An oil pipeline to Canada's untapped Tar Sands deposits would create short-term construction jobs, but its effects on the climate could permanently destroy jobs elsewhere. Photo: rickz (Flickr)

Proponents of the proposed pipeline from Canada’s Athabasca Tar Sands to the Gulf of Mexico claim that its construction would create jobs. But while the long-term employment prospects are debatable at best, the resulting long-term economic devastation is far more certain.

The recent decision by the Obama administration to deny a permit for the construction of the pipeline has received much press and been touted as a victory for environmentalists. But as climate activist Bill McKibben and his organization point out, stopping the extraction of the tar sands would be a victory for those far removed from the American environmental movement as well.

McKibben said in an interview with Green Prophet that “Any place that is already living close to the margins is in the greatest danger” when facing climate change.

This means the world’s poorest, already suffering from food shortages and decreased agricultural production, would be hardest hit by this carbon bomb. And scientific consensus backs up McKibben’s view.

Country Ranks, Estimated Percentage of Agricultural Productivity Loss by 2080: Potential Carbon Emissions from Canadian Oil Sands. Photo: Center for Global Development

David Wheeler, senior fellow emeritus of the Center for Global Development, compiled a recent study specifically tying the exploitation of the Canadian oil sands to increased agricultural losses.

Wheeler concluded that “full exploitation of Canada’s oil sands deposit would impose significant agricultural productivity losses on over 3 billion people in the developing world, and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.” He calculates that “combustion of the Alberta deposit would increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by 99 ppm, or 21.3 percent of the increase already projected to occur by 2100.”

Or, as reputed climate scientist Jim Hansen of NASA put it, tapping the tar sands would be “essentially game over for the climate."

Wheeler's findings show a "game over" scenario in poor rural regions, in particular, predicting agricultural productivity losses of up to nearly 13 percent in Africa and 9 percent in Asia. Wheeler, who also created a ‘Climate Vulnerability Index’ by country, sums up his findings powerfully and succinctly, stating "Put simply, the potential destructive power in Canada’s oil sands exceeds anything modern civilization has witnessed to date."

“This new report puts into stark relief exactly what ‘game over’ looks like: Millions upon millions of starving people across the planet," says 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn.

On the ground, countries projected by Wheeler to see further damaging impacts are already struggling with agricultural losses. Another 350.org co-founder, Phil Aroneanu, told Global Envision that “we have a plethora of anecdotal and story-based thoughts from our organizers around the world” of agricultural devastation and food shortages linked to changing climate patterns.

Drought-stricken countries in the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia and Sudan, among others, provide some of the most poignant images of climate-related suffering. An Oxfam International report points out that 85 percent of Ethiopians depend directly on agriculture. And as a local farmer told Oxfam, “The rain doesn’t come on time anymore. After we plant, the rain stops just as our crops start to grow. And it begins to rain after the crops have already been ruined.”

And with the projections from scientists like Hansen and Wheeler, Africa’s farmers and communities appear unlikely to recover soon.

While McKibben writes that “Blocking one pipeline was never going to stop global warming,” and Obama’s denial of the Keystone permit may well not kill the project in the long run, the scientific and anecdotal evidence is clear: Vulnerable populations are suffering at the hands of carbon kings already, and tapping the tar sands will exacerbate their problems.

So the Keystone proposal may or may not be dead. But the political discourse around potential job-killing has mostly left out an important aspect: the killing of crops and livelihoods elsewhere in the world.

McKibben has said that extracting Canada’s tar sands would mean lighting the “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” For now, at least, that fuse remains unlit.

Women in Kenya drag jerry cans of water 4 kilometers through a parched landscape. Photo by Erin Gray/Mercy Corps.

How bad is the drought and famine in East Africa? Climate scientist Simon Mason elaborates in this video interview. Comparing East Africa’s situation to other drought situations, Mason highlights the dramatic impacts in a region receiving 5 to 25% of its usual expected rainfall.

