Showing posts from category Ethiopia.
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Taming Hunger in Ethiopia: The Role of Population Dynamics
›May 4, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur
Ethiopia has been deemed a population-climate “hotspot” – a place where rapid growth and a changing climate pose grave threats to food security and human well-being.
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Food Security in a Climate-Altered Future, Part Two: Population Projections Are Not Destiny
›March 20, 2012 // By Kathleen MogelgaardRead part one, on the food-population-climate vulnerability dynamics of Malawi and other “hotspots,” here.
Too often, discussions about future food security make only a passing reference to population growth. It is frequently framed as an inevitable force, a foregone conclusion – and a single future number is reported as gospel: nine billion people in 2050. But adhering to a single path of future population growth misses the opportunity to think more holistically about food security challenges and solutions. Several recent food security reports illustrate this oft-overlooked issue.
Accounting for Population a Challenge
Oxfam International’s Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World is a thorough and fascinating examination of failures in our current food system and future challenges related to production, equity, and resilience. It reports newly-commissioned research, carried out by modelers at the Institute of Development Studies, to assess future agricultural productivity and food prices given the anticipated impacts of climate change.
But both the modeling work and the report text utilize a single projection for population growth: the UN’s 2008 medium variant projection of 9.1 billion by 2050 (which has since been revised by the UN up to 9.3 billion). Early on, the report does recognize some degree of uncertainty about this number: “Greater investment in solutions that increase women’s empowerment and security – by improving access to education and health care in particular – will slow population growth and achieve stabilization at a lower level.” But such investments do not appear in the report’s overall recommendations or Oxfam’s food security agenda. This is perhaps a missed opportunity, since the range of possibilities for future population growth is wide: the UN’s low variant for 2050 is 8.1 billion, and the high variant is 10.6 billion.
Food Security, Farming, and Climate Change to 2050: Scenarios, Results, and Policy Options is another frequently-cited report published by the International Food Policy Research Institute in 2010. In recognizing that economic growth and demographic change have important implications for future food security, IFPRI researchers modeled multiple scenarios for the future: an “optimistic” scenario which embodies high GDP growth and low population growth, a “pessimistic” scenario with low GDP growth and high population growth, and a “baseline” scenario which incorporates moderate GDP growth and the UN’s medium population projection. Each of these scenarios was then combined with five different climate change scenarios to better understand a range of possible futures.
Using different socioeconomic scenarios enabled researchers to better understand the significance of socioeconomic variables for future food security outcomes. The first key message from the report is that “broad-based economic development is central to improvements in human well-being, including sustainable food security and resilience to climate change.” This focus on economic development is based in part on the “optimistic scenario,” which counts on high GDP and low population growth (translating to high rates of per capita GDP growth).
Unfortunately, the socioeconomic scenario construction for this analysis doesn’t allow for an independent assessment of the significance of slower population growth, since high population growth is paired only with low GDP and lower population growth is paired only with high GDP. Therefore, none of the report’s recommendations includes reference to reproductive health, women’s empowerment, or other interventions that would contribute directly to a slower population growth path.
Expanding the Conversation to Better Inform Policy
Without a more nuanced treatment of population projections in technical analysis and popular reporting on food security, decision-makers in the realm of food security may not be exposed to the idea that population growth, a factor so critical in many areas where food security is already a challenge, is a phenomenon that is responsive to policy and programmatic interventions – interventions that are based on human rights and connected to well-established and accepted development goals.
There are some positive signs that this conversation is evolving. A new climate change, food security, and population model developed by the Futures Group enables policymakers and program managers to quickly and easily assess the impact of slower population growth on a country’s future food requirements and rates of childhood malnutrition. In the case of Ethiopia, for example, the model demonstrates that by 2050, a slower population growth path would make up for the caloric shortfall that is likely to arise from the impact of climate change on agriculture and would cut in half the number of underweight children.
