In an article about the highly suspect arrival of 40,000 tonnes of genetically modified (GM) maize in Kenya's Mombasa port, the BBC concludes "Many African countries are under increasing pressure to grow GM crops to tackle hunger and malnutrition, and drought in recent years has caused food shortages in Kenya."
This is very misleading, in several ways. Multinationals like Monsanto, which are having a lot of trouble persuading most countries to trust their attempts to take over world food production, want people to think that GM crops provide a solution to hunger and malnutrition. They want people to believe that their crops are resistant to drought, flooding, pests and whatever else. But none of these things are true. They have not developed crops that have any of these qualities.
Further, it has taken more than just drought to cause Kenya's food shortages. Much of Kenya's productive land is taken up with non-food or non-staple crops, such as sisal, flowers, tea, coffee, sugar and luxury fruit and vegetables. Most of these crops are for the export market. People cannot afford to buy food because they are poor. Because they lack empowerment, they do not have much choice as to what crops the country grows. And most people don't own large amounts of land, producing just enough to get by, if they are lucky. On the other hand, most of the industrial scale farms are owned by very few, well connected people, many of them foreigners.
The BBC article seems to take it as given that GM crops could play any part in reducing hunger and malnutrition. This couldn't be further from the truth. Most Kenyan farmers are subsistence farmers. GM crops were developed for rich farmers, mainly in the US. Some South Africans have fallen into the trap of accepting 'free' GM seeds and other inputs from the likes of Monsanto. Now they are stuck with contaminated land, crops they can't sell, rising input costs, shrinking profits and increased poverty and dependency levels. That's great if you're Monsanto but not so good if you're a small farmer.
This is probably the reason that the unwanted GM maize has ended up in Mombasa in the first place, but many Kenyans are wondering what it is doing there. Well, unless South Africans and some of the other poor fools who have been duped can now dupe others to take GM crops off their hands, they will have trouble shifting it. They have a surplus of maize in South Africa, which is bad enough, but a surplus of contaminated maize could prove to be a very hard sell.
High food prices, which are the real cause of hunger and malnutrition in Kenya and other countries, have a lot more to do with international speculation in staple food commodities. This speculation has recently been spurred by attempts by biofuel producers to buy up land cheaply in developing countries to produce yet more non-food crops or food crops that are destined for the petrol tanks of rich people. [Reuters have an interesting article about potential dangers of biofuels that the EU commissioned but subsequently 'forgot' to publish.]
Drought, flooding, pests and other phenomena can destroy crops and cause widespread poverty and starvation. But rich countries treating developing countries as mere inputs for the production of cheap raw materials, using cheap labour, is the real culprit in many of the famines and food shortages that are labeled 'natural' disasters. The real disasters are far from natural. They are artificially created for the benefit of the world's multinationals, the rich, the powerful and even those who just happen to live in the more fortunate countries.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Mining, Biofuels and Other Forms of Abuse
I'd like to follow on from yesterday's theme about developing countries being used to provide wealthy countries with cheap raw materials and labour. These developing countries are never helped to or even allowed to produce their own higher value goods so that they can improve their economies. On the contrary, wealthy countries go out of their way to ensure that poor countries stay that way. Several recent articles discuss other ways in which developing countries are held back from developing.
The European Community (EC) has set a target to source 10% of its energy from renewable sources. Rather than look for genuinely renewable source, the EC has latched on to biofuels as a means of achieving this target. Warnings were raised about the dangers of biofuels as long ago as 2004 but no one was listening then and few are listening now. Biofuel prospecting has gone on, as predicted, to destroy vast tracts of land, increase the prices of fuel, dispossess people of their land and livelihood and cause numerous other social and economic problems.
Like the US, the EC preaches against the use of subsidies. Yet they subsidize biofuel production (and anything else that suits them). Growing biofuels cannot be sustainable, there just isn't enough land, even if everyone in Tanzania and other developing countries are thrown off their land to grow the crops. Growing, processing, transporting and using biofuels does not reduce carbon emissions, they increase it. So even the rich countries are not gaining much by their quest for biofuels. Somebody must be making money out of it but Tanzanians and people in other poor countries will suffer increased poverty and hunger as a result. And there will be global level losses too.
