| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| October 15, 2008 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 12 Number 10 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| What Africans Will Remember About George W Bush |
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Adapted from a piece by former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios:
When President Bush traveled to sub-Saharan Africa in February, he was greeted by large and tumultuous crowds of admirers. This mystified many of his critics, who believe that the animosity toward his administration abroad is universal. But polling data from the Pew Foundation shows something different: Approval ratings for the US exceed 80% in many African countries, some with large Muslim populations. In Darfur, many families name their newborn sons George Bush. One reason for it is diplomatic: It was the Bush administration that first raised the alarm about the atrocities in Darfur, organized a massive humanitarian relief effort to save people in the displaced camps, and rallied an international coalition to send peacekeeping troops to restore order through the UN and the African Union. America has played an important role as mediator in Burundi, Liberia, Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo after civil wars devastated all five countries. However important these efforts may be, though, Bush's enduring legacy in Africa rests on humanitarian and economic, not political, foundations. More than anything else it has been the revolution in the US government's development assistance that is responsible for Bush's popularity. The Bush administration doubled foreign aid worldwide over the past eight years -- the largest increase since the Truman administration -- and used it to encourage poor countries to undertake political and economic reform. Total US government development aid to Africa alone has quadrupled from $1.3 billion in 2001 to more than $5 billion in 2008, and it's scheduled to go to $8.7 billion in 2010, principally for education (primary school enrollment in Africa is up 36% since 1999), healthcare, building civil society, and protecting fragile environments. Africa has received $3.5 billion in additional funds from Bush's Millennium Challenge Corporation initiative, which rewards poor countries that encourage economic growth, govern well, and provide social services for their people. The president's HIV/AIDS program, principally focused on providing Africans with anti-retroviral drugs (1.7 million people are on the therapy), has been such a success that the program has been extended to 2015 at $48 billion. His five-year, $1.2 billion effort to combat malaria has provided 4 million insecticide-treated bed nets and 7 million drug therapies to vulnerable people. While Bush's critics have given him little credit for his African initiatives, they will be among his most enduring legacies in a region of the world neglected by policymakers from both parties for too long. Africans will long remember what Bush's critics have ignored. Source: Boston Globe |
| Movement for a New Poverty Metric |
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Congressional lawmakers of both major parties and officials of some cities are increasingly calling for an overhaul in the way the federal government measures poverty. They argue that the current definition fails to reflect fully the hardships or resources available to struggling Americans.
"Getting a new poverty measurement will help us identify appropriate policies and measure the success of the policies we have," said Sophia Heller, policy director for economic development for the mayor of Los Angeles. Concerns about the federal measure have been percolating for more than a decade. The current measure was developed in the 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, an economist with the Social Security Administration, who based her figures on a 1955 USDA study which estimated that poor Americans spent about a third of their after-tax money on food. Orshansky decided that a family was not poor if its income equaled three times the annual cost of basic groceries. Today, however, families typically spend about one-seventh of their income on food, census officials say. Families spend much more on housing, transportation, and child care, expenses that are not taken into account by the federal poverty measure. Officials also point out that the current measure only counts cash as income. They say a more accurate model would include government assistance like food stamps, housing subsidies, and tax credits. "We have done a whole number of things to help low-income families, and it doesn't show up in the poverty figures," said Rebecca Blank, an economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Therefore, we misinterpret the effect of these policies." In the 1990s, Blank and scholars at the National Academy of Sciences recommended making changes to the official measure. New York City used those recommendations to develop its own method, which takes into account housing, child care, clothing, and government assistance. Calculation by the new method yielded a poverty rate of 23%, more than the official 19%. Fewer people were deemed extremely poor, because government aid was taken into consideration. More elderly were deemed poor, because the new measure also includes out-of-pocket medical costs. Source: New York Times |
| World Food Program to Start Buying from Local Farmers |
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In a significant policy shift, the Rome-based World Food Program (WFP) announced last month that it would start buying food directly from local farmers' associations in developing countries. Dubbed the Purchase for Progress (P4P) initiative, WFP says it will be an alternative to the established bidding process where pre-qualified suppliers file tenders.
