"More organic food production could help Africa: UN" -- by Laura MacInnis, Reuters

By Laura MacInnis, Reuters News Service

GENEVA (Reuters) - Demand for organic foods will keep growing despite the world economic crisis, creating an opportunity for farmers in poor countries, the United Nations' trade and development agency said on Monday.

In a research note, UNCTAD projected that sales of certified organic products would reach $67 billion in 2012, up from $46 billion in 2007 and about $23 billion in 2002.

"Even in this current economic crisis, where demand for most products is dropping fast, demand for organic products continues to grow," it said.

Sales of organic fruits, vegetables, grains, eggs and meats -- produced without synthetic fertilisers and pesticides -- shot up in past years on claims the food is healthier, tastes better and causes less ecological damage than conventional agriculture.

The typically pricier products have lost some momentum as a result of economic stress in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, hurting some specialist retailers such as Whole Foods Market. But organics remain broadly popular among rich-market consumers, especially parents of young children.

UNCTAD said the resilient interest in ecologically-friendly production represents an opportunity for developing nations, who produce and export a large share of the world's organic goods.

Poor-country farmers, who often struggle to compete against their subsidised and technologically advanced counterparts in Europe and the United States, could benefit from growing and exporting more organic foods.

"Studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America indicate that organic farmers earn more than their conventional counterparts," it said, estimating that organic foods carry price premiums for farmers ranging from 30 to 200 percent.

In Africa, where the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says agriculture accounts for 57 percent of employment but just 11 percent of export earnings, UNCTAD said ecological farming techniques could have an especially large impact.

"Organic production is ... particularly well-suited for smallholder farmers, who comprise the majority of Africa's poor," it found.

Using more natural techniques such as composting, mulching, and crop rotation could help African crops yield two to four times more than they now do, UNCTAD said, citing soil scientists.

Drawing on a study of 331 Ugandan farmers, it concluded that "conversion to organic was fairly easy, involved little risk and required few, if any, fixed investments. The organic households became more food-secure due to higher incomes."

Between 20 and 24 percent of the world's organic farms are now located in Africa, a continent whose lagging food production has drawn the attention of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in recent years.

Only about 14 percent of Africa's 184 million hectares of arable land is under cultivation, according to FAO statistics.

"AIDS battle burnishes Bush's legacy in Africa" -- Associated Press

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - In her AIDS-scarred South African township, Sweetness Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise for George W. Bush that echoes to the deserts of Namibia, the hills of Rwanda and the villages of Ethiopia.

Like countless Africans, Mzolisa looks forward to Barack Obama becoming America's first black president Jan 20. But — like countless Africans — Mzolisa says she will always be grateful to Bush for his war on AIDS, which has helped to treat more than 2 million Africans, support 10 million more, and revitalize the global fight against the disease.

"It has done a lot for the people of South Africa, for the whole of the African continent," says Mzolisa, a feisty mother of seven. "It has changed so many people's lives, saved so many people's lives."

Mzolisa, 44, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1999 and formed a women's support group to "share the pain." In 2004 she received a U.S. grant to set up office in a shipping container and start a soup kitchen from the group's vegetable garden. She stretches her $10,000 in annual funding to train staff to look after bedridden AIDS victims, feed and clothe orphans, and do stigma-busting work at schools and taxi ranks.

Hundreds of projects get funding

Hundreds of similar small grass-roots projects are being funded by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, alongside higher-profile charities and big state clinics.

Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003 to expand prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African, which account for more than half the world's estimated 33 million AIDS infections. The initiative tied in with a World Health Organization campaign to put 3 million people on AIDS drugs by 2005 — a goal it says was reached in 2007.

Congress last year passed legislation more than tripling the budget to $48 billion over the next five years, with Republicans and Democrats alike hailing the program as a remarkable success.

But the task remains enormous. More than 1.5 million Africans died in 2007 (the U.S. death toll is under 15,000), fewer than one-third had access to treatment, and new infections continued to outstrip those receiving life-prolonging drugs.

