Lynas Spanks One Out for Genetic Engineering, Again

It's good to read a simple article by a Kenyan in a Kenyan newspaper about staple crops rather than cash crops for export being the key to tackling poverty. Many people probably suspect that it is true, but we are constantly blasted with articles about luxury fruits and vegetables for the European market and cash crops that make Kenyan farmers very little money but sell well in the West.

The article refers to a study brief by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) called Strategies and Priorities for African Agriculture. The study concludes that "producing more staple crops such as maize, pulses, and roots and more livestock products tends to reduce poverty further than producing more export crops such as coffee or cut flowers". IFPRI is connected with some of the big bullies among the multinationals and some heavy handed Western governments, but they can still produce sensible research, it seems.

Unfortunately, all the mainstream media are taking an interest in Mark Lynas' supposed conversion from environmentalist to promoter of genetic engineering (GE). Lynas spanked one out in public for GE over 18 months ago. Perhaps the press weren't quite ready then for such a shocking conversion, or they had other things on their mind. But back in July 2011 Lynas claimed that Africa must embrace GM technology to abolish hunger and malnutrition.

Lynas would be well aware that his claims are utter rubbish, so one can only conclude that he is making them for reasons that don't relate to science or anything too academic. All the more surprising that he considers opposition to GE to be 'anti-scientific'. Even his own arguments are not primarily about the science of GE, but the economics; and his arguments are based on falsehoods.

Back then, Lynas said "One of the most pervasive myths about biotech crops is that they are part of a nefarious plot by multinational seed companies such as Monsanto to dominate the world food chain." But that's pretty much how Monsanto and other GE multinationals would describe themselves, albeit using a slightly different rhetoric. Any science involved is of little relevance, which means that even someone with as little grasp of science as Lynas has can still take part in the debate, as long as they come to realize what exactly the terms of the debate are.

The most astonishing thing about GE crops is that they are so unneeded. Conventional crops have developed at a pace that GE can not keep up with; costs are also far lower; the claimed advantages of GE crops, where they didn't turn out to be exaggerations and lies, turned out to be short lived. Lynas and the GE industry are well aware of this, hence the need to keep pumping out the party line. Conventionally bred staple crops are what poor people depend on for survival, not expensive high technologies that don't perform well, despite all the hype.

For GM Lobbyists like Lynas, East African Famine is Gap in Market

Mark Lynas, who used to be an environmentalist, has become a rabid pro-GMO commentator. The title of his recent article in Kenya's Nation newspaper is:'To abolish hunger and malnutrition, Africa must embrace GM technology'.

Firstly, Lynas should know that if the world wanted to abolish hunger and malnutrition, they would have done so by now. Hunger and malnutrition are caused by lack of access to affordable and nutritious food. Even East Africa, where there is such a serious lack of access to food, has produced more than enough food in recent years.

But another thing Lynas should be aware of are the various factors that are causing food prices to spiral beyond what poor people can afford, especially in the last four or five years. Rich speculators are betting on the price of food staples rising in a world where many other sources of easy profits are more risky right now.

Growing biofuels, which require viable agricultural land and water, other things many poor people don't have access to, is also increasing the cost of food. A number of food crops are actually used to produce fuel so that rich Westerners don't have to reduce their fuel consumption.

And one of the most pernicious factors of all, land grabbing, should be very familiar to Lynas, if he has paid the slightest attention to his history lessons. Much of the best agricultural land in developing countries is not owned by poor people. That's precisely why most of them are poor.

Big multinationals, various non-African countries, speculators, wealthy individuals, pension funds and the like are all speculating in land in African countries. And even without those malign influences, much of the best land was handed over to top politicians and their families at, or soon after, independence.

That's quite a few items on the agenda that could be discussed before genetically modified organisms need even raise their ugly head. And all these items are long term trends, not something that just cropped up recently. The very threat of drought, food shortages and even famine have been noted over and over again by agencies whose job it is to warn of such possibilities.

This claimed 'need' for GMOs didn't just arise in the last few weeks, since the big news agencies, who seem so anxious to interview Lynas the expert, started taking notice and raiding their photo archives for choice photographs of dying people in dry and dusty locations. There's a stink of news manufacturing here, and a very nasty smell that is.

Lynas seems to see the problem of aid agencies simply coming up with more unsustainable strategies to deal with hunger. But that's no reason for imposing GMOs, which represent the most unsustainable strategy yet. They cost phenomenal amounts of money when you take in the long term commitments they represent and what the farmer loses by embracing them.

Farmers will have to pay inflated prices for agricultural inputs, accept the huge risks that have destroyed so many farmers in India and other countries, face lower yields after the first few years, once resistance develops to the pesticides and the fertilizer has contaminated the land and reduced yields further. And they won't be selling their produce in Europe, either.

It's strange how specific Lynas is in mentioning what he sees as "myths about biotech crops" being "part of a nefarious plot by multinational seed companies such as Monsanto to dominate the world food chain." As a former anti-GM activist and current Monsanto backscratcher, he should be aware that Monsanto's entire GMO effort is to dominate the world food chain.

All multinationals aim to dominate their field or fields of interest. Monsanto is no different in that respect. They don't even make any secret or that, except to Lynas, it seems. Does he think that Monsanto has suddenly transformed itself into a great big philanthropy engine, a jolly green giant?

If Lynas wishes to let on to be so disingenuous, others are not convinced. The Tanzania Alliance for Biodiversity (TABIO), an alliance of organizations concerned with the conservation of agricultural biodiversity for livelihood security and food sovereignty, has sent a vigorous response to Lynas's prognostications to the English Times (though I don't think it has been published yet).

This feigned innocence in reporting the GMO line as if it were an honest weighing up of the arguments doesn't wash. Lynas is not unaware of the faultlines in his 'reasoning'. That doesn't explain why he should wish to put his name to such rubbish, or be so widely reported to be doing so. But it will take a bit more than classic greenwashing to sell GMOs to anyone who has taken the trouble to study the issues.

Ribbon of Hope Projects

It's a delicate balance sometimes, when you are trying to support orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and some other members of their family are even worse off than they are. Several of the guardians of the OVCs Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group are supporting face more immediate threats to their health than the children they are looking after. One mother is suffering from diabetes that appears to be very advanced. She is just recovering from TB and she has been losing her sight for some time. She is in her early twenties and is already having trouble caring for her daughter. If she was HIV positive, she could at least get antiretroviral drugs (ARV) for free. But as it's diabetes, the drugs are prohibitively expensive. Her own mother is on ARVs but she is old to be looking after a daughter and a granddaughter. The father of the child is absent.

Another HIV positive guardian is so sick that she has checked herself into a private hospital. Why she chose a private hospital when she can get the drugs for free is not clear. But she appears to be having trouble accepting that she is HIV positive and refuses to go to the local clinic, where she was diagnosed. You do hear stories of people preferring private hospitals but I doubt if this woman will benefit much from the care she gets there. And her life savings will not go too far, either. Maybe Ribbon of Hope can support one or two of her children but I think she has several others, who will all be vulnerable if anything happens to her. Her husband died some time ago, apparently of Aids.

Thankfully, some of the guardians are well enough to care for their own children, in addition to another child, usually a relative. They are all doing some kind of work but that usually involves long hours, low pay and a good chance that the employer will withhold the wages for as long as possible, months and even years. All the villages we are working in are sisal growing areas. These are vast tracts of land owned by a very small number of extremely rich business people and politicians. The villages are all isolated, several kilometers from the nearest tarred road. For people who live there, the main transport available is bicycle, motorbike, or hired bicycle or motorbike, for those who don't have their own.

We hope that each guardian will come up with some kind of income generation scheme, some way of making a bit of extra money. Ribbon of Hope will assist with loans, advice and perhaps other things. Some of the guardians already have a clear idea of what they would like to do and they have the skills and knowledge to start just as soon as the money is made available. Others are not so sure and are not quite ready. A couple of people seem unprepared to be completely honest or committed, but most had some kind of income generation activity up until the start of 2008. It's unbelievable how many people lost assets and businesses as a result of the civil unrest. Two and a half years later and many have not got back to where they were then and probably will not do so for some time yet. Some will be lucky just to get their land back but most have lost things they will never be compensated for.

After spending a few days visiting two of the villages where some of our clients live, we had to return to our fields, where the maize was in need of harvesting and the other crops, millet and sorghum, were in need of weeding. There has been terrible flooding in the last few months, since the maize was planted. Luckily, much of the maize has survived and the crop is looking good. The beans we planted between the maize plants were almost all washed away. The weeding is being done by some local people and in a few days we should have cleared the backlog and got back to the OVCs in the three other villages we work in.

