers acquire skills to cope with erratic rainfall as an adaptation strategy to climate change.

According to Dr. Deepa Pullanikkatil, a consultant based at the Coordinating Assembly of NGOs (CANGO) and co-director at Sustainable Futures in Africa, permaculture helps farmers to adapt to changing climate using sustainable farming practises which mimic nature.

“The practise produces healthy organic crops which can improve their incomes thereby enhancing their adaptive capacity,” Pullanikkatil told IPS.

She said, in permaculture, farmers harvest and conserve water, which is an adaptation strategy particularly because the country is experiencing erratic rainfall patterns due to climate change. Farmers also use low or no tillage methods and composting which are all great for soil fertility. Low tillage frees up time and it is less costly than hiring labour or tractors.

“This also has co-benefits to climate mitigation because of permanent crops, trees grown in the farm and low tillage practices contribute to carbon sequestration,” she said.

Garden farming equates healthy nutrition

Guba also supports the farmers with eating habits that promote a healthy lifestyle such as cooking that retains nutrients and adjusting the composition of the plate according to the right amount of starch, protein and vegetables.

The Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) also promotes healthy and sustainable dietary patterns and sustainable ways of producing food. According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the BCFN and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), sub-Saharan Africa is home to the world’s hungriest populations. It also states that when it comes to countries addressing nutritional challenges “best practices might be found in smart regulation, whether that means educating consumers on healthy eating, discouraging unhealthy consumption patterns or requiring foods to contain certain vitamins and minerals”.

“What we’ve learnt about our farmers is that after participating in our programme, they visit the clinic less often because of the health benefits from the food they eat and how they eat it,” said Hodgson.

From garden to market

Guba also realised that one of the farmers’ challenges was money to pay school fees for their children and cater for other needs. Therefore, the centre decided to train some of the interested farmers to produce for the market. Hodgson described Guba as “an ethical middle-man” that supports the farmers to produce high-quality organic vegetables and sells it on their behalf to surrounding restaurants.

“We collect, repack and deliver,” said Hodgson. “This area (Malkerns) has a large middle-class population and many restaurants who buy the fresh produce that is delivered on the same day of harvest.”

This project earned about $1,100 from the sale of vegetables. Each farmer makes about $200 per month.

During the COVID-19 partial lockdown, which the Government introduced in March, all Guba restaurant customers had to close overnight. In response to this sudden loss of market, Guba opened a farm stall at the centre.

“After four weeks of operating the farm stall, three days a week. We’re doing well. Sales are increasing and customer feedback is very positive,” said Hodgson. 

This means Guba continues to buy produce from the farmers even during the COVID19 period thus keeping their income stream open and, at the same time, supplying fresh produce to the local community. 

Excerpt:

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Nov 11 2015 (IPS)

Slower economic growth since 2008, and especially with the commodity price collapse since the end of last year, threatens to reverse the exceptional half-decade before the financial crash when growth in the South stayed ahead of the North. From 2002, many developing countries – including some of the poorest– had been growing much faster after a quarter century of stagnation in Africa, for example.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAO

But this has not been their delayed reward for sticking to policies prescribed by conventional wisdom as claimed by some latter-day apologists for the structural adjustment programmes of the last two decades of the 20th century. Instead, a more favourable international environment, including higher commodity prices, low interest rates and renewed aid flows, along with accelerated growth in China and India, have been the main reasons.

Recent trends need to be seen in a longer historical context if the right lessons are to be drawn. Economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s was generally slower than in the preceding two decades. But despite the spectacular growth of several developing countries, sub-Saharan Africa lost due to stagnation for more than two decades from the late 1970s and Latin America lost at least the 1980s.

Government policies from the 1980s – ostensibly to conform to ‘market expectations’ – often cut public spending on primarily social expenditures. As national-level inequalities grew in most countries from the 1980s, inter-national inequalities among countries continued to grow. Economic welfare in developing countries has been further squeezed by demographic pressures including rapid urbanization.

Nascent industrialization in many countries was aborted by structural adjustment and economic liberalization. Premature trade liberalization has thus exacerbated de-industrialization, unemployment and fiscal deficits without generating alternative sources of economic growth. Low income countries as well failed and failing states are generally characterized by modest industrialization which, in turn, retards structural transformation and more inclusive sustainable development.

The negative developmental implications of policies and programmes forced on developing countries, regardless of historical circumstance and economic context, are now well known. There is a world of difference between measured liberalization from a position of economic strength, as in newly industrialized East Asia from the 1980s, and their forced adoption, to meet World Trade Organization or loan obligations. Despite pious official rhetoric claiming the contrary, multilateral rules are far from supportive of sustainable development and need to be reformed accordingly.

Since the late 19th century, adverse terms of trade movements – favouring manufactures over primary commodities, temperate compared to tropical agricultural products, or manufactures from developed countries against those from developed countries – have meant that many developing countries have been producing and exporting much more, but earning relatively less from doing so.

International financial liberalization was supposed to attract private capital to fill financing gaps. But instead, it has resulted in net capital flows from the ‘capital poor’ to the ‘capital rich’, increased financial volatility and slower economic growth. Bitter experience has also shown that ‘shock therapy’ – often involving financial system ‘big bangs’ – has generally caused more harm than good.

Considering their greater vulnerability to external vicissitudes, developing countries must have greater fiscal space to ensure countercyclical capacity as well as sustained public spending for needed investments in physical and social infrastructure and human resources. Strengthening the tax base, ensuring more reliable sources of international finance and channelling aid through national budgets can be crucial.

Instead of the current fetish with eliminating fiscal deficits, a more balanced and appropriate approach to macroeconomic stabilization is needed, to minimize disruptive swings in economic activity and external balances, while fostering a virtuous cycle of greater macroeconomic stability, investment, growth and employment generation. Developing countries need to strengthen their capacities and capabilities and to ensure sufficient ‘policy space’ in order to pursue appropriate reforms favouring sustainable development.

It has often been claimed that development could only be attained through retrenchment of the state. In much of the developing world, however, this has left choice-less illiberal democracies and frustrated disenfranchised citizens. Instead, democratically accountable governments should consult widely among their citizens to promote investments for structural transformation and better employment.

The global economy now risks continuing its downward spiral into protracted stagnation. The International Monetary Fund’s improved surveillance mechanisms have not led to better international macroeconomic coordination, as touted. Instead, the path to sustainable development remains blocked by self-imposed deflationary policy constraints and a refusal to provide needed aid or to cooperate to increase taxation for all.

(End)

Excerpt:

Sixty-five years after a major international summit here on malaria, the mosquito-borne disease remains a scourge and its incidence may even be rising in parts of sub-Saharan Africa due to the combined effects of climate change, agricultural practices and population displacement.

Almost half the world’s population is deemed at risk of malaria, and an estimated 214 million people will contract it in 2015, with nearly half a million dying.

Credit: FAO

“Malaria is the number one public health problem in our country,” says Babria Babiler El-Sayed, director of Sudan’s Tropical Medicine Research Institute. Sudan has begun, with the assistance of FAO and the IAEA, to release sterilized male mosquitoes into the air in hopes that they crowd out their virile brethren and lead to reduced mosquito populations.

The Unite d Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) have used this “nuclear” technique with success against the lethal tsetse fly and the produce-destroying fruit fly. Malaria is a new area, and the two agencies are experimenting across East Africa with this so-called Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) of pest control.

And yet malaria is demonstrably preventable – and that is why it is explicitly named in Sustainable Development Goal No. 3 as something to be ended by 2030.

The key is not to rely on one method or tool but to develop integrated efforts to subdue the disease, notes El-Sayed.

That fits FAO’s broader approach. While working with the IAEA on the logistics and technology of SIT, field officers emphasize the need to integrate agricultural practices ranging from crop selection, tilling technique, water use and even rural home locations.

It’s a shift from 1950, when a World Health Organization conference held in Kampala resolved to support the intensive use of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) to eradicate the disease. As was learned the hard way, even such a potent chemical cannot on its own sustainably solve the problem. Indeed, in the emblematic case of the Tennessee Valley in the United States, it was a mass anti-poverty campaign coupled with a huge hydroelectric public-works program that led to the rapid demise of malaria without the use of chemicals in the 1930s.

Warmer climate helps bugs fly higher

Particularly alarming is malaria’s literal ascent into the densely-populated highlands of east Africa. Inhabitants of southwest Uganda and parts of Zambia and Rwanda typically lack the genetic resistance to malaria developed by farmers in mosquito-prone areas.

Climate change wreaks all sorts of changes in the risk profile of the human environment. For example, more and more Zambians are killed by crocodiles, lions and buffalos as they travel further for water in times of drought. Less headline-grabbing, but more pervasive, is the way one poor harvest can wipe out livelihoods, driving people to sell their livestock, tools and even land in a bid to survive and ending up mired in poverty. Similarly, pressure on the land – sometimes linked to civil conflict – is driving record flows of migrants, the majority of whom don’t leave their countries, but move into new ecosystems, as scores of Ugandans are doing by moving to the hilly southwest regions of this country and ultimately taking up a form of farming that enhances the risk of malaria.

