Showing posts from category poverty.
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Bringing Cambodia Back from the Brink: An Audio Interview with Suwanna Gauntlett
›December 10, 2010 // By Hannah MarquseeThree decades after the Khmer Rouge regime wiped out an estimated 1.7 million people – one fifth of Cambodia’s total population – the environment and Cambodian people are still feeling the effects.
The Pol Pot regime’s policy of agrarian collectivization dramatically reorganized land ownership and relocated millions from urban to rural areas. The ensuing decades of Vietnamese occupation and civil war further changed Cambodia’s workforce, dislocating millions.The “Khmer Rouge regime increased the destruction of natural resources exponentially,” Suwanna Gauntlett, founder and CEO of Wildlife Alliance, told ECSP in this interview. Today, 78 percent of Cambodia’s 14.5 million people live in rural areas, according to the World Bank, nearly all of whom work as subsistence farmers. These rural households account for almost 90 percent of Cambodia’s poor and 36 percent of the total population in 1997.
“These Forests Were Silent”
When Wildlife Alliance arrived in Cambodia in 2000, “these forests were silent,” Gauntlett said. “You couldn’t hear any birds, you couldn’t hear any wildlife and you could hardly see any signs of wildlife because of the destruction.”
In one village, Chi Phat, Gauntlett noted how years of slash-and-burn agriculture had left a “circle of death” around the village as farmers gradually encroached further into the forest.
Cambodians have compensated by turning from traditional subsistence farming to illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, slash-and-burn agriculture, mining, and other unsustainable development (with significant Chinese investment). This has contributed to food and water insecurity, rapid deforestation, habitat loss, and species extinctions. In 1990, 73 percent of Cambodia’s land was covered by forest. By 2007, that number had dropped to 57 percent. Cambodia’s 146 threatened plant and animal species have also felt the effects of this loss. The Indochinese tiger, native to Cambodia, is now thought to have less than 30 individuals remaining in the entire country.
Integrated Solutions
Focusing on the Cardamom mountain range – Cambodia’s largest remaining intact forest – Wildife Alliance established several community-based agriculture and ecotourism programs to help villagers escape the “vicious circle” of poverty and environmental destruction. Ten years later, “there’s been tremendous progress in the geographic areas of our projects,” said Gauntlett.
In another village, Sovanna Baitong, Wildlife Alliance’s community agriculture program has raised the incomes of some residents to over $200 a month when the national poverty level is $200 a year, Gauntlett said. Today this village has a school, a clinic that provides health care and family planning, and a micro-credit fund. This is all managed by the community leaders, 30 percent of whom are women.
Ten years ago, “it was a mess,” Gauntlett said. “It’s amazing to see the difference.”
However, in parts of the country where Wildlife Alliance does not operate, deforestation continues at an alarming pace, often fueled by Chinese and other foreign investment. In some parts of the country, “deforestation has led to very severe water shortages,” including villages where people have to walk up to 20 kilometers for water because “there is no more underground water,” said Gauntlett. This has troubling implications for Cambodian security, particularly with aggressive hydrological development of the Upper Mekong continuing in China and Laos.
“I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen throughout Cambodia – that this water shortage will lead to food shortage [which] will lead to civil unrest,” Gauntlett said.
Sources: BBC, Cambodian Genocide Program, The Washington Post, Wildlife Alliance, World Bank, WWF, UNEP.
Photo Credit: “Farmer at Sovanna Baitong” and “Suwanna Gauntlett” Courtesy of Wildlife Alliance. -
Hans Rosling Double Feature: ‘The Joy of Stats’ on BBC and Population Growth at TED
›Hans Rosling, creator of Gapminder and professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, hosts a new documentary on the BBC called The Joy of Stats that takes a look at the breadth and depth of data available today to analysts and private citizens alike.
In the clip above, Rosling demonstrates his primary interest in world health, tracking life expectancy and income over the last 200 years to show both the remarkable progress that has been made but also the tremendous gap that remains between those at the top (the very rich and healthy) and those at the bottom (the very poor and sick).
Rosling has been a vocal (and visual) advocate for expanding people’s knowledge of the world by presenting statistics in innovative ways. “Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them,” he said at a discussion at the Wilson Center in May 2009.