I was very keen on demonstrating solar cookers and a couple of other simple technologies and I did some demonstrating a while back. But there has not been a lot of interest since. Ribbon of Hope has plenty of core activities to keep us busy and I wanted solar cookers and the like to be an additional activity that wouldn't take up too much time. I mentioned the ideas to the community volunteers whom we work with and they mobilized people. But after a few demonstrations, there were no requests for more. I'd like to do some refresher demonstrations but I'm not sure if it will be possible to drum up enough interest.

I think income generation schemes are good, especially when they work. But they often don't. Not everyone can be a business person. And as we have found from our own projects, mostly growing crops, there are a lot of things that can go wrong; too much rain, too little rain, diseases, pests, lack of market, poor infrastructure and downright dishonesty. That's why I try to persuade people to do some things that can save them money. If they spend a little less on cooking fuel, they will have more for food or other things. And you can save quite a lot, perhaps the equivalent of two or two and a half month's pay over a period of one year. I'd like to understand better why I have not been too successful in selling these technologies, which, by the way, are more or less free! It can be very hard to make money but it's not so hard to spend less.

But most of Ribbon of Hope's projects are going well at the moment. Some of the community based organizations are running themselves and we only visit now and again. One of the organizations that was doing badly at the start of the year, but turned itself around later, is now much stricter, which is a good thing. Too many times the work would be done by two or three people and the others would only turn up when the returns were coming in. A number of projects would have done well if the few workers just got on with it. But no one will work when they think others will help themselves to the results and many community based organizations fail because they are not strict enough about what people have to do in order to collect any of the group's winnings.

I think some people will do a very good job of supporting an extra child while continuing to look after their immediate family. Others may already be too overwhelmed by sickness and poverty. But then maybe we'll find additional ways of supporting them. So far, Ribbon of Hope has done very well keeping things ticking over. There have been challenges, some of which we have met, some of which have been too much. In the long run it's hard to say, but I'm optimistic about a lot of things. I'm just sorry I won't be able to stay here indefinitely to see how everything goes.

Development and Sustainability

Back in Mogotio today with Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group. We have to go to five villages and identify four especially needy orphans so that we can support their adoptive families to care for them. Not that it's a difficult job to identify four, we ended up with five today and pleas for several others. Yesterday, also, we had several pleas from mothers who heard there were people assessing orphans in the area. It doesn't take long for the word to get around but it's hard to have to tell people that we only have the funding for a very limited number right now.

Today we went to Alfega (a corruption of Alpha and Omega, reflecting the Greek 'ownership' of most of the land in the area), which is about one hour of difficult cycling from Mogotio. I was given one of the very heavy but resilient Indian 'Avon' bikes and told the brakes were not too good. I would have been surprised if I had been told they were good and I've never cycled on a bike that had two brakes here. But by the time I was on a steep hill trying to check my speed, the one brake had failed. I made various attempts to slow down before preparing myself for a crash landing, which I found in a bank of clay that happened to be at just the right angle to stop me without resurfacing my face.

Without further incident, we took the least muddy route through the kilometres of sisal. It was very hot and there were several places where we struggled to push the bikes through the wet mud, but all in all, it was an enjoyable journey. The area is particularly beautiful in the present, rainy season, just a bit wet sometimes. And in the midst of all the sisal, we spotted some industrial greenhouses and some bright green fields of something other than sisal. I hoped to see food crops but, alas, there was mostly flowers (for the European market) and coffee grown there. The area is owned by one of the sons of the former president, Moi, who was quite acquisitive in his time.

Like Majani Mingi, where we went yesterday, Alfega is pretty isolated. The best roads that surround it are mud roads and impassable during and just after the rain. And it's expensive to make the journey if you really need to. So most people don't leave the village much. In spite of being surrounded by such greenery and wealth, the village is as poor as Majani Mingi and far more populous. The latter has a population of only three or four thousand, Alfega is closer to eight thousand. Of course, I never know whether the population figures we are given count the children or just the adults.

We visited four houses, assessing five orphans in all. They were all in need of assistance and the worst thing is seeing the problems that their families have to cope with. It's amazing that families that are so overstretched will still take on another child to care for, but it does seem to happen a lot. And Ribbon of Hope is fortunate enough to have members who are from the area because otherwise, it would be impossible to tell who is genuine and who is not. Even people who are clearly in need sometimes tell a few white lies to try and have one of their children assessed, which is not really surprising.

And that's another way in which we are fortunate, we have limited funding, so we have to be very careful. I've seen and heard of organisations that have large amounts of funding but they end up using it rather indiscriminately and even losing it to people who are not really in need. Organisations shouldn't have any more cash than they know how to administrate. Our biggest asset right now is the closeness of some of our members to the local community we hope to assist.

Just as it seems unfair to help people who are HIV positive when other people are suffering from all sorts of treatable and curable illnesses, it sometimes seems unfair to single out orphaned and vulnerable children for special assistance when there are others who are in equal need. And this is a dilemma that we face every time we visit such villages. Today and yesterday, we saw people, adults and children, who were suffering, but they probably won't attract the attention of NGOs. We try to do things that benefit communities as a whole as well, but we are small right now. Hopefully, things will change over time.

Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that in this area that is mostly owned by Gideon Moi, there are a lot of public toilets being built. As the houses there don't have good sanitation, this sort of intervention will have major benefits for everyone in the village. Water and sanitation related illnesses give rise to a huge share of the disease burden and deaths in developing countries. The Greek owned area around Majani Mingi didn't have any public toilets that I could see and it is likely that the overall health in Alfega in the near future will be far better as a result. I hope to see more of this kind of public intervention, despite the dominance of private (and highly exploitative) enterprise in the area.

Ideally, Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group won't get much bigger because the things we are doing now will be done by other self help groups. To some extent this is already happening. But there is a certain futility to NGOs and community based organisations (CBO) continually setting up and targeting the people and things they most want to benefit, only to be replaced by more NGOs and CBOs, without an end in sight. It would be nice to think that communities like Alfega and Majani Mingi will one day be able to support themselves, perhaps because of the support they received in the past from various parties.

In fact, if that is not what happens, if the development that we are involved in now is not sustainable, if it doesn't give rise to further development that is greater than what came before, I think it may have failed. But the possibility that what we are doing now may only have a short term benefit and that others may have to come and do the same again and again in the future is no reason to stop doing what we are doing. Unless we are doing some harm, and I hope we are not doing that.

A New Orphan Project (and Another Grumble About Pills)

I recently blogged about the tendency to medicalise problems that have very simple and cheap solutions. For example, if people are suffering from nutritional deficiencies, they need a good balanced diet and therefore access to adequate food. So many companies, especially multinationals, are weighing in with their very expensive food supplements and 'biofortified' versions of various seeds. If people don't have the money for even their meager diet, they certainly can't afford these overpriced supplements and fortified seeds.

But as myself and my colleagues from Ribbon of Hope Self Help Group sat in a restaurant having a meeting yesterday, a woman came up to us to sell us some nutritional supplements which had all manner of stuff in them, according to the colourful label. But they were to be taken three a day for seven days to relieve just about any ailment that could possibly relate to nutritional deficiency. And the course cost as much as more than two weeks of staple food for four or five people.

If people had this sort of money, they could just buy good food. They would be ill advised to spend it on pills that some woman who approached them in a restaurant tried to sell them. But people do buy all sorts of rubbish that promises to sort out all their children's or their own problems. This is a terrible form of exploitation and the stuff being sold is often produced by very big, powerful, wealthy companies. We tried to persuade her that what she was saying couldn't be true. But you can't blame her for trying to make a living in a country where most people don't have jobs. After all, she's been conned too.

Anyhow, today we went to a small village called Majani Mingi to assess some orphans so their families can be supported to send the orphans to school and look after them, along with the rest of their family. Majani Mingi is near Mogotio, about 50 kilometres North of Nakuru. In fact, you can't get to Majani Mingi most of the time and the best way to get there is by motor bike. It's about 10 kilometres from the main road but, despite this, you never leave the massive sisal estate that is 'owned' by a Greek man who can't even be bothered to pay his employees and suppliers most of the time.

With this in mind, we visited four households, taking in 5 orphans in all. All of them had lost both of their parents and all were being cared for by families that were already stretched for the means to keep providing themselves with the basics. Most people in the village have some connection, direct or indirect, with the sisal factory, either as employees or people who are dependent on employees. I think it is safe to say that pretty much all the people living in these sisal dominated villages are very needy, so it's hard to assess children and families when your finances will only stretch to four children.

We can put together the information we have received, along with similar information for four other villages and then make a decision. I suspect that families themselves will have to decide how to use any support they get because when money is in short supply, so is everything else. You can't very well ask a family of thirteen to give food, clothes and schooling to the one orphan and leave the others without. I really don't know how these decisions are made at the family level. I hope to gain some insight into this over the next few months.