In addition to having a lot of land, which rich countries are busy grabbing right now, Tanzania also has a lot of minerals, especially gold. But various murky deals mean that the country makes very little money out of these resources. Most of the money is made by foreign owned companies, especially companies from Canada, South Africa and the UK. The royalties Tanzania gets are tiny whereas the profits the foreign companies make are huge and are amply enhanced by the privileges and tax incentives they receive at the expense of poor Tanzanians and even indigenous Tanzanian companies, who are unable to compete with the foreigners.
Despite mining companies having a deplorable human rights and corporate responsibility record, laws, neither Tanzanian nor international, do not adequately protect those who have to work for the industry. In particular, laws do not protect those who lose their land, those whose environment and water supply are contaminated and those who formerly made a living as artisanal miners. Tanzania has enough valuable resources to improve the living conditions for all Tanzanians but the revenue from these resources always seems to leave the country. All that ordinary Tanzanians get is the pollution, the industrial problems and the social problems, the majority remaining very poor.
In Kenya, similar things are happening. Land is being grabbed to be used to produce food and biofuels for rich countries. This viable land is currently occupied by Kenyans but is being sold as 'unoccupied' and 'marginal'. Whole ecologies are being destroyed to produce unsustainable crops for the benefit of non Kenyans, but at the expense of Kenyans. The Kenyan government appears to be doing little to protect its citizens and seems to be keen to promote the interests of this land grabbing. As if things were not bad enough in the worst affected area, the Tana River basin, Tiomin are going to do some kind of mining there, a Canadian company with a disgraceful record of wanton destruction.
The only good news is that a few hundred families in the Tana River basin have been awarded 2.55 million Kenyan shillings each as compensation for their land. Unfortunately, the people involved were displaced for environmental protection reasons. It seems unlikely that there will be any compensation for people displaced to make way for the miners and land grabbers. WTO rules tend to defend such land grabbing and resource exploitation, protecting only the interests of the very rich. Condemning vast populations to generations of poverty, disease, dependency and degradation is all in a day's work. It's been going on for a long time and it's not going to stop now, not as long as there is money to be made.
The European Community (EC) has set a target to source 10% of its energy from renewable sources. Rather than look for genuinely renewable source, the EC has latched on to biofuels as a means of achieving this target. Warnings were raised about the dangers of biofuels as long ago as 2004 but no one was listening then and few are listening now. Biofuel prospecting has gone on, as predicted, to destroy vast tracts of land, increase the prices of fuel, dispossess people of their land and livelihood and cause numerous other social and economic problems.
Like the US, the EC preaches against the use of subsidies. Yet they subsidize biofuel production (and anything else that suits them). Growing biofuels cannot be sustainable, there just isn't enough land, even if everyone in Tanzania and other developing countries are thrown off their land to grow the crops. Growing, processing, transporting and using biofuels does not reduce carbon emissions, they increase it. So even the rich countries are not gaining much by their quest for biofuels. Somebody must be making money out of it but Tanzanians and people in other poor countries will suffer increased poverty and hunger as a result. And there will be global level losses too.
In addition to having a lot of land, which rich countries are busy grabbing right now, Tanzania also has a lot of minerals, especially gold. But various murky deals mean that the country makes very little money out of these resources. Most of the money is made by foreign owned companies, especially companies from Canada, South Africa and the UK. The royalties Tanzania gets are tiny whereas the profits the foreign companies make are huge and are amply enhanced by the privileges and tax incentives they receive at the expense of poor Tanzanians and even indigenous Tanzanian companies, who are unable to compete with the foreigners.
Despite mining companies having a deplorable human rights and corporate responsibility record, laws, neither Tanzanian nor international, do not adequately protect those who have to work for the industry. In particular, laws do not protect those who lose their land, those whose environment and water supply are contaminated and those who formerly made a living as artisanal miners. Tanzania has enough valuable resources to improve the living conditions for all Tanzanians but the revenue from these resources always seems to leave the country. All that ordinary Tanzanians get is the pollution, the industrial problems and the social problems, the majority remaining very poor.
