None of us can live without water. But for many people around the world, the water they depend on is far away and it isn’t always safe for drinking. March 22 marks World Water Day. Here’s a look at some of the hardship more than one billion people endure:
Archive for the ‘North Africa & Middle East’ Category
Transplanting rice in Cambodia. Helping small-scale farmers is an essential part of improving the world's ability to produce more food. Photo by Isabelle Lesser/Oxfam America
Norman Borlaug died over the weekend. He was a gifted plant scientist credited with achieving a significant increase in agricultural production in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s, the so called “Green Revolution.” He developed special varieties of wheat that boosted production six fold in Mexico, and then brought them to India. The new disease-resistant varieties helped both these countries become self-sufficient in wheat. “Descendants of these wheat varieties now cover virtually all of the spring bread wheat area in the developing world,” says Melinda Smale, a researcher in Oxfam’s office in Washington. Gary Toennissen, at the Rockefeller Foundation, estimates that about half the world goes to bed each night having eaten bread made from them. Accomplishments like these led to a Nobel Prize for Borlaug in 1970. Read the rest of this entry »
Since writing about President Obama’s speech in Ghana I have continued to see many fascinating comments about it rolling around the internet. The AfricaFocus web site has organized several reactions from Africa that are critical and very revealing. If you want some perspective on how Africans perceive their own challenges, and how they are reacting to the speech, check it out. Particularly notable are comments about how the US has failed to acknowledge its role in supporting dictators, influencing political transitions, and supporting conflicts during the Cold War. Firoz Manji of Pambazuka News noted this in a clever, alternative version of Obama’s speech called “Obama in Ghana: The speech he might have made.”
Trade came up in an editorial in Public Agenda in Accra, Ghana, which pointed out that “if the developed countries would open just three percent of their markets to African countries, these countries would earn more income from exports trade than the total foreign aid doled out to them in any given year. Mr. Obama shied away from the controversial issue of US farm subsidies which is killing small scale farmers, especially cotton farmers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.” Oxfam has been pointing this fact out for years, so it was good to see that the idea about trade and subsidies are still relevant, especially to Africans who have so much to gain from trade.
So what are your reactions to Obama’s speech? And if you could rewrite it as Manji did, what would you say?
Photo by Ceerwan Aziz
This is Jameela.
She’s featured in a new report Oxfam has just published on the challenges facing women in Iraq today—challenges that have plunged many of them, including those widowed by the war, deep into poverty. “In Her Own Words” is the name of the report. But words hardly begin to capture all that Jameela’s face conveys.
I print out her portrait and study it.
She’s 50. Only 50.
Two years younger than me? How could that be? Read the rest of this entry »
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