"This is a revolution in food aid," said WFP director Josette Sheeran. "More than half of the 90 million people we will reach with lifesaving food this year are poor farmers. They are often cut off from markets, roads, transportation, and storage." The WFP says the initiative will create reliable markets for low-income farmers. Forward contracting and sale guarantees are supposed to serve as incentives to increase output and productivity. Over the next five years, P4P will be piloted in 21 countries with the aim of significantly boosting the incomes of at least 350,000 small farmers. However, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, an internationally known expert on food policy and a professor at Cornell University, stressed that P4P may not automatically improve the situation for poor people in developing regions: "It is true that in some African countries, the main bottleneck to additional income to small farmers is the lack of a market. Under those circumstances, P4P would be a good program." Small farmers could produce more, sell more, and earn more money. "But many others are not able to produce more," he explained. With food demand and prices already high, more demand from WFP could tighten the situation, he said. "Only if P4P can strengthen the rural infrastructure is it a good program." Asked about these concerns, Sheeran said that WFP is going to be "very careful not to compete with local markets". Source: Inter Press Service |
| Ancient Agricultural Practice Revived in New Jersey |
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"Gleaning" goes back at least as far as the Bible, in which growers are admonished to set aside a portion of their harvest for the poor. For the past decade, a group called Farmers Against Hunger (FAH) has been carrying out the ancient practice in New Jersey, linking farmers with
volunteers to make sure surplus fruits and vegetables do not go to waste.
On Friday, FAH was busy harvesting at Longmeadow Farm, in the village of Hope NJ. The day before, members were in northern Burlington County, picking apples at the Strawberry Hill Farm in Chesterfield in the morning, and peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes later in the day in a vegetable plot in Florence farmed by Jean and Fritz Wainwright. "The great thing about Thursday," said FAH director Judy Grignon, "is that the produce we picked in the morning was on someone's plate by that night." About 1,500 pounds of apples and a similar amount of eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes were trucked to a church in Trenton that afternoon and distributed to area church groups, food pantries, and other agencies. Fresh produce is among the most expensive items to put on the table, even as it is one of the most vital. And these days it is not just the poor who are finding it difficult to eat well. "It's getting to the point where our client is us," Grignon said. "All our agencies tell me that they are getting people in their food lines who have never before joined any such thing. These people have jobs, cars, and homes. But the cost of everything has skyrocketed, while their salaries have remained static or even declined, and fresh food is no longer within their financial reach." About 50 farmers from around the state participate in the program, which is coordinated by the New Jersey Agricultural Society. In any given year, FAH delivers about 1.5 million pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables to an estimated 7,000 recipients, working through more than 200 community food organizations. FAH runs on a budget of $150,000, which is used mainly for transportation and administration. Some of the surplus is what's left in the fields after mechanical harvest. Some is purposefully planted with the needy in mind. Some is just the result of an unexpected abundance. Grignon recruits volunteers from churches, schools, and civic groups to conduct the harvests. She has turned to the state Department of Corrections more than once: The inmates are "not farmers, for the most part, but they come in very handy, particularly when I get a last-minute call from a farmer." Source: Courier-Post |
| Cheap Labor Mines Virtual Gold in Web-Based Games |
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Nearly half a million people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods to sell to players in online games, a study has found. The research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly. The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn £77 per month on average as they generate a global market value of some $500 million.
The practice is flourishing despite efforts by games companies to crack down on the trade in virtual goods. Report author Professor Richard Heeks, head of the development informatics group at Manchester, said gold farming had become a significant economic sector in many developing nations. "I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry. In a way, that is still true. It's just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands." The quasi-criminal nature of gold-farming made it hard to truly gauge its extent, said Heeks. It could be twice as big as the report's estimate. In many online games, virtual cash remains rare. Many players turn to suppliers such as gold farmers to get money to outfit avatars with better gear, weapons, or a mount. Some gold-farming operations offer other services such as "power levelling", in which they assume control of a player's character and turn it into a high-powered hero far faster than the original owner could manage themselves. In most online games, all the activities associated with gold farming are a violation of the terms governing the game's title. Violators are likely to be banned from the game and to lose their accounts. Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the "virtual offshoring" likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time in cyberspace. "It is also a glimpse into ... a digital underworld populated by scammers and hackers and pornographers and which has spread to the 'Third World' far more than we typically realize." Source: BBC |
| Asset Poverty: A Profile |
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Most low-income working families have too few assets to weather emergencies. Over three-quarters of low-income working families are "asset poor": without enough assets to finance consumption for three months at the federal income poverty level. Yet, unemployment spells average two to four months. If only financial (liquid) assets are
considered (savings, 401(k), bonds, etc), then nearly 80% of low-income working families are asset poor and highly vulnerable to eviction and other financial vagaries and assaults.