In Kenya, similar things are happening. Land is being grabbed to be used to produce food and biofuels for rich countries. This viable land is currently occupied by Kenyans but is being sold as 'unoccupied' and 'marginal'. Whole ecologies are being destroyed to produce unsustainable crops for the benefit of non Kenyans, but at the expense of Kenyans. The Kenyan government appears to be doing little to protect its citizens and seems to be keen to promote the interests of this land grabbing. As if things were not bad enough in the worst affected area, the Tana River basin, Tiomin are going to do some kind of mining there, a Canadian company with a disgraceful record of wanton destruction.
The only good news is that a few hundred families in the Tana River basin have been awarded 2.55 million Kenyan shillings each as compensation for their land. Unfortunately, the people involved were displaced for environmental protection reasons. It seems unlikely that there will be any compensation for people displaced to make way for the miners and land grabbers. WTO rules tend to defend such land grabbing and resource exploitation, protecting only the interests of the very rich. Condemning vast populations to generations of poverty, disease, dependency and degradation is all in a day's work. It's been going on for a long time and it's not going to stop now, not as long as there is money to be made.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Aid is But a Tiny Fig Leaf
While the Icelandic volcanic cloud means that people in Europe are having to cancel or postpone trips or find alternative ways of returning from trips, Kenyans are worrying about what is going to happen to their perishable produce, such as flowers, fruit and vegetables. Europe is their biggest market. Although owners of these industries make huge profits when things are going well, the employees, who make a pittance, make nothing at all when something prevents produce from getting to market.
At the same time, the BBC comments on a report that finds that the UK imports a lot of its water from other countries in the form of produce such as flowers, fruit, vegetables and other goods. Much of this imported water comes from developing countries, such as Kenya, where clean water and sanitation problems are responsible for high rates of avoidable mortality, especially among infants and children, and numerous treatable and curable illnesses. The report estimates that two thirds of the UK's water use is imported.
The mass production of non-seasonal food and non-food crops by developing countries results in much of the starvation that the UK and other rich countries seem to see as 'natural disasters', to be remedied by a sticky plaster, some handout or even a 'deal' of some kind that is calculated to do more harm than good (it benefits the donor, of course). Yet the industries that claim to be such a great source of foreign currency, fruit, vegetable and flower industries, are mostly foreign owned, British owned, in fact. They pay little or no tax in Kenya and, being offshored, little in Britain either.
When a country like Kenya starts to realise that their 'cash crops', such as tea, sugar or coffee don't make them much money, they seem to reach for another cash crop. The Kenyan cotton industry (along with that of many other developing countries) was wrecked many years ago by the US cotton industry successfully lobbying for subsidies to support them so that no developing country could compete. Subsidies are bad, according to the US, except when they are US subsidies. Sadly, Kenyans are calling for their government to help them return to cotton production. But this is unlikely to fly because US cotton is still subsidised to such an extent that no developing country can produce it as cheaply. And this is despite Kenya having pay and working conditions that would make Bill Gates proud.
But cash crops have always made very little money. Many of them here are grown as part of a kind of agreement that was formed with British land 'owners' after independence. They were allowed to keep their land and those Kenyans producing their (the colonial's) crop, tea, for example, were bound to go on producing tea. The law is slowly changing so that people may be allowed to stop producing tea and produce some food instead (God forbid!). But with sugar, the factories are demanding that even more land be given up to it so they can produce biofuel. Never mind that those whose land the sugar cane is planted on make little or no money from it.
It may well be wondered why farmers produce a non-food crop when they are starving and these crops don't make any profit for them. Well, aside from the promise to keep producing crops that only profit foreign companies, such as Unilever, farmers can't afford the inputs to grow food. They could make a lot of money from growing food and feed themselves at the same time. But as the government does little to support subsistence farmers, only being able to help the rich industrialists with tax breaks and other preferential conditions, farmers have to accept the generous offers from the likes of sugar companies to meet some of the costs involved. In the end, the farmer does all the work and gets little remuneration, if any. And they and their families starve.
