“Water access is no longer simply a global health and development issue; it is a mortal and long-term threat that is increasingly becoming a national security issue,” said Senator Richard Durbin at a March 17, 2009, event on Capitol Hill. Introducing the Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009, Senator Durbin called for renewed American leadership on the global water crisis plaguing billions around the world.

“The United States needs to do much more to ensure that global water access is protected and expanded,” he said. Senator Durbin’s remarks come on the heels of the Fifth Global Water Forum held in Istanbul, Turkey this week, and precede UN World Water Day on March 22, 2009.

“The global water crisis is a quiet killer,” Durbin said. “In the developing world, 5,000 children die every day from easily preventable water-related illnesses such as cholera, typhoid, and malaria, diseases that have been all but eradicated in wealthier nations.”

The Water for the World Act of 2009 expands a commitment from the earlier Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005, which has had notable success in focusing U.S. aid on water-related assistance. From 2007-2008, for instance, the U.S. helped provide 2 million people with access to an improved source of drinking water and more than 1.5 million people to improved sanitation.

But these efforts need to be scaled up to reach the billions of people without clean water. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer, speaking at the same event, there are more people in the world today without access to adequate sanitation than the populations of China and India combined. The Water for the World Act of 2009 will seek to provide “100 million people around the world with sustainable access to clean water and sanitation by 2015,” said Durbin.

In addition, if passed, the act will make water a development priority for U.S. foreign assistance and “designates within the State Department a high-level representative to ensure that water receives priority attention in our foreign policy, and establishes a new Office of Water at USAID to implement development assistance efforts related to water,” Durbin said.

Access to clean water and adequate sanitation is a cornerstone for sustainable development around the world. Developing countries will not be able to build their economies or bring their resources to fruition if people in these countries have to travel for hours to find water, or are “too sick from drinking unsafe water, to work or to go to school,” Durbin warned.

Improving access to safe water will not only reduce mortality from waterborne illness, but will help provide long-term stability in countries that suffer from population pressures due large population growth from high total fertility rates. In developing countries, 3,900 children under 5 years old die every day from waterborne illness. “Mothers who fear the deaths of their children bear more, in a desperate race against the odds,” said Senator Durbin. While access to education and family planning programs is also essential to reducing high fertility rates in developing countries, so too is basic access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

But funding for water infrastructure and sanitation programs is just the first step. In developing countries, poor governance is a major roadblock to implementing successful development projects. Unregulated privatization of water can prevent the “voiceless and powerless” poor from gaining access to the water services they need, Durbin cautioned.

To address the challenges of governance, the bill will help “build the capacity of poor nations to meet their own water and sanitation challenges,” Durbin said, by providing “technical assistance, best practices, credit authorities, and training to help countries expand access to clean water and sanitation.”

Working to ensure access to safe water and adequate sanitation can help implement the “smart power” strategy the U.S. desperately needs during a period when the world is redefining America – a strategy to help provide “things people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of American leadership,” writes the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Smart Power.

CSIS President John Hamre said the U.S. should re-establish its moral leadership in the world by making a serious commitment to increasing access to clean water and adequate sanitation. CSIS recently issued a Declaration on U.S. Policy and the Global Challenge of Water, endorsed by more than 35 leaders in business, government, and academia, and called on President Obama “to launch a bold new U.S. campaign to address the global challenge of water.”

“Throughout history, civilized nations have put aside political differences to address compelling issues of life and survival,” said Senator Durbin. “Our generation owes the world nothing less.”

Photo: Senator Richard Durbin. Courtesy of the Office of Senator Richard Durbin.

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A landlocked, impoverished, densely populated country, Rwanda faces steep challenges in the quest to improve the quality of life of its people, who are mostly small-scale farmers. One solution promoted by the Sustaining Partnerships to enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD) project, which I visited last month with the leaders of the East Africa Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Network, is helping farmers produce higher-quality crops, which can be sold for premium prices on international markets. In this way, farmers can increase their income by producing better crops, rather than producing more—since in Rwanda, there isn’t any more land to go around.

Coffee is Rwanda’s primary export, so SPREAD focuses its efforts there, although it also targets other high-value crops like chili peppers. SPREAD helps organize farmers into cooperatives with their own bylaws and elected leaders; for instance, the highly successful Maraba cooperative includes 1,400 farmers and their families. Agricultural extension agents show farmers techniques for raising the quality of their coffee. One innovation SPREAD has introduced is coffee bikes, which are specially designed eight-speed mountain bikes that can carry up to 300 kg of coffee cherries. SPREAD found that coffee transported to processing stations on the bikes scored 3.5 SCAA quality points higher than coffee transported by foot or truck, due to shorter average times between harvesting and processing.

