Showing posts from category food security.
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Bringing Cambodia Back from the Brink: An Audio Interview with Suwanna Gauntlett
›December 10, 2010 // By Hannah MarquseeThree decades after the Khmer Rouge regime wiped out an estimated 1.7 million people – one fifth of Cambodia’s total population – the environment and Cambodian people are still feeling the effects.
The Pol Pot regime’s policy of agrarian collectivization dramatically reorganized land ownership and relocated millions from urban to rural areas. The ensuing decades of Vietnamese occupation and civil war further changed Cambodia’s workforce, dislocating millions.The “Khmer Rouge regime increased the destruction of natural resources exponentially,” Suwanna Gauntlett, founder and CEO of Wildlife Alliance, told ECSP in this interview. Today, 78 percent of Cambodia’s 14.5 million people live in rural areas, according to the World Bank, nearly all of whom work as subsistence farmers. These rural households account for almost 90 percent of Cambodia’s poor and 36 percent of the total population in 1997.
“These Forests Were Silent”
When Wildlife Alliance arrived in Cambodia in 2000, “these forests were silent,” Gauntlett said. “You couldn’t hear any birds, you couldn’t hear any wildlife and you could hardly see any signs of wildlife because of the destruction.”
In one village, Chi Phat, Gauntlett noted how years of slash-and-burn agriculture had left a “circle of death” around the village as farmers gradually encroached further into the forest.
Cambodians have compensated by turning from traditional subsistence farming to illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, slash-and-burn agriculture, mining, and other unsustainable development (with significant Chinese investment). This has contributed to food and water insecurity, rapid deforestation, habitat loss, and species extinctions. In 1990, 73 percent of Cambodia’s land was covered by forest. By 2007, that number had dropped to 57 percent. Cambodia’s 146 threatened plant and animal species have also felt the effects of this loss. The Indochinese tiger, native to Cambodia, is now thought to have less than 30 individuals remaining in the entire country.
Integrated Solutions
Focusing on the Cardamom mountain range – Cambodia’s largest remaining intact forest – Wildife Alliance established several community-based agriculture and ecotourism programs to help villagers escape the “vicious circle” of poverty and environmental destruction. Ten years later, “there’s been tremendous progress in the geographic areas of our projects,” said Gauntlett.
In another village, Sovanna Baitong, Wildlife Alliance’s community agriculture program has raised the incomes of some residents to over $200 a month when the national poverty level is $200 a year, Gauntlett said. Today this village has a school, a clinic that provides health care and family planning, and a micro-credit fund. This is all managed by the community leaders, 30 percent of whom are women.
Ten years ago, “it was a mess,” Gauntlett said. “It’s amazing to see the difference.”
However, in parts of the country where Wildlife Alliance does not operate, deforestation continues at an alarming pace, often fueled by Chinese and other foreign investment. In some parts of the country, “deforestation has led to very severe water shortages,” including villages where people have to walk up to 20 kilometers for water because “there is no more underground water,” said Gauntlett. This has troubling implications for Cambodian security, particularly with aggressive hydrological development of the Upper Mekong continuing in China and Laos.
“I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen throughout Cambodia – that this water shortage will lead to food shortage [which] will lead to civil unrest,” Gauntlett said.
Sources: BBC, Cambodian Genocide Program, The Washington Post, Wildlife Alliance, World Bank, WWF, UNEP.
Photo Credit: “Farmer at Sovanna Baitong” and “Suwanna Gauntlett” Courtesy of Wildlife Alliance. -
International Responses to Pakistan’s Water Crisis
›December 6, 2010 // By Michael KugelmanExcerpt from the executive summary of the NOREF Policy Brief, via the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre:
Pakistan faces a multidimensional water crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. The root causes of the crisis are twofold:- Circumstantial, which are linked to poor water-resource management policies (including water-wasting flood irrigation);
- Structural, tied to factors deeply ingrained in politics and society such as the obsession with India, inequitable rural land-ownership and endemic water misgovernance (for example, exploitation of the rotational irrigation system to the detriment of the poor).
However, international responses must be measured. They should actively target the circumstantial causes but, at the same time, recognize that their ability to take on the structural ones is limited. While the international community can help mitigate the effects of the underlying structural drivers, Pakistan itself must take the ultimate steps to eliminate them.
Circumstantial causes can be addressed through international aid provision and international exchanges. Aid provision must be generous enough to meet Pakistan’s prodigious needs but modest enough to respect the country’s limited absorptive capacities. It should emphasize the restoration of infrastructure and distribution systems, be more responsive to the needs of Sindh and Baluchistan provinces, and be channeled through both government agencies and civil society.