Biofuels, like all the other luxury and non-food crops produced in developing countries, effectively export unthinkable amounts of water, along with vast tracts of land. The 'natural' disasters of flooding, drought, famine and the rest, are not as natural as they are painted. Rather, they result from explicit policies and agreements that keep things cheap for people in rich countries, profitable for foreign companies, and if any of those people in developing countries start complaining we can always point to the aid money we send them, whatever aid money even reaches the majority of people.
It's no secret that rich countries steal water from developing countries, preferring to feed ourselves luxuries and run our cars than allow undernourished and starving people to eat. But we steal a lot more than that. The majority of people in Kenya are subsistence farmers or workers. Even those who have jobs usually work for very little so that those in rich countries can afford cheap raw materials and goods. Many people have next to nothing, and that seems to be the way we in the West like it. And in return for extracting what we can, we send a little money every now and again and think of ourselves as very philanthropic indeed.
There is an alternative to rich countries sending ever increasing sums of money to developing countries. That is to identify some of the ways they extract even larger and faster increasing sums of money. That way, Kenya could be assisted to develop its own flower businesses. They could produce and process fruit and vegetables, thereby making more money from them. They could choose what crops to grow and in what quantities, especially crops that could be used to produce high value goods. In fact, the list of things that constitute extraction of wealth by rich countries from countries like Kenya is very long. Then Kenyans will be in a position to tell us what to do with our aid.
At the same time, the BBC comments on a report that finds that the UK imports a lot of its water from other countries in the form of produce such as flowers, fruit, vegetables and other goods. Much of this imported water comes from developing countries, such as Kenya, where clean water and sanitation problems are responsible for high rates of avoidable mortality, especially among infants and children, and numerous treatable and curable illnesses. The report estimates that two thirds of the UK's water use is imported.
The mass production of non-seasonal food and non-food crops by developing countries results in much of the starvation that the UK and other rich countries seem to see as 'natural disasters', to be remedied by a sticky plaster, some handout or even a 'deal' of some kind that is calculated to do more harm than good (it benefits the donor, of course). Yet the industries that claim to be such a great source of foreign currency, fruit, vegetable and flower industries, are mostly foreign owned, British owned, in fact. They pay little or no tax in Kenya and, being offshored, little in Britain either.
When a country like Kenya starts to realise that their 'cash crops', such as tea, sugar or coffee don't make them much money, they seem to reach for another cash crop. The Kenyan cotton industry (along with that of many other developing countries) was wrecked many years ago by the US cotton industry successfully lobbying for subsidies to support them so that no developing country could compete. Subsidies are bad, according to the US, except when they are US subsidies. Sadly, Kenyans are calling for their government to help them return to cotton production. But this is unlikely to fly because US cotton is still subsidised to such an extent that no developing country can produce it as cheaply. And this is despite Kenya having pay and working conditions that would make Bill Gates proud.
But cash crops have always made very little money. Many of them here are grown as part of a kind of agreement that was formed with British land 'owners' after independence. They were allowed to keep their land and those Kenyans producing their (the colonial's) crop, tea, for example, were bound to go on producing tea. The law is slowly changing so that people may be allowed to stop producing tea and produce some food instead (God forbid!). But with sugar, the factories are demanding that even more land be given up to it so they can produce biofuel. Never mind that those whose land the sugar cane is planted on make little or no money from it.
It may well be wondered why farmers produce a non-food crop when they are starving and these crops don't make any profit for them. Well, aside from the promise to keep producing crops that only profit foreign companies, such as Unilever, farmers can't afford the inputs to grow food. They could make a lot of money from growing food and feed themselves at the same time. But as the government does little to support subsistence farmers, only being able to help the rich industrialists with tax breaks and other preferential conditions, farmers have to accept the generous offers from the likes of sugar companies to meet some of the costs involved. In the end, the farmer does all the work and gets little remuneration, if any. And they and their families starve.