In particular, Rosling’s focus has been on health, poverty, and the developing world, where he’s advocated for increased focus on child and maternal health and education. “The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world – nothing more, nothing less,” he said during a TED talk on population growth (see below) where he broke from his more flashy visuals and went analog – using IKEA boxes to illustrate population and consumption growth. “But it’s a very important role. Do it well and get used to it.”
Rosling’s Gapminder software has been incorporated into Google’s Public Data Explorer, where many development indicators from the World Bank, World Health Organization, and others can now be easily tracked by anyone. For more on Google Data and to see an example set of indicators (agriculture as a percentage of GDP vs. fertility rates over the last 50 years), check out this previous Eye On, on The New Security Beat.
Video Credit: “Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC Four,” courtesy of BBC, via YouTube, and “Hans Rosling on global population growth,” courtesy of TED. -
From Cancun: Roger-Mark De Souza on Women and Integrated Climate Adaptation Strategies
›“When you look at the negative impacts of climate change, the impacts on the poor and the vulnerable – particularly women – increase, so investing in programs that put women at the center is critical,” said Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president of research and director of the climate program at Population Action International (PAI), speaking to ECSP from the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. “There are a number of missed opportunities here in Cancun and in climate change deliberations overall that are not including women and are missing an opportunity to have a bigger bang for the buck, or power for the peso, as we say in Mexico.”
PAI hosted a side session with five panelists from Denmark, Ethiopia, Kenya, Suriname, and Uganda on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet: Women’s Empowerment, Family Planning, and Resilience.” The session attracted more than 100 attendees and prompted incisive, informative questions, said De Souza.
“There was a call for additional research that is policy relevant that identifies some of the key entry points and added benefits at a country level,” said De Souza. “And there is a very strong call for youth partnerships from a number of youth advocates who are looking at medical and public health interventions and are desirous of including reproductive health programming as part of that.”
“One concrete next step for Cancun is to work with other civil society partners who are here who are tracking how gender is being integrated into the negotiating language, particularly with regard to financing mechanisms,” De Souza said.
Besides financing and the need for more research, De Souza said the key issues that emerged from the panel were: the importance of linking programs of different scales; ensuring women’s empowerment and ownership; and recognizing and replicating effective partnerships.
For more from Roger-Mark De Souza, see ECSP Focus Issue 19, “The Integration Imperative: How to Improve Development Programs by Linking Population, Health, and Environment.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
World AIDS Day 2010: Not Yet in a Position to Say “Mission Accomplished”
›December 1, 2010 // By Schuyler NullToday is World AIDS day. More than 33 million people are currently living with HIV around the world, according to the UN, and the vast majority of them (22 million) are located in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We have halted and begun to reverse the epidemic. Fewer people are becoming infected with HIV and fewer people are dying from AIDS,” said Executive Director Michel Sidibé in the 2010 edition of UNAIDS’ annual report.“However we are not yet in a position to say ‘mission accomplished.’ Growth in investment for the AIDS response has flattened for the first time in 2009. Demand is outstripping supply. Stigma, discrimination, and bad laws continue to place roadblocks for people living with HIV and people on the margins.”
Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, “people on the margins” often means women and children. As a result, there has been more and more integration of HIV/AIDS programs with gender and maternal health. The environmental community has also worked closely with HIV/AIDS interventions in places where the destruction of natural resources makes certain populations more vulnerable than others and valuable conservation efforts are threatened.
As development efforts become more cross-sectoral, it’s important to keep in mind and maximize these connections between community, economic, and environmental health.
Check out The New Security Beat’s coverage of HIV/AIDS integration with other health and environment programs including coverage from the Global Health Initiative’s “Integrating HIV/AIDS and Maternal Health Services” event last year, a sit-down interview on the challenges facing HIV-positive adolescents with Harriet Birungi of the Population Council in Kenya, and an examination of how gender-based violence contributes to women’s vulnerability to HIV.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UN, World Wildlife Federation.
Map Credit: World AIDS Campaign. -
Climate-Proofing Development: An Interview With Karen Hardee
›November 29, 2010 // By Hannah MarquseeWhile expectations are deflated for broad international consensus at the UN Climate Change Convention in Cancun, the need to “climate-proof” development efforts has been gaining ground in recent years as a necessary preventative measure to help developing countries adapt to the adverse effects of climate change.