Despite the challenges the international community faces in addressing the structural causes, opportunities do abound. These include embarking on back-channel diplomacy to bring Pakistan and India closer together and cooperative projects with Pakistanis to make water distribution more equitable. To be effective, international responses must target all affected parties and be sensitive to ground realities. They should also be mindful of indigenous success stories and the factors that bring about that success.
The full report, “International Responses to Pakistan’s Water Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges,” is available through the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Image Credit: Adapted from “USG Humanitarian Assistance to Pakistan for Floods in FY 2010 and FY 2011 (as of 30 Nov 2010),” courtesy of USAID and ReliefWeb. -
Joydeep Gupta, ChinaDialogue
Nervous Neighbors: China-India Water Relations
›December 3, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpted from the original article, “Nervous Neighbors,” on ChinaDialogue.net:
Only five rivers in the world carry more water than the Yarlung Zangbo, or Brahmaputra, as it is known when it reaches India. Only one carries more silt. Rising at a height of 5,300 meters in the Kailash range of the Middle Himalayas – an area holy to both Hindus and Buddhists – the river flows east through Tibet for 1,625 kilometers before taking a horseshoe bend, changing its name and flowing as the Brahmaputra into north-eastern India.
There, for 918 kilometers, it is both a lifeline, due to the water it carries, and a scourge, because of the floods it causes almost every year. It then takes a southward turn and flows into Bangladesh for 363 kilometers before it merges with the Ganges, together forming South Asia’s largest river, the Meghna, and flowing into the Bay of Bengal. This huge river, with its 25 large tributaries in Tibet and 105 in India, drains much of the eastern Himalayas.
As the world’s youngest mountain range, the Himalayas are particularly unstable – and so is the river. It has changed its course significantly at least once in the last 200 years, following a major earthquake. Smaller changes in course are common, wiping out farms and homes on one bank while depositing fertile silt on the other. Now humans are changing the course of this river: Chinese engineers have started to build the Zangmu hydroelectric power station in Lhoka prefecture, 325 kilometers from Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. The development has led to serious expressions of concern, particularly in India but also in China.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.net.
Joydeep Gupta is the project director (South Asia) of ChinaDialogue’s Third Pole Project.
Map Credit: Google Maps. -
Managing the Mekong: Conflict or Compromise?
›December 1, 2010 // By Russell SticklorAt nearly 5,000 kilometers long, the Mekong River is one of Asia’s most strategically important transboundary waterways. In addition to providing water for populations in the highlands of southern China, the Mekong helps support some 60 million people downstream in Southeast Asia, where the river is a key component of agricultural production and economic development.
In recent years, however, the Mekong has emerged as a flashpoint for controversy, pitting China against a coalition of downstream nations that includes Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The countries of the Lower Mekong argue that Beijing’s construction of multiple dams on the Upper Mekong is robbing them of critical water resources, by decreasing both the quality and quantity of water that makes it through Chinese floodgates and spillways. China, however, mindful of soaring energy demand at home, has continued its campaign to harness the hydroelectric potential of the Upper Mekong and its tributaries – but at what cost to the environment and Beijing’s relationships with Southeast Asia?
China’s Hand on the FaucetChina’s total energy demand just recently passed the United States and is expected to continue to increase in the near-term – by 75 percent over the next 25 years, according to the International Energy Agency.
As a result, Beijing has been looking to bolster its energy security by reaching out to develop energy resources in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as along the Mekong and in the East and South China Seas.
In that context, China’s aggressive hydroelectric development of the Upper Mekong — known in China as the Láncang Jiang (shown in the boxed area of the map at right) — makes perfect sense. The river’s sizeable elevation drops make it a rich source of energy; already, 15 large-scale dams have either been completed or are under construction on the Upper Mekong in Tibet and Yunnan.
Those dams also provide China with enormous geopolitical leverage over downstream nations. With little more than the flick of a switch, the Chinese government could substantially curtail the volume of flow entering the Lower Mekong basin. Doing so would of course be tantamount to an act of war, since depleted flow volumes in the Lower Mekong would hinder crop irrigation, jeopardize food security, and endanger the health of the region’s economically critical freshwater fisheries, which are among the world’s most productive. Chinese floodgates and spillways essentially give Beijing de facto control over Southeast Asia’s water security.
The View Downstream
To date, China has never threatened to deliberately reduce the flow of the Mekong to its downstream neighbors. Nevertheless, the perception of threat in Southeast Asian capitals remains high.