Biofuels, like all the other luxury and non-food crops produced in developing countries, effectively export unthinkable amounts of water, along with vast tracts of land. The 'natural' disasters of flooding, drought, famine and the rest, are not as natural as they are painted. Rather, they result from explicit policies and agreements that keep things cheap for people in rich countries, profitable for foreign companies, and if any of those people in developing countries start complaining we can always point to the aid money we send them, whatever aid money even reaches the majority of people.
It's no secret that rich countries steal water from developing countries, preferring to feed ourselves luxuries and run our cars than allow undernourished and starving people to eat. But we steal a lot more than that. The majority of people in Kenya are subsistence farmers or workers. Even those who have jobs usually work for very little so that those in rich countries can afford cheap raw materials and goods. Many people have next to nothing, and that seems to be the way we in the West like it. And in return for extracting what we can, we send a little money every now and again and think of ourselves as very philanthropic indeed.
There is an alternative to rich countries sending ever increasing sums of money to developing countries. That is to identify some of the ways they extract even larger and faster increasing sums of money. That way, Kenya could be assisted to develop its own flower businesses. They could produce and process fruit and vegetables, thereby making more money from them. They could choose what crops to grow and in what quantities, especially crops that could be used to produce high value goods. In fact, the list of things that constitute extraction of wealth by rich countries from countries like Kenya is very long. Then Kenyans will be in a position to tell us what to do with our aid.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Health Aid: Supporting People or Supporting Indicators?
While news that maternal mortality has been decreasing since 1980 has been welcomed by many, others point out that a significant contributor to maternal mortality is HIV. A lot of attention and resources go towards mother to child transmission of HIV (MTCT), but very little go towards the health and survival of the mothers. Concentration on the single indicator of numbers of infants infected by their mothers, also called vertical transmission, seems to have left the health of HIV positive mothers out of the picture.
Of course, it is madness to ignore the HIV status of the mother, for many reasons. For a start, mothers are people too, not just 'cases' or carriers of disease. They, like their children, husbands and other family members, are entitled to health and to treatment when their health is compromised. And it would be madness too to ignore any other diseases, in mothers and children or anyone else. But health funding is mad. Hence the selection of a few headline grabbing indicators.
HIV positive mothers can go on to transmit HIV to their infants at a later stage, through various routes, or to their partners. They are at risk of dying from Aids related illnesses or of suffering from serious and prolonged illnesses. These will also have an impact on the health of their children and other family members. Even the MTCT prevention treatment (PMTCT) can lead to drug resistance in mothers. In developing countries this can seriously affect the chances of the mother being successfully treated or cut the length of time that the treatment remains effective.
It seems extraordinary that health funders still take this piecemeal approach to disease reduction, even when it directly affects their chosen indicator(s). Unsurprisingly, the report was funded by the Gates Foundation. They particularly favour somewhat rarefied approaches to health issues, selecting the bits that they are interested in and leaving the rest. For example, the foundation is interested in finding a vaccine for cholera but not so interested in clean water and sanitation, which could reduce incidence of numerous water related health issues. (They give small amounts of money to water and sanitation projects but nothing like the amount going to vaccines and the like.)
A particularly worrying aspect of approaching MTCT in this piecemeal fashion is that as many as half of infant infections may result from mothers who were infected while they were pregnant or whose positive status was not detected while they were pregnant (perhaps because they were in the 'window' period, where they had not yet seroconverted). This occurred in a PMTCT programme in Malawi, considered to be one of the best. Another survey found that such missed maternal HIV infections resulted in a high percentage of infants being born HIV positive. Ironically, the paper also concludes that recently increased child mortality rates in KwaZulu-Natal could be caused, in part, by increased maternal mortality.
It has been suggested that this may be a potentially useful role for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). PrEP involves putting HIV negative people on antiretroviral drugs, usually where they are thought to be at particular risk of infection. Of course, some of these women may not have been infected through sexual intercourse. It is not even clear from the article whether the mothers of infants subsequently found to be HIV positive were also re-tested or were just assumed to be positive because their infants were. Apparently, an unusually high percentage of women who were not found to be HIV positive before delivery were later found to have HIV positive infants.
