Junk food - A novel market swaps rubbish for vegetables in Mexico

The Economist, October 27, 2012 The 21m residents of Mexico City have far too much rubbish and not enough healthy food. Now they can swap one for the other. A new monthly market run by the city government takes paper, glass, plastic and aluminium in return for tokens that can be swapped for locally grown food and plants. Since it began in March the “Barter Market” in Chapultepec park has exchanged 140 tonnes of rubbish for 60 tonnes of produce. The market is a small step towards tackling a big waste problem. In January piles of rubbish built up after a landfill closed. It had received up to 12,600 tonnes of trash a day, and was the size of 450 football pitches. The muck-up will not be the last unless households get better at recycling. “We want people to learn that rubbish is not rubbish,” says Paola de María y Campos, a city official who helped set up the market. The project provides welcome jobs for the city’s farmers, many of whom work in the watery southern district of Xochimilco. Canals there are the last reminder of what Mexico City looked like before the Spanish drained the lake on which it sat. The city’s undeveloped south is prone to illegal slum-building. The government hopes to deter this by promoting farming on the land. The market is proving popular. Queues start to form at 6am, and food nearly sells out by noon. “Now everyone in our family is separating their waste,” says Eugenia Trueba, showing off a bag of lettuce, sesame seeds and cactus leaves which she got for newspapers and plastic bottles. However, over half of visitors come by car, somewhat undermining the market’s green credentials. The project does not break even. Each month the market sells 20 or so tonnes of rubbish to glassmakers, paper manufacturers and other firms for about 40,000 pesos ($3,100). The food, which the government buys from Xochimilco’s farmers at above-market prices, costs 90,000 pesos. Taxpayers pick up the difference. The point, however, is to get people recycling, not to make money. Plans for new branches are under way, and the market may go fortnightly. The real test will be whether more households can be persuaded to recycle even without the carrot of free food in return. Source

Lady to Camera, Mount Kenya Region

Lady from Mount Kenya region talks about how her life has been transformed by a local micro-hydro plant Practical Action helped implement.

Supporting small-scale agriculture in Latin America and Caribbean

By Latinamerica Press, October 18, 2012 According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO, although Latin America and the Caribbean produce enough food to meet the needs of its 600 million inhabitants, 49 million people continue to suffer from hunger. While in the last 20 years Latin America and the Caribbean has been the region of the world with the largest recorded improvements in hunger reduction, the governments of the region continue to support agricultural exports, leaving behind small-scale agriculture, which is main source of food for millions of people and generates high levels of employment in rural areas. As part of World Food Day, celebrated on Oct. 16, the FAO asked national authorities to support small-scale farmers, who are the world’s main food producers at affordable prices. “In the last three decades, national investments in agriculture and development have decreased, and millions of small farmers have had to fight to adapt to many changes: climate, market and price,” said José Graziano da Silva, FAO’s director-general. The international humanitarian organization Oxfam also called for the support of small-scale agriculture that guarantees food security and urged Latin American governments to change their focus in agricultural policies, now centered on boosting food exports because of profitability. Antonio Hill, the representative for Latin America from Oxfam’s CRECE Campaign, a campaign directed to boost small-scale agriculture, insisted that the governments of the region should take advantage of “the current economic growth that many countries are experiencing, adding to the 2013 budgets an increase in investment in family and rural agriculture, especially in women, who have much potential to increase their productivity in a sustainable way. This is the most viable change to eliminate hunger in the region.” “Small-scale agriculture has to be viewed as profitable, first because it is the food pantry of the people in the region, and second, because it continues to be an important source of employment. Strengthening small-scale agriculture through major investments in agricultural technology or policies for adapting to climate changes is a change not only to decrease hunger but also to protect the region against the economic crisis in Europe and other parts of the world,” said Hill in statements to the agency Intercultural Communications Services, or SERVINDI. The FAO warned against the continued volatility of food prices, and it did not rule out that this tendency will continue in the next few years. According to the FAO’s Food Price Index, since mid-year food prices have increased by 10 per cent, directly affecting the poorest sectors of society who allocate close to 70 per cent of their income to purchasing food. To offset this tendency and to protect the most vulnerable, Oxfam invoked the governments of the region to “not yield to the private interests of the agrobusiness sector, which oftentimes go against the generation and production of basic food,” and to “invest in the sustainable productivity of small-scale farmers within the framework of food security policies that will guarantee the provision of food for everyone.” “The close relationship between the demands of powerful interest groups and budget allocations in their interest is no secret,” said Hill. “The part of the story that remains untold is that governments cave in to these pressures at the expense of the rights of almost 50 million of the poorest and most vulnerable farmers and consumers in Latin America year after year. Either we change those tendencies or we throw away a more just food system.” Source