Add to this the steady climb in average temperatures, which increase the potential habitat for the main malarial vectors and are “related to altitude rather than latitude,” according to recent research done by the International Food Policy Research Institute into why the incidence of malaria has risen so dramatically in Uganda’s upcountry. That spells special risks for elevations above 2,000 meters in Kenya, Ethiopia and Burundi, too.

Strategies must be integrated and local

Despite popular images today, malaria is not particularly a tropical disease. Indeed, it was the successful use of DDT in postwar Italy that galvanized the Kampala conference, even though it now appears the rising incomes linked to Marshall Plan-funded economic growth was the determining factor.

Integrated methods – farming techniques, crops themselves, and human practices such as the use of nets – are all part of any success story in malaria. Zambia’s Malaria Institute at Macha has, with international support, practically eliminated malaria in its southern district, and the credit should go primarily to an engaged community effort, according to Dr. Phil Thuma, one of the institute’s mainstays and an advocate of what he calls “full court press” tactics in battling the epidemic.

FAO has long been involved in distributing mosquito nets, one of the simple but critical tools in any effort. Indeed, one current FAO project promotes the use of insecticide-treated nets around livestock barns in Kenya and has led to a sharp uptick in dairy production as both humans and animals are healthier.

The media has long indulged in donor-depressing tales about Zambian fishermen using anti-mosquito nets to boost their catch or – in one quirky story from Uganda but published in Botswana – p eople using the nets to make bridal dresses. But in fact most people in eastern Africa have and use their government-provided nets today, and many buy another one in a sign of conviction about their utility, according to a detailed survey of actual behaviour in Tanzania.

The real problem is that many farmers have to get up before dawn, or stay out in their fields late, and as a result their work forces them to forgo protection during the biting hours.

Almost everybody knows the basics about malaria, but few had heard about climate change. Intriguingly, those with secondary or higher education tended to worry about unpredictable rain patterns while those with only primary education are focused on rising temperatures.

Empirical surveys clearly show that where cultivation practices reduce vegetation cover, temperatures rise in mosquito breeding sites. That means land use and reforestation efforts need to be part of the community-driven policy mix. Farmer field schools, a longtime FAO priority focus, are key to spreading knowledge that is locally useful, such as casting shade on breeding places or fostering fish in ponds.

Developing “malaria-smart” programs need to be drawn up with that in mind, especially given efforts to increase irrigation infrastructures to boost agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa. One survey in Ethiopia found that the rate of childhood malaria was seven times higher in villages within three kilometres of a microdam for irrigation than children living more than eight kilometres away.

Maize cultivation, a huge force in the region, may also be lifting the incidence of malaria because the higher-yield hybrid varieties used pollinate later in the year, helping fatten up mosquito larvae – meaning more, bigger and longer-living adult ones.

(End)

Patient undergoing dialysis treatment at Mulago Hospital in Kampala. Credit: Rebecca Vassie

By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, Jun 15 2015 (IPS)

Vincent Mugyenyi, a 65-year-old retired pilot from the Ugandan Air Force, has lost count of how many dialysis treatment slots he has had to attend in the eight years he has been fighting chronic kidney disease.

He spends eight hours a week on a dialysis machine in Mulago National Referral Hospital that filters toxins from his blood, performing the functions of healthy kidneys. The ultimate aim of dialysis is to bridge a gap until kidney functions recover or until a transplant is available for patients.

“I used to have a small farm with about one hundred animals. I sold all those animals for treatment because I still needed life. That is how this disease has affected me. It has depleted every resource of mine … land is very important but I have sold mine just to buy life,” Mugyenyi told IPS.

Mugyenyi is both luck and unfortunate. He is one of the minority of Ugandans with chronic kidney disease who has been able to receive dialysis treatment, but he does not qualify for a kidney transplant operation because of his advanced age.“We don’t have sufficient data on the disease. We understand more about HIV, malaria and tuberculosis, because these are diseases with lots of funding behind them. But funding for kidney disease isn’t there. Kidney disease deserves the same level of importance as HIV” – Dr Robert Kalyesubula, nephrologist at Mulago Hospital in Kampala

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a growing health burden in Uganda that is affecting the economic, social and physical livelihoods of patients and their family members.

Dr, Simon Peter Eyoku, a kidney disease specialist at Mulago Hospital’s renal unit, told IPS that CKD affects mainly Ugandan adults aged between 20 and 50, and that the commonest causes of kidney diseases in Uganda are HIV-related infections of the kidney, followed by hypertension and diabetes.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that with CKD being the 12^th leading cause of deaths worldwide and its incidence growing by around eight percent annually, it is a global public health concern.

Mulago National Referral Hospital is the only public hospital in Uganda treating patients with renal or kidney-related complications and, according to Eyoku, that often places a further burden on patients who have to travel long distances to the dialysis unit.

“I have seen patients migrate from far corners of the country to Kampala because that is where the dialysis machines are. That is how costly this disease can be to patients,” Eyoku told IPS.

A further problem is that the dialysis unit only has 33 haemodialysis machines for a total population of about 36 million people.

When the unit opened almost eight years ago with four dialysis machines, a patient had to pay the equivalent of 500 dollars for a week of dialysis treatment, making the cost of treatment prohibitive.

“Those who could afford it would fall out after selling land, houses, cars and then failing to continue. And at that time, the cost of a transplant was equal to the amount of money you paid in a year for dialysis,” said Eyoku.

In March 2014, the administration of Mulago Hospital decided to reallocate its budget in order to finance the renal unit and brought the cost of a week of treatment down to 40 dollars, but that is still out the reach of most Ugandans.

The hospital is now also offering two free sessions of dialysis, and Eyoku told IPS that this has led to an influx of patients with CKD, “so now we are struggling because we are getting many more patients on dialysis.”

Uganda’s health planners are accused of not giving priority to kidney-related diseases. “I wish we had more specialists managing kidney diseases,” Dr Robert Kalyesubula, one of the four consulting nephrologists at Mulago Hospital, told IPS.

“I wish we had more specialists managing kidney diseases, I wish we had more awareness programmes about kidney disease so that people know about it because it is devastating. I have seen big people break down on being diagnosed with kidney disease. And the pain, because it affects a whole family. If a father gets the disease then the children will not go to school.”

One of the difficulties with kidney disease is that in its early stages it has no specific symptoms so the patients who turn up for treatment are often in the final stages of the disease.

“Patients come in the dying stage,” said Kalyesubula. “You spend 90 percent of your time struggling to keep people alive rather than making them live.”

In addition, said the nephrologist, in Uganda as in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the magnitude of CKD is unknown and is not given sufficient importance.

“We don’t have sufficient data on the disease. We understand more about HIV, malaria and tuberculosis, because these are diseases with lots of funding behind them. But funding for kidney disease isn’t there. Kidney disease deserves the same level of importance as HIV. We are ignoring a disease which can be treated in its early stages.”

Patients who cannot afford to pay the 40 dollars a week for dialysis are treated in ward 4C, and the impression is that they are prisoners condemned to a death sentence with no possibility of appeal.

When IPS visits the ward on a busy afternoon, the scene was one of pathetic chaos, with the few doctors and nurses available rushing round, attending to both adult males and young girls in the same ward.

A male patient in his mid-forties had just died from kidney failure, and at the entrance to the ward, IPS met Rosemary Kyakuhaire, packing the bags of a brother who had died earlier in the day. She said that he had spent three weeks in the ward receiving palliative care because her family could not afford the expensive dialysis treatment.

In Uganda, Kalyesubula told IPS, a person would rather be diagnosed with HIV than kidney disease. “I say that mainly because HIV has a lot of support systems in Uganda. But for kidney disease, you are there on your own.  I have also seen people sell their houses to go for a kidney transplant but you don’t have to do that for HIV/AIDS.”

Provision of CKD treatment in Uganda depends primarily on whether the patient has health insurance or can otherwise afford treatment through taking out loans, selling property or financial support from relatives and friends. There are two private hospitals offering dialysis but only a lucky few can afford them.

Twenty-seven-year old Benon Mulindwa is one of the lucky ones. His employer, the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF), had medical insurance cover for his treatment and transplant costs. He told IPS that without that medical cover, he could not have afforded the 20,000 dollars or so a year for dialysis and another 20,000 dollars for his kidney transplant.

However, Mulindwa received the transplant not in Uganda but in India, with his employer’s medical insurance cover paying for the costs of transport to India and surgery there. He explained that most patients have to look for their own kidney donors at home.

Unlike developed countries which run public kidney donation registries, patients in Uganda have to find potential donors and that, said Kalyesubula, is where one of the difficulties for CKD patients lies.

Because of lack of awareness about the safety of kidney donations, many Ugandans are unwilling to donate a kidney to save the life of one of the growing number of patients on the kidney donation waiting lists.

But that is not the only difficulty, as Mulindwa explained. “It is very difficult because there those who come as thieves, there those who come expecting to be paid a lot of money. I know of one who promised to donate a kidney to one of the patients, but when the money was sent the ‘donor’ disappeared.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Slums in a Kenyan shanty town. Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, according to UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Photo credit: Colin Crowley/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 22 2015 (IPS)

Nompumelelo Tshabalala, 41, emerges from her dwarf ‘shack’ made up of rusty metal sheets and falls short of bumping into this reporter as she bends down to avoid knocking her head against the top part of her makeshift door frame.