There can be a tendency to associate orphans and other vulnerable children with orphanages. But thankfully, Ribbon of Hope is not interested in such institutions, they are beyond our scope. They cost so much money to run and the children do not get the sort of care they could get in a family. And so many orphanages have been hotbeds of corruption and deceit, where often children get very little and those running the orphanages make a very comfortable living. Of course, they are not all like that, but finding out which are genuine and which are not is just too time and resource consuming. As the orphan and vulnerable children project gets up and running, I'll report progress here.

Oxfam Abandons Development, Goes for Corporate Lobbying

It is easy and sometimes even right to criticize NGOs, especially big, well funded ones, for spending a lot of money on dubious programmes, such as technical aid that may only benefit a handful of rich Western 'experts'. But when it turns out they are using their money to support one of the most destructive agricultural processes to date, genetically modified organisms (GMO), it's hard not to be very angry. Yet Oxfam America seems to have been nobbled by the biotechnology industry and its supporters, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Of course, Oxfam have pulled out the poverty and food security cards to make it look as if GMOs are just the solution they need. But production of GMOs requires industrial scale farming practices. Although these are found in developing countries, those involved are not poor farmers. Most farmers in developing countries are subsistence farmers. They cannot afford the sort of inputs required by GMO farming and where they have fallen for the lies and taken on GMOs, they have ended up in debt. In addition to the inputs being very expensive compared to non-GM inputs, yields at the subsistence level have not been higher, indeed, they have often been lower. So GMOs, despite claims to the contrary, do not scale down.

This is not to suggest that large scale GMO farming has been successful either. In the handful of countries where this has been practiced, the US, India, Australia, Canada, Argentina and a few others, yields may have increased for the first few years. But input costs have also risen, especially pesticides and fertilizer costs, and yields flatlined or decreased after that. US GMO farmers, especially, are finding out what it's like when superweeds take over, weeds that develop resistance to even huge applications of herbicide. And Indian farmers have found what it's like when pests develop resistance to the GMO industry's noxious sprays. Even Canada is realising what it's like to face blacklisting by many of the countries who have been buying their agricultural outputs because of contamination by an organism that has been banned there for years.

So what does Oxfam think they are doing, trying to trick the very people they are supposed to be helping? This may be related to funding they have received from Rockerfeller and Gates, who are wedded to the GMO industry till death do us part. Frankly, I think if Oxfam is willing to take funding from organisations that only have the interests of multinationals at heart, they should not be receiving public funding. They have, effectively, jumped ship. They should be treated accordingly. They should no more be considered to be independent or to be benefiting poor people in developing countries that they would be if they had decided to accept funding from the armaments industry. Of course, I don't know whether they already receive money from the armaments industry or not.

Farmers, especially those working small and medium sized farms in developing countries, need ecologically and economically sustainable farming practices. They certainly don't need expensive and highly damaging technologies that render the farmers slaves on land whose quality is fast diminishing. GMOs will increase food insecurity, dependency, poverty and low health. Ultimately, people will die as a result of embracing GMOs. And Oxfam, along with their friends in the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, will be responsible for the resulting poverty, death and destruction. The latter two were set up to wreak destruction, despite their stated ambitions. But I don't believe Oxfam was set up for this, I believe they have more recently been injudicious in their choice of funders. Perhaps there is time to rethink this and, if necessary, send back the blood money they have received. Alternatively, they can admit that they are no longer involved in development and concentrate on promoting and lobbying for the systematic destruction of whole societies, economies and ecosystems. And then they may as well accept money from the armaments industry, while they are at it. It could make the job quicker.

Incidentally, the experience of African countries so far with GM crops is not good. Millions have been spent over a long period in Kenya to produce a GM sweet potato but nothing has been delivered yet that can outperform conventionally bred versions. South Africa found that Monsanto had blundered somewhat by supplying them with 'free' genetically modified maize that didn't produce any grain. But the industry is still doing everything it can to force more GMOs on South African farmers. Attempts to introduce GM cotton in West Africa have met with the same problems as GM cotton everywhere and Monsanto has even admitted that it has failed in India. However, their solution to this problem is that farmers buy a new and more expensive version of the failed crop. I assume West African cotton growing countries will receive the same privilege.

None of the arguments that Monsanto and the rest of the GMO bunch use to defend the technology work. The evidence has always shown that conventional crops and farming practices are the only ones that work and that are sustainable. This is especially true for small farmers, those who are most likely to suffer from poverty, food security and environmental degradation problems. It is to be expected that Monsanto and other interested multinationals will lie, cheat and pay through the nose (also known as lobbying) to make us think otherwise. And why wouldn't they when they receive so much public money to do this. But we also have to be aware of the influence of the rich privately owned institutions, such as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, who are supporting GMO. And sadly, we have to add Oxfam into the equation, unless they suddenly remember who it is they are supposed to be working for.

Visiting With SAIPEH

Although I am only in Mumias on a short visit, I brought a couple of solar cookers with me, along with some black pots. I was hoping I would be asked to demonstrate the impressive, but very simple, trick of cooking food without any costly fuel. Sure enough, I was taken to SAIPEH's feeding centre, where volunteers feed 100 or more children who are orphans, in some way vulnerable or disabled. They get through a lot of fuel every day and the cost over the course of a year is in the region of $1000. This is a very sizable sum to an organisation like SAIPEH. Any way of reducing it or eliminating it would be very welcome.

There were only a few people when I got there as it was far too early for lunch. But we set up the cookers to prepare some rice, just to demonstrate. We also set up a cooker to demonstrate how you can pasteurize milk or water to make them safe to drink. Solar cookers heat things up to 80 or 85 degrees, which is hot enough to cook and to kill all bacteria. In order to show that the water had reached the required temperature, we used a WAPI (Water Purification Indicator). This is a plastic cylinder with a lump of wax inside which melts at a little over 80 degrees. The wax is at the top of the cylinder when you start, but as it melts, it slides to the bottom.

Both the demonstrations worked well, despite a lot of thin cloud. The sun was hot even though the cloud didn't shift the whole morning. The rice cooked faster than I expected, in about one and a half hours and the water was ready in about 45 minutes. People were appropriately impressed. Every time I demonstrate, I keep thinking, what if it doesn't work. But it always does, as long as it doesn't cloud over. But in addition to being impressed, I would like to think that people would adopt the technology. They always say they will, but people who have been demonstrating for a long time say most people never adopt it. So we have to wait. Given that SAIPEH pay for the fuel, perhaps they will make sure that the fuel bill is cut, substantially.

We also had the opportunity today to demonstrate cooking baskets, at least, to some extent. There were lots of banana trees growing nearby and there were deep, round baskets available. We weren't organised enough to cook anything in one, they were too small, but I think the point got across. These can really save a lot of fuel and you can use them whether it's night or day, sunny or raining. They can be made of easy to find materials, such as straw, hay, newspaper, leaves, old clothes, etc, along with a bit of sacking material if you don't have baskets of the right size.

A technology we didn't have the opportunity to demonstrate yet, we just described it, is that of fuel briquettes made from organic waste, such as kitchen waste. They are made of various kinds of waste, finely chopped and mixed so they bind into a cohesive lump. These can be dried or compressed with a simple press made of wood or metal. We haven't got a press yet but we are still hoping to get one made as a template. Then they can easily be produced by 'jua khali' workers (jua khali meaning 'hot sun', they work outside).

If you combine these three technologies and put the required amount of work in, and that's not a lot of work, you can reduce your fuel bills to almost zero. Perhaps you can eliminate them but I suspect there will always be unforeseen occasions when you will need wood and charcoal. But even a few hundred dollars a year could mean better food for existing children or more food for more children. Now that the idea is there, hopefully there will be those who want to use these intermediate technologies. I'll be checking up on them now.

SAIPEH support several hundred children and teenagers and this brings up many problems that children have when they are orphaned, disabled or in some way vulnerable. A meeting revealed that some girls are still unable to go to school when they are having their monthly periods. I felt so bad when I heard that there was even a girl who reported using leaves because she didn't have access to any alternative. But it is unthinkable that even some of them are unable to go to school because of something like this.

Some community development workers in Kenya and other African countries teach girls to make re-usable sanitary pads out of flannel or other appropriate materials that can be recovered from old clothes. They are easy to make, especially for SAIPEH, as they have a training and resource centre that teaches tailoring. Making sanitary pads would be a great thing for prospective tailors to start off with. You can start and finish several of them in a few hours. A perfect lesson plan! Again, I hope there are people willing to adopt this simple alternative to commercial disposable sanitary pads. They are very expensive and ultimately unsustainable, both economically and environmentally.

No matter how good these intermediate technologies are and no matter how appropriate they are, the main challenge is getting people to adopt them. Just being impressed is not enough. You may think that anything would be better than using leaves instead of proper sanitary pads, but these technologies have been promoted elsewhere and they haven't always taken off. For me, it's all very well doing the research and giving people the plans and diagrams, but I'd really like to crack the nut of why people seem unwilling to adopt things that seem so obviously good and how I can meet this challenge. If and when the scales drop from my eyes, I'll report back.