With the world facing more and more severe climate-related disruptions, Mason explains some ways in which weather forecasting is being used to help humanitarian aid organizations prepare responses in the short and long term. Check out his interview here.

57 million women give birth each year without the help of a trained professional. Photo: hugrakka(Flicker)

Bringing one life into the world shouldn't mean sacrificing another. While the developing world scrambles to secure funding for midwifery services, there's a cheap, short-term solution: birth kits.

The risk of death due to pregnancy or childbirth is 1 in 8,000 in developed countries, as opposed to 1 in 17 in developing countries, according to the organization Unite For Sight. Yearly, approximately 57 million women give birth in their home without the help of a trained professional, increasing the risk of complications.

Midwives are an essential player in lowering maternal deaths. "Midwives can save women's and newborns' lives if they are properly trained and equipped, and if a support network is available," writes the World Health Organization. Worldwide, the WHO estimates, there is a shortage of 350,000 midwives. But training 350,000 new midwives won't happen overnight. In the meantime, birth kits could fill the gap.

Birth kits provide the tools for a safer and sanitary delivery, including soap to wash hands, razors and ties for the umbilical cord, plastic sheets for a clean surface, and an instruction sheet.

The impact of birth kits can be life-saving but their success depends on acceptability within the community where it is introduced. At times, modifications might be needed such as redesigning the instruction sheet to use images instead of words, considering low literacy rates. PATH, an international organization which focuses on global health and well-being, has produced kits used in Bangladesh, Egypt and Nepal. Cutting the umbilical cord on a coin is considered good luck in Nepal. To adhere to traditional customs, PATH created a kit that includes a plastic rupee.

Another common problem: Cutting the umbilical cord with unsanitary, used razor blades. Disposable razor blades or an illustrated instruction sheet encouraging woman and midwives to sterilize reusable blades after every use could reduce this problem. The Janma clean delivery birthing kit by AYZH is making modifications to its current scalpel handle design to discourage reuse.

Though midwives are the ideal choice for safe births, families can't always afford their services. Government and non-profit programs that subsidize midwifery programs aren't economically sustainable in the long run. A model pursued by the Midwifery Association of Pakistan involves changing public perceptions of the midwife's role in health care, advocates for government-set standards for midwifery education, and lobbies for professional rights.

Until midwifery is economically viable and publicly understood, we need an affordable stop-gap solution to save lives. Maternal mortality will continue to rise if birth kits—and, eventually, midwifery services—aren’t accessible to the women who need them now.

Women farmers in Africa produce over 60 percent of all food crops. CIMMYT (flickr)

Women comprise 43 percent of the world’s farmers. In Africa, it’s 80 percent. Women plant, harvest, process and sell their crops, but men continue to dominate agricultural science and research. This may be about to change.

African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) is trying to close the R&D gender gap. Their program fast-tracks female science careers in agriculture, empowering them to contribute more effectively to hunger and poverty alleviation in their own communities - a model that could be replicated internationally.

Although African women produce 60 to 80 percent of food crops, they receive significantly less (5% as of 2008) of the agricultural training and tools available to men, says the United Nations. A 2010-2011 research report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization shows that women could produce 20-30 percent more if they had equal access. This creates a subsequent increase in household income, health, and community food supply. The East Africa Report emphasizes that research is also pivotal in fostering innovation. Without a seat at the table, women cannot influence practices. Who better to innovate than the farmers themselves?

Over one billion people live on less than one dollar a day, according to the U.N. But what can you actually buy with a dollar?

It seems like something that would vary across countries. Luckily, the World Food Programme recently released a series of videos in which it seeks to answer that question. Country specialists in Nepal, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guatemala, Somalia, Kenya, and the Philippines each went to their local markets with the equivalent of about one U.S. dollar and attempted to put together a meal. Watch as Reem Nada visits a market in Alexandria, Egypt.