“This has been my home for the past 16 years and I have lived here with my husband until his death in 2008 and now with my four children still in this two-roomed shack,” she told IPS.

Tshabalala lives in Diepkloof township in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a densely populated informal settlement – a euphemism for slums, where an estimated 15 million of the country’s approximately 52 million people live, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N. agency for human settlements.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe has an estimated 835,000 people living in informal settlements, according to Homeless International, a British non-governmental organisation focusing on urban poverty issues. “Local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs” – Precious Shumba, Harare Residents Trust

“Slum-dwelling here in Africa has become normal, a trend to live with, which is difficult to combat owing to numerous factors ranging from political corruption to economic inequalities necessitated by the growing gap between the rich and the poor,” Gilbert Nyaningwe, an independent development expert from Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Overall, out of an estimated population of 1.1 billion people, Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, reports UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Worldwide, notes the U.N. agency, the number of slum-dwellers now stands at 863 million and is set to shoot up to 889 million by 2020.

Development agencies in Africa say slum-dwelling remains a continental trend despite the U.N. Millennium Development Goals targets compelling all countries globally to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

According to the United Nations, that 100 million target “was met well in advance of the 2020 deadline”, and in African countries such as Egypt, Libya and Morocco the total number of urban slum dwellers has almost been halved, Tunisia has eradicated them completely, and Ghana, Senegal and Uganda have made steady progress, reducing their slum populations by up to 20 percent.

However, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the highest rate of “slum incidence” of any major world region, with millions of people living in settlements characterised by some combination of overcrowding, tenuous dwelling structures, and poor or no access to adequate water and sanitation facilities.

Hector Mutharika, a retired economist in late Malawian President Kamuzu Banda’s government, blamed poor service delivery for the increase in slums in Africa.

“The increasing numbers of slum dwellers in Africa is due to poor service delivery here by local authorities which more often than not worry most about filling their pockets from local authorities’ coffers instead of channelling proper housing facilities to poor people, which then pushes homeless individuals into building slum settlements anywhere,” Mutharika told IPS.

For Rwandan civil society activist Otapiya Gundurama, the roots of the problem go far back in time. “Shanty homes in Africa are a result of the continent’s urban infrastructure set up during colonial rule at which time housing and economic diversification were limited, with everything related to urban governance centralised, while towns and cities were established to enhance the lifestyles and interests of a minority,” Gundurama told IPS.

Some opposition politicians in Africa, like Gilbert Dzikiti, president of Zimbabwe’s opposition Democratic Assembly for Restoration and Empowerment (DARE), see the trend of growing slums here as a result of government failure. “The perpetual rise of slum settlements in Africa testifies to persistent failure by governments here to invest in both rural and urban development,” Dzikiti told IPS.

African civil society leaders blame rising unemployment on the continent for the continuing rise in the number of slums. “Be it in cities or remote areas, slums in Africa are a result of huge numbers of jobless people who hardly have the means to upgrade their own dwellings,” Precious Shumba, director of the Harare Residents Trust in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

In order to reverse the trend of growing slums across the continent, Shumba said, “local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs.”

African slum-dwellers like South Africa’s Tshabalala accuse city authorities of ignoring the mushrooming of informal settlements for selfish reasons.

“Slums here are sources of cheap labour that keeps the wheels of industry turning, which is why local authorities are not concerned about our living standards because they [local authorities] are getting more and more revenue from firms thriving on our sweat,” Tshabalala told IPS.

Meanwhile, rising slum settlements in Africa are also having a knock-on effect for other development goals in the education and health sectors for example.

“The United Nations Millennium Development Goal of universal attainment of primary education for all by the end of this year is certainly set to be missed by a number of countries here in Africa, especially as many of these sprouting slum settlements have no schools to help the children growing in the communities get any education,” a senior official in Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education told IPS on the condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

At the same time, “there are often no toilets, no water and no clinics in most slum-dwelling areas here, exposing people to diseases, consequently derailing the MDG of halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases in informal settlements,” Owen Dliwayo of the Youth Dialogue Action Network, a lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Yilmaz Akyüz
GENEVA, Mar 30 2015 (IPS)

Debt restructuring is a component of crisis management and resolution, and needs to be treated in the context of the current economic conjuncture and vulnerabilities.

International debt workout mechanisms are not just about debt reduction, but include interim arrangements to provide relief to debtors, including temporary hold on debt payments and financing.

They should address liquidity as well as solvency crises but the difference is not always clear. Most start as liquidity crises and can lead to insolvency if not resolved quickly.

Yilmaz Akyuz

Liquidity crises also inflict serious social and economic damages as seen in the past two decades even when they do not entail sovereign defaults.

International mechanisms should apply to crises caused by external private debt as well as sovereign debt. Private external borrowing is often the reason for liquidity crises. Governments end up socialising private debt. They need mechanisms that facilitate resolution of crises caused by private borrowing.

Only one of the last eight major crises in emerging and developing economies was due to internationally-issued sovereign debt (Argentina). Mexican and Russian crises were due to locally-issued public debt; in Asia (Thailand, Korea and Indonesia) external debt was private; in Brazilian and Turkish crises too, private (bank) debt played a key role alongside some problems in the domestic public debt market.

We have had no major new crisis in the South with systemic implications for over a decade thanks to highly favourable global liquidity conditions and risk appetite, both before and after the Lehman Brothers bank collapse in 2008, due to policies in major advanced economies, notably the United States.

But this period, notably the past six years, has also seen considerable build-up of fragility and vulnerability to liquidity and solvency crises in many developing countries."There are problems with standard crisis intervention: austerity can make debt even less payable; creditor bailouts create moral hazard and promote imprudent lending, and transform commercial debt into official debt, thereby making it more difficult to restructure”

Sovereign international debt problems may emerge in the so-called ‘frontier economies’ usually dependent on official lending. Many of them have gone into bond markets in recent years, taking advantage of exceptional global liquidity conditions and risk appetite. There are several first-time Eurobond issuers in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

In emerging economies, internationally-issued public debt as percentage of gross domestic product has declined significantly since the early 2000s. Much of the external debt of these economies is now under local law and in local currency.

However, there are numerous cases of build-up of private external debt in the foreign exchange markets issued under foreign law since 2008. Many of them may face contingent liabilities and are vulnerable to liquidity crises.

An external financial crisis often involves interruption of a country’s access to international financial markets, a sudden stop in capital inflows, exit of foreign investors from deposit, bond and equity markets and capital flight by residents. Reserves become depleted and currency and asset markets come under stress. Governments are often too late in recognising the gravity of the situation.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending is typically designed to bail out creditors to keep debtors current on their obligations to creditors, and to avoid exchange restrictions and maintain the capital account open.

The IMF imposes austerity on the debtor, expecting that it would make debt payable and sustainable and bring back private creditors. It has little leverage on creditors.

There are problems with standard crisis intervention: austerity can make debt even less payable; creditor bailouts create moral hazard and promote imprudent lending, and transform commercial debt into official debt, thereby making it more difficult to restructure; and risks are created for the financial integrity of the IMF.

Many of these problems were recognised after the Asian crisis of the 1990s, giving rise to the sovereign debt restructuring mechanism, originally designed very much along the lines advocated by the U.N. Conference on Trade and development (UNCTAD) throughout the 1980s and 1990s (though without due acknowledgement).

However, it was opposed by the United States and international financial markets and could not elicit strong support from debtor developing countries, notably in Latin America. It was first diluted and then abandoned.

The matter has come back to the attention of the international community with the Eurozone crisis and then with vulture-fund holdouts in Argentinian debt restructuring.

After pouring money into Argentina and Greece, whose debt turned out to be unpayable, the IMF has proposed a new framework to “limit the risk that Fund resources will simply be used to bail out private creditors” and to involve private creditors in crisis resolution. If debt sustainability looks uncertain, the IMF would require re-profiling (rollovers and maturity extension) before lending. This is left to negotiations between the debtor and the creditors.

However, there is no guarantee that this can bring a timely and orderly re-profiling. If no agreement is reached and the IMF does not lend without re-profiling, then it would effectively be telling the debtor to default. But it makes no proposal to protect the debtor against litigation and asset grab by creditors.

There is thus a need for statutory re-profiling involving temporary debt standstills and exchange controls. The decision should be taken by the country concerned and sanctioned by an internationally recognised independent body to impose stay on litigation.

Sanctioning standstills should automatically grant seniority to new loans, to be used for current account financing, not to pay creditors or finance capital outflows.

If financial meltdown is prevented through standstills and exchange controls, stay is imposed on litigation, adequate financing is provided and contractual provisions are improved, the likelihood of reaching a negotiated debt workout would be very high.

The role of the IMF in crisis management and resolution is incontrovertible. However, the IMF cannot be placed at the centre of international debt workout mechanisms. Even after a fundamental reform, the IMF board cannot act as a sanctioning body and arbitrator because of conflict of interest; its members represent debtors and creditors.

The United Nations successfully played an important role in crisis resolution in several instances in the past.