Rambling in Kenya

Yesterday, I made the fairly familiar journey from Nakuru in Rift Valley province to Mumias in Western Province. There are many beautiful sights on the way and the weather was good for travelling, sunny but not too hot. The roads for some of the journey have been improved, some are sill in the process of being improved and others are disintegrating and in a very dangerous condition.

Infrastructure conditions in Kenya have a lot to do with structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. These were first imposed in the early 1980s and they are still used, but they go under different names sometimes. Whereas, the road and other infrastructure improvements have a lot to do with Chinese development, which is carried out without the same level of conditionality.

Much of the fertile land in Nakuru is owned by a handful of very rich people, many of whom are members of political families, the Mois and the Kenyattas, for example. And like a lot of rich landowners, they don't feel the need to grow food crops or, at least, not food crops for Kenyans. You might think that wheat, sorghum and millet are food but the large scale producers, apparently, grow these crops to sell to breweries.

A few hours from Nakuru, the next big non-food product is tea, which dominates Kericho. Most of the industry is foreign owned or run and Kenyans make very little from this monoculture. It may be a world renowned product, but employees are paid very little, live in bad conditions and have few labour rights. That applies to those who have real jobs, rather than the far larger number, who have to take whatever bit of work that crops up, however rarely and however badly paid.

One of the big employers there is Unilever. You can read up on their level of corporate social responsibility on the Corporate Watch website. Suffice to say, they tick all the boxes that you'd expect of a multinational; monopolistic practices, unsustainable agriculture, exploiting cheap resources and labour, environmental degradation, appalling health conditions and a whole lot of other things. It's a long and depressing read.

Long before you reach Mumias you begin to see the sugar cane fields, sugar being another of Kenya's handful of monocultures that have played a big part in keeping Kenya poor for many decades. While sugar cane has long been grown in Mumias to be used as sugar, now there are plans to grow even more sugar cane destined for the biofuel market. Yet more land that could be used for food is being sacrificed for the blessed export market. The profits will go to a handful of rich people. Mumias Sugar Company does pay its employees well but the majority of people who work for the Sugar Company are not considered to be employees. They are casuals, contractors, outgrowers, etc. The majority of them make bugger all.

It probably sounds like I have a thoroughly miserable time travelling through Kenya, thinking about how much of the country is dedicated to exploitation. Well, there are still a lot of beautiful sights, if you are in a position to enjoy them. There's a good reason why tourists come to places like Kenya and even the trip to Kakamega Rainforest, Mount Elgon and Lake Turkana can be a great way of seeing the country. But even the tourist industry is another case in point; very few people make most of the money. The majority eke out a living somehow, but much of the tourist revenue doesn't even stay in the country.

Such conditions in developing countries may be, to some extent, influenced by their own governments. There are, indeed, many corrupt politicians and other parties and they have made themselves very rich. But governments, multinationals and other parties in rich countries have also made themselves rich by grabbing much of the wealth to be made in developing countries. And institutions like the IMF and the World Bank (and the World Trade Organisation) are simply some of the tools by which the rich and powerful extract huge amounts of wealth from the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.

Poverty and underdevelopment are not remote phenomena, far from Western style homes and living conditions. The forces that create and exacerbate poverty also bring to those living in comfortable conditions many of the cheap products that make their lifestyle possible. Tea, chocolate, coffee and other things that come, primarily, from developing countries, are only affordable because of policies created by undemocratic institutions (who, ironically, constantly talk about improving democracy in developing countries). Even Ipods, Iphones and Macs, made by a company that likes to boast about how responsible they are, depend on (high value) materials extracted cheaply from countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Much of Western democracy itself, and much Western wealth, depend on the terrible conditions that are created and maintained by undemocratic international financial institutions, multinationals and powerful governments in developing countres. It doesn't seem possible for every country in the world to end up with the same kind of democracy enjoyed by a handful of the world's people. I don't want to argue that democracy is impossible or that it is wrong. Perhaps, as Amartya Sen has argued, there is not enough democracy. Perhaps it is not widely enough distributed.

But if Sen is right and there were more democracy in the world, I think it would look a lot different. The small number of countries that have enough, too much in fact, use more resources per head of population than the world can provide. The level of choice that some people enjoy, the range of goods and services, necessary and unnecessary, the opportunities to overconsume with impunity, could not be offered to all peoples, equally. But I haven't gone deeply enough into political philosophy yet to figure out what sort of democracy would be sustainable democracy. Perhaps I'm just rambling.

I'm in Mumias to visit a very fine NGO called SAIPEH (Support Activities in Poverty Eradication and Health). Like the community based organisation I work for, Ribbon of Hope, Nakuru, they work with HIV positive people and their families, people suffering from hardship, orphans and vulnerable children. (Except that SAIPEH has been going for about 14 years, Ribbon of Hope is still small and young, not much over a year old.) Anyhow, they run all kinds of income generation schemes, such as growing food crops and livestock, teaching people trades, such as tailoring and computing and various other initiatives.

I'm hoping that SAIPEH will be interested in schemes that reduce spending too, such as solar cookers, cooking baskets and fuel briquettes made from organic waste materials. For lack of a convincing political philosophy, I'll stick to a more Aristotelian form of home economics in the hope that, although people will not end up rich, they may end up with a bit more cash than they had before. After all, for Aristotle, all economics was home economics.

The Gates/GM Progeny

Some of the most deceitful and unscrupulous people in the business world want to exploit Africa and one of the richest people in the world is spending huge amounts of money trying to help them. This person, Bill Gates, considers himself to be a philanthropist. Yet he is party to efforts to tie farmers into agreements that will commit them to expensive farm inputs, such as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, will probably reduce yields, will have significant health consequences, will increase dependence and food insecurity and will generally make things worse than they already are.

Someone who really wanted to benefit people in developing countries with a lot of money at their disposal could do many things. In agriculture, they could develop indigenous crops that are selectively bred to resist drought, flooding, increased salinity and other adverse conditions. In infrastructure, they could provide people with clean water and give them access to better and more sustainable forms of energy and fuel. This would also confer great health benefits. There are numerous things that could be done to improve people's economic conditions, their education and their skills.

But Gates prefers technical solutions, mostly ones that will make his foundation, along with some people connected with it, rich. Never mind that these 'solutions' will worsen the situation in developing countries, that doesn't seem to be a worry for this 'philantrocapitalist'. Perhaps he's just an old style capitalist in disguise. Genetically modified (GM) crops have been a disaster in developed and developing countries alike. His efforts to tackle a handful of diseases while ignoring the conditions that allow those diseases to spread will have few long term benefits. Just because he is rich, he shouldn't have the right to interfere with the welfare of so many vulnerable people, especially at the same time as claiming to be doing good.

Another article sees Gates as propping up a form of neo-colonialism. GM crops are an inappropriate, imported technology, designed for large scale industrial farming like that predominant in the US. Most African farmers are small farmers and they are the ones likely to suffer if they are pushed out of farming by GM. It's not the big farmers and landowners who can afford industrial scale farming that are suffering from food shortages. And those who are suffering from food shortages will quickly find that GM will not feed them, either. They are short of food because they are poor, GM foods will only increase the prices and reduce access further.

It's time that people realised that GM does not have any advantages for poor people, or even for relatively well off people. It is designed to make money for the handful of multinationals that develop the technology. And anyone who claims to be doing good by imposing GM on poor farmers in developing countries is a liar and an opportunist.

The Free or Almost Free Model

Walking around Nakuru town today, I was thinking about why a particular project was going so slowly. The project involves showing people how to make simple solar cookers. They just require cardboard or something similar, reflective paper, glue, tape and a blade. But the main problem has been getting hold of the materials in large enough quantities at as low a cost as possible. It's all very well to say 'just buy them' but I don't have a budget and if I buy them, what use will that be to the free or almost free model.

I would like to think that certain things can be constructed using free or very cheap materials. In Western countries, such as the UK, you can get all the cardboard you need by visiting a supermarket or department store. But here, you have to pay. I don't know about the lowest price yet, but I had to pay the price of half a kilo of maize for a single cardboard box. They are reused until they can no longer be called a box, and that's a very good thing. You don't see lots of cardboard box waste lying around, not until it's completely useless. Because this 'waste' is valued, it doesn't present the sort of litter problem they have here with plastic bags, say.

Similarly, I wanted to find some kind of durable reflective paper. I know that lots of sweets, biscuits, chocolate and other products are wrapped in such paper. Even better, car tyres are wrapped in a very durable reflective paper. Having identified these sources, I now need to identify places where people can get the stuff in large enough quantities. I'm still working on that. Some shops I visited were reluctant to hand over any more than a small sample, others simply said they didn't have any to spare. Perhaps this stuff is also reused for something, perhaps people are just holding out for an appropriate price. Tin foil would be Ok but it's expensive and not very durable.