The shorts are entertaining, but present a rather bleak reality. Almost all of the investigators come up short nutritionally. In Nepal, Deepesh Das Shresta leaves the market holding a few small bananas and a loaf of white bread. Meat is categorically too expensive, and staying within budget means many investigators can’t purchase all of the components necessary to create the meals that are considered cultural staples. It appears that those living on less than a dollar a day are also living far below their daily caloric and nutrient requirements.

Feeding oneself on less than a dollar is tricky business under the best of circumstances. Even worse, the recent volatility of the price of staple foods such as rice has jumped three times since 2008, says the New York Times — meaning that dollar must now be stretched even further.

The rest of the videos can be found on the World Food Programme website. The videos for Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Philippines are listed separately.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

African leaders discuss the state of the African economy at the 2010 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings. Photo: International Monetary Fund (flickr)

The Economist

The Economist

Since 2001, the budding economies of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have dominated global financial headlines. But looking back, it turns out some of the so-called “African lion” economies (Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda) were just as fierce.

Six of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world hail from the “forgotten continent” of Africa — putting up annual average GDP growth rates of around 8 percent or more from 2001-2010. The monumental rates have even earned these sprinters a spot next to “Asia's tigers” of the 1980 and 1990s — Making Africa one of the fastest growing regions in the world, according to The Economist.

Over the past decade, sub-Saharan Africa’s real GDP growth rate jumped to an annual average of 5.7%, up from only 2.4% over the previous two decades. That beat Latin America’s 3.3%, but not emerging Asia’s 7.9%. Asia’s stunning performance largely reflects the vast weight of China and India; most economies saw much slower growth, such as 4% in South Korea and Taiwan. The simple unweighted average of countries’ growth rates was virtually identical in Africa and Asia.

That said, in the next five years Africa is set to take the top spot from Asia as the fastest-growing region in the world, writes The Economist. "Standard Chartered forecasts that Africa’s economy will grow at an average annual rate of 7 percent over the next 20 years, slightly faster than China’s."

Ironically, much of Africa's growth can be attributed to China's investment and demand for raw materials in the region. And more recently, another of the BRICS, Brazil, has been competing for assets in Africa, writes Fast Company.

The Economist also notes growing success in Africa's manufacturing sector, which Standard Chartered predicts will become "significant."

Even with challenges such as political instability, corruption and weak rule of law, the African lions have been able to compete with the economic prowess of the Asian tigers.

But before Africa's growling economies can dream of surpassing Asia's roaring ones, those structural problems will have to be fixed.

"Without reforms," The Economist says, "Africa will not be able to sustain faster growth."

Economist Jeffrey Sachs spearheaded the Millennium Village Project to create sustainable economies in villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Photo: kevin813 (flickr)

If you had millions in cash and a team of some of the most brilliant minds in development, could you transform a poor African village's extreme poverty to a viable economy in five years?

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) is trying to do just that. It is the ambitious, high-profile development initiative spearheaded by economist Jeffrey Sachs in 2004. Today the Millennium Village Project operates in 13 sites across sub-Saharan Africa. Each site has tailored projects aimed at improving health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, and commercial business, and relies heavily on local participation. According to their website, MVP says that by 2011 their role will shift from financing and implementing projects, to a more advisory one.

Jeff Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, recently visited one MVP site comprised of 11 rural villages in the Koraro region of Ethiopia. While he was there he wrote about his experience for the Nicholas Kristof's On the Ground blog.

Of the several posts he wrote, the "Sustainability Factor" was by far the most interesting to me. The MVP acknowledges that sustainability is crucial to success, but these villages aren't self-sufficient despite several years of support. Though Marlow found that huge gains were made in education and health, economic sustainability remains elusive:

What began as a five year initiative to end extreme poverty and send the Millennium Villages on their way toward further economic development has now ballooned into at least a 10-year program with no clear end in sight....