SPREAD has provided the impetus for the construction of 120 coffee washing stations (CWS) during the past several years, and has also set up three CWS support centers, which assist with quality control. Washing coffee before and after fermentation is key to preserving its quality. SPREAD has made sure to incorporate a number of environmental initiatives into coffee growing and processing, including mulching coffee trees and digging trenches around them to prevent erosion on Rwanda’s steep hillsides; purchasing new water-efficient coffee-washing machines; filtering the CWS wastewater before releasing it into the river; and using vermiculture (worms) to process coffee pulp and mucilage into organic fertilizer. As SPREAD’s Jean Marie Irakabaho put it, growing coffee without caring for the land is like milking a cow without feeding it.

SPREAD has incorporated family planning (FP) and health initiatives into its agricultural work. The same coffee extension workers who teach farmers how to improve the quality of their coffee have been trained to deliver basic health and FP messages and products to them. Working closely with the district government and local health center, SPREAD staff focus primarily on improving maternal and child health; FP; HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, and treatment; and water, sanitation, and hygiene. A weekly radio program, “Imbere Heza” (“Bright Future”), integrates coffee-growing and health information.

SPREAD, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and led by the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M; University, knows it won’t be around forever, so it is striving to make its improvements to Rwandan livelihoods permanent. It created the Rwanda Small Holder Specialty Coffee Company (RWASHOSCCO), a cooperative-owned company that helps cooperatives market and export their coffee. Specialty Rwandan coffee can now be found in online stores like Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee and Allegro Coffee, as well as in cafes around the world. At the East Africa PHE Network workshop, our coffee breaks featured wonderful coffee from the Maraba cooperative. I encourage all coffee connoisseurs to taste for themselves the delicious results of sustained investment in the livelihoods, agriculture, environment, and health of Rwanda’s coffee farmers!

Rachel Weisshaar attended the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda. See previous posts on the New Security Beat: “Rwanda: More Than Mountain Gorillas,” “East Africa PHE Network: Translating Strong Results Into Informed Policies,” and “East Africa Population-Health-Environment Conference Kicks Off in Kigali.”

Photo: Jean Marie Irakabaho (left), chief agronomist and coffee research coordinator at SPREAD, shows the beds where worms are being raised to digest coffee pulp and mucilage, while local children look on. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

“The ultimate weapon of mass destruction—and perhaps of economic destruction—is the testosterone molecule,” quipped Malcolm Potts at the February 11, 2009, discussion of his new book, “Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Offers a Path to Peace,” which explores the pivotal question, “Why do human beings systematically and deliberately kill our own species?” Potts, the Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, was joined Science magazine’s Ann Gibbons, a leading correspondent on human evolution, who examined whether aggressive human behaviors are evolving in response to changing social structures.

Testosterone: Risky Business

“In 1987, some anthropologists and sociologists made a statement at UNESCO that it is scientifically incorrect to say we’ve inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors,” said Potts. “I think that that is wrong.” Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans have inherited certain predispositions that “help us adapt to find food, select mates, avoid danger, and compete for resources in a hostile world,” said Potts. Men compete for women, so it is logical, from a reproductive standpoint, that men would take more risks than women, he argued.

In addition, “there’s strong evidence that there is a genetic tendency for men in the prime of life to attack and kill their neighbors,” Potts noted, while emphasizing that this does not mean that men are preordained to fight one another. “Such predispositions are extraordinarily flexible,” and respond well to peaceful cultural norms.

The Pill Is Mightier Than the Sword

“Once we recognize our violent origins, then we need to ask not ‘why do wars break out?’ but ‘why does peace break out?’” posed Potts. “Judged on the basis of same-species killing,” the violent 20th century may have been the most peaceful in human history, he claimed.

“In the whole of recorded history, I cannot find a single example of women banding together spontaneously and then going out to attack a neighboring group,” maintained Potts. He argued that increasing women’s individual freedom and collective power in civil society and government is the best way to achieve a more peaceful world. More specifically, slowing population growth and promoting more balanced age structures by giving women access to family planning will contribute not just to their own autonomy, but also to long-term peace, he argued.

Evolving To Become Less Aggressive?

“Humans are capable of incredible acts of kindness but also despicable acts of terror,” said Gibbons. “We murder, slaughter, barbeque, and even eat our own species, and we’ve been doing it for a long time.” But it is difficult to determine whether this propensity for aggression is an ancient trait or has more recently evolved. “There are no other human species alive to show us different models for male aggression…so we have look at fossils, DNA, and our closest relatives—the chimpanzees and gorillas,” Gibbons said.