Anyhow, I think people who are making these solar cookers should source the materials by themselves. They will get a much better price and will be better placed to source the materials for free. I just want to know that the materials are available so no one can tell me that I'm asking them to do something impossible. I'm getting closer, but I'm not there yet. Once I have found a good place to get adequate amounts of cardboard and reflective paper at a good price, hopefully free, then I can tell people where to go and get started making the cookers. I'll throw in a free pot of glue and anything else that is required!

I've had similar experiences with cooking baskets (also called fireless cookers). The main material for these devices, which insulate cooking pots sufficiently to allow partially cooked food to cook completely, is some kind of stuffing. An ideal kind of stuffing is a waste product from a local blanket factory. However, this waste product is also used for furniture, pillows, quilting, etc. So, again, you have to pay for it. Enough for a medium sized cooking basket costs about the price of two kilos of maize meal, enough to feed quite a number of people. I'm sure buying it in large quantities would bring the cost down but it's a challenge to the free or almost free model. Alternative, waste from local sisal factories could be used, but this too costs money as it is used to stuff furniture.

Another of our proposed projects is to construct a press that can compress briquettes made from organic waste. I spent some time looking for someone who could make such a press (it's not as easy to find someone as you might think!). When I found one, I gave him some plans I had found on the internet, a variety of wooden and metal ones. I was surprised that he recommended making the press from metal because the sort of high strength wood required would be very expensive. On the other hand, the metal could be sourced from scrap metal dealers. The labour would be cheap and I'm expecting to have a version of the press in the next week or so.

The briquettes can be made out of many things, fruit and vegetable peelings, charcoal dust, sawdust, waste from food production and other sources. Getting large amounts of waste in the right form may not be so easy. Sawdust has to be paid for, though the other materials are free (unless the word gets around that they are valuable). But they will probably need to be chopped or crushed so they can be mixed in the right proportions. And chopping or crushing machines are available, but they are very expensive. Ok, expensive means tens or hundreds of dollars. But where you only stand to make a few dollars a day profit at the most, no one is going to shell out large amounts for materials.

Economy of scale would make a huge difference, of course. But the aim of these projects is to be small and cheap. They need to be small enough and cheap enough for people who have very little money and probably very little education. If the money, training and education were readily available, there wouldn't be so much of a problem. So I'm looking for as many of these 'free or almost free' ways of either making money, saving money or a combination of the two.

Luckily, the organisation I'm working with, Ribbon of Hope, in Nakuru, has a number of other projects. We grow crops and support people to produce things that get them an income. Some of our clients keep livestock and we are investigating the possibility of breeding rabbits for food. These are all good 'bread and butter' projects because they provide people with income or food or both. But the more we can branch out and find other ways of making money, especially ways that don't require much capital, the better. Hence my aim to work on the free or almost free model to see how far it can take us.

GMOs, the Antithesis of Sustainable Development

Yesterday I went to see a lovely farm in Ngubreti, just a few kilometres north of Mogotio, in Kenya's Rift Valley province. Of course, if you like farms, many of them are beautiful. But when the climate is hot and dry for most of the year with flash floods that can wash everything away, the odds could be stacked against the farm being beautiful. This farm is beautiful because the farmer has employed numerous techniques to get as much as he possibly can from a twenty acre plot.

This farm has 30 or 40 orange trees, 80 or 90 mango trees, vegetable crops, grain crops, animal fodder, 20 or 30 beehives, a tree nursery (which has already produced 2000 seedlings), cattle, sheep and, most importantly, water pans for collecting and storing as much as possible from those flash floods. It's hard to believe there is so much variety on this small farm but it's encouraging to see everything doing so well, given the amount of work that has been put in over the years.

One of the sickening things about institutions like the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) is that they can (and do) produce research to show that the way forward for farmers in developing countries is to increase support for farm inputs, provide extension programmes, improve infrastructure and other somewhat obvious things.

Obvious, except that the same two institutions also give loans with conditions that include reducing public sector employment, cutting expenditure on extension programmes and banning anything that could be considered a subsidy, such as grants, loans or anything else to help farmers afford farm inputs, fertilizer, pesticides and the like. Never mind that these are allowed in rich countries, that's not the point. The point is that these institutions are run for the benefit of rich countries and what is good for them would never be allowed in developing countries.

Well, the new head of the UNDP (United Nations Development Program), Helen Clark, has now said that she thinks there should be more public funding for agriculture, for extension services and for research that improves productivity and yield. There should also be public funding to help farmers to reduce inputs. The last one is especially gratifying because 'modern' agriculture often involves a constantly increasing dependence on things like fertilizer and pesticide. So there would still be inputs but the financial costs would be significantly lower and the environmental costs incalculably so.

In the case of the farmer in Ngubreti, I said the water pans were the most important initiative on his farm. The failure to avail of cheap water harvesting techniques in the area is quite extraordinary. But this farmer has taken heed of what the local agricultural extension officers have taught him. He has two water pans, one that is just fed directly, the other which is fed by run-off water from the main road. These supplies ensure that the farm does not run out of water, even during prolonged dry periods.

I shouldn't leave out the point that the head of the UNDP was actually responding to a question about genetically modified organisms (GMO). Ms Clark said that world food security depends on getting "back to the basics" with agriculture, it does not depend on GMOs. She also said that crops for biofuel competed with crops for food, despite the lies to the contrary that we so often hear from those investing in biofuels. So congratulations to Helen Clark. She could really benefit farmers in developing countries.

The farm in Ngubreti was the scene of a number of agricultural extension programmes yesterday, including improved cooking stoves, cooking baskets, solar lighting and phone charging, beekeeping, water harvesting and various other ways of increasing the productivity of small farms. I'm hoping that Ribbon of Hope can try some of the things being done there, especially water harvesting and perhaps growing tree seedlings.

It is clear from visiting a farm like this that GMOs have nothing to offer, especially in the sort of dry areas that make up so much of Kenya's land. The farmers are almost all smallholders, whereas GMOs are designed for farmers with huge tracts of land (that they can afford to waste, presumably). The farmers are poor but GMO seeds cost several times more than conventional seeds. Inputs for GMOs are far higher than inputs for conventional crops and increase over time (and conventional crop farmers usually put by their own seed every year). Organic methods, which increase yields, improve resistance to pests and to bad growing conditions and therefore cost less, are inimical to GMO production.

GMOs are the antithesis of organic farming, indeed, the antithesis of sustainable agriculture. And there are many other problems with GMOs, as GMWatch.org make clear. It's good to know that much of Kenya's land is, as yet, unspoiled by modern agriculture. The same is true of much of the land in most developing countries. So it's time to ensure that it stays that way by resisting GMOs and anything else that compromises the future of the world's food security.

Why are DfID Giving 'their' Money to the Rich?

In many developing countries, a substantial majority of people live in rural areas. The majority of rural dwellers depend, directly or indirectly, on agriculture of some kind. And most of those engaged in agriculture are smallholders, producing food for their families, their local market and perhaps a bit beyond that. Even a lot of people who don't depend on agriculture grow some food for their own use. Small scale food crops, fodder crops and stock keeping is so widespread in Kenya, where over 80% of the population lives in rural areas, that it would be difficult to estimate their value in the overall economy.

On the other hand, 'aid' from the UK's Department for International Development (DfID), seems to assume that the best way to help poor people in developing countries is to give the bulk of their money to large and wealthy sectors of agriculture. DfID favour large-scale agriculture, high use of expensive, environmentally destructive technologies, such as fertilizer, pesticide, various pharmaceutical products, heavy machinery and genetically modified organisms (GMO).

Small farmers, who can't afford these technologies and who are stuck with relatively undestructive farming methods that preserve biodiversity are therefore denied the opportunity to investigate ways of increasing their yields in sustainable ways. DfID seems particularly opposed to the production of food crops and stocks, spending only 3% of their of aid on food (.3% in Sub-Saharan Africa). MPs are calling for the figure to be raised to 10%.

DfID probably hasn't realised that these small farmers produce most of the food that people live on in Kenya. Many of the rich farmers in Kenya produce for export, things such as tea and coffee and a lot of non-food crops such as flowers and sisal. A lot of land is even being used to produce crops for biofuel, which, whether for export or the domestic market, is not going to help starving people very much. DfID even supports programmes that 'donate' food aid, which is just a form of dumping that suits Western countries but serves only to destroy local markets in developing countries and leaves many of the putative recipients worse off than they were before.

Any institution that supports GMOs has no right to call itself an 'aid' agency. GMOs are the prerogative of wealthy and rapacious multinationals who want to control the food market in order to maximize their profits. Such institutions also have no regard for the importance of biodiversity, which is under serious enough threat but will be even more rapidly destroyed by widespread use of GMOs. An example is the current attempt to introduce genetically modified aubergine (eggplant, brinjal) into India, where there are currently several thousand varieties. If these modified aubergines are introduced, all others will either die out or become contaminated.