The Compensatory Financing Facility – introduced in the early 1960s to enable developing countries facing liquidity problems due to temporary shortfalls in primary export earnings to draw on the Fund beyond their normal drawing rights at concessional terms – resulted from a U.N. initiative.

A recent example concerns Iraq’s debt. After the occupation of Iraq and collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution to implement stay on the enforcement of creditor rights to use litigation to collect unpaid sovereign debt.

This was engineered by the very same country, the United States, which now denies a role to the United Nations in debt and finance on the grounds that it lacks competence on such matters, which mainly belong to the IMF and the World Bank.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* This article is partly based on South Centre Research Paper 60 by Yilmaz Akyüz titled Internationalisation of Finance and Changing Vulnerabilities in Emerging and Developing Economies.

Excerpt:

Many specialist doctors and nurses in Africa are migrating to greener pastures, leaving cancer patients with few options. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Feb 13 2015 (IPS)

Hidden by the struggles to defeat Ebola, malaria and drug-resistant tuberculosis, a silent killer has been moving across the African continent, superseding infections of HIV and AIDS.

World Cancer Day commemorated on Feb. 4 may have come and gone, but the spread of cancer in Africa has been worrying global health organisations and experts year round. The continent, they fear, is ill-prepared for another health crisis of enormous proportions.

By 2020, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately 16 million new cases of cancer are anticipated worldwide, with 70 percent of them in developing countries. Africa and Asia are not spared.“Africa is at a crossroads in the face of rising cancer cases, with the disease proving to be more deadly than HIV/AIDS and it is worsening at a time when the continent faces a serious shortage of cancer specialists,” Menzisi Thabane, private oncologist in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province

“Africa is at a crossroads in the face of rising cancer cases, with the disease proving to be more deadly than HIV/AIDS and it is worsening at a time when the continent faces a serious shortage of cancer specialists,” Menzisi Thabane, a private oncologist in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, told IPS.

“Africa and its leaders have failed to recognise cancer as a high-priority health problem despite millions of people succumbing to the disease,” added Thabane.

Most of Africa’s 2,000 plus languages have no word for cancer. The common perception in both developing and developed countries is that it is a disease of the wealthy world, where high-fat, processed-food diets, alcohol, smoking and sedentary lifestyles fuel tumour growth.

While many cancers are linked to unhealthy diets and smoking, a large number – particularly in Africa – are caused by infections like hepatitis B and C which can lead to liver cancer and the human papillomavirus (HPV) that causes almost all cervical cancers.

An HPV vaccine treatment costs 350 dollars for three doses over six months in most sub-Saharan African countries, whereas in Zimbabwe radiotherapy costs between 3,000 and 4,000 dollars for a whole session.

A study published in 2011 found that since 1980 new cervical cancer case numbers and deaths dropped substantially in rich countries, but increased dramatically in Africa and other poor regions. Overall, 76 percent of new cervical cancer cases are in developing regions, and sub-Saharan Africa already has 22 percent of all cervical cancer cases worldwide.

According to Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and Child Care, the country only has four oncologists catering to over 7,000 cancer patients nationwide. “The shortage of cancer doctors stands as an impediment to comprehensive treatment and care for cancer patients here,” Dr Prosper Chonzi, director of Health Services in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, told IPS.

The shortage of cancer specialists is also seen in West Africa.

Last year, The Vanguard, a Nigerian newspaper, reported that there were an estimated 60 oncologists serving over 300 million people in the West African sub-region with fewer than 20 oncologists serving 160 million Nigerians. Ghana has only seven for 24 million people, Burkina Faso two and Cote D’Ivoire just one. Sierra Leone has more than six million people and no cancer doctors.

Across the continent in Kenya, cancer accounts for approximately 18,000 deaths annually, with up to 60 percent of fatalities occurring among people who are in the most productive years of their life. Men are most commonly diagnosed with prostate or oesophageal cancer, and women are most frequently affected by breast and cervical cancer.

Zimbabwe’s health activists blame the absence of cancer education for the upsurge of fatal cases in the African nation. “Very few people, including government, consider cancer a real threat to the health delivery system,” Agnes Matutu, director of the Zimbabwe Cancer Alliance, an anti-cancer lobby group here, told IPS.

Melody Hamandishe, a retired government nutritionist, told IPS she blamed imported genetically modified foods. This contributes to cancer, she said, as does the abuse of alcohol, often causing liver cancer.

In Zambia, anti-cancer activists accuse the government of not prioritising the fight against the disease. “People are perishing in huge numbers because of cancer here in Zambia while government is seized with fighting HIV/AIDS,” Kitana Phiri, a cervical cancer survivor, now a devoted anti-cancer activist based in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, told IPS.

In Tanzania, cancer is also wreaking havoc. A January 2014 report by the Ocean Road Cancer Institute (ORCI), the only specialised facility for cancer treatment in this east African nation, said there are 100 new patients in every 100,000 population out of the country’s population of 45 million.

Finally, in Namibia, uranium workers were reported to have elevated rates of cancers and other illnesses after working in one of Africa’s largest mines.

Rio Tinto’s Rössing uranium mine extracts millions of tonnes of rock a year for the mineral. “Most workers stated that they are not informed about their health conditions and do not know if they have been exposed to radiation or not. Some workers said they consulted a private doctor to get a second opinion,” say researchers at Earthlife Namibia and the Labour Resource and Research Institute who collaborated in a study.

“The older workers all said they know miners dying of cancers and other illnesses. Many of these are now retired and many have already died of cancers,” says the study report.

Cancer is not beyond us in terms of cancer control and reducing the impact of the disease, declared the Cancer Association of South Africa (CANSA) on World Cancer Day this year.

“The global cancer epidemic is huge and set to rise,” said Elize Jourbert, head of CANSA. “In South Africa, more than 100 000 are diagnosed annually. This day helps us spread the word and raise the profile of cancer”.

Under the tagline ‘Not beyond us’, World Cancer Day in South Africa focused on taking a positive and proactive approach to the fight against cancer, highlighting that solutions do exist regarding cancer care and early detection and that they are within reach.

Meanwhile, Ellen Awuah-Darko, the 75-year-old founder of the Accra-based Jead Foundation for breast cancer, says it was her personal experience of finding a breast lump and ending up paying tens of thousands of dollars to be treated in the United States that made her start to push for change.

“In America I had to put down 70,000 dollars before they’d even talk to me,” she said in an interview with Reuters. “I was lucky, I could afford it after my husband died and left me money, but I thought ‘why should I get treatment when others can’t’.”

Now, every Wednesday, Awuah-Darko goes with healthcare workers into communities in the Eastern Region of Ghana to offer women a simple breast examination and show them how to check themselves.

“Early detection can save your life,” she said. “I want everybody to know that. It’s not something people should be ashamed of or embarrassed about.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

Kandeh Yumkella, U.N. Special Representative for Sustainable Energy, believes that Africa should focus on small and more decentralised renewable energy options that could quickly reach rural energy-poor citizens instead of waiting until funding is obtained for big renewable energy projects. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
ABU DHABI, Jan 22 2015 (IPS)

Diversification of Africa’s electricity sources by embarking on renewable energy solutions – such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydro power – is being heralded as a solution to the continent’s energy poverty.

But although a number of countries are already reaping benefits from investment in renewables, there is concern that many of the countries are yet to exploit those resources.

African ministers and delegates at the Abu Dhabi International Renewable Energy Conference in Abu Dhabi from January 15-17 noted that a mere handful of countries in the continent are tapping into renewable energy resource.“People don’t have to wait in darkness before the big projects come. We can have those solutions out today because the technologies are there. It is about markets and the spreading out of off-grid” – Kandeh Yumkella, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy

Some of the bottlenecks identified included lack of finance, lack of interest from investors and the desire by some to take on mega projects that could easily fail to attract private investors.

Davis Chirchir, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Energy, told IPS that for many sub-Saharan Africa countries, accessing financing for fossil fuel projects was much easier compared with renewable energy options. “It is a big problem even when the prices for renewable energy solutions like solar and wind are going down” said Chirchir, whose country is now seeing costs reducing as a result of investing in geothermal energy.

Kenya plans to generate up to three gigawatts (3GW) of power from geothermal energy alone from its Rift Valley area.

Chirchir said that despite the long-term benefits, many of the countries in the region lacked their own initial resources for investment in projects.

“While renewable projects are often cheaper, they tend to require up-front capital costs. So for many, we shall require more targeted financing if we are to kick off many from the ground,” said Chirchir.

“In Kenya, our investment in geothermal energy displaced some 65 percent of fossil fuels, and brought down the cost to the customer by about 30 percent,” he added.

Kandeh Yumkella, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy and CEO of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative, decried the fact that despite the declining costs of generating energy from renewable energy sources, Africa was consuming only one-quarter of global average energy per capita.

“How do we help the majority of people in Africa that rely on charcoal and cow dung for their primary needs? How do we do that? This is where the context of off-grid really comes in,” he suggested.

According to Yumkella, Africa should focus on small and more decentralised renewable energy options that could quickly reach rural energy-poor citizens instead of waiting until funding is obtained for big renewable energy projects.

“Sometimes the project preparation costs before the investments come are about three to ten percent of project costs. For many African countries that is a lot of money. It takes a big time to get the big projects under way,” he noted.