The asset picture improves if net worth is considered, but it is still tenuous. In this case, just under half (44.9%) of low-income working families are asset poor. While an improvement, this still leaves roughly half of families in precarious financial situations. At the bottom of the asset totem pole, nearly 30% of low-income working families have zero or negative net worth. Overall, the median net worth among low-income working families is $6,565. A closer look at low-income working families' asset holdings reveals that the typical family has limited savings and does not own a home or have a retirement account. Many such families have no car. A slim majority (56.5%) of low-income working families has a bank account, but often it is too small -- $800 is the median -- to see a family through even a short employment gap or other financial emergency. Few in this population save for retirement. Only 21.2% of low-income working families report having any type of retirement account. Families headed by older adults are slightly more likely to have one -- 26% vs 17%. These accounts have a median value of $10,000 -- not much when spread out over an individual's expected retirement years but not trivial as a defense against the unforeseen either. The value of families' retirement savings varies by age, from roughly $6,000 for 30- to 39-year-olds to $23,000 for 50- to 60-year-olds. Low retirement savings rates may reflect lack of an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan or the diversion of funds to more pressing needs. Also, fear of penalties for early withdrawals for bill-paying or other unauthorized uses of these funds may discourage saving for retirement. Further, many of the tax benefits that better-off families enjoy for saving for retirement elude low-income families because their tax bills are relatively low. Homeownership is more prevalent than retirement savings among low-income working families. Nearly half (45.6%) own a home, and the median value of home equity for these homeowners is $45,000. Source: Urban Institute |
| Ugandan Crafts Become Fair-Trade Industry |
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Producing baskets and mats in central Uganda has traditionally been women's work. Women used to make these items primarily for home use. The National Association of Women Organizations in Uganda (NAWOU) has changed this practice into a force against poverty.
NAWOU has a big crafts collection center in Kampala, the Ugandan capital. Baskets, toys, mats, and hand-made cotton cloth can be found there, among other things. The collection center operates according to fair trade principles and is affiliated with the International Fair Trade Association, a global network of groups seeking to improve the livelihoods of "disadvantaged" producers by linking up fair trade organizations and advocating justice in global trade. Most of the crafts are sold in the US, with others going to Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK. According to Pamela Kyagera, marketing officer at the collection center, fair trade has not only turned the Ugandan crafts trade around but has ensured that women artisans benefit equally from their work. "I strongly believe we can go a long way in fighting poverty through fair trade. The women you see bringing the crafts would never make it through conventional markets. They would not sell through markets which are far from their homes. They would not have enough information and they would get exploited." Kyagera has worked with 70 women groups in various parts of Uganda to train them on quality standards. She can identify a poorly made craft on sight. "It hasn't been easy to teach women to understand the quality requirements but over the years they have learnt. And, of course, we have had to teach our consumers to understand some variations because these crafts are made by human beings. "The biggest challenge has been building the capacity of women. It is not easy to grow the numbers. As you train more and more women, issues like HIV/AIDS come up. Many of our women have been affected by HIV/AIDS. Some die or some get old and can no longer make baskets. The young ones are not interested in making baskets." Kyagera's main disappointment is that many Ugandans don't want to buy the crafts: "They always complain that the prices are too high. Sometimes we have to buy the crafts from the women to keep them in business -- even when we have no orders from our partners abroad." The baskets are made from banana fibers and leaves, so the artisans don't have to spend money on raw materials. The products are environmentally friendly because most of the materials are collected when crops are being pruned or harvested. Source: Inter Press Service |
| Apartments Renamed in Honor of Moorestown Advocate |
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Chestertowne Apartments in Moorestown NJ has been renamed in honor of a local affordable-housing advocate. The apartment complex on East Second St is now known as "The Baylor Arms Chestertowne Apartments" in memory of the late Clarence L Baylor.
Moorestown Ecumenical Neighborhood Development (MEND), a faith-based housing nonprofit, decided to rename the apartments in honor of Baylor for all of his dedicated work to find more affordable housing in the township over the years. "He was a beloved, active member of the entire Moorestown community, said MEND CEO Matthew Reilly, "and demonstrated a consistent, unwavering commitment to the provision of affordable housing in the Moorestown area." Baylor, known as "Sparky," was a longtime deacon at Second Baptist Church. He served on MEND's Board of Trustees from 1969 to 1998 and was the board's first delegate, according to Reilly. Founded in 1969 by nine Moorestown churches, the organization has developed and continues to manage 250 residential units in Burlington County, including the Chestertowne Apartments. MEND acquired and renovated the 45-unit complex in 1996 with financial help from the township, Burlington County, the state Department of Community Affairs, and the former Commerce Bank. The complex is a component of Moorestown's state-mandated affordable housing portfolio. Source: Burlington County Times |
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| Economic Downturn Fails to Slow Greenhouse Emissions |
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The world pumped up its pollution of the chief man-made global warming gas last year, setting a course that could push beyond leading scientists' projected worst-case scenario, international researchers said a few weeks ago. The new numbers, called "scary" by some, were a surprise because scientists thought an economic downturn would slow energy use.