Every few weeks there is an article about some kind of crop that will supposedly save a country or reduce levels of malnutrition or increase yields or whatever. These articles don't usually say so, but if you check further, you'll often find that the crop in question is genetically modified. The article may even talk about biodiversity and sustainability and all sorts of lovely things. But if GM is involved, then neither biodiversity nor sustainability are involved.

There are many reasons why GMOs should not be grown anywhere, yet some GMOs now dominate in a few countries, such as cotton in India and maize and soya in the US. Many farmers in countries like India, the US and Canada are now regretting the fact that they bought into GM but it's very hard to get back out again. Yet the industry still churns out its lies about GM being high yielding, uses less pesticides and herbicides, is more drought resistant, grows well in marginal land, etc. It's hard to understand why so many seem to fall for their lies.

But DfID, with all its money and expertise, could not possibly be in the dark about the dangers of GM or even the inappropriateness of funding only large scale, industrial agriculture in developing countries. The question is, who has nobbled them and what are they getting out of supporting the biotechnology and other industries that stand to profit from their big spending?

Fiddling with Technical Fixes While People Continue to Die

Time reports on a study which raises concerns about HIV drug resistance. Most Kenya government documentation about HIV treatment is concerned with getting as many people on treatment as possible, or appearing to do so. Where the aim is to get as many drugs out to as many people as possible, resistance is probably not so visible. After all, you need to monitor people regularly and carefully for signs of resistance and funding doesn't always stretch to that.

It's not really clear how many people in Kenya are currently on HIV treatment. Figures vary a lot and don't always make it clear whether people who were once on treatment but have since died are included. Probably a few hundred thousand are on treatment at the moment, maybe three hundred thousand. But it's even less clear how many are on second line treatment. Second line treatment is given to those who have developed resistance to first line treatment and it's prohibitively expensive.

Most of the hundreds of millions of dollars of HIV money is spent on drugs, either for treatment or prevention. No one would want to deny people who are suffering from HIV/Aids access to necessary drugs, of course, but there must be a limit to how much money can be spent on drugs to the almost total exclusion of other aspects of treatment and prevention. I don't know what that limit is but there are proposals to put even more people on drugs and the sustainability of these proposals is highly questionable.

At present, people whose HIV infection has reached a particular stage are usually put on antiretroviral drugs (ARV). Perhaps about half the HIV positive Kenyans who have reached this stage are currently receiving treatment. Pregnant women who are infected with HIV are put on a short course of ARVs and this results in most babies growing up HIV negative. Less frequently, people who may have been accidentally infected with HIV can be given a short course of ARV treatment called post exposure prophylaxis (PEP).

But there are proposals to roll out ARV drugs to more and more people. For example, it was proposed just over a year ago to test everyone, or as many people as possible, and to put anyone found to be HIV positive on ARVs. If this could be done, the number of people on treatment would go up several hundred percent.

Another proposal is to roll out what is called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This would involve putting HIV negative people on ARVs in the hope that this would protect them from becoming infected. The target of this kind of programme would be those seen to be most at risk of contracting HIV. This could involve sex workers, men who have sex with men, prisoners, intravenous drug users and perhaps the clients of sex workers, people who have many parters and people who have concurrent sexual partners, relationships that overlap with other relationships.

The number of people who would be targeted would be hard to estimate. How many men who have sex with men are there in Kenya? Is it five percent of the population or 10 percent (2-4 million)? Men who have sex with men are hardly going to identify themselves in the current homophobic climate anyway. An obvious target of PrEP is people who are HIV negative but are in a relationship of some kind with someone who is HIV positive, called discordant relationships. This could number some 350000 people.

Similarly for sex workers, how many are there? Is it hundreds of thousands and does that include people who occasionally engage in sex work or who don't consider themselves to be sex workers? And what about identifying their clients, how many million would there be? Is it really feasible to identify those most at risk of becoming infected with HIV? The recently published modes of transmission survey shows that, for years, HIV programming has been seriously misdirected and also that those who are most at risk is a very mixed and constantly changing group.

There are questions about the possible effectiveness of PrEP but there must also be questions about the feasibility of identifying all the people who could benefit from it, given the numbers of people who are infected with HIV and the numbers of people who are in danger of becoming infected. If resistance is a problem at current levels of ARV rollout, what kind of problem would it be if ARVs were rolled out to all people at risk or thought to be at risk of contracting or of transmitting HIV?

All the uses of ARV run the risk of resistance. Those who are HIV positive and on ARVs are at risk, but so are the women who receive short courses of ARVs to prevent mother to child transmission, so are those who receive post exposure prophylaxis, so are those who receive pre exposure prophylaxis. With resistance comes increased sickness and death unless second line treatment is rolled out. And second line treatment means increases in cost of several hundred percent. Again, questions about sustainability arise.

The question of whether we can treat our way out of the HIV epidemic is constantly raised but the answer is unclear. I would suggest that the answer is no and that even efforts at preventing the spread of HIV should steer clear as much as possible from technical fixes, such as ARV drugs. Drug treatment of HIV, let alone drug prevention, may not be sustainable and is already seriously affecting the amount of money available for preventing HIV transmission.

Instead of the almost inconceivable amounts of money being proposed to pay for drugs for treatment and prevention, far lower sums of money could be spent on improving the overall health, education and welfare of Kenyans and of those in other high HIV prevalence countries. It is immoral to continue pretending that there is a technical fix just around the corner and that everything will be OK. As long as we continue to look for technical fixes and ignore the lives of people in underdeveloped countries, people will continue to become sick and to die from treatable and/or preventable conditions.

(For further discussion of PrEP, see my other blog, pre-exposureprophylaxis.blogspot.com)

Tomorrow's Disasters Are Preventable Today

I think most people, if they saw their child playing near a fire or in some other dangerous situation, would do something about it before an accident occurred. They wouldn't just watch and then shell out the money for hospital fees once an accident had occurred. But donor money is usually spent on clearing up after a disaster has hit.

Many children (and quite a number of adults) in developing countries are severely burned because most cooking is done on open fires, close to the ground. Donor money is sometimes forthcoming for the expensive surgery and skin grafts required by people who have suffered burns. But it's not often you come across substantial projects to provide people with alternatives to cooking on open fires, using mainly wood or charcoal.

Burning wood and charcoal accounts for a very large proportion of the carbon emissions from developing countries. Forests are fast disappearing and wood is getting more expensive and less viable as a fuel source. The use of wood and charcoal is part of a massive environemntal disaster. There are cheaper alternatives, such as solar cooking, biogas and the use of fuel briquettes made from combustible materials.

There is a lot to be gained from not burning wood and charcoal. There are the environmental benefits and safety benefits to consider. Also, people in close proximity to wood and charcoal cookers suffer from respiratory problems, one of the top killers in developing countries. Alternative fuels are cheaper, even free. And their use can reduce the time and effort taken to collect wood and produce charcoal.

But rather than see aid money go into proejcts that have these multiple advantages, we continue to direct it to big disasters. The children that suffer terrible burns, that we wish to see treated, shouldn't have to suffer these burns in the first place. The plastic and reconstructive surgeons should be concentrating on people who are not suffering from preventable injuries.

Similarly, money for surgeons and health resources is spent on reconstructing the faces of children affected by noma, which affects children suffering from malnutrition. Food security and proper nutrition would prevent many other illnesses and health conditions, in addition to noma, and would also reduce deaths, especially among infants and young people. Those who don't die from illnesses arising from insufficient food and nutrition still suffer stunted growth and retarded mental development. These are all avoidable.

The current debate about land grabbing in developing countries, where greedy multinationals are buying up huge tracts of land to grow food for rich countries, is an idle exercise if it does not go any way towards reducing this phenomenon substantially. By the time this land has been ravaged by industrial scale farming and contaminated by genetically modified organisms, it will be too late. What is the point knowing now what the consequences will be if we are not going to do anything about it?

Much of the land being grabbed is destined for biofuel production. The ridiculousness of starving people producing crops to fuel the cars of well fed people, far away, seems to be lost on us. We, the people benefitting from the increasing impoverishment of the poor, may be willing to see our governments giving large sums of aid money to starving people in the future, but we don't seem to want to do anything to prevent the circumstances that will eventually leave people starving.

Land grabbing, especially for biofuel production, results in food, water and other vital resources being exported from poor countries to rich countries. If we prevent the land grabbing now, we won't have to send aid money later to the disaster we are so busy creating.

Lomborg Preaching to the Converted, Again

As we (Ribbon of Hope) go about, visiting our various clients in and around Nakuru, we see the many and fast changing problems that people here face. Some people get through these problems well enough, others don't. It's always hard to figure out if some make it through because they are better off than others or if they are better off because they are good at getting through problems or if there is a mixture of factors.