And recently, we’ve begun to see some of this more nuanced treatment of population, family planning, and food security linkages in a riveting, year-long reporting series (though perhaps unfortunately named), Food for 9 Billion, a collaboration between American Public Media’s Marketplace, Homelands Productions, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and PBS NewsHour.
In January, reporter Sam Eaton highlighted the success of integrated population-health-environment programs in the Philippines, such as those initiated by PATH Foundation Philippines, that are seeing great success in delivering community-based programs that promote food security through a combination of fisheries management and family planning service delivery. Reporting from the Philippines in an in-depth piece for PBS NewsHour, Eaton concluded:So maybe solving the world’s food problem isn’t just about solving the world’s food problem. It’s also about giving women the tools they want, so they can make the decisions they want – here in the world’s poorest places.
Making clear connections of this nature between population issues and the most pressing challenges of our day may be the missing link that will help to mobilize the political will and financial resources to finally fully meet women’s needs for family planning around the world – an effort that, if started today, can have ongoing benefits that will become only more significant over time. Integrating reproductive health services into food security programs and strategies is an important start.
Back in Malawi, just before we turned off the highway to the Lilongwe airport, I asked the taxi driver to pull over in front of a big billboard. We both smiled as we looked at the huge government-sponsored image of a woman embracing an infant. The billboard proclaimed: “No woman should die while giving life. Everyone has a role to play.” Exactly. The reproductive health services that save women’s lives are the same services that can slow population growth and bring food security within closer reach. -
International Research Institute for Climate and Society
Ethiopia Provides Model for Improving Climate, Other Data Services in Africa
›The original version of this article appeared on the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
In developed countries, we are accustomed to having access to long and detailed records on weather and climate conditions, demographics, disease incidence, and many other types of data. Decisionmakers use this information for a variety of societal benefits: they spot trends, fine-tune public health systems, and optimize crop yields, for example. Researchers use it to test hypotheses, make forecasts, and tweak projections from computer models. What’s more, much of these data are just a mouse click away, for anyone to access for free (see examples for climate and health).
Across much of Africa, however, it’s a different story. By most measures, Africa is the most “data poor” region in the world. Wars and revolutions, natural and manmade disasters, extreme poverty, and unmaintained infrastructure, have left massive gaps in socioeconomic and environmental data sets. Reliable records of temperature, rainfall, and other climate variables are scarce or nonexistent. If they do exist, they’re usually deemed as proprietary and users must pay to get access. This is not an inconsequential matter. Without readily available, reliable data, policy makers’ ability to make smart, well-informed decisions is hobbled.
The problem of data access persisted even in Ethiopia, regarded as having one of the better meteorological services on the continent. Thanks to the recent efforts of Tufa Dinku, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the situation has improved considerably.
Continue reading on IRI.
Video Credit: Overview of Ethiopia Climate Maprooms, courtesy of IRI. -
What Would It Take To Help People ‘and’ the Planet?
›February 1, 2012 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThe original version of this article first appeared in the “Scientist’s Soapbox” column of Momentum magazine’s special issue on “what would it take” to craft solutions to some of the Earth’s toughest challenges.
People living in the most biodiverse areas of the world tend to be poor, isolated, and dependent on natural resources. They often lack reliable access to alternative livelihoods and health services and thus can place stress on these ecologically unique regions.
Conservation efforts will merely slow habitat loss if they don’t fundamentally address the living conditions of the human residents as well as the flora and fauna. But programs to assist these communities have commonly focused on one problem at a time, reflecting the interests of the funders: Environmental groups focus on conservation, while health organizations concentrate on disease. We must ask whether investments to protect biologically rich areas are effective and sustainable if they don’t respond to the many needs of the people who live there.
But the problems faced by people in these remote areas don’t fit our traditional sectors. The way we disburse our funds, divide our bureaucracies, demarcate our disciplines, and measure success ignores the reality of intersecting needs. Such stovepiping can disrespect the communities’ scarce resources, especially their time. It can waste development aid on duplicate supplies and staff. And it can lead us to miss how the solution to one problem (e.g., providing antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS) can be undercut by another (e.g., lacking access to safe water with which to take the pills).