In most African countries, life expectancy has dropped dramatically, and only a few, like Botswana, have started to turn the corner again.

And with no end in sight to the global financial crisis, there are fears about whether all the funding approved by Congress will be delivered.

Read the entire story here.

"Our Moonshot" -- by Elaine Thomas

There are two seemingly disparate strands running through my mind these days, but I think some sort of connection is actually there. The first thought is of my niece, Suzannah, who recently returned from a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. She primarily worked with the women on health and economic empowerment. In this heavily Muslim country, empowerment of women is a daunting, if not impossible, task. In her first months in Niger, Suzannah was convinced that she would never learn to speak or understand Hausa yet is fluent upon leaving the country. Her genuine compassion and concern for the women of her village is just what the impoverished countries of sub-Saharan Africa need. Not someone to tell them what to do but just to be there, helping connect them with resources they need to climb out of the poverty trap.

However, Suzannah will not be going back to Africa. There was a time when she was pretty convinced that she would go into international development work as her parents had before her. But now, she says she’ll probably stay in the States, devoting herself to women’s issues here.

What happened? Why the change of heart? Shortly after her return to the US, she met up with a woman who had served in Niger twenty years ago. Although they were in different villages, as they compared notes it dawned on Suzannah that the things she was doing and the issues the people of Niger face have not changed in those twenty years. Aid organizations might as well have saved their time, money and energy for all the results they produced. Disheartened, this good and talented young woman will not return to the continent that so desperately needs people just like her.


The other thought occupying my mind? The video from the village of Kogelo, Kenya, Barack Obama’s ancestral home, on the eve of his election as President of the United States. The unbridled joy of these people that one of their own could ascend to the most powerful position on the face of the earth was thrilling to witness. As media reports poured in from around the world, it was abundantly clear that the American voters sent a very clear message to the world about the kind of country we are and intend to be, reclaiming our role as the land where tired, poor and huddled masses are welcome and as a symbol of justice and liberty throughout the world. The hope right now is palpable.

So I think that I can connect the two strands of thought. Where once things did not change or improve, maybe, just maybe things might be different. Maybe, just maybe, the new administration will live out its promises to support the MDGs with full financial commitment, not just words. Maybe, just maybe, we can say to the people of Kogelo, Kenya or Konni, Niger that we share a common humanity and live out those words in action. It’s clear that much of the development money of the past has not been utilized appropriately or effectively. That doesn’t mean that we stop trying. Surely in this time of renewed hope, we can dedicate ourselves as a country to finally making a real difference in helping those in extreme poverty climb onto solid footing.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued his man-on-the-moon challenge:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

There are those who say we need to issue a similar challenge to address global climate change.

Well, I’d like to make another proposal.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, before this decade is out, assuring that every man, woman, and child on this planet has the resources and capabilities to be self-supporting, free of preventable disease, with access to education and economic opportunity.

Someone tell Mr. Obama.

"For Africa, 'Energy From Dirt'" -- By Cate Doty, New York Times

START-UP companies around the world are looking at Africa — where 74 percent of the population lives without electricity — as a test market for new, off-the-grid lighting technologies.

Many of these efforts involve wind or solar power. But one group in Cambridge, Mass., is working to develop fuel cells made from the bacteria that occur in soil or waste.

“You can just literally make energy from dirt,” said Aviva Presser, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “And there’s a lot of dirt in Africa.”

Ms. Presser is one of the founders of Lebone Solutions, which is being financed by a $200,000 World Bank grant and private investments. Lebone’s idea is a microbial fuel cell, a battery that makes a small amount of energy out of materials like manure, graphite cloth and soil, which are common to African households.

But Lebone — which means “light stick” in the Sotho language — does not just want to make the batteries and sell them to African consumers. The group hopes that eventually, as the technology becomes more refined, each household will be able to build a battery at a one-time cost of no more than $15.