Already, a number of the region’s governments — represented formally through the Mekong River Commission, a 15-year-old organization that China still has not joined as a full-fledged member — have complained that completed or in-progress Chinese dams are resulting in less water entering their countries, a phenomenon that becomes particularly pronounced during periods of drought, as observed this summer. Further, there is also the issue of water quality. Since Chinese dams trap silt being flushed out of the Himalayas, that nutrient-rich material cannot be carried downstream, where it historically has helped create fertile soils in the floodplains of the Lower Mekong basin.Quality and quantity concerns aside, there are also structural issues concerning how Beijing goes about its business on the Upper Mekong. Since it is only a “Dialogue Partner” to members of the Mekong River Commission, China is not required to seek approval from downstream nations on hydroelectric development of the river’s Chinese stretch, even though that development has both direct and indirect implications for water security in the Lower Mekong basin. China has even shown a penchant for deliberate secrecy as it develops its stretch of the river, choosing to share a minimal amount of hydrological data with downstream neighbors and typically refraining from even announcing new dam projects.
“The Security Implications Could Hardly Be Greater”
Given its geographic position, Cambodia is particularly vulnerable to China’s stewardship decisions. With one of the poorest populations in Southeast Asia and also one of the highest fertility rates, at 3.3 births per woman, the potential for water scarcity issues is real. By mid-century, its population is projected to jump from its current 15 million to nearly 24 million.
“The government of Cambodia will be entirely at the mercy of Beijing,” said Wilson Center Scholar and Southeast Asian security expert Marvin Ott. “For Cambodia, the question becomes how they can curry China’s favor so as to avoid coercive use of the Mekong — or find some way of exerting counter-pressure on Beijing.”
Overall, population for mainland Southeast Asia is projected to rise from its current 232 million to 292 million by 2050. This growth will require increased agricultural output across the region and thus increased reliance on the waters of the Lower Mekong. The Lower Mekong nations’ shared dependency on the river and China’s continued unilateralism in the Upper Mekong could have serious repercussions for the region, said Ott:The security implications could hardly be greater for the downstream states. With the dams, China will have literal control over the river system that is the lifeblood of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The power this gives China is equivalent to an invasion and occupation of a country by the Chinese army.
For its part, the PRC maintains that water woes in the Lower Mekong are not its doing. In response to the chorus of Southeast Asian claims that China diverts or stores more than its fair share of water, Beijing’s typical refrain has been that blame for low water levels downstream lies not with Chinese water resource management but with heightened precipitation variability associated with climate change. Chinese water officials also contend that the Lower Mekong countries’ complaints are misdirected because water from the Chinese-controlled sections of the Upper Mekong basin accounts for less than 20 percent of the Mekong’s total flow volume by the time the river reaches its natural outlet in the South China Sea.
There are some indications, however, that China may be experimenting with a more open approach to engaging downstream nations. Earlier this year, China overturned precedent by offering top Southeast Asian government officials a tour of what had once been a top-secret hydro project, the mammoth Xiaowan dam. Some critics insisted Beijing’s fear of growing U.S. influence in the Lower Mekong helped motivate the rare show of transparency, while others said it was a means to curry favor with Southeast Asian nations so that they would support China’s controversial resource-development strategies in the South China Sea. Yet regardless of motive, Beijing’s move away from secrecy – if sustained – could do a great deal to smooth over regional tensions.
Dammed If You Do, Damned If You Don’t
Beyond some limited transparency, Beijing also hopes to mitigate concerns about development of the Upper Mekong by offering funding or logistical support for similar large-scale hydroelectric facilities on the Lower Mekong. The move has been largely welcomed by the Mekong River Commission countries, which envision dams of their own generating much-needed energy input for national grids, accelerating continued economic modernization, and enhancing flood control. As of 2009, there were 12 dam projects for stretches of the Mekong south of the Chinese border and many more planned for key tributaries.
The danger in such deal-making is that the environmental costs will be lost in the shuffle. A series of major dams would fundamentally alter the Mekong’s hydrology, which could lead to the degradation of sensitive riverine ecosystems, the disruption of upstream migratory routes for fish that serve as local dietary staples, and the decline of fresh water fisheries that form the backbone of many local economies.
Given the long-term effects on the food, environmental, and economic security of the Lower Mekong heartland, Beijing’s attempt to ease water tensions with a new round of dam construction may end up doing far more harm than good. Unfortunately, with both China and the Mekong River Commission countries currently viewing the dam proposals