“The places in the world where the environment is most fragile, women’s health is most fragile,” said Leila Darabi, director of global communications for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, at the Wilson Center. “The negative impacts on the environment tend to affect women the most. Women are the people who are planting kitchen gardens, women are traditional healers, and so they often feel the impact first when those things are degraded.”

USAID’s annual report to Congress on its global health programs breaks down the broad array of initiatives carried out each year “from the American people” to prevent child and maternal deaths, provide safe access to water, combat infectious disease, and deliver HIV/AIDS relief, among other priorities. Maternal and child health are of particular focus, with the agency helping to launch the Child Survival Call to Action, London Summit on Family Planning, and U.S. Government Action Plan on Children in Adversity last year. The authors report significant declines in maternal and newborn mortality rates for priority countries and the establishment of “national contraceptive security strategies” in 36 out of 47 USAID-supported countries since 2003. “All of these efforts align under U.S. goals to end extreme poverty and promote peace and prosperity worldwide, which result in improved security at home and better markets for U.S. businesses abroad,” writes Assistant Administrator Dr. Ariel Pablos-Méndez.

The original version of this article, by Mike Ives, appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Phan Dinh Duc leans against yellow sacks of freshly harvested rice. It’s a warm spring evening in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, and Duc, a local farmer, is waiting for traders to arrive by truck to purchase his produce and sell it on commodities markets. Beyond him lies a vast checkerboard of rice paddies, each filled with water and bordered by a network of canals and roughly 10-foot-high earthen dikes. They enable year-round rice cultivation in an area where, a half century ago, vast floodplains typically lay fallow for half the year and farmers planted one annual rice crop that grew in tandem with seasonal floods.

China’s economic boom appears to be contagious. Over the past few years, China’s northern neighbor has quietly caught the bug and become the world’s second-fastest growing economy, experiencing a GDP growth rate of approximately 17.3 percent in 2011. 

The original version of this article, by Harry Verhoeven, appeared on ChinaDialogue.

The growing intensification of economic, political and social ties between China and Africa in the last 15 years is often told as a story of copper, petrodollars, emerging Chinatowns, and bilateral visits by heads of state.

“The development agenda is discretionary and the human rights agenda is obligatory,” said Kitty van der Heijden, the ambassador for sustainable development in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the final day of the ICPD International Conference on Human Rights here in the Netherlands.