It’s hard to deny that the quality of life in Koraro has increased substantially: disease rates have plummeted, crop yields have gone up, and children are attending school at unprecedented levels. Does this mean the Project will accomplish its lofty goals and, as Sachs puts it, “end the dependency on help and create the kind of breakthroughs that will have a transformative effect on the world”? ...The Project faces fundamentally different challenges in scaling up and moving out than it has seemingly overcome in raising crop yields and cutting disease rates.

It looks like the millions in cash, brilliant minds, and local determination haven't succeeded in creating sustainable economic growth for these 11 villages. Maybe another five years will make the difference? We can only hope so.

What do you get when you put together a small environmentally friendly Ethiopian business, a trendy-looking product, and a huge international retailer together? In the case of the company soleRebels, you get a hit!

SoleRebels founder Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu came up with the idea for her company out of a desire to make a shoe based on the flip flops made of old tires that had been worn by Ethiopians for decades, she explains to the Guardian. But instead of focusing on the local market, Alemu had her sights on the international market.

She used the internet to contact retailers and eventually companies like Urban Outfitters and Amazon.com started selling soleRebels. Her company now employs 45 workers and they can produce up to 500 pairs of shoes in a day. Sales are growling steadily, and Alemu has plans to expand: Her sales goal for 2010 is £300,000 ($479,760).

The company's progress signifies more than just a desire to for commercial success; it's a way for Ethiopians to help each other. "In Ethiopia we have become used to taking money from the west, to always getting help," said Alemu. "That does not make for a sustainable economy. We need to solve our own problems."

SoleRebels footwear is based on the sandals made from used tires that Ethiopians have worn out of necessity. Photo: soleRebels

A homemade drip-irrigation system. Photo: Care of Creation (flickr)

Flood irrigation: that's how poor farmers in developing countries usually water their crops. It's wasteful and too water-intensive to work in the dry season, but until recently there haven't been other viable options — a traditional drip irrigation system could cost thousands of dollars.

But social entrepreneurs like Paul Polock and the California-based company, Driptech are working to change this by helping poor farmers set up low-cost drip irrigation systems. Driptech can sell their irrigation system for $30 in places like India, China and Ethiopia, because they use cheaper materials and have developed a new (top-secret) method for punching the holes in the irrigation tubes, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Business Week notes, the technology could be transformative:

Experts say low-cost irrigation could alter the economics of food. Subsistence farmers may be able to grow excess crops they can sell. Countries that rely on food imports could see their dependence on outsiders decline.

The innovation has allowed poor farmers to save "water, labor, and time — all while growing a valuable dry-season crop that greatly increased their annual income," boasts Driptech's website.

Driptech plans to relocate their manufacturing facilities to the countries where their products are sold. The company's blog notes that this "will help support the local economies while cutting out transportation costs and headaches."

Selling redesigned products to the poor can be a profitable business model, as some companies in India have also discovered. (I wrote about this phenomenon in "Selling to the Poor, On Terms They Can Afford"). In line with this trend, Driptech expects to make money while helping poor farmers start to turn a profit of their own.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has developed a new tool to measure the state of a country's food system and its ability to withstand global shocks. Rather than just predicting food crises through its current early warning system, the new tool will help to measure a region's resilience — defined, in humanitarian terms, as "the ability of a system to withstand stresses and shocks in an uncertain world."

Luca Alinovi, a senior economist at FAO, explains that the logarithm for measuring resilience was developed in the Palestinian Territory, which serves as an example of a vulnerable, but ultimately resilient society. "The Palestinians have been living under incredible stress for a long time; everyone is vulnerable there," explained Alinovi. "Despite that, they continue to live and work in that situation — they are a particularly resilient community."

Data is collected according to five pillars: existing social safety nets, access to public services, assets, income and food access, households' capacity to adapt, and the stability of food supply. The goal is that this data will complement the FAO's early warning system — which focuses mainly on immediate upcoming crises — and allow for more effective long-term aid and planning. For example, stronger public services in a country that is highly susceptible to annual drought might mean less personal hardship if and when such droughts occur.