Instead, carbon dioxide (CO2) output jumped 3% from 2006 to 2007. That's an amount that exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007. Meanwhile, forests and oceans, which suck up CO2, are doing so at lower rates than in the 20th century, scientists said. If those trends continue, it puts the world on track for the highest predicted rises in temperature and sea level. The pollution leader was China, followed by the US, which past data show is the leader in emissions per person in CO2 output. Several developed countries slightly cut their CO2 output in 2007, but the US churned out more. Emissions in the US rose nearly 2% in 2007. Still, it was large increases in China, India and other developing countries that spurred the growth of CO2 pollution to a record high of 9.34 billion tons of carbon. Figures released by science agencies in the US, the UK, and Australia show that China's added emissions accounted for more than half of the worldwide increase. China passed the US as the #1 CO2 polluter in 2006. "We're shipping jobs offshore from the US, but we're also shipping carbon dioxide emissions with them," said Gregg Marland, a senior staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "China is making fertilizer and cement and steel, and all of those are heavy energy-intensive industries." Developing countries not asked to reduce greenhouse gases by the 1997 Kyoto treaty -- China and India among them -- now account for 53% of carbon dioxide pollution. That group of nations surpassed industrialized ones in CO2 emissions in 2005, a new analysis of older figures shows. Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider said that if the overall trend continues for the century, "you'd have to be luckier than hell for it just to be bad, as opposed to catastrophic." Source: Associated Press |
| Charities Sue UK Government Over Fuel Poverty |
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Two charities have gone to the High Court accusing the Government of failing to meet its legal duty to tackle fuel poverty. Friends of the Earth and Help the Aged argued that government departments were not doing enough to meet their stated targets of helping millions of vulnerable citizens who cannot heat their homes adequately.
Michael Fordham QC, representing the campaigners, told Mr Justice McCombe that fuel poverty was "a blight upon society" and asked the court to order the government to do more. He said five million households are expected to be suffering its consequences this winter. Government lawyers say that it is doing its best in the face of dramatic increases in energy prices, and that there has been no breach of duty. Fuel poverty has been caused by three factors -- fuel prices, household incomes, and lack of energy efficiency in homes. Fordham said that fuel poverty made a significant contribution to between 20,000 and 40,000 additional deaths in the winter months in the UK and also gave rise to environmental concerns. A fuel poverty strategy was introduced under the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000. Its stated intention was to do everything "reasonably practicable" to end fuel poverty among vulnerable households by 2010 and in all households in England by 2016. Almost seven years into the strategy, there were expected to be some 1.3 million vulnerable households still in fuel poverty in 2010. Fordham said the government was taking insufficient measures to meet its commitment and the courts should intervene. He said the situation was "stark" and on current forecasts fuel poverty targets would not be met. He argued there had been "a fundamental error of approach", and the Government had downgraded fuel poverty to "minor status" within its Public Service Agreement and Target Framework. Source: Independent Television News |
| Zulu Artists Rise from Poverty and AIDS to International Acclaim |
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Zulu artists working at the Ardmore Ceramic Studio in South Africa's coastal province of KwaZulu Natal have gone from poverty to international acclaim. Some of them have exhibited internationally, and the work created by Ardmore artists can be seen in galleries, shops, and embassies across the globe. Thousands of pieces are exported, either through people who visit the studio and place orders or through people using the Net.