“Africans are very, very creative,” said Hugo Van Vuuren, a Lebone founder. “It’s very entrepreneurial, just not in the way we traditionally define entrepreneurial.”

Mr. Van Vuuren, who is from Pretoria, South Africa, and who graduated from Harvard last year with a degree in economics, likened the simplicity of the battery to “the potato experiment that most of us did in high school class,” a two-step reaction that produces a simple charge.

But the bacteria in a microbial fuel cell produce electrons while doing what they naturally are supposed to do: metabolize organic waste, like dead leaves or grass or compost, for energy. The electrons then stick to an electrode, like a piece of graphite, and the chemical reaction that follows creates a small charge sufficient to power a small lamp or cellphone.

“It can be made by people with minimal training,” Ms. Presser said. “It doesn’t take a massive investment.”

The founders of the Lebone team were classmates at Harvard, and looking at sustainable lighting technologies for Africa was their class project. Last summer, they took the technology to Leguruki, a village in Tanzania, to see how the batteries work in households. For three hours each night, six families used batteries made of manure, graphite cloth and buckets, and a copper wire to conduct the current to a circuit board.

While in Leguruki, Mr. Van Vuuren said, the group learned as much about the people who used the batteries as the batteries themselves.

“People walk an hour or more a day to the local high schools to get their phones charged for two or three days,” he said, noting that the phones were sources of light as well as communication devices. The batteries are also used to power radios, Mr. Van Vuuren said, as important a medium of communication in Africa as the cellphone.

Read the entire article here.

Step by Step: Finding the blessings in the slums of Nairobi

by Reynolds Whalen

As I walked through the streets of Nairobi’s poorest area, the police were pulling electricity out of people’s homes. Local gangs had tapped it illegally from nearby power lines and charged residents to use it. My friend, Fred, advised me to hide my camera as we passed a dump truck full of wires surrounded by a dozen officers donning sleek sunglasses and brandishing fully automatic weapons. The air pulsed with a dangerous tension.

Several minutes after we passed this scene, gunfire erupted behind us, popping like the firecrackers I had watched serenely on a grassy hill in St. Louis weeks earlier for the Fourth of July. Startled, I turned to my friend Fupi for a plan of action and was surprised to find him and Fred laughing.

“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” I asked frantically. They just smiled reassuringly and replied:

“Don’t worry, they’re not aiming at people, they’re shooting into the air.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I can tell by the way it sounds,” replied Fupi.

My immediate thought, and one that still haunts me, was that no one should have to know the difference between the sound of bullets being fired into the air and the sound of bullets being fired into a human body.

Mathare is one of the most neglected areas in Kenya. It is the second largest slum in the country with 700,000 people living on about four or five square miles of land. Like many condensed informal urban settlements in this part of the world, problems of HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, violence, prostitution, early pregnancies, and poor sanitation plague its inhabitants. Visitors to this harsh and violent area often balk with disgust and lament the hopeless conditions of its inhabitants. Over the past year, I have learned to think differently.

During a study abroad program last fall and while conducting research this summer, I worked with a group called Haba na Haba, which means “step by step” in Kiswahili. This is a development agency run entirely by people in the community that empowers youth to change their own difficult situations, using a broad spectrum of performing and visual arts. As an Acting major at Washington University, I found particular interest in the drama group and their stunning community outreaches.

Every weekend, groups of young performing artists pile into vans and drive to nearby informal settlements. Upon arrival, they identify an open area such as a field or courtyard and set up drums. Soon, the air is filled with powerful rhythms and a crowd of hundreds has gathered within 10 or 15 minutes. Then, a group of acrobats performs, creating impressive human structures, doing rope-skipping tricks, and swallowing fire. A team of dancers follows, merging aspects of many Kenyan cultures into one poignant routine that uses specific movements to address important issues in the community. Finally, the drama group enters the space and performs an original short play about a concern affecting that particular area. These topics are carefully selected in weekly rehearsals where members of the drama group brainstorm and use improvisation exercises to form their plays. The actors live in these areas, and thus understand which issues are most important at the time. Due to a high level of illiteracy, education through drama is the most effective way to teach about HIV/AIDS prevention, violence, and drug abuse. Haba na Haba reaches nearly 100,000 people a year with its community outreach program.