Human aggression may be continuing to evolve. As Gibbons explained, “researchers, as they look at the human genome project—the HapMap Project—have discovered there are many, many genes that have come under natural selection that have evolved in the last 100,000 years, since modern humans spread out of Africa.” Therefore, as warfare becomes less necessary to our daily survival, our species might evolve to become less aggressive. “Are we seeing, in our sexual selection, mates being chosen that are a little less aggressive?” Gibbons asked. “We are still evolving,” she emphasized. “The story isn’t over yet.”

Photos: From top to bottom, Malcolm Potts and Ann Gibbons. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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“The road to inaction is paved with research reports,” said Marya Khan, our Population Reference Bureau facilitator, opening today’s East Africa Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Network workshop on bridging the research-to-policy gap.

Rwandan Minister of Natural Resources Stanislas Kamanzi officially launched the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network this morning, stating that Rwanda’s highest-in-Africa population density of 365 people per square kilometer—which he argued leads to environmental degradation and poor human health in both rural and urban areas—compels an integrated approach to development. Kamanzi said that Rwanda’s National Environment Policy and national development plan, Vision 2020, both recognize population-health-environment (PHE) links, and he expressed Rwanda’s commitment to implementing the recommendations of the First Inter-ministerial Conference on Health and Environment in Africa, which was co-hosted by the World Health Programme and the UN Environment Programme in Gabon in August 2008.

A House-Senate conference committee, with significant input from the White House, is currently striving to produce a compromise stimulus bill that will satisfy all three players. One item that won’t be in the bill is funding for family planning, which was nixed from the House version late last month. The proposal to include money for contraception—which would have been part of a bundle of funds to help states with Medicaid costs—faced high-profile opposition from conservatives, who argued that it would not stimulate the economy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to the criticism, countered, “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now…one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

It turns out that the debate over whether population growth is a net gain or loss for the economy has been going on for decades. According to Population Matters: Demographic Change, Economic Growth, and Poverty in the Developing World (see ECSP event), edited by Nancy Birdsall, Allen Kelly, and Steven Sinding, in developing countries, rapid population growth slows economic growth, and rapid fertility decline reduces poverty. Furthermore, as described in “Poor Health, Poor Women: How Reproductive Health Affects Poverty,” research by Margaret Greene and Thomas Merrick found that poor reproductive health—which includes unmet need for family planning—negatively impacts certain measures of poverty, including health and educational attainment.

Academics aren’t the only ones exploring these concepts; the popular press has also taken on the question of how population growth affects economic growth. The Christian Science Monitor published “Can Obama’s family-planning policies help the economy?,” which Population Connection’s Marian Starkey criticized for failing to adequately answer the question in its headline. MarketWatch published an op-ed contending that population growth is the world’s biggest economic problem. On the other side of the debate, the Wall Street Journal argued, “A smaller workforce can result in less overall economic output. Without enough younger workers to replace retirees, health and pension costs can become debilitating. And when domestic markets shrink, so does capital investment.”

Population-poverty links are incredibly complex, and it’s worth paying attention to the different dynamics between—and among—developing and developed countries, as well as the distinction between the larger goal of economic growth and the more targeted aim of jumpstarting an economy out of a recession. Nevertheless, policymakers don’t have to be flying blind when it comes to the question of whether access to contraceptives affects economic growth. Demographers and economists have been studying these relationships for a long time, and although they may never have complete answers, they have already come up with some valuable insights.

This is an exciting time to be working global public health, with more attention and money going to the field in the last decade than perhaps ever before. In the past, the struggle has been to direct more money and attention to these issues, but recent efforts have focused more on maximizing funds’ impact—by strengthening health systems, focusing on prevention, and finishing so-called “unfinished agendas” in maternal health, child mortality, and family planning. In my remarks at a recent panel on foreign policy challenges facing the 111th Congress, I focused on four issues: infectious diseases, neglected health issues, funding, and capacity building.

Were you one of the millions—or billions—who tuned in to watch President Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday? If so, and you also happen to be one of several thousand New Security Beat readers, your ears probably perked up at this paragraph in his inaugural address:

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

Development practitioners and advocates are tickled pink that President Obama saw fit to mention their issues in such a prominent forum. They’re not resting on their laurels, though: ONE launched an e-mail campaign asking supporters to thank President Obama for his commitment to international development and urge him to include funding for it in his first presidential budget request.

Meanwhile, WaterAid America released a statement saying it “welcomes the mention of clean water in Obama’s speech and stands ready to support the commitment made by the new President in his first day of office. Along with other NGOs, WaterAid America has been encouraging the new administration to recognize the importance of clean water and sanitation and to take a lead to end the years of political neglect of these vital services.”

Although Obama did not mention family planning and reproductive health in his speech, population experts are also trying hard to ensure their recommendations are heard by the new administration.