For Yumkella, African governments urgently need to put in place policies that would support renewable energy power generation using private investments to construct off-grid power stations, especially in areas where it is hard to reconnect to the main grids.

“We can have millions of energy entrepreneurs spreading the off-grid solutions while we wait for the big projects to take off,” he explained. “People don’t have to wait in darkness before the big projects come. We can have those solutions out today because the technologies are there. It is about markets and the spreading out of off-grid.”

Furthermore, said Yumkella, off-grid solutions would support Africa’s social development agenda at the community level and “that can be done now because off-grids can be in the hands of the poor communities to increase their productivity and help their social development.  But we will need millions of entrepreneurs in Africa in order to make energy poverty history.”

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), even with available renewable energy potential, Africa still has the lowest rate of rural electrification compared with other continents.

Globally, over the last two decades, rural electrification has increased from 61 to 70 percent but there are large disparities in rural access rates – in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, that rate is just 18 percent compared with over 70 percent in developing Asia.

IRENA says that Africa needs to double its rate of expansion of rural electrification and change the way it approaches rural electrification for it to achieve the universal electricity access for all target by 2030.

“And in this expansion, it is estimated that about 60 percent of additional generation will come from stand-alone and mini-grid solutions, with most of it being renewables because they can tap into locally available energy resources,” said Rabia Ferroukhi, IRENA Deputy Director in charge of Knowledge, Technology and Financing.

Adnan Z. Amin, Director-General of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), believes that all African countries can reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and leapfrog into a sustainable future. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

Meanwhile, African energy ministers and delegates at the Abu Dhabi renewable energy conference called on IRENA and countries with greater knowledge in renewable energy to help them in supporting the Africa Clean Energy Corridor initiative.

This initiative encourages the deployment of hydro, geothermal, biomass, wind and solar options from Cairo to Cape Town to increase capacity, stabilise the grid, and reduce fossil fuel dependency.

Ethiopia, one of the countries already investing in renewable energy, especially in wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power, is one of the proponents of financing for the Clean Energy Corridor.

The country plans to generate 800 megawatts of wind power, 1 gigawatt of geothermal power and is constructing a 6,000 MW hydroelectric plant, which will be the largest such facility in Africa costing about 4.8 billion dollars.

Ethiopia’s Water, Irrigation and Energy Minister, Alemayehu Tegenu, told IPS that, if implemented, the Africa Clean Energy Corridor would help to advance renewable energy solutions to the corridor.

Adnan Amin, the Director-General of IRENA, told IPS that the Africa Clean Energy Corridor has gathered strong political support and engagement from within Africa and at the level of the United Nations.

“We have to make sure that we have regional programmes that can support countries to move in the clean direction and this is the concept behind our African Clean Energy Corridor,” said Amin.

“We want to interconnect African markets, create a larger regulated market, because when you have big markets, you can have big projects that pass the technology forward.”

With smart planning and prudent investment, Amin believes that all African countries can reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and leapfrog into a sustainable future.

Edited by Phil Harris    

“We need a transformative change in our food and agricultural policies to have sustainability” – Ren Wang, FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
NAPLES, Italy, Oct 9 2014 (IPS)

In his parody of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat It”, the American satirist and singer Weird Al Yankovic has a parent urging his son to eat the food on his plate, warning that “other kids are starving in Japan”.

The parody has raised smiles since it was released 30 years ago, but today “Eat It” could be a battle cry for activists trying to reduce the widespread waste of enormous quantities of food, an urgent concern around the world and no laughing matter.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 1.3 billion tonnes of food go to waste globally every year. Meanwhile, 805 million of the world’s people are still experiencing chronic undernourishment or hunger, Ren Wang, Assistant Director General of FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, told the 11^th International Media Forum on the Protection of Nature.“Even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world” – SAVE FOOD Initiative

“We need a transformative change in our food and agricultural policies to have sustainability,” Wang said.

Organised by the Rome-based environmental group Greenaccord and hosted for the second time by the city of Naples from Oct. 8 to 11, this year’s forum – entitled ‘Feeding the World: Food, Agriculture and Environment’ – has brought together experts, journalists and policy makers.

It comes as the United Nations’ International Year of Family Farming draws to a close, and as rising food prices continue to pound the incomes of vulnerable groups.

Wang said that although global food production has tripled since 1946 and the world has reduced the prevalence of undernourishment over the past 20 years from 18.7 to 11.3 percent, food security is still a crucial issue.

The food that goes to waste is about one-third of current global food production, so expanding current agricultural output is not necessarily the answer. In fact, the world produces enough food for every individual to have about 2,800 calories each day, according to scientists. But while some people are able to waste food, others do not have enough.

Even if waste and hunger might not be directly related, there is unquestionable inequality in the world’s food system, said Gary Gardner, a senior fellow with the Worldwatch Institute, a research and outreach institute that focuses on sustainable policies.

“In wealthy countries, food waste often occurs at the level of the retailer or consumer, either at the grocery store or at home where a lot of food is thrown away,” he told IPS.

By contrast, food waste in developing countries mainly happens at the “farm or processing” levels, Gardner said. “Food is lost because usually there aren’t systems for getting it to processing facilities and then to the consumer efficiently.”

Food losses and waste amount to roughly 680 billion dollars in industrialised countries and 310 billion dollars in developing countries, according to the SAVE FOOD Initiative, a project involving the German trade fair group Messe Düsseldorf in collaboration with FAO and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Saying that “consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes)”, the SAVE FOOD initiative found that “even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world.”

In Europe, the vast quantity of food thrown out by supermarkets has sometimes sparked public outrage, especially in countries where it is illegal for people to help themselves to the rejected items.

British supermarket chain Tesco has acknowledged discarding some 28,500 tonnes of food in the first six months of 2013, according to reports, and in Britain overall, an estimated 15 million tonnes of food is wasted annually.

In the United States, agencies estimate that roughly 40 percent of the food produced is discarded in landfills, with supermarkets accounting for much of this.

Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, people can be prosecuted for taking food from dumpsters – a sore point with some activists who have organised public campaigns that offer meals cooked from thrown-away food.

At the Naples forum, where experts discussed the social and environmental consequences of food waste, among other issues, Gardner of the Worldwatch Institute described the experiences of activist Rob Greenfield, who has fed himself entirely from food from dumpsters while cycling across the United States.

“Many times the food was in packages that hadn’t been opened – whole boxes of cereal, sodas, that kind of thing – that for various reasons had been thrown out but which was perfectly good food to him,” Gardner told IPS in an interview.

“That’s not the optimal way for us to get rid of waste,” he added. “The better way would be not to generate that waste in the first place.”

Some solutions

Tesco and several other British supermarket chains have agreed to a programme of waste reduction, and restaurants in several countries are also taking steps not only to decrease the waste but to turn it into biogas to be used for energy.

Gardner told IPS that instead of throwing away food, supermarkets should be looking at donating produce to local organisations such as soup kitchens, although it would be better if they “weren’t generating the waste to begin with.”

On biogas, some speakers said that using food or household waste for energy at the local level could contribute to wider environmental solutions, but again the main aim should be to stem the creation of waste.

“Food security and climate change have certain challenges in common,” said Adriana Opromollo, international advocacy officer for food security and climate change at Caritas Internationalis, a federation of charity organisations.

“At the local level, we have seen where using food or household waste can be a successful strategy. But we have to focus on solutions that are tailored to the particular context,” she told IPS.

The ways to reduce waste can begin simply. Some U.S. food services companies found that by providing only plates (without accompanying trays), in school cafeterias, students were encouraged to take only the food they could consume, consequently throwing away 25 percent less waste.

Perhaps schools should record another version of “Eat It” for lunch hour.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
ROME, Sep 19 2014 (IPS)

At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed themselves to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2014 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that 805 million people – one in nine people worldwide – remain chronically hungry: 789 million are in developing countries where this share has declined from 23.4 to 13.5 percent.

By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015.

Some 25 countries have made more impressive progress, achieving the more ambitious WFS target of halving the number of hungry. However, the number of hungry people in the world has only declined by one-fifth from the billion estimated for 1990-92.

Major effort needed

The proportion of undernourished people – those regularly not able to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has decreased from 23.4 percent in 1990–1992 to 13.5 percent in 2012–2014. This is significant because a large and growing number of countries show that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.

However, the MDG target of halving the chronically undernourished people’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 cannot be met at the current rate of progress. Meeting the target is still possible, however, with a sufficient, immediate additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress so far.

Progress uneven

“By 2012-14, 63 developing countries had reached the MDG target – to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the hungry under five percent – with several more on track to do so by 2015”
Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 14 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases. While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished.

Marked differences in reducing undernourishment have persisted across regions. There have been significant reductions in both the estimated share and number of undernourished in most countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean – where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached, or nearly reached.

West Asia has seen a rise in the share of the hungry compared with 1990–1992, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.

In several countries, underweight and stunting persist in children, even when undernourishment is low and most people have access to sufficient food. Such nutrition failures are due not only to insufficient food access, but also to poor health conditions and the high incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Food security and nutrition

Hunger is conventionally measured in terms of the prevalence of undernourishment, the FAO estimate of chronic inadequacy of dietary energy. While such a measure is useful for estimating hunger, it needs to be complemented by more measures to capture other dimensions of food security.