While critics may dismiss the new tool as no more than semantic brouhaha, there are real signs that the notion of resilience suggests a genuine paradigm shift. Mafa Chipeta, a FAO Representative in Ethiopia, recently spoke much less theoretically about resilience by underscoring the need for improving access to water, protecting natural resources, and addressing land tenure. "We need to think beyond responding at the consumption end and start putting resources on the production end," says Chipeta. "Scarce resources are better spent on increasing production than on subsidizing food. If you subsidize grain, next year you have to subsidize it again."

In other words, we need to put aid money into developing successful food systems, rather than waiting to spend money on one-time aid when a crisis hits. After all, without investments into a resilient agricultural sector, an eventual crisis is inevitable. Seen in this context, the FAO's new tool is representative of recent major shifts in food policy — reflecting growing consensus that in the long run, food aid fails to address genuine need. For millions of vulnerable people who have seen the pattern of crisis hit time and time again, this may be one critical step toward breaking that cycle for good.

Four Ethiopian children are dead. Are inefficiencies in U.S. food aid to blame?

Photo: Peter Casier(flickr)

This summer, multiple regions of the globe have been hit by water-related disasters, ranging from bone-dry droughts to devastating floods. An international group of water experts is warning of severe social and economic consequences unless significant investments in infrastructure such as irrigation systems and dams.

Speakers at the World Water Congress in Vienna told attendees that infrastructure has to more than double from $80 billion to $180 billion to keep pace with the effects of population growth and climate changes.

According to the World Bank, the major water challenges we face include lack of access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation, water scarcity and extreme weather events resulting from climate change. It is estimated that four billion people will be affected by these challenges in the near future, especially in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.

Without sustained investment in water infrastructure like irrigation systems and dams, the results could be dire, especially for developing countries. This summer’s news headlines are further evidence. Haiti and other Caribbean countries are reeling from four back-to-back hurricanes, the flooding in Bihar, India is the worst in 50 years, and countries from Australia to Ethiopia are experiencing record droughts.

With the effects of water challenges accelerating so rapidly, it remains to be seen whether world leaders will have the foresight to effectively address these problems preventatively, or be stuck playing catch up — with deadly results.

If you think that the global food crisis is taking a toll on countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Mexico, imagine what its like for those living in Ethiopia. Alex Perry’s report from Kersa, Ethiopia for Time Magazine paints a grim picture:

The day photographer Thomas Dworzak and I arrived at Kuyera, four children died. There were four more the next day…. On that first day, I glimpsed Ayano in the intensive care room, wrapped in a red and blue blanker, struggling to breathe, his eyes tipped back into his skull. When I next saw him, he was trussed up the blanket that had become his death shroud, lying on a slab next to two other small bundles in the morgue…. For five days, we turned our hired SUV into an ambulance, ferrying bodies of dead children back to their villages, picking up the starving and taking them to Kuyera.

Ethiopia faces a major crisis — chronic drought coupled with food prices that have risen 330 percent in the past year and a population that has doubled in size since the mid-1980s.

Yet nature alone is not to blame for Ethiopia's food crisis. Some argue that the government's tight control of the agricultural sector that puts all land under state ownership exacerbates Ethiopia's food insecurity. The distribution of fertilizer and seeds are government-controlled, and while farmers can choose what they want to grow, the Los Angeles Times reports that some 20,000 agricultural advisors, also functioning as tax collectors, keep close tabs of what is being grown.

This week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that "despite the best efforts of the government and humanitarian community to respond to the crisis the needs of people continue to far outstrip the resources available to hand."

Yet surrounding the famine are lush fields of green — feeding goats and cattle — while children continue to die of hunger. It is the harsh reality of what is being called "green hunger" or "green drought" — starvation amidst plenty. A recent BBC article describes it as "the time when the land is full of new shoots but there is no food. It happens because the last rains failed and few crops were planted."