The Ardmore studio was founded in 1985 by the Zimbabwean born ceramic artist Fee Halsted Berning. She had one employee at the time: Bonnie Ntshalintshali, a qualified ceramic artist. Together they created functional and fine art objects -- Ardmore’s characteristic fantastical animals which decorate each piece. Increasingly, artists from the surrounding poor community came knocking on the door asking to be allowed to join the studio. Today there are 80 artists. All of them support extended families. "Some of the artists earn up to 26,000 rand ($3,095) per month," said Halsted. It is a large sum of money in any language but more so in the poverty-stricken rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal, which has the highest HIV prevalence in South Africa. Tragically, Ntshalintshali succumbed to AIDS. Halsted Berning has created the Bonnie Ntshalintshali Museum and Gallery in her memory, the first museum in South Africa to be named after a black artist. The museum is planning an annual cultural festival. "Many of the artists here have lost someone close to them to HIV/AIDS and many of our best artists have also succumbed to the disease," said Halsted Berning. "The festival is a way to remember them. It is also a way to link the studio with the rest of the community as people from the surrounding areas perform at the festival as singers and dancers. "People who go to galleries are usually white people. With the exhibitions and the annual festival at Ardmore we invite local people so that they can see that one can make a living as an artist, even if you come from a poor community. It creates hope." Mickey Chonco has been with Ardmore for seven years. The quality of his life has improved dramatically: "I can now buy clothes and anything else that we need for my wife and me. But most important, I have grown tremendously as an artist. I also find a lot of pleasure in teaching sculpting and teaching skills to children from the community." Source: Inter Press Service |
| Bulgarian Monk Offers Perspective on Financial Crisis |
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Brother Nikanor, a Nasdaq broker turned monk, advises former colleagues to put a jar with soil on their desks to remind them where we are all heading and what matters in life. As western banks fold into each other like crumpled tickets and commentators portray the current crisis as the last gasp of modern capitalism, the monk formerly known as Hristo Mishkov, 32, shares the pain and speaks from an unusual vantage point.
Retaining one luxury -- a mobile phone, which connects him with both potential donors and former trading colleagues -- he has brought the rigor of his brokerage experience to his faith. He has helped to raise hundreds of thousands of levs (dollars) to rebuild the monastery. It's a hard task in a country where charity takes a back seat to the building of shopping malls and golf courses. "Many people ... in the world do not realize that they have not earned the food they eat, that they take without giving," Nikanor said. "But if someone consumes more than they have earned, it means someone else is starving. "It is right to see people who consume more than they deserve shattered by a financial crisis from time to time, to suffer so that they can become more reasonable." Being a trader has seldom been more traumatic. "We always search for happiness in the outside world, in material things, which makes us constantly unsatisfied, angry with ourselves and the world," said Nikanor, who exudes a sense of tranquility, intelligence, and humor. Greed and the marketization of our lives have reached the point where people have been turned into a commodity. Even their health can be traded like a stock, he said. "We have so quickly lost our human appearance, we have become beasts ... There's no-one to count on and say, 'hey neighbor come help me.' He will come but demand a payment." His monastery, tucked among hills 31 miles west of Sofia, was founded in the 12th century. The communist regime which banned religion turned it into a labor camp, then a children's pioneer camp and a livestock farm. Nowadays, Nikanor works hard milking buffalo cows and building stone walls. "Everybody can be a good broker, but this does not bring much benefit for the world." He said the crash should help correct a dangerous global trend of an excessive outflow of labor to the service sectors, by people attracted by high pay and an easy life. "Milk is not produced by computers, bread doesn't come from a good company PR. It is necessary to plow, sow and harvest before that." Source: Reuters |
| Seychelles Stands Up Against World Trade Regime |
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The distorted world trade regime is an obstacle to development, the leader of the Seychelles told the General Assembly last month, calling for increased justice and fairness to recognize the specific needs of small island nations. President James Alix Michel told the body's annual high-level event, "We should abandon 'solutions' which continue to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor and the vulnerable."
Subsidies handed out to farmers of wealthy nations reduce the competitiveness of poorer nations' exports, he said. "Yet developing countries are obliged to follow WTO [World Trade Organization] rules to the letter, even to the extent that they may undermine domestic economic policies formulated to protect vulnerable sections of society." Foreign investors have exploited the Seychelles' natural resources and made great profit, while the Indian Ocean archipelago nation receives a "pittance," said Michel. "It is like taking a bowl of food from the poor and giving them back a spoonful as a generous donation!" The Seychelles receives only 7% of the revenue from tuna caught and shipped in its waters by foreign fishing vessels annually. "This, to my mind, is unacceptable," the President said. "I ask you, is it unreasonable to fight for a better share of the proceeds?" Further impeding development for his country, according to Michel, is the "middle-income" trap in which donors withhold grants and soft loans to the Seychelles, which ranks 50th in the Human Development Index, even after donor organizations have confirmed that all assistance given to the nation has been used to benefit the population. "It is as if we are being penalized for our success in raising the standard of living of our people." Source: United Nations |
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