So, what would it take to help particularly vulnerable populations while protecting particularly important ecological systems?
We need to strategically target our help by addressing HELP – health, environment, livelihoods, and population – through a truly integrated approach to sustainable development in these areas. Evidence suggests tackling problems concurrently can be more efficient and effective. Key donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development are increasingly prioritizing integrated responses, providing some funding for sustainable development innovators and supporting evaluation of the results. But we need more evidence that these efforts can achieve results that match or exceed the outcomes of single-sector projects. To rigorously test this approach, more projects must be funded, implemented and analyzed, over longer periods of time and at bigger scales.
To date, some promising projects and research in diverse locations – Ethiopia, Nepal, Madagascar, Rwanda, the Philippines, and Uganda – suggest that the HELP approach offers greater benefits than traditional programs.
In the Philippines, for example, the PATH Foundation Philippines’ Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) program addresses pressing needs for both family planning services and sustainable environmental stewardship in densely populated coastal communities, where local fisheries have been depleted because of increased demand for food. IPOPCORM helps create marine protected areas and promotes alternative economic livelihoods such as seaweed harvesting, thus allowing critical local fish stocks to recover. Concurrently, the initiative mitigates human-induced pressures on the environment and lowers the vulnerability of this underserved population by providing voluntary family planning services. Since its launch in 2001, the IPOPCORM program’s approach has yielded measurable benefits, simultaneously reducing program costs and improving health and environmental outcomes – and outperforming compartmentalized, side-by-side sector interventions.
How can we bring HELP to biodiversity-rich communities? First, we can encourage scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers to step outside their stovepipes by producing and distributing manuals, for example, based on lessons learned from existing cross-disciplinary projects. Second, we must bridge the gap between analysis and field-based programs by developing new metrics that better assess the impact of integrated programs. Third, we must open up bureaucratic funding structures by demonstrating not only the short-term savings but also the synergies that bolster long-term sustainability.
The challenges are significant, but I see promising new opportunities for overcoming them. For example, the new Pathfinder International-led projects around Lake Victoria in Uganda and Kenya mark the entry of a respected health organization into the environmental arena and the return of a leading private funder – the MacArthur Foundation – to HELP programs. With some of Africa’s highest population densities, poverty, ethnic diversity, and biodiversity, the Great Lakes region is one of the most volatile intersections of human development and environmental change.
Through these and other community-based, integrated projects, we can truly help people and the planet at the same time.
Photo Credit: “Boy on road east of Addis,” courtesy of Geoff Dabelko/Wilson Center. -
Move Beyond “Water Wars” to Fulfill Water’s Peacebuilding Potential, Says NCSE Panel
›January 26, 2012 // By Schuyler NullOne of the best talks of last week’s NCSE Environment and Security Conference was thewater security plenary on Friday. Moderator Aaron Salzberg, who is the special coordinator for water resources at the Department of State, led with a provocative question: how many in attendance think there will be war over water in the future?
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Famine and Food Insecurity in the Horn of Africa: A Man-Made Disaster?
›This year’s drought in the Horn of Africa has been the region’s worst in decades and has exploded into a humanitarian catastrophe affecting millions. In Somalia, where the drought is layered on top of two decades of conflict and an extremely weak state, the impact of the drought has been most damaging. Somalia is the only country in the region where the UN has declared famine zones. And, even though the UN recently upgraded three of Somalia’s six famine areas to “lesser emergencies,” four million Somalis – more than half the country’s population – remain in urgent need of food and general humanitarian aid.
The drought may have been what sparked the current crisis, but other, longer-term factors, like a sustained lack of agricultural development, extreme rural poverty, and changing weather patterns, not to mention Somalia’s lack of functioning government, set the stage.
A Long-Term Crisis in the Making
“Lack of rainfall over several seasons is the most immediate and most visible cause of the current humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa,” said Jim Hansen of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in a brief video produced this summer by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University (watch above). Much of the Horn’s population “depends on rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism for their livelihoods and sustenance,” said Hansen. Already “quite poor and…locked in poverty for quite a long time,” environmental and resource degradation, paired with rapid population growth, have compounded their vulnerability to extreme events, he said.