Images posted by Reuters photographer Radu Sigheti puts a face to the crisis in an intimate visit with the Mohamed family during the loss of their young daughter, Michu, who died of malnutrition.

Other children will likely suffer the same fate. Recent government figures estimate some 75,000 children under the age of five in the country are severely malnourished. Among all Ethiopians, more than 4.5 million are in need of emergency food aid.

Now is the time for us to help fill Ethiopia's need. As Mark Lang from the Christian relief agency Tearfund writes in the Times Online, "This is no time to give Ethiopians a compassion fatigued brush-off."

Photo: guuleed (Flickr)

Millions are on the edge of starvation in the Horn of Africa due in part to severe drought. Photo: Filipe Moreira (flickr)

Somalia and Ethiopia are hovering at the edge of famine.

The Washington Post reported on the crisis in the “hungry horn” of Africa last week. In Somalia, U.N. officials predict that half of the population, about 3.5 million people, will need food aid. The New York Times explains the hunger is driven by rampant political insecurity, spikes in global food prices, devaluation of the local currency, and a severe drought.

The World Food Program is struggling to keep up, having already doubled the amount of food it distributes in Somalia and needing an additional 369,000 metric tons of food in Ethiopa. But Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid organization, says the situation just keeps getting worse as cereal prices in the Horn in the last year surged by as much as 375 percent. To make things worse, the drought has killed of most livestock, forcing formerly self-sufficient people to wait in line for food aid.

The next rainy season isn’t due till October, and the wells and watering holes that the people and animals depend on during the dry season are already drying up. Even the camels are hard pressed to survive.

Mercy Corps' country director in Somalia says "It's a life or death situation right now." A 72-year-old herder says it's "the worst I've ever seen."

International Medical Corps, another international medical aid organization in Somalia, is predicting grave starvation risks, with a recent 400 percent rise in the number of severely malnourished young children.

And the current drought — and its problems — are probably here to stay. Researchers have discovered that global warming is drying out the Horn of Africa — and it's happening much faster than anyone anticipated.

What will happen when current drought becomes a permanent shift to desert conditions? Somalia is only the first. Ethiopia is soon to follow.

Whether it is Somalia’s food crisis, the multi-year drought in Australia, or flooding in the American bread basket, climate change is going to vastly affect the world’s food markets.

Malaria nets. Photo: Tomas de la Maza (flickr)

Is malaria's reign of terror coming to an end?

Every year, 500 million people fall seriously ill with malaria — a disease that induces fever, chills, nausea, flu-like illness and, without treatment, coma and death. More than 1 million people die each year from malaria — almost all in the developing world. The near-universal poverty of its victims is one reason it has not received the attention, and therefore the money, necessary to secure its demise.

Even in the face of these scary statistics, malaria may be about to meet it's match. The Economist reports a renewed sense of interest in its eradication, mainly because it jeopardizes the UN's Millennium Development Goals, a set of benchmarks in health, education and human welfare that world leaders committed to attain by 2015.

There's a cost-benefit rationale, too. Malaria costs Africa upwards of $12 billion a year in health expenses and lost productivity. Yet a five-year eradication plan might cost as little as $2.2 billion a year, according to a report by Malaria No More and McKinsey & Company.

With these numbers in mind, last week the UN unveiled a new campaign to fight malaria at its most critical spots. The Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership — created to "enable sustained delivery and use of the most effective prevention and treatment for those affected most by malaria — staged the first World Malaria Day last week. It coincided with a UN plan to spray inside houses and distribute insecticide-treated bed nets to "all people at risk" of the disease by the end of 2010.

Any effort to stamp out malaria must deal with an added layer of complexity. When diminished but not destroyed, malaria can come back with a vengeance. Any letup in the eradication campaign may end up actually increasing the numbers of those at risk.

But considering how much malaria undermines the war on poverty, a risk taken to ensure its eradication may be a risk worth taking.