The rains have come in some areas. This means that it is time to plant crops. If the right preparations have been made, the crops should grow and if the rains continue, there will be a good harvest. But now the rains are here, are people preparing to harvest rainwater in order to ensure they get through the next drought? Sadly, not many people harvest rainwater. This doesn't appear to be a government priority either. The government even talked about distributing cheap or free seeds and fertilizer but now, there appears to be a shortage of both seeds and fertilizer because, well, er, the government has bought up so much of them. They must have just forgotten to distribute them.

In other areas, the rains have brought too much, too quickly, and have washed away fields, crops, roads, bridges, houses and anything else in their path. Were provisions made for flooding? It appears not. Roads that have been swept away in Coast Province were not flood proof. Floods occur with amazing regularity but flood proofing is an optional extra.

There have been power cuts again recently, despite promises that these would become a thing of the past. The government, it has been claimed, have now got the extra oil they need to make up for the shortfalls in power. Perhaps they will sort it out before the next fuel shortage. But fuel shortages, like floods, droughts, famines and other disasters keep occurring and will continue to occur. They need to be planned for. Last year, politicians were talking knowingly about planning for such disasters but there is little evidence that they have achieved anything yet.

The antics of the 'environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg are well known to those who are interested in environmental issues but Nairobi appears to have the dubious pleasure of hosting a conference organised by Lomborg's 'think tank', the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.

Strangely enough, Lomborg appears to make a valid point about the need to concentrate on some very cheap, efficient and vital development programmes, such as micro-nutrient deficiencies and intestinal parasite infestations, which affect billions of people. However, there is a need to ensure that these billions of people have access to a balanced diet. The cheapest and most sustainable solution to these problems is not to enhance foods with various supplements and to produce things like vitamin A enriched chewing gum and other headline grabbing stories. There are already plenty of foods rich in vitamin A and other micro-nutrients. It's just that many people are too poor to afford them.

Lomborg also uses the opportunity given by this smokescreen to plug his tired old argument that climate change is not caused by human activities and that we need to adapt to it rather than trying to fight it. If the money and effort spent on denying that climate change is caused by human activities were to be spent on worthwhile causes, such as the ones Lomborg mentions, a lot of good work could have been achieved by now.

Kenya can't afford to risk accepting Lomborg's puny argument. Whether climate change is caused by human activities or not, the government has to put money into sustainable sources of energy for two reasons: first, these sources of energy will still be available for the foreseeable future, unlike fossil fuels; second, the country is not able to afford these expensive and unsustainable sources of energy and they are not able to afford the costs that go with high usage of unsustainable energy sources.

On the other hand, Kenya can afford to invest in wind power (as long as they produce their own generators, rather than buying the ridiculously expensive British ones that the UK government seems hell bent on selling them); they can afford hydrothermal power, solar power, biogas and probably all sorts of other ways of reducing the country's energy bill and the bill for the pollution and environmental damage that has taken place and that continues to take place.

But what is the government doing? Boasting about the possibility of finding oil in the Eastern Province. Billions have been sunk in drilling for oil in Kenya but the point is not that they have diddly squat to show for it. The point is that they don't need to spend all this money on fossil fuels when there are so many alternatives available here.

And the politicians will continue talking about flood proofing now the rains have come and they will surely talk about rainwater harvesting when the rains have gone away. If oil is discovered, they will rake in the money and when the oil has gone they will talk about how long term thinking is required. But I guess you can't blame Lomborg for talking the Kenyan government into stupid energy policies and development agenda. Because people who listen to such arguments seem to want to believe them.

And the bit that Lomborg gets right, that we could achieve a lot by working on micro-nutrient deficiencies and intestinal parasites, has long been recognised. But these are issues that the Kenyan government has little to say about.

Will We Prevent the Next Genocide?

The land grabbing orgy currently taking place in developing countries is a lot more serious than I thought. There are some countries buying up or leasing land but the biggest buyers are actually corporations. Corporations have amply demonstrated in the past that they don't care anything for the lives or livelihoods of people, they only care about maximizing profits for their shareholders and other interested parties.

In addition to grabbing land and denying millions of subsistence farmers their only means of survival, this trend is part of what has been driving up the price of food, especially staple foods. These corporations can also indulge in some practices that would be more difficult or expensive or perhaps even totally illegal in other countries. For example, land in developing countries is seen as ideal for biofuel crops. It's also seen as a good place to grow genetically modified crops that have not been given the go ahead in other countries.

Everyone feels the effects of rising food prices, of course. But for people who were barely able to afford enough food to eat a couple of years ago, the rush to buy up or otherwise occupy land in developing countries will push many people well below the threshold of having enough food, however lacking in nutritional value, just to survive.

Developing countries are also presently experiencing severe water shortages. Rich countries growing their food in developing countries means that they are effectively exporting huge quantities of water from those who have least to those who have most.

Corporate nobs may talk of 'win-win' situations, or even 'solving world hunger' but it is only people who are now rich who have any chance of winning anything and those who are now poor who face starvation. There is nothing in this for development, it is purely motivated by the need to make big profits. In addition, land and water supplies will be contaminated by the large scale agricultural practices which are absolutely necessary for this sort of investment to be really profitable.

I realise that those driven purely by profit are not going to be interested in these questions: but what will people now on the brink of starvation do once they have been thrown off their land? And what will those now barely able to afford basic foods do when the price has gone just that little bit too high? What will the rest of the world do when most of the land and water that have been supplying them with food are contaminated to the extent that they are no longer productive?

Rich Academics Talk Bollex About Climate Change

Academics and wannabe academics have been beating on for decades about population growth being a threat to humanity. The main paradigm for development was, for many years, population control. Extremely well funded organisations from rich countries went around developing countries trying to persuade people to adopt various birth control techniques and technologies, whether they wanted to or not.

Most of these organisation in most of the countries where they worked were not very successful. In Kenya, when the British finally left, health, education, water and sanitation, infrastructure and other social services started to improve from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. At around the same time, fertility also started to drop.

However, development came to mean economic development as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to, effectively, run most developing countries. All the things that had started to improve went into decline and are still declining today, nearly three decades later.

Also in the late 1970s and early 1980s, HIV started to spread rapidly. Once it was identified as a sexually transmitted virus, the same organisations that had been toting condoms and contraception as a panacea for development changed their tack and tried to promote the use of condoms to protect against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. These efforts have been even less successful than their earlier efforts.

Now, the 'Optimum Population Trust', run by a collection of academics and wannabe academics, is advocating the use of condoms to curb population growth as a means of reducing climate change due to over consumption. They are suggesting that this is the most economic method of influencing climate change, too, cleverly combining those two earlier development paradigms into one.

Ironically, when people have smaller families, they often become bigger consumers. In fact, many people say they want to have smaller families so they can afford things like cars, consumer durables and various other goods. So, the result of reducing family size is often an increase in consumption. In fact, there is little connection between high fertility and high consumption. On the contrary, populations with high fertility rates usually have low rates of consumption. The biggest consumers have low fertility rates.

In Kenya, much of their carbon emissions result from the production of goods destined for rich, high consumption countries. Kenya produces all sorts of goods in Export Processing Zones (a posh name for sweat shops), fruit and vegetables are force grown under electric lights and transported by air and biofuel crops that are responsible for the destruction of much of the country's remaining land resources. The rich have managed to export a lot of their carbon emissions to developing countries.

Contraception is a vital technology in reducing the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. It also reduces unintended pregnancies. And many of the children who are born to HIV positive women are, in fact, unintended. There is a huge unmet need for contraception that the birth control evangelists seem to have done little to alleviate over the course of the last half century.

But it is not poor people in developing countries who contribute the most to global warming and environmental destruction, it is rich people in rich countries. Fertility may be low in rich countries, thankfully. But that doesn't reduce consumption, rather, it seems to be behind much of the continued increase in consumption.

Apparently this Trust is very excited by a study based on the principle that "fewer people will emit fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide". But this principle is flawed. Lower consumption (or fewer high consumers) will result in fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide. Most people in the world are low consumers. Here in Nakuru, some of the poorest are probably even negative consumers. The municipal dump is full of homeless people who derive their meager income by collecting and selling rubbish for recycling. Some even live in the dump in hovels made from waste.

I'm not suggesting that it is a good thing that people live like that because it isn't. What is disgusting is the idea that very rich, well educated, well fed people are pointing the finger at the very poorest of people and saying that they are the problem when it comes to climate change and environmental degradation.

So Porritt, Attenborough, Lovelock and other pompous tossers, leave your comfortable homes and offices, visit a few poor countries, or even poor people in your own countries, shut your big gobs, open your eyes and then rethink the consequences of the cooperation of a mere handful of the world's biggest consumers for the whole of humanity. Those who are condemned to a life of poverty will reduce the size of their families when they can see that it will be of direct benefit to them and people like them, but certainly not to people like you.

[See George Monbiot's 'The Population Myth' for an elaboration of the above argument.]