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Robert Walker on Family Planning Promotion and Global Population Growth
›“Expanding voluntary family planning access and ensuring that all women have access to reproductive health services is, to me at least, a no brainer,” said the Population Institute’s Robert Walker in this interview with ECSP. “I think it’s a win for women, for their health, for their welfare, the welfare of their families, for their communities, for the environment, and for the planet at large.”
While China and India dominate much of the global headlines about population growth, other parts of South Asia – namely Afghanistan and Pakistan – and sub-Saharan Africa receive comparatively little attention. For Walker, a renewed global effort to boost the quality and quantity of reproductive healthcare tools and services in these areas of the developing world is essential.
“This is very, very doable. We face a lot of really incredible challenges in the world today, particularly with respect to food, energy, water, and poverty. But if we can increase what we spend on international family planning assistance by three or four billion dollars a year, we can literally change the world,” Walker said. “And I think we desperately need to.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Nigeria’s Future Clouded by Oil, Climate Change, and Scarcity [Part One, The Delta]
›November 18, 2010 // By Schuyler NullNigeria holds nearly a fifth of the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa. By 2050, it’s expected to pass Indonesia, Brazil, and Bangladesh and take its place among the top five most populous countries in the world, according to UN estimates. But a litany of outstanding and new development, security, and environmental issues – both in the long-troubled Niger Delta in the south and the newly inflamed north – present a real threat to one of West Africa’s most critical countries.
A 400-Year CurseNigeria collected $46 billion in oil revenue during FY 2009, trailing only Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Despite their country’s mineral wealth, however, roughly 70 percent of Nigerians live below the poverty line, with the oil-producing south facing particularly abject deficiencies.
“I have never worked in an area as bereft as the Niger Delta – it is shockingly undeveloped,” said former Wilson Center fellow Deirdre Lapin, in a phone interview with ECSP (listen to the audio embedded above for the full interview). Lapin worked in community development for Shell in Nigeria from 1997-2003 and also spent time at USAID and UNICEF. “Compared to everywhere else I have been, it is without question the most neglected and the least advanced in terms of general development and welfare for the ordinary person,” she said.
According to the UN, the Niger Delta accounts for upwards of 80 percent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings and about 70 percent of total government revenues. Instead of benefiting from its mineral wealth, the delta has suffered tremendous environmental damage that has spurred a grassroots anti-oil (and later anti-government) insurgency. During the oil companies’ drilling drive in the 1970s, it was not uncommon to see large amounts of tar collected on the roots of mangroves and the sides of creeks, and oil slicks were frequent, Lapin said.
The environmental situation in the delta improved as production plateaued, but due to oil theft, poor maintenance, and derelict equipment and pipelines scattered across the delta, spills continue. According to The New York Times, by some estimates, the delta has endured the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year, for the last 50 years. But there has never been an impartial, empirically based environmental study of the impact of the oil and gas industry on the delta, Lapin said, which would be an important step forward. (A UNEP study is currently underway but has already been criticized for alleged inaccuracy.)
Southern Nigeria’s infamous duality – miserable lack of infrastructure, services, and security in the midst of abundant natural resources – helped give rise to the term “resource curse” among development specialists, a term which has since been applied to similar situations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and even Afghanistan. Lapin pointed out that in the eastern part of the delta, the resource curse actually goes back 400 years, to the slave trade and palm oil.
“Blood Oil” and Scarcity in the Delta
The sophisticated insurgency in the delta began as a response to the oil and gas industry, but has in many ways become dependent on it. Groups of armed “boys” – some of whom are remnants of political-intimidation efforts during the 2003 elections – have become notorious in the delta and abroad, often putting on shows for the media. Some of these groups are loosely organized under the moniker MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta), with the stated intent of driving the oil companies out of the delta in response to environmental destruction and lack of revenue sharing, but others simply profit through extortion, racketeering, and oil theft (also known as “bunkering”). At the peak of their activities, insurgent activity has cut oil production between 25 and 35 percent, Lapin said, prompting oil companies to move further and further off-shore in recent years.With unemployment in the delta at 90 percent by some estimates, militancy has become a viable way of life for many. Bunkering can net up to $60 million a day, according to a BBC report. The practice, which former president Umaru Yar’Adua called Nigeria’s “blood oil,” costs the government up to $5 billion annually, and many gangs are rumored to have political connections that protect them in exchange for their services.