Throughout the region, resilience to crises like the current drought has been weakened by decades of poor agricultural planning, “driven more by shifts in ideology than any real evidence among some of the key international development organizations,” said Hansen. That poor planning has made communities more dependent on humanitarian aid when poor weather hits, which in turn forces aid groups to redirect resources away from longer-term development and towards short-term disaster relief instead, Hansen said.
While these problems exist across the Horn of Africa, Hansen points out that the crisis has been most damaging in Somalia, which he attributes to the country’s weak governance and to international aid groups’ limited ability to operate in the country.
“Northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and Somalia have similar severity of drought, but the humanitarian crisis is much more severe – the loss of livelihood and life is greater in Somalia largely because the government is weaker,” he said.
The Government’s Role
Owen Barder, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, draws a more direct line between governance and famine in the Horn. “In Somalia…there’s a complete breakdown of government, and the consequence is the famine that we’re seeing,” said Barder during a Center for Global Development podcast. The country has been without a functioning government since 1991, when civil war broke out. It has since become “the most food-insecure nation in the world” and, as described by Foreign Policy, “the international community’s longest-running failure.”
Barder raised two points about the government’s role in famine. One, that access to information – in this case an early warning system monitoring drought conditions – can minimize the humanitarian impact of any given natural disaster; and two, that a country’s government must be able to translate that information into action in order for it to actually make a difference.
Barder is not alone in emphasizing the state’s role as a driver of the famine. Edward Carr, a AAAS science fellow with USAID, wrote in July, when the UN first declared famine in Somalia, that attributing the famine solely to drought is “a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.”
Charles Kenny, also a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, went even further on Foreign Policy, arguing that famine, or “mass starvation as an intentional act of governance,” should be categorized as a crime and prosecutable at the International Criminal Court.
Al Shabab and the Months AheadAs of late November, the United Nations estimated that tens of thousands had died in Somalia alone since drought began this spring. Though USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) reports that famine has now subsided in three of the six southern regions it initially struck, a quarter of a million Somalis remain at risk of “imminent starvation,” according to the UN.
According to FEWSNET, famine should not reappear in the foreseeable future, assuming aid groups can maintain current distribution levels – a key caveat. Ten days after FEWSNET issued its analysis, however, Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda-linked militant organization that controls much of southern Somalia, banned 16 aid groups, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, from operating in the areas under its control. UNICEF spokesman Jaya Murthy told the BBC that the move would put “about 160,000 severely malnourished children…at imminent risk of death.”
Fighting in southern Somalia between Al Shabab and Kenyan and Ethiopian forces is adding another layer to the country’s humanitarian crisis. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees reported that, as of late November, the fighting had become the primary driver of internal displacement, replacing drought and famine as the key drivers during the first three quarters of the year. The UNHCR estimated that, between the drought and the conflict, 1.46 million Somalis have been displaced.
Meanwhile, the rainy season is picking up, and although that’s good news for farmers and pastoralists, it also means that Somalis will be vulnerable to diseases like measles, typhoid, and cholera, which can spread quickly through overcrowded, under-supplied IDP camps. Somalis still living under Al Shabab’s control are prohibited from getting vaccinations, amplifying their vulnerability to disease in the coming months.
These latest developments offer strong evidence that policy decisions can exacerbate the human toll of natural disasters. From Barder’s perspective, that is reason for optimism. “We have the information, we have the capacity to prevent it from happening,” he said.
For more on Somalia’s underlying demographic issues, see Elizabeth Leahy Madsen’s post “In Somalia, Beyond the Immediate Crises, Demography Reveals a Long-Term Challenge.”
Sources: AlertNet, Associated Press, BBC, Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, The New York Times, UNHCR, UN News Centre, Voice of America.
