Fwd: FW: Stopping Starvation is Like Solving Rubik's Cube

March 11, 2006

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> />Editor's Note:

> Efforts to relieve starvation face dilemmas from

> several angles. Canadian aid

> efforts to Africa (for example) which buy grain from

> Canadian farmers

> supports the domestic grain industry but has the

> potential to

> undermine food security precisely where it is

> attempting to be relieved, for

> grain farmers there can't compete with free grain.

> Buying grain in Africa could

> drive up prices there, placing it out of reach for

> locals. What to do? This

> article suggests

> " triangulation. " <FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " ><SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 24.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " >Avoiding

> these catch-22s means finding and applying multiple

> strategies and paying

> attention to grain prices. Ideally, sourcing grain

> as near the hungry

> population as possible but not so close as to

> undermine local prices.

> </H1>

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>

href= " http://www.theglobeandmail.com " >www.theglobeandmail.com</A></EMBED>\

</H2>

> <H2 style= " MARGIN: auto 0in " ><FONT face= " Times New

> Roman " ><SPAN

> class=sifr-alternate><SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " >Stopping

> starvation is like solving Rubik's

> Cube<SPAN lang=EN-CA

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> EN-CA " ></H2>

> <FONT

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> <DIV></DIV>

> <DIV>By DOUG SAUNDERS

> </DIV>

>

> <SPAN

> lang=EN-CA

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> face= " Times New Roman " >Saturday, September 10, 2005

>

> <SPAN

> lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " ><IMG class=counter height=1

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> ads= " 1 " >LONDON -- How do you stop

> people from starving to

> death? It's the question of the month, now that even

> prosperous North Americans

> have learned that a second-string natural disaster

> in a fragile city can plunge

> a huge number of people from mild poverty into

> dirt-eating poverty -- and then,

> after only a few days, into nothing-eating poverty

> and sometimes death.

>

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >You pull out a few pegs in

> the land of the supermarket,

> and we're all begging for

> bread.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Still, you would think that

> this would be one of the

> easier questions. After all, there are no global

> food shortages any more. Quite

> the contrary: The world produces several times more

> food than it needs; even

> India, which still has terrible child-malnutrition

> rates, maintains an

> " emergency " supply in warehouses containing enough

> rice to feed every poor

> family in the country for months (which is not done,

> because the reserve is used

> to boost the price of agricultural

> commodities).

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Preventing starvation is the

> Rubik's Cube of humanitarian

> puzzles. The sad old phrase " feed the world, "

> translated into a workable

> formula, reads like a complex work of higher-order

> calculus. And we keep getting

> it wrong. Over and

> over.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >The most difficult test, for

> Canada especially, began

> this summer and is now entering its final, most

> challenging computations. It is

> not in New Orleans but in Niger, in West Africa,

> where a terrible food crisis

> (sometimes incorrectly identified as a famine) left

> millions of people without

> any viable source of nourishment. After an

> alarmingly long delay, TV news

> programs began showing those children with the

> distended

> bellies.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >So, you would think, it's

> time for airplanes to start

> dropping those bags of grain with the maple leaf

> flags on them. Canada has been

> in the food-aid business since the 1950s, when we

> realized that our

> (artificially) oversized grain industry produced way

> more wheat than could ever

> be bought at home or sold abroad, and that our

> farmers could find a new outlet,

> and maybe prime the pump for future markets, by

> providing humanitarian supplies

> for impoverished

> nations.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >It looks good, until you

> think about

> it.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >As with most mass-starvation

> crises, the people in Niger

> weren't starving because food wasn't available.

> There was plenty, on the market

> from all over the world. They just didn't have any

> money to buy any, because

> they make their livings as farmers, and they

> couldn't get a decent price for

> their cows.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Grain had been expensive in

> the spring (partly because of

> new protectionist policies, designed to make farmers

> richer, in the African

> countries that usually export it), so the farmers'

> savings had dwindled, and

> then they couldn't get much for those expensively

> fed cows to buy the

> still-expensive grain to feed their kids. Which in

> turn meant the local grain

> farmers suddenly weren't getting money to feed their

> own families, and -- well,

> everyone went broke.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >The Canadian tradition is to

> air-drop bags of food into

> such situations. In modern times, we put it on boats

> to be distributed through

> the United Nations World Food Program. In the Niger

> crisis, Canada has been the

> most generous donor. What happens at the receiving

> end? To start with, people

> feed their families, and then they sell some of the

> grain in the village market

> to buy other things they desperately

> need.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >And then, around

> mid-September, the harvest season

> begins. This year, aid workers tell me, is promising

> to be a very good harvest

> in Niger, potentially enough to make up for this

> terrible year.