Concentrating on one disease or on that disease in one demographic, or even looking at absence of sickness as the only criterion for health, is not going to ensure the health of whole populations. The dominant approach to HIV and the almost universal adherence to the behavioural paradigm (the view that the disease is predominantly sexually transmitted) is wrong for many reasons that have been made clear, in particular, by our lack of success in significantly slowing the pace of transmission. It's time to look at HIV as being part of health as a whole, as being related to the totality of conditions in which people live and work.
If we continue to fail to ensure good health services, education, nutrition levels, food security, infrastructure and numerous other conditions, all diseases, including HIV, will continue to spread. This will reduce people's quality of life and life expectancy. Self serving reports that show how well some favoured indicator is doing should be seen for what they are. Billions of people still suffer from and die from preventable and treatable diseases every year. That's nothing to celebrate.
(For further discussion of PrEP, see my other blog, pre-exposureprophylaxis.blogspot.com)
Of course, it is madness to ignore the HIV status of the mother, for many reasons. For a start, mothers are people too, not just 'cases' or carriers of disease. They, like their children, husbands and other family members, are entitled to health and to treatment when their health is compromised. And it would be madness too to ignore any other diseases, in mothers and children or anyone else. But health funding is mad. Hence the selection of a few headline grabbing indicators.
HIV positive mothers can go on to transmit HIV to their infants at a later stage, through various routes, or to their partners. They are at risk of dying from Aids related illnesses or of suffering from serious and prolonged illnesses. These will also have an impact on the health of their children and other family members. Even the MTCT prevention treatment (PMTCT) can lead to drug resistance in mothers. In developing countries this can seriously affect the chances of the mother being successfully treated or cut the length of time that the treatment remains effective.
It seems extraordinary that health funders still take this piecemeal approach to disease reduction, even when it directly affects their chosen indicator(s). Unsurprisingly, the report was funded by the Gates Foundation. They particularly favour somewhat rarefied approaches to health issues, selecting the bits that they are interested in and leaving the rest. For example, the foundation is interested in finding a vaccine for cholera but not so interested in clean water and sanitation, which could reduce incidence of numerous water related health issues. (They give small amounts of money to water and sanitation projects but nothing like the amount going to vaccines and the like.)
A particularly worrying aspect of approaching MTCT in this piecemeal fashion is that as many as half of infant infections may result from mothers who were infected while they were pregnant or whose positive status was not detected while they were pregnant (perhaps because they were in the 'window' period, where they had not yet seroconverted). This occurred in a PMTCT programme in Malawi, considered to be one of the best. Another survey found that such missed maternal HIV infections resulted in a high percentage of infants being born HIV positive. Ironically, the paper also concludes that recently increased child mortality rates in KwaZulu-Natal could be caused, in part, by increased maternal mortality.
It has been suggested that this may be a potentially useful role for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). PrEP involves putting HIV negative people on antiretroviral drugs, usually where they are thought to be at particular risk of infection. Of course, some of these women may not have been infected through sexual intercourse. It is not even clear from the article whether the mothers of infants subsequently found to be HIV positive were also re-tested or were just assumed to be positive because their infants were. Apparently, an unusually high percentage of women who were not found to be HIV positive before delivery were later found to have HIV positive infants.
Concentrating on one disease or on that disease in one demographic, or even looking at absence of sickness as the only criterion for health, is not going to ensure the health of whole populations. The dominant approach to HIV and the almost universal adherence to the behavioural paradigm (the view that the disease is predominantly sexually transmitted) is wrong for many reasons that have been made clear, in particular, by our lack of success in significantly slowing the pace of transmission. It's time to look at HIV as being part of health as a whole, as being related to the totality of conditions in which people live and work.
If we continue to fail to ensure good health services, education, nutrition levels, food security, infrastructure and numerous other conditions, all diseases, including HIV, will continue to spread. This will reduce people's quality of life and life expectancy. Self serving reports that show how well some favoured indicator is doing should be seen for what they are. Billions of people still suffer from and die from preventable and treatable diseases every year. That's nothing to celebrate.
(For further discussion of PrEP, see my other blog, pre-exposureprophylaxis.blogspot.com)
Friday, April 16, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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