Video Credit: “Jim Hansen on Food Security in East Africa,” courtesy of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society on vimeo; image credit: FEWSNET/USAID. -
Can “Climate-Smart Agriculture” Help Feed Africa’s Growing Population?
›December 13, 2011 // By Brenda ZuluFood production needs to increase 70 percent by 2050 to meet the demands of a growing world population, said former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a keynote address on “climate-smart agriculture” at a COP-17 event hosted by the World Bank and African Union. Annan, who is now chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said this was a particular concern in Africa, where four out of five citizens are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods.
One in seven people in the world do not have enough food to eat, Annan said, and climate change is expected to make this challenge more difficult to overcome. Climate-smart agriculture includes a wide variety of techniques that help increase the resilience of communities and protect them from extreme weather events, such as terracing to prevent soil erosion, improving weather forecasting, managing water runoff, and developing irrigation systems.
“Climate change affects us by undermining our resource base through water and soil degradation,” said Prime Minister of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi at the event. “There is need to protect the resources and to rehabilitate green areas of our land.” He said that since 70 percent of Africans are small-scale farmers and that most of the poor in Africa were farmers, there is no better way to fight poverty on the continent than through agriculture.
South African President Jacob Zuma said at the event that given that the UN projects a population of more than nine billion people in the world by 2050, agriculture should be a priority as it is more vulnerable to climate change than any other sector.
“Climate-smart agriculture includes proven practical techniques such as mulching, intercropping, conservation agriculture, integrated crop management and agro forestry, improved grazing, and innovative better weather management,” he said, all of which have the potential to help increase crop yields.
Mary Robinson, chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, said there could be no smart agriculture without integrating women’s issues, because climate change affects women disproportionately. “Women make the connection between climate-smart agriculture, food security, and gender,” she said.
“Our ability to feed the growing population under climate variability and change will require new expertise and harmonized efforts,” said Robinson.
Annan agreed, saying African women should be fully involved in early action that can support technical assistance, such as screening agriculture plans to ensure they are “climate smart” as well as integrating climate resilience and mitigation into ongoing poverty-reduction programs and testing new approaches.
But according to Brylyne Chitsunge, a farmer from Pretoria speaking on the panel, things will need to change considerably from the status quo. “The small-scale farmer remains very much marginalized in institutions,” she said. “They exist on paper but they really don’t exist.”
Brenda Zulu is a member of Women’s Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the “From Durban” series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.
Sources: World Bank, World Food Programme.
Photo Credit: “Cultivated hillsides,” courtesy of flickr user coda (Damien du Toit). -
Jason Bremner, Behind the Numbers
PHE Champions Bring Their Experiences From the Field to the International Family Planning Conference in Senegal
›December 8, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Jason Bremner, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.
This past week at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning, four practitioners from the field traveled from remote parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Tanzania to Dakar, Senegal, to share their successes and challenges in reaching remote communities with an integrated package of health, livelihood, and environment services. Together they made up the panel, “Reaching the Hardly Reached: Delivering Family Planning Through Population, Health, and Environment Integration.”
The panelists came from four environmental organizations whose starting point for working in these remote places was the protection of the biodiversity and natural resources upon which all life depends. Dr. Vik Mohan, physician and medical director for Blue Ventures, talked about how he and his organization transitioned from focusing initially on the conservation of coastal marine reserves and coral reefs to now working to improve health care, including access to family planning.
Blue Ventures, in response to community and women’s needs, opened a family planning clinic, and on the opening day, 20 percent of the women of reproductive age in the community came out to request contraceptives. Today they offer a whole spectrum of short- and long-acting contraceptive methods through partnerships with Marie Stopes International, Population Services International, and various funders. Blue Ventures reported that contraceptive prevalence had risen from 8 percent when they began in 2007 to 35 percent today.
Continue reading on Behind the Numbers.
Photo used with permission courtesy of PRB. Left to right: Didier Mazongo, WWF; Vik Mohan, Blue Ventures; Baraka Kalangahe, Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership; and Jason Bremner, PRB.