Contributing to the delta’s propensity for conflict is the region’s demography.
“There are probably 120 mutually unintelligible languages and dialects that are spoken [in the Niger Delta] and 40 major identifiable ethnic groups,” Lapin said. Because of the number of creeks and lack of infrastructure, the region’s 20 million inhabitants are fractured into many small communities – roughly 80 percent are under 1,500 people, according to Lapin. In addition to its splintered social structure, population growth and years of conflict have left a mass of unemployed delta residents who have adopted a “siege mentality,” as a UN report puts it (a feeling especially prevalent among the young). With three percent population growth and local fish and agriculture sectors on the decline, it is likely the Niger Delta will face increased scarcity in the coming years, further fueling discontent.
“What is truly needed in order to put Nigeria on a solid footing for the future is a government with very clear objectives for the economic and social development of the country, putting those forward as the priorities, changing the style in which governance is taking place today,” Lapin said. “And that will require something of a revolution, a major sea-change.”
Part two on Nigeria’s future – The Sahel – addresses conflict, scarcity, and demographics in the northern part of the country and concludes with recommendations for the future.
Sources: BBC, CIA, Energy Information Agency, The Guardian, The New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, Reuters, UN.
Photo Credit: “Niger Delta oil disaster,” courtesy of flickr user Sosialistisk Ungdom – SU, and a NASA Space Shuttle Overflight photo of the Niger Delta, courtesy of NASA. -
Yale Environment 360: ‘When The Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts’
›November 10, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffOriginally posted on Yale Environment 360:
For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.
When the Water Ends, a 16-minute video produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. To report this video, Evan Abramson, a 32-year-old photographer and videographer, spent two months in the region early this year, living among the herding communities. He returned with a tale that many climate scientists say will be increasingly common in the 21st century and beyond — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.”
But the story recounted in When the Water Ends is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.
The video focuses on four groups of pastoralists — the Turkana of Kenya and the Dassanech, Nyangatom, and Mursi of Ethiopia — who are among the more than two dozen tribes whose lives and culture depend on the waters of the Omo River and the body of water into which it flows, Lake Turkana. For the past 40 years at least, Lake Turkana has steadily shrunk because of increased evaporation from higher temperatures and a steady reduction in the flow of the Omo due to less rainfall, increased diversion of water for irrigation, and upstream dam projects. As the lake has diminished, it has disappeared altogether from Ethiopian territory and retreated south into Kenya. The Dassanech people have followed the water, and in doing so have come into direct conflict with the Turkana of Kenya.
The result has been cross-border raids in which members of both groups kill each other, raid livestock, and torch huts. Many people in both tribes have been left without their traditional livelihoods and survive thanks to food aid from nonprofit organizations and the UN.
The future for the tribes of the Omo-Turkana basin looks bleak. Temperatures in the region have risen by about 2 degrees F since 1960. Droughts are occurring with a frequency and intensity not seen in recent memory. Areas once prone to drought every ten or eleven years are now experiencing a drought every two or three. Scientists say temperatures could well rise an additional 2 to 5 degrees F by 2060, which will almost certainly lead to even drier conditions in large parts of East Africa.
In addition, the Ethiopian government is building a dam on the upper Omo River — the largest hydropower project in sub-Saharan Africa — that will hold back water and prevent the river’s annual flood cycles, upon which more than 500,000 tribesmen in Ethiopia and 300,000 in Kenya depend for cultivation, grazing, and fishing.
The herdsmen who speak in this video are caught up in forces over which they have no real control. Although they have done almost nothing to generate the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, they may already be among its first casualties. “I am really beaten by hunger,” says one elderly, rail-thin Nyangatom tribesman. “There is famine — people are dying here. This happened since the Turkana and the Kenyans started fighting with us. We fight over grazing lands. There is no peace at all.”
Watch When the Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts on Yale Environment 360.
For more on integrated PHE development and the Horn of Africa, see “The Beat on the Ground: Video: Population, Health, and Environment in Ethiopia” and “As Somalia Sinks, Neighbors Face a Fight to Stay Afloat,” on The New Security Beat.
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