by Letha Tawney
Farmers throughout the Bobo-Dioulasso region of Burkina Faso met last week to discuss the advantages of an innovative FAO project to sustainably intensify production in the moist savannah region. Pictured is the Kankota Baré Farmer Field School, meeting to report on the progress of their work. In a shared test plot, they have been growing a diversified range of crops using improved pest and soil management practices, under the guidance of an FAO trained farmer facilitator. They're seeing improved yields with reduced inputs.
Resolving the lagging crop yields in West Africa is a complex issue, but FAO has been testing an integrated production system, based on conservation (no-till) agriculture with farmers in Burkina Faso since 2001. In their fifth season, the farmers are growing a broader range of cash and fodder crops, which stabilizes their livelihoods. The soil's improved nutrient cycling is reducing the need for chemical fertilizer while improving yields and the soil's improved water retention is lengthening the growing season. The long-term goal is to turn the moist savanna band across Africa into the breadbasket it has the potential to be, improving food security throughout the continent.
After a quick trip to the Ethiopian Ministry of Information, I'm pleased to report that UN Dispatch is officially a news organization in the eyes of the Ethiopian Government. Being officially, official I dropped in on the African Youth Panel, which is a meeting of about 30 young social entrepreneurs from across Africa. I met some amazing people there and heard some truly incredible stories -- the kind of stories that reaffirm your faith in humanity.
I'll share these in a later post. In the meantime, I'm off to visit some of the Danish government's development project sites and will drop back in on the youth panel. Stay tuned.
While piracy may be rampant off the coast of Somalia, it's actually on the decline in another, even more highly trafficked sea route.
"It will be very difficult to copycat the Somalia situation in Asia," said Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center at the International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. "The governments here are more committed and have more resources. In fact, the attacks here are coming down." A regional piracy-monitoring agency in Singapore said maritime attacks in Asia in the first nine months of the year dropped 11 percent compared to 2007 and 32 percent from 2006.This is good news, as 40% of the world's seaborne trade passes through the Strait of Malacca, a thin avenue [shaded dark blue on the map] between Malaysia and Indonesia. And while increased government anti-piracy activity - something that actual functioning states are much more capable of -- has certainly played a role in vanquishing Southeast Asian pirates, it also helps that, whereas Somali pirates are typically "very heavily armed," their Southeast Asian counterparts "usually just have knives."
Contrast these two headlines, from The New York Times and Scientific American, respectively, on the report released yesterday by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, detailing industrial countries' progress in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions .
NYT: Pollution Has Leveled Off, but the Figures Have Holes, Report Says
Scientific American: From Bad to Worse: Latest Figures on Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The ledes of the two stories present the difference even more starkly. The Times declares that "[e]missions from industrialized countries plateaued in 2006" -- only afterward adding the extremely relevant caveat that emissions have not been reported since then -- while Scientific American presents the reality more bluntly: "The U.N. says that even countries that vowed to cut pollution that causes global warming are churning out more of it."
Why the Times chose to present the story with a more optimistic slant is unclear to me. It is correct that greenhouse gas emissions did decrease over the 2000-2006 period, but, in an emergency as dire as climate change, these declines should not be interpreted in a vacuum, but judged against the extent to which countries pledged to reduce their emissions in the Kyoto protocol. And according to this metric, every country has failed rather ignominiously.
There are perhaps two small enclaves of optimism. Leading up to next month's climate change conference in Poznan, Poland, two countries did meet their emission reduction goals: the United Kingdom and...the Principality of Monaco.
(image from flickr user freefotouk under a Creative Commons license)
Reflecting on this past weekend's G-20 summit on the global economy, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan emphasized the imperative of continuing development aid even in the straights of dire economic times.
"It would be incredibly short-sighted - as well as immoral - for wealthy countries to use this financial crisis to drop promises to help the poorest," Annan said at a debate in Paris.
This is a point we've made before -- and one that should prove salient to policymakers. Investing in eliminating extreme poverty around the world is not simply a moral exigency; it is in wealthier countries' strategic interests to do so. A poorer, more stratified, and likely more extremist world is in no country's interest.