>

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >But there will be a problem:

> The market will be flooded

> with free food.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >There isn't a grain farmer in

> the world who can compete

> with a price of zero. As we've learned hundreds of

> times around the world,

> sometimes the worst thing you can do for starving

> people is give them

> food.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Canada has never been

> terribly good about this. Ninety

> per cent of our food aid, by government edict, needs

> to come from Canadian

> farmers. This particular backhanded compliment,

> known as " tied " aid (and

> increasingly recognized as a backdoor form of

> dumping by trade bodies), is

> designed primarily to find a market for our bloated

> grain industry, not to

> provide maximum help to people. Shipping dirt-cheap

> grain across an ocean makes

> little economic sense.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " > " It would be cheaper, and a

> lot better for the victims,

> if you just dumped it all in Montreal Harbour and

> used the shipping money you

> saved to buy grain in Africa, " Mark Fried of Oxfam

> Canada told me the other

> day.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Even Canada's farmers have

> realized that this misguided

> approach has to change. At a conference in Ottawa in

> June, all the major farm

> and foreign-aid groups agreed that the forthcoming

> World Trade Organization

> talks should be used to pressure the governments of

> Canada, the United States

> and other countries to put an end to the free food

> and replace it with money.

>

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Some members expressed fear,

> though, that food aid would

> be replaced by nothing, or by far less. It would

> help the world a lot if Ottawa

> took its own initiative to get rid of this

> counterproductive old

> practice.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >Mr. Fried and his colleagues

> at Oxfam have become

> advocates of another approach, which they first

> developed in the 1980s: Using

> cash-based aid donations to purchase your food-aid

> grains locally, usually

> within the crisis-stricken country, so that local

> farmers actually benefit from

> the flood of free food.

>

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >But this approach has come

> under criticism itself,

> because such big purchases from wealthy countries

> have a way of driving up local

> grain prices to the point that nobody can afford

> grain for their children and

> cattle -- the very problem that began the Niger

> crisis.

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >In practice, the UN folks on

> the ground have to strike a

> careful balance between the two extremes using

> complex targeting methods. First,

> you make sure the food isn't free -- you set up

> community food banks, which

> place some value on it and make " loans " to the

> neediest families. You make sure

> it only goes to people who would not otherwise be

> buying food.

>

> <SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA " ><FONT

> face= " Times New Roman " >You also monitor prices in

> hundreds of tiny markets to

> make sure they're not undercutting local farmers or

> raising their prices above

> the feed-grain level. You make careful use of

> " triangular " sourcing -- buying

> the grain in a more prosperous country that's

> nearby, but not so nearby that

> prices will be dramatically affected. And when

> harvest season rolls around, you

> promptly cut off the free food so people can start

> buying and selling

> again.

> <DIV><SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New

> Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-fareast-font-family:

> 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;

> mso-bidi-language: AR-SA " >The

> elegant calculations invariably end up creating some

> terrible messes. Bailing

> out a crashed society is not an elegant or precise

> job. The end goal, of course,

> is to get people out of small-hold farming entirely,

> to turn their millions of

> tiny family farms into thousands of medium-sized

> businesses with hundreds of

> employees -- businesses whose produce may be able to

> bail someone else out next

> time. Such ambitions remain a long, long way off.

> But there is at least one

> thing we could do to hasten their

> arrival.</DIV>

> <DIV><SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New

> Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-fareast-font-family:

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> mso-bidi-language: AR-SA " > </DIV>

> <DIV><SPAN lang=EN-CA

> style= " FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New

> Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;

> mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-fareast-font-family:

> 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;

> mso-bidi-language: AR-SA " >WHO

> WE ARE: This e-mail service shares information to

> help more people discuss

> crucial policy issues affecting global food

> security. The service is

> managed by Amber McNair of the University of Toronto

> in partnership with the

> Centre for Urban Health Initiatives (CUHI) and Wayne

> Roberts of the Toronto Food

> Policy Council, in partnership with the Community

> Food Security Coalition, World

> Hunger Year, and International Partners for

> Sustainable Agriculture.

> Please help by sending information or names and

> e-mail addresses of

> co-workers who'd like to receive this service, to

> <A

>

href= " foodnews " >foodnews</A><B\

R></DIV></BODY></HTML>

> Attachment: clip_image001.gif (1.08KB)

>

I have decided to do the CN Tower

Climb for World Wildlife Fund. this link should take you to the 'sponsor a

climber' page, where you can search by name for someone. search for my name

(alison syer) and you should be able to find it.

https://wwfcentral.ca/NetCommunity/SSLPage.aspx? & pid=232 & srcid=232 & tab=1

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Fwd: FW: Stopping Starvation is Like Solving Rubik's Cube

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