Ogoni: Experts Praise Lawsuit Against Shell In The Netherlands

By UNPO, October 23, 2012 Foreign experts have described as a major landmark, the suit filed by Ogoni people against the Dutch oil company, Shell, in Netherlands last week by farmers in the host oil community. Shell was dragged to court in The Hague, Netherlands, by four Nigerian farmers from Ogoni in Rivers State in collaboration with environmental campaigners, Friends of the Earth. The farmers said they could no longer work or feed their families because oil spills caused by Shell in the area have damaged crops and fish farms. Commenting on the suit, an environmental law expert, Professor Jonathan Verschuuren, of the Netherlands’ Tilburg University, said: “It was a really important case, if (the claimants) are successful. It is a big step in cases where Western multinationals commit acts that cause pollution. Up until now, you had to go through a developing country’s courts,” he said. The plaintiffs, according to Friends of the Earth, Netherlands, opted to drag Shell before a Dutch court because they were said to have lacked confidence in Nigerian courts as hundreds of legal cases allegedly brought by victims of oil pollution have become “stranded in the inefficient and corrupt Nigerian legal system.” The NGO added: “Furthermore, the verdicts are often not or inadequately carried out and the damages awarded – if they are paid – are far from sufficient.” Senior Campaigner for Friends of the Earth, Netherlands, Evert Hessink, explained why the case was taken to The Netherlands: “We have more confidence in the Dutch system,” he said. The group also said it took the case to The Netherlands so that Shell’s headquarters could be held accountable for the actions of its subsidiaries. “It’s not about whether the headquarters know every detail. It is about whether senior managers and executives of a well-organised international company were aware of the problem and were able to instruct their company,” Hessink added. “When it’s clear that this is a possibility, many others from Nigeria, or other countries that have issues with Dutch or European companies, can take this route,” he added. Source

2012 Global Hunger Index - The challenge of hunger: Ensuring sustainable food security under land, water, and energy stresses | ReliefWeb

The 2012 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report focuses particularly on the issue of how to ensure sustainable food security under conditions of water, land, and energy stress. Demographic changes, rising incomes and associated consumption patterns, and climate change, alongside persistent poverty and inadequate policies and institutions, are all placing serious pressure on natural resources.

In this report, IFPRI describes the evidence on land, water, and energy scarcity in developing countries and offers two visions of a future global food system—an unsustainable scenario in which current trends in resource use continue, and a sustainable scenario in which access to food, modern energy, and clean water improves significantly and ecosystem degradation is halted or reversed. Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe provide on-the-ground perspectives on the issues of land tenure and title as well as the impacts of scarce land, water, and energy on poor people in Sierra Leone and Tanzania and describe the work of their organizations in helping to alleviate these impacts.

2012 Global Hunger Index - The challenge of hunger: Ensuring sustainable food security under land, water, and energy stresses | ReliefWeb

World Food Day 2012: A Do or Die Affair | ActionAid

How can we eliminate hunger in Nigeria when despite the changing climate, our government has not incorporated sustainable agricultural practices as a means of rejuvenating the sector and serving as insurance to thousands of smallholder famers especially the women? Will hunger ever be deported from our land with our government investment in agriculture grossly inadequate as it has consistently disrespected its own signature on the Maputo declaration wherein she pledged to allocate 10% per cent of its annual budget to agriculture?
World Food Day 2012: A Do or Die Affair | ActionAid

Conservation programmes that address livelihoods have better chance of success

T. V. Padma, South Asia regional coordinator, SciDev.Net Imagine if you are a poor farmer with less than a hectare of land, and find a rhino or a leopard munching your crop away, or an elephant trampling your house meanwhile. Your, or many poor communities whose livelihoods depend on local resources, point of view may differ a little from of a wildlife enthusiast on the rhino, leopard or elephant. Efforts are on to integrate livelihood issues into conservation programmes and I listened to several such case studies in the Asia-Pacific today (19 Oct). In Nepal’s Bardia national park, explained Rabin Kadariya from the National Trust for Nature Conservation, Kathmandu, the human-wildlife conflict became severe due to animals from the nearby national park rampaging fields. The trust, therefore, initiated a programme to help farmers switch to cultivation of mentha which, for some reason, the rhinos do not like. The trick succeeded. The farmers income trebled fromUS$400 a year from a hectare of wheat, to US$ 1200 and rhinos no longer annoy them. “The farmers are happy in their fields, and the rhinos are happy in their forest,” Kadariya says. Under a Wildlife Conservation Society project, a remote part of northern Cambodia grows “Ibis rice”. A “unique repository for biodiversity,” the area is home to 40 species in IUCN’s Red List, with six species critically endangered, says WCS’s Madu Rao. It was also under threat from over-exploitation, hunting, illegal logging, and over fishing. The project engaged the local communities to conserve Ibis, and also helped them grow and market rice. The trick here was clarify resource tenures to the local communities, and provide incentives for niche marketing, which were linked to their efforts at conservation. Thus came the “Ibis rice” , whose production rose from 38 tons in 2008-09, to 141 tons in 2011-12. “It is an example of benefit sharing relevant to the Nagoya Protocol’s Access and Benefit Sharing,” she says. There are similar projects in Papua New Guinea, where Ona, Keto and other tribes are engaged in local reforestation programmes that also help raise their incomes. The Ona Keto community reforestation and sustainable livelihoods project has since been recognised as a model project by government institutions and universities. These are some heartening examples .. and seem to be the way forward to avoid the human-wildlife conflicts that invariably plague top-down conservation programmes in abjectly economically poor areas that are also rich in biodiversity. Source