SOFI’s suite of indicators measures different dimensions of food security. Information thus generated can guide priority policy actions. For example, in countries where low undernourishment coexists with high malnutrition, specially-designed nutrition-enhancing interventions may be crucial to address early childhood stunting.

With the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals likely to seek to overcome hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, FAO has recently developed and tested a new Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) in over 150 countries to measure the severity of reported food insecurity.

Lessons

Improvements in nutrition generally require complementary policies, including improving health conditions, hygiene, water supply and education. More sophisticated and creative approaches to coordination and governance are needed, with more, and more effective, resources to end hunger and malnutrition in our lifetimes.

With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment continuing and likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome without universalising social protection to all in need, but also to provide the means for future livelihoods and resilience.

The forthcoming Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome on November 19-21 is expected to articulate coherent bases for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition as well as for greater international cooperation and support for enhanced and more integrated national nutrition efforts.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

To meet the challenge of feeding the world’s 805 million hungry people, this year’s State of Food Insecurity report calls for the creation of an ‘enabling environment’. Credit: FAO/Giulio Napolitano

By Phil Harris
ROME, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

The number of hungry people in the world has declined by over 100 million in the last decade and over 200 million since 1990-92, but 805 million people around the world still go hungry every day, according to the latest UN estimates.

Presenting their annual joint report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), international Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and World Food Programme (WFP) said that while the latest hunger figures indicate that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of undernourished people by 2015 is within reach, this will only be possible “if appropriate and immediate efforts are stepped up.”

These efforts include the necessary “political commitment … well informed by sound understanding of national challenges, relevant policy options, broad participation and lessons from other experiences.”"We cannot celebrate yet because we must still reach 805 million people without enough food for a healthy and productive life" – WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin

Introducing this year’s report, FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said that the figures indicate that a “world without hunger is possible in our lifetime.”

The three Rome-based UN agencies noted that while there has been significant progress overall, some regions are still lagging behind: sub-Saharan Africa, where more than one in four people remain chronically undernourished, and Asia, where the majority of the world’s hungry – 520 million people – live.

In Oceania there has been a modest improvement in percentage terms (down 1.7 percent from 14 percent two years ago) but an increase in the number of hungry people. Latin America and the Caribbean have made most progress in increasing food security.

However, WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin warned that “we cannot celebrate yet because we must still reach 805 million people without enough food for a healthy and productive life.”

Calling for what they called an ‘enabling environment’, the agencies stressed that “food insecurity and malnutrition are complex problems that cannot be solved by one sector or stakeholder alone, but need to be tackled in a coordinated way.” In this regard, they called on governments to work closely with the private sector and civil society.

According to the report, the ‘enabling environment’ should be based on an integrated approach that includes public and private investments to increase agricultural productivity; access to land, services, technologies and markets; and measures to promote rural development and social protection for the most vulnerable, including strengthening their resilience to conflicts and natural disasters.

Speaking at the presentation of the report, the WFP Executive Director referred in particular to the current outbreak of Ebola in the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea which, she said, “is an unprecedented health emergency which is rapidly becoming a major food crisis.”

“You cannot isolate people without addressing the food and nutrition challenges of those who need assistance,” she added, noting that the populations in these countries are not harvesting or planting according to their regular seasonal requirements while the crisis rages.

“This is rapidly becoming a food crisis that is potentially affecting 1.3 million people today, with an unknown number of how many will be affected in the future.”

“We cannot let the unprecedented level of humanitarian crisis undermine our efforts to progress even further, to reach our planet’s most vulnerable people and to end hunger in our lifetimes.”

The State of Food Insecurity report will be part of discussions at the Second International Conference on Nutrition to be held in Rome from 19-21 November, jointly organised by FAO and the World Health Organization (WHO).

This high-level intergovernmental meeting will seek a renewed political commitment at global level to combat malnutrition with the overall goal of improving diets and raising nutrition levels.

By Roberto Azevêdo
GENEVA, Jul 29 2014 (IPS)

In the 1960s, there were high hopes for the development of the newly-independent sub-Saharan African countries but these hopes were quickly dashed following a series of shocks which began in the mid-70s, with the first oil price spikes, followed by a severe decline in growth and increase in poverty in the 80s and early 90s. However, by the mid-1990s, economic growth had resumed in certain African countries. Economic reform, better macroeconomic management, donor resources and a sharp rise in commodity prices were having a positive effect.

WTO Director General Roberto Azevêdo. Credit: WTO/CC BY SA-2.0

In the 2000s, many African countries witnessed high economic growth performance and during that period some of the world’s fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa. Angola, Nigeria, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda all recorded annual growth of over 7 percent.

In 2012 Africa’s exports and imports totalled 630 billion dollars and 610 billion dollars respectively, ­ a fourfold increase since the turn of the millennium. And the long term prospects for growth are good. The Economist Intelligence Unit has forecast average growth for the regional economy of around 5 percent yearly from 2013-16.

Despite all this, the continent still plays a marginal role in the global market, accounting for barely 3 percent of world trade. One significant reason – although, of course there are others – is that African economies are still narrowly based on the production and export of unprocessed agricultural products, minerals and crude oil.“There is little doubt that the regional [African] market offers good scope for African firms to diversify their production and achieve greater value addition”

Now, due to relatively low productivity and technology, these economies have low competitiveness in global markets – apart from crude extractive products. The low productivity of traditional agriculture and the informal activities continue to absorb more than 80 percent of the labour force. And growth remains highly vulnerable to external shocks.

This story of half a century of struggle, set-backs and progress shows two things:

One, the road to meaningful and inclusive development still seems long.

Two, we are in a better position than ever to make real, sustainable progress.

Many countries are striving to do more in turning their strength in commodities into strengths in other areas,­ using commodities as a means of spurring growth across various sectors. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s 2013 Economic Report echoes this ­ calling for the continent’s commodities to be used to support industrialisation, jobs, growth and economic transformation.

In line with this, I think there are a number of essential steps to take:

– diversification of economic structure, namely of production and exports;

– enhancement of export competitiveness;

– technological upgrading;

– improvement of the productivity of all resources, including labour; and

– reduction of infrastructure gaps.

Only by delivering in these and other areas can policymakers ensure that growth enhances human well-being and contributes to inclusive development. But how can we take these steps?

Of course I should say that although African countries share some common features, no unique set of policies, including those on trade and industrial policy, could ever fit for all in a uniform way. Even among the least-developed countries (LDCs), some are already exporters of manufactured products, although often they rely on a single product  while others are more dependent on commodities. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that some preconditions of success are universal.

African regional integration is of course very high on the policy agenda. There is little doubt that the regional market offers good scope for African firms to diversify their production and achieve greater value addition. Already now, manufactures constitute as much as 40 percent of intra-African exports, compared with 13 percent of Africa’s exports to the rest of the world.

The Bali Package, which World Trade Organisation members agreed in December last year, will help to resolve some problems. Inclusive, sustainable development was at the heart of the whole Bali project ­ and our African members played a crucial role in making it a success. It brought some progress on agriculture. It delivered a package to support LDCs. It provided for a Monitoring Mechanism on special and differential treatment.

And, in addition, Bali delivered the Trade Facilitation Agreement and this is a direct answer to some of the problems of fragmentation. Costly and cumbersome border procedures, inadequate infrastructure and administrative burdens often raise trade-related transaction costs within Africa to unsustainable levels, creating a further barrier to intra-African trade.

This Agreement will help to address some of these bottlenecks. It will support regional integration, and therefore complement the African Union’s efforts to create a continental free trade area. And it will begin to remove some of the barriers which prevent full integration into global value chains. As such it will create an added impetus for industrialisation and inclusive sustainable development.

And it is worth noting here that the Trade Facilitation Agreement broke new ground for developing and least-developed countries in the way it will be implemented.

Another vital issue here is the importance of agricultural development in industrialisation, and the role of industrial collaboration through regional cooperation. The contribution of the agriculture sector is of utmost importance for the establishment of a sound industrial base. It can provide a surplus to invest in industrial capacity building, and supply agricultural raw materials as inputs to the production process, especially for today’s highly specialised food processing industry.

Moreover, it can also significantly contribute to industrialisation by providing an ample supply of food products. This is because food constitutes a large share of what wage earners in African countries spend their money on. Its availability at low prices contributes to increase the purchasing power of wages, and therefore raise the competitiveness of a country in international markets. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

By Yilmaz Akyüz
GENEVA, Jul 16 2014 (IPS)

Since the onset of the crisis, the South Centre has argued that policy responses to the crisis by the European Union and the United States has suffered from serious shortcomings that would delay recovery and entail unnecessary losses of income and jobs, and also endanger future growth and stability. 

Despite cautious optimism from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the world economy is not in good shape. Six years into the crisis, the United States has not fully recovered, the Euro zone has barely started recovering, and developing countries are losing steam. There is fear that the crisis is moving to developing countries.

Yilmaz Akyuz

There is concern in regard to the longer-term prospects for three main reasons.