Rebels claim they are going to "withdraw troops" from humanitarian corridors, just after they -- and government forces -- broke a recently agreed ceasefire.
On the UN side, attack helicopters are ready to go, and the mission may potentially acquire about 3,000 new troops, according to a draft Security Council resolution to be voted on this week. The problem, of course, is that Member States will have to step up to contribute these troops, which will then likely take months to deploy. An fast-deploying European force not seeming to be in the works, the best we can hope for right now is for countries to offer their troops to the UN force as expeditiously as possible.
UPDATE: Refugees International's Erin Weir, writing from on the ground in eastern Congo, is frustrated that "the member states represented on the UN Security Council have persisted in doing absolutely nothing." She agrees that a delayed addition of troops is not going to be enough and that, after so much dithering, "time is not a luxury that the world can afford" in Congo.
On the eve of World Toilet Day (Nov. 19), TIME's Bryan Walsh explains why we shouldn't take our toilets for granted:
Toilets are a privilege that nearly half the world lacks. At least 2.6 billion people around the planet have no access to a toilet -- and that doesn't just mean that they don't have a nice, heated indoor bathroom. It means they have nothing -- not a public toilet, not an outhouse, not even a bucket. They defecate in public, contaminating food and drinking water, and the disease toll due to unsanitized human waste is staggering. ... But despite the horrific fate of the toiletless masses across much of South America, Africa and Asia, sanitation has never been high on the world's development agenda. NGOs and governments focus on making sure the poor have access to enough clean drinking water, but comparatively little funding goes into sanitation, even though the two are sometimes inextricable: Untreated sewage often ends up poisoning the available clean water in developing nations.
In addition to a Japanese cargo ship, they have seized possibly their biggest prize since the Ukrainian ship full of tanks -- a Saudi oil tanker transporting over a quarter of the country's daily oil production.
Elizabeth Dickinson points out that the most recent hijackings took place "under the watch" of dozens of international warships dispatched to protect shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden. This is true, but patrolling the waters off Somalia is not as exactly the same as standing guard over a bank vault; the ships' "watch" would have to extend for quite a few nautical miles to be able to capture every incident of piracy.
Opinio Juris' Kenneth Anderson suggests that incoming Obama administration use the case of piracy "to demonstrate its approach to use of force, multilateralism, and international law." He envisions a rather muscular -- and cunning -- response.
I had a conversation with a US Navy officer, not a lawyer, but someone with operational duties, who suggested that the best military course of action would be to equip some number of civilian vessels as decoys - heavily armed and carrying marines. The best thing, he said, would be for Somali pirates to attack, and then be aggressively counterattacked, in a battle, not the serving of an arrest warrant - sink their vessel and kill as many pirates as possible. It would send a message to pirates that they could not know which apparently civilian vessels might instead instead counterattack.To "kill as many pirates as possible" seems a little wanton, but I do agree with Anderson that the outbreak of piracy presents an opportunity for the United States to recommit to international accords like the law of the sea, and possibly even the ICC. Clearly, it will take some sort of aggressive response -- coupled with peaceful efforts on Somalia's mainland, of course -- to deter pirates from further increasing their lucrative banditry. Across the continent, Nigerian militants are already starting to emulate the Somali swashbucklers. UPDATE: The pirates attacking the tanker were indeed quite a few nautical miles off the coast. And if it had held a certain type of natural gas, it could have had the potential of causing "50 Hiroshimas." Gulp.
The scoop, straight from PerezHilton:
Blonde beauty Charlize Theron was just named a United Nations messenger of peace this past Friday. Theron's special focus will be on ending violence against women. The messengers of peace consist of mainly 10 celebrities from films, music, sports and literature, who are responsible for promoting United Nations activities and goals through the media. And it seems Theron cares about many causes, such as her involvement and effort to place mobile health clinics all over rural areas of South Africa, where access to health care is limited. As for Theron's latest role as messenger of peace, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said of the actress, "You have used your voice, compassion and special relationship with the public to create a better world."Let's hope that references to Theron can now start with descriptor "UN Messenger of Peace" rather than "blonde beauty." (image from flickr user som sol'n forlat under a Creative Commons license)