In addition to the theatre activities, Haba na Haba has a program called Shootback. This initiative started nearly ten years ago when an American photography student equipped about a dozen Mathare youth with cameras and asked them to take pictures of their daily lives. The result was stunning and produced a beautiful book and photography exhibit that traveled the world for years. Last year, Shootback underwent a similar project where they educated ten local young people about the Millenium Development Goals, then asked them to take pictures of them in the community. The resulting book has raised a considerable amount of money for Haba na Haba and increased international exposure.

The Shootback that exists today is run entirely by the original youth and seeks to capture a life that is horribly misrepresented in the national and international media. Journalists and reporters only venture to Mathare when something terrible happens. Therefore, we get the image with which we are all so familiar: starving babies, crumbling homes, uncontrollable violence, towering trash heaps, etc. We never hear about the talented football team that won an international tournament in Norway, the local furniture business that successfully put a bright student through college, the thousands of Mathare residents commuting six hours a day to central Nairobi, or the Mathare kid who became an important United Nations consultant. These stories are not told, so Shootback makes it their mission to tell them.

Recently, Shootback developed a program called Slum T.V. where they spend all week in the community, interviewing people about their businesses and shooting footage of important events. On selected weekends, they have a showing on a large screen in a popular Mathare field, highlighting slum life and the significant contributions of its residents. These bright young adults have reacted to a life of extreme poverty and marginalization by re-claiming agency and changing the community from the inside.

Supporting the MDGs should be central to our lives as Americans and Christians. But when you plan on giving, carefully consider why you are doing it and where your money is going. Resist the temptation to feel you are somehow solving “third world” problems or saving helpless African children. Our role as the church and as a global community is not to “save” anyone. Our role is to share the love of Christ by offering all that we can, while thanking God for the innumerable blessings granted to us.

When you donate 0.7% of your income, know that your money does not have to go to huge organizations like the United Nations or USAID. There are countless movements and groups like Haba na Haba doing incredible work every day. Be creative. Think locally. Find someone who has traveled in developing countries and ask how you can be involved. Participating in the MDGs should not be a passive activity. Take ownership of your ministry and seek to be like Christ, constantly seeking the best way to serve others and share a message of undying love.

Reynolds Whalen is a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, has traveled extensively in Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan. He spent fall semester 2006 in Kenya working with Haba na Haba in Mathare -- read his blog on it here and is working on a documentary film on that experience.

Tomorrow: The Rev. Becca Stevens

Bono says G-8 Behind on Aid to Africa

From the Associated Press:

BERLIN -- The world's biggest industrial countries are failing to keep up with financial promises they made to Africa, rocker-activist Bono said Tuesday, calling a new progress report "a cold shower" for the Group of Eight.

G-8 members in 2004-2006 contributed less than half the amount needed to make good on promises to double Africa aid to $50 billion by 2010, according to a report released by DATA _ Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa _ an advocacy group founded by Bono, the 47-year-old frontman for Irish band U2.

"The G-8 are sleepwalking into a crisis of credibility. I know the DATA report will feel like a cold shower, but I hope it will wake us all up," he said.

Bono is urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chairs a G-8 summit in Germany next month, to ensure that members contribute what they said they would.

The report shows the G-8 increased aid by $2.3 billion but says they need to increase aid by an additional $3.1 billion to substantially help the people of Africa.

"These statistics are not just numbers on a page," Bono said. "They are people begging for their lives, for two pills a day, a mother begging to immunize her children, a child begging not to become a mother at the age of 12."

Read the rest here.

Download the Data2007 report here.

Download/stream a podcast of Bono talking with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta about Bono's love for music and "passion to save the world."