Al Gore's Bullshit Won't Make the Crops Grow

Today is Blog Action Day, where lots of blogs around the world all write about some aspect of climate change. I'm all for promoting environmental and climate change issues but I noticed that, pretty late in the day, Al Gore got involved in the initiative. I'm sorry that an otherwise worthwhile sounding effort feels the need to be associated with a loudmouthed freeloader who jumped on the environmental bandwaggon when his political career went off the rails. I suppose there'll always be Gores and the like, who attach themselves to something that allows them to promote their own interests.

Anyhow, developing countries like Kenya are going to bear the brunt of climate change and are probably already feeling the effects. There have been prolonged droughts in many areas for some time now. The El Nino rains are due to start soon, which may resolve some of the short term problems. But they may also increase the problems. If the rains are too heavy and result in flooding, crops that are planted could be washed away. There has already been flooding in several areas, with loss of life and livelihoods and a lot of people being displaced.

The Kenyan government has done little to alleviate the problems and probably a lot to exacerbate them. The much talked about Mau Forest, where large scale logging over a long period has probably resulted in a massive reduction in water tables, is still being destroyed. True, the government has very publicly evicted small settlers in the forest but they will not quickly reverse a problem that took such a long time to develop.

Over several decades, people have been persuaded to grow things for export, such as flowers, tea, coffee, fruit and vegetables. This sort of farming has done a lot of environmental damage. But also, these are cash crops and they are not used to benefit ordinary Kenyans. They will not solve the food shortages because they are produced by rich landowners, often foreigners, who expect big profits.

What Kenya needs now, and what they have always needed, is food security. They need to produce enough staple crops for the domestic market and ignore the advice they seem to get from foreign interests to keep concentrating on exports. Feeding Kenyans should be the priority.

The Kenyan government is belatedly talking about things like providing fertilizer at low cost. This may help some large scale farmers but it is unlikely to help small farmers, the majority, who only produce enough to provide for themselves and perhaps for a modest surplus. Some of them are planting right now in the expectation that rains will come. If the rains come, great. But if there is not enough rain, the crops will be destroyed by the use of these artificial fertilizers, just as much as they would be if the rain failed altogether.

This kind of intervention is typical of the sort of short term thinking that has made small farmers increasingly vulnerable as the years go by. Small farmers need also to consider organic waste, household and farm waste, whatever is available. Artificial fertilizers may be of use in the short term, especially to large farmers, but even they eventually end up destroying their land.

But small farmers can least afford this process of land degradation. To keep their costs and their losses low, they need to use cheap or free materials. Because, even if they don't have to pay much now for artificial fertilizers, they will still have to bear the costs in the long run. The production and use of artificial fertilizers is part of the problem, it will never be a sustainable solution. It may not even be a short term solution.

Self Reliance Doesn’t Protect Against Unreliable Leaders

We have built a bigger parabolic cooker and are now waiting for a suitably sunny day to try it out. Some areas around here get sun all the time but the parabolic cooker is not very mobile. So we just have to wait for suitable conditions. Meantime, one of the things we are concerned about is safety. For a start, the concentrated light reflected from the device is very hard on the eyes and could potentially damage users' eyesight. We can use sunglasses but there's no guarantee that others will do the same, especially as some of the people around will not even be using the device but could still be affected.

There is also the issue of safety from burns. Parabolics heat things to very high temperatures. Some of the models I've found online depict a cooking pot at about chest height. If this pot were to be turned over by accident, the user could receive dangerous burns. I would prefer a model where the pot is low and where you can move the parabola without moving the pot and vice versa. This should reduce the possible dangers. We discussed this problem with other people experimenting with parabolic cookers and they agreed. We resolved to suspend the pot from a line or large tripod, rather than trying to build a tripod inside the parabola.

One of the community support groups is so interested in solar cooking that they have asked for a workshop on making the cookers. We will be doing that in the next few weeks, once we have all the materials. The members of the support groups themselves need to bring the materials because there is very little funding available. But it is a good exercise to get them to source the materials as most of them should be cheap or even free. One of the advantages of solar cooking is increased sustainability and self reliance. Therefore, recycled materials are preferable to new materials. I suspect people here will be good at finding cheap and free materials!

The same people who have shown such interest in solar cookers also raised questions about home made, reusable sanitary pads. A friend kindly sent me some materials on how to make these. I also found various websites dedicated to this issue. Sanitary pads are so expensive here, compared to people's ability to buy them, that it is no wonder many never use them. This is a particular problem for young girls as they have no spending power at all. They often miss school for a few days every month, which is quite unnecessary. However, there are safety aspects relating to making reusable sanitary pads as well and I hope we can include resolutions to this problem as part of the project.

We're still trying to find out about getting people to produce briquettes from organic waste as a way of reducing use of wood and charcoal, which is expensive and in short supply. It's also time consuming to collect wood and make charcoal. We have plenty of instructions for the process but lack the devices that could mix the materials and compress the mixture into a suitably compact end product. We are in touch with people at Egerton University who may be able to help us. Ultimately, the process should be cheap and small scale, but as someone near here has already done some work on this area, we'd like to see that first.

We visited the local municipal dump to see what useful materials may be available there. Actually, there are many people in the dump, every day, picking up all the materials they can sell on for reuse. I think we need to spend more time finding out what reaches the dump, who is picking it up and selling it on, what materials never reaches the dump and what other recycling projects are currently taking place. There are lots of organisations here doing various things and few organisations seem to be aware of what others are doing. As we are trying to find tried and tested ways of reducing poverty and increasing self reliance, we need to know what others are doing in and around Nakuru. That is proving to be a difficult task!

There's a lot of talk about closing down the camps for internally displaced persons (IDP) which were set up as a result of the post election violence. It's all very well to get people to go back home but many don't wish to return to properties from which they were forcibly ejected. Many of the properties have been burned, looted and squatted by others. The government is giving many mixed messages about how much they will pay people to return home and what they will do for people who can't go back to where they were before. Also, the IDP camp in Nakuru consists of many small plots, all of which have been purchased by the residents. People have been there for nearly two years, they have made lives for themselves. They have set up kitchen gardens, shops, community groups and what not. The 'camp' is now a village in its own right and the current government plans seem like yet another forced eviction.

The support group that we are involved in at the IDP camp is interested in some of our projects and this area is in particular need of greater sustainability and self reliance. But people there are now wary of doing anything in an area that they may have to leave in the near future. There is even talk now about the next election and the possible displacement that may occur in the next few years. Far from trying to anticipate and prevent further politically motivated violence, politicians seem to be spending their time and energy planning their attack.

Empty Pockets Revisited

It's nice to be able to try out some of the things I've been looking for, thinking about and researching for a long time. Not my ideas, by the way, just ideas that sound like good income generation activities and ways of saving money. Generally, they are cheap or free sustainable activities that are easy to get involved in, even for those who have few practical skills, such as myself. I'm harking back to a posting entitled 'Empty Pocket Finances', which I wrote nearly a year ago.

The sort of projects I am thinking of have not changed that much. At present we are trying out solar cookers and cooking baskets but we would like to look into reusable, home-made sanitary towels, briquettes made from organic waste, solar fruit and vegetable driers and, I'm sure, many other techniques. Anything that people can fit into their day to day life with the minimum bother and the maximum benefit.

In addition to persuading people to use solar cookers, cooking baskets, home-made sanitary towels and other things, we would like to get people to make these cookers, baskets and towels themselves. Perhaps they'll even go on to teach other people and convert them to the virtues of sustainability and self-reliance. Then it will be up to them to sell the ideas on to others. So, in addition to saving people money, some people should be able to go on to make money. Admittedly, just a little money, but some of our clients are making almost nothing right now.

So much for the theory, anyhow. But we visited a Ministry of Agriculture office that has been involved in developing appropriate technology for several decades, apparently. One of the people we talked to had little good news to impart. He said he had long been trying to persuade people to do things that would be of benefit to them, with very little success. On the other hand, his colleague seemed to be of the opinion that people find change hard but that that's no reason not to continue to develop good ideas and try to disseminate them.

We also visited Egerton University to see a parabolic style solar cooker being constructed using an umbrella, much like the one I made recently, only bigger. I want to try a bigger one now to see if they can do some things that the Cookit can't do. I'm pretty sure they can but I am worried about safety aspects as people here are not exactly safety conscious. For instance, parabolic reflectors can quickly damage your sight. And if they heat things up to high temperatures, they are potentially dangerous when it comes to spillages, especially when children are involved.

But maybe this won't be a problem. When we were at Egerton, we were able to make some design suggestions that should make the parabolic cooker a lot safer. As for the difficulty of getting people to adopt new things, we hope that living close to our clients will mean we can check up on and badger them regularly. And if they tell us they are short of money or that they need something, we can ask them why they haven't adopted the wonderful techniques that various people around the world have made available, free of charge.