First, the crisis and policy response aggravated systemic problems, whereby inequality has widened. Inequality is no longer only a social problem, but also presents a macroeconomic problem. Inequality is holding back growth and creating temptation to rely on financial bubbles once again in order to generate spending.

Second, global trade imbalances have been redistributed at the expense of developing countries, whereby the Euro zone especially Germany has become a deadweight on global expansion.

Third, systemic financial instability remains unaddressed, despite the initial enthusiasm in terms of reform of governance of international finance, and in addition new fragilities have been added due to the ultra-easy monetary policy.“The external financial vulnerability of the South is linked to developing countries’ integration in global financial markets and the significant liberalisation of external finance and capital accounts in these countries” – Yilmaz Akyuz

The policy response to the crisis has been an inconsistent policy mix, including fiscal austerity and an ultra-easy monetary policy. While the crisis was created by finance, the solution was still sought through finance. Countries focused on a search for a finance-driven boom in private spending via asset price bubbles and credit expansion. Fiscal policy has been invariably tight.

The ultra-easy monetary policy created over one trillion dollars in fiscal benefits in the United States – which was more than the initial fiscal stimulus; the entire initial fiscal stimulus was limited to 800 billion dollars.

There was reluctance to remove debt overhang through comprehensive restructuring (i.e. for mortgages in the United States and sovereign and bank debt in the European Union). Thus, the focus was on bailing out creditors.

There was also reluctance to remove mortgage overhang and no attempt to tax the rich and support the poor, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States – where marginal tax rates are low compared with continental Europe. There has been resistance against permanent monetisation of public deficits and debt, which does not pose more dangers for prices and financial stability than the ultra-easy monetary policy.

The situation in the United States has been better than in other advanced economies. The United States dealt with the financial but not with the economic crisis, whereby recovery has been slow due to fiscal drag and debt overhang. And employment is not expected to return to pre-crisis levels before 2018.

As for the Euro zone, Japan and the United Kingdom, all have had second or third dips since 2008. None of them have restored pre-crisis incomes and jobs.

Meanwhile, trade imbalances have not been removed, but redistributed. East Asian surplus has dropped sharply and Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa have moved to large deficits. Developing countries’ surplus has fallen from 720 billion dollars to 260 billion dollars. On the contrary, advanced economies have moved from deficit to surplus, whereby U.S. deficits have fallen and the Euro zone has moved from a 100 billion dollars deficit to a 300 billion dollars surplus.

As tapering comes to an end and the U.S. Federal Reserve stops buying further assets, the attention will be turned to the question of exit, normalisation and the expectations of increased instability of financial markets for both the United States and the emerging economies.

This exit will also create fiscal problems for the United States because, as bonds held by the Federal Reserve mature and quantitative easing ends, long-term interest rates will rise and the fiscal benefits of the ultra-easy monetary policy would be reversed.

Developing countries lost steam as recovery in advanced economies remained weak or absent due to the fading effect of counter-cyclical policies and the narrowing of policy space. China could not keep on investing and doing the same thing. Another factor contributing to the change of context in developing countries has been the weakened capital inflows that became highly unstable with the deepening of the Euro zone crisis and then Federal Reserve tapering. Several emerging economies have been under stress as markets are pricing-in normalisation of monetary policy even before it has started.

The external financial vulnerability of the South is linked to developing countries’ integration in global financial markets and the significant liberalisation of external finance and capital accounts in these countries. These include opening up securities markets, private borrowing abroad, resident outflows, and opening up to foreign banks. While developing countries did not manage capital flows adequately, the IMF did not provide support in this area, tolerating capital controls only as a last resort and on a temporary basis.

Several deficit developing countries with asset, credit and spending bubbles are particularly vulnerable.  Countries with strong foreign reserves and current account positions would not be insulated from shocks, as seen after the Lehman crisis. When a country is integrated in the international financial system, it will feel the shock one way or another, although those countries with deficits remain more vulnerable.

In regard to policy responses in the case of a renewed turmoil, it is convenient to avoid business-as-usual, including using reserves and borrowing from the IMF or advanced economies to finance large outflows. The IMF lends, not to revive the economy but to keep stable the debt levels and avoid default. It is also inconvenient to adjust through retrenching and austerity.

Ways should be found to bail-in foreign investors and lenders, and use exchange controls and temporary debt standstills. In this sense, the IMF should support such approaches through lending into arrears.

More importantly, the U.S. Federal Reserve is responsible for the emergence of this situation and should take on its responsibility and act as a lender of last resort to emerging economies, through swaps or buying bonds as and when needed. These are not necessarily more toxic than the bonds issued at the time of subprime crisis. The United States has much at stake in the stability of emerging economies. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

*   A longer version of this column has been published in the South Centre Bulletin (No. 80, 30 June 2014).

Excerpt:

Since Israel secretly deported over 1,000 Sudanese refugees several months ago, sending them back to Sudan and threatening to deport hundreds more Sub-Saharan African refugees, Israeli authorities have suspended this practise in the face of international outrage and condemnation by the United Nations.

Yet refugees, even legal ones, nevertheless continue to leave in fear of deportation as well as abuse amid a climate of racism and frequent attacks against African refugees in Israel.

African refugees in Israel live in fear of deportation by authorities. Credit: Zack Baddorf/ZUMA Press/IPS

“We are subjected to verbal abuse and sometimes physical assaults,” Mulus Arafni, 30, a student from Asmara, Eritrea who has been in Israel two and a half years, told IPS. “We can’t work freely and are forced to live hand to mouth. Because of having to work illegally, sometimes the employers refuse to pay us.”

Still, in some ways the situation has improved, Sharon Harel from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), told IPS. “While in theory there has been no official change in the deportation policy of Sub-Saharan refugees from Israel, in practise the deportations of Sudanese has ceased and to date no forcible repatriation of Eritreans has taken place,” she explained.

“However, we are continuing to monitor events and are meeting regularly with members of the Israeli government,” Harel added. “Our efforts are focusing on helping the government to establish a proper procedure where refugees have access to a fairer system and are made aware of their rights.”

No rights for refugees

In February, Israeli media exposed the mass deportation of Sudanese refugees to their home countries and to third countries. Refugees were being pressured to sign deportation forms or face at least three years’ detention without access to due process.

While Israeli authorities claimed the refugees signed forms “voluntarily”, the UNHCR demanded an explanation and lambasted the claim, stating the deportations had taken without its knowledge and without it being consulted to supervise the process.

“The refugee claims were not examined. [Nor] were the refugees told they had the right to challenge the deportations,” Harel told IPS, adding most of the refugees were already in prison, many for at least six months and others for several years.

“They don’t receive full access to the refugee apparatus, and when there’s no access to the refugee apparatus that can lead to their release, then there is no voluntary return,” Harel explained."We are subjected to verbal abuse and sometimes physical assaults" -- Mulus Arafni

An Israeli Interior Ministry committee subsequently advised the Israeli government to ignore a demand from UNHCR for an explanation.

Illegal deportations

For years Israeli authorities have known UNHCR’s position on Israel’s systematic deportation of refugees. Michael Bavli, a senior adviser to UNHCR, told the head of Israel’s Immigration Administration in 2008 that “deporting Sudanese to Sudan would be the gravest violation possible of the refugee convention that Israel has signed – a crime never before committed”.

Sudan defines Israel as an enemy country and has warned that it will punish any of its citizens who set foot in Israel. Consequently, human rights groups have said, deportation constitutes a violation of Israel’s most basic obligations under international law. According to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, Sudanese and Eritrean citizens cannot be deported from Israel.

“In deporting people to Sudan, Israel [crosses] a red line and is not only violating its most basic obligation under international law, but demonstrating cruelty, hard-heartedness and indifference to the fate of human beings,” Assaf, the Aid Organisation for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, said in a statement.

In addition to stating that the refugees had been “voluntarily” sent out of the country, Israeli authorities also claimed to be protecting the interests of the refugees by sending them to a third country where they wouldn’t face persecution from authorities in their own countries.

T.H., an Eritrean army deserter, feared persecution and imprisonment if he returned to Eritrea. After being arrested, T.H. was given the choice of “volunteering” to be sent to Uganda or being incarcerated for three years.

Upon arrival in Uganda he was refused entry and forcibly flown to Cairo, where he was detained until Israeli authorities relented, under pressure from Israel’s attorney general, allowing him to return to Israel.

Despite the improvement in the situation, many Sub-Saharan refugees remain tense about their prospects in Israel. In interviews with IPS, several Eritreans were reluctant to talk, refused to have their photos taken, and answered questions quickly before hurrying away.

“I don’t want to stay in Israel but I’m afraid to return home,” Brihani Gazay, 24, also a student from Asmara told IPS. “Who do we turn to when we have problems?”

Over 57 percent of maternal deaths occur in Africa. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Blain Biset
ADDIS ABABA, Jan 27 2013 (IPS)

Every single day, 452 women in sub-Saharan Africa die from pregnancy-related causes; that’s 18 women every hour.

Against this backdrop, heads of state gathered in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa for the African Union Summit met at a side event on Sunday, Jan. 27 to renew their commitment to reducing the maternal mortality rate on the continent.

Back in May 2009, the African Union and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) launched CARMMA, the Campaign for Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa, with the aim of expanding the availability of reproductive health services and moving Africa closer to achieving Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5: reducing the maternal mortality rate by three-quarters and ensuring universal access to reproductive health care by 2015.

Ahead of the CARMMA meeting, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged African heads of state to commit to the MDGs.

But although pledges and promises have been made, the continent still has a long way to go before it reaches the 2015 target – so far, sub-Saharan Africa has seen an average reduction rate of just 41 percent.

UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin believes that, while sub-Saharan Africa has made significant progress, this high-level meeting with African heads of state is urgently needed.

“Africa knows what to do and how to do it,” he told IPS, “but there are still challenges.”

African Union Commissioner of Social Affairs, Dr. Mustapha Kaloko, is not convinced Africa will reach the set goal by 2015 but he does believes CARMMA has the capacity to accelerate the reduction.

“The unique nature of this campaign is that it is not asking for anything new,” Kaloko told IPS. “We are not developing new plans, but improving the instruments we already have.”

He added that most maternal deaths in Africa could have been prevented by using already existing practices and interventions.

A recent study by the renowned medical journal ‘The Lancet’ shows that a woman in sub-Saharan Africa is almost 100 times more likely to die because of pregnancy and childbirth complications than a woman in a wealthy country.

The same study also states that eight out of ten countries with the highest numbers of maternal deaths are in Africa with Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo topping the list.

Another major challenge, according to Osotimehin, is the level of political commitment from nations to reduce the rate of maternal mortality on the continent.

He stressed,“This event is not about money but about commitment. We are here to ensure that no women dies giving life.”

A vast majority of maternal deaths – roughly 57 percent – occur on the continent of Africa, giving it the world’s highest maternal mortality ratio.

And the mortality rate is not the only thing of concern to development experts and local medical practitioners — for every pregnancy-related death, there are about 20 women who suffer complications before, during and after childbirth, leaving mothers and children alike with lifelong disabilities or medical conditions.

Severe bleeding after childbirth, infections, high blood pressure during pregnancy and unsafe abortions are the most common causes for pregnancy-related complications and deaths according to the UNFPA.

According to Dorothee Kinde Gazard, Benin’s Health Minister, these numbers are exorbitant: “All levels of society, notably on the communal level, have to be involved and committed to making sure no woman dies or becomes handicapped unnecessarily.”

Benin has taken steps towards reducing pregnancy-related deaths by improving data collection services in clinics and hospitals. Gazard told IPS, “Every death is now registered so we can learn why women die and how we can prevent (unnecessary deaths).”

The increased use of family planning services has been successful in several countries such as Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia.

Another solution is to reduce the maternal mortality rate by preventing child marriages, Osotimehin said.

“Early child marriages create a situation where children are bearing children, when they are physically and psychologically not ready.”

In Niger, over three-quarters of women get married in their teens. Pregnant girls between the ages of 10 and 14 are five times as likely to die during pregnancy than women in their twenties, according to a UNICEF rapport, while pregnant girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are twice as likely to die during pregnancy than women in their twenties.

Though CARMMA is primarily focused on women’s health, men do play an important role in this campaign. Osotimehin says everybody needs to realise that the high rates of maternal mortality are not acceptable.

“So we must talk to men because they are the ones who are causing all these problems,” he stressed.

Minister Gazard agreed that men’s participation is crucial. “Without them we will not be successful in reducing the maternal mortality rate,” she said. In a bid to involve men in these efforts, Benin recently started a project whereby men are encouraged to attend prenatal consultations with their wives during the pregnancy.

So far, Equatorial Guinea is the only African nation among ten countries worldwide to have reached MDG 5.

Leading experts like Michelle Bachelet, executive director of UN Women, are convinced that few, if any, African countries will be able to reduce maternal deaths by 75 percent in 2015.

“We have to focus on increasing the efforts but we should already start thinking about what is going to happen after 2015,” Bachelet told IPS.

Children living on Sri Lanka's tea estates are among the country's most malnourished. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Justine Leone
BRUSSELS, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

One hundred and ninety million – that’s more than the populations of Germany, France and Poland combined. It is also the number of children affected by vitamin A deficiency around the world.

An insufficient intake of this vital nutrient – found in foods like liver, carrots and kale – can be fatal and causes blindness in 250,000 to 500,000 children every year.

One hundred years after Polish scientist Casimir Funk formulated the concept of vitamins, substantial progress has been made in promoting awareness that proper nutrition is vital to health.

Yet much remains to be done, especially in the developing world, to spread awareness that simply solving the problem of hunger does not necessarily tackle the question of nutrition. Currently, 7.3 percent of the global health burden is caused by vitamin and nutrient deficiency.

Poverty is the leading cause of many vitamin deficiencies, especially vitamin A. Much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa is affected by severe cases of vitamin A deficiency – since many diets in this part of the world include only staples. For instance, rice can represent up to 70 percent of caloric intake in many Asian countries, while cassava – rich in calories but poor in nutrients – is the main food source for many Africans.

In contrast to other countries in South Asia, such as Bangladesh and Nepal, India has been slow to tackle vitamin A deficiency. As a result, India represents 37 percent of victims, including roughly 80 million children.

Dr. Klaus Kraemer of Sight and Life, a Swiss nutrition advocacy group, laments this lack of focus. “The World Health Organisation recommends two to three doses of vitamin A per year for children under the age of five years. This is based on scientific evidence indicating a mortality reduction of 24 percent.

“It is tragic that India is lagging behind in implementing this guideline, resulting in needless child deaths,” he said.

Dr. Shilpa Vinod Bhatte, a medical professional based in Mumbai, told IPS that the Indian problem is partly due to local diets: “Hidden hunger and vitamin A deficiency in India is not just due to poverty but a lack of knowledge about the nutritive value of foods that need to be consumed to maintain good health – most diets of children under-five only consist of corn or rice or wheat porridge.”

Still, there are signs that the trend is changing, largely due to a renewed push by development practitioners around the world to tackle the problem.

The Copenhagen Consensus 2012 Expert Panel of top global economists assessed the most effective ways of allocating funds to address the world’s toughest challenges, and reported that “bundled micronutrient interventions” should be the top priority for investments in global health and development.

One of the participants, Nobel laureate economist Vernon Smith, explained, “One of the most compelling investments is to get nutrients to the world’s undernourished. The benefits from doing so – in terms of increased health, schooling, and productivity – are tremendous.”

Indeed, the estimate put forward by the Copenhagen Consensus is a 17-fold return on every dollar spent.

Achieving the MDGs

Experts argue these benefits should be seen in the light of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), targets agreed upon by all U.N. member states in 2000 to tackle extreme poverty and improve lives.

The most recent U.N. scorecard showed that hunger and malnutrition rates are still abysmally high.

In particular, sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing very high levels of hunger – in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Eritrea, over 60 percent of the population was listed as “undernourished”.

The U.N. and national governments provide vitamin A capsules equivalent to the needs of 390 million of the 540 million children with deficiencies, but a lack of coordinated action has left millions outside the scope of these efforts.

Now, the private sector has stepped in to fill the breach, providing supplements and helping to build capacity.

DSM – a global leader in vitamins, with headquarters in the Netherlands – has teamed up with organisations such as the World Food Programme (WFP), the World Bank, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), as well as charities like Vitamin Angels, to provide vital vitamins and nutrients to poor communities.

Renu Devi, of Bagwanpur Rati village in India’s Bihar state, with her children who take the Vitamin A doses. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

DSM provides direct financial support – one million dollars for rice fortification in 2012 alone – as well as capsules, powders, technical expertise and logistical resources.

“Vitamin Angels supports more than 100 NGOs in high-risk Indian states who help us reach close to three million children under five years at risk of going blind or dying due to vitamin A deficiency,” explained Bhatte.

Vitamin Angels, alongside Sight and Life and DSM, also works in communities across India to engage stakeholders on the ground, from NGOs and local governments to community leaders, to formulate long-term goals such as working through local institutions to set up a sustainable vitamin A distribution system.

Already, there are tangible results. Private contributions could push the number of children with access to Vitamin A capsules to 50 million by the close of 2013. These joint efforts are currently meeting approximately 17 percent of the unmet global demand.

Private sector efforts have nudged the European Union and its member states to spotlight the problem as a crucial development issue. At a recent conference on development, the European Commission’s Francesca Mosca explained, “It is unbearable that so many children are dying from malnutrition. The time to act is yesterday, not tomorrow.”

Mosca rightly pointed out that some efforts have started to bear fruit, based on a successful public-private partnership model. “We have been extremely involved in the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement”, a country-led initiative launched in 2010 to increase the efficacy of existing programmes. “I think it was the first time that all the actors came together: private sector, public sector, donors and partner countries.”

Paulus Verschuren, the Dutch Government’s Special Envoy on food and nutrition security for development, speaking at the same event, stressed, “The (period) of a child’s life during which we can intervene is very short. Children’s futures depend on nutrition… it’s really a moment that we can’t afford to miss.”

Nutrition plays a role in achieving almost every MDG – its impact on child health, for instance, could also boost the number of children attending school, promote gender equality by empowering women to take a more active role in their children’s health, and also improve maternal health, thereby reducing the maternal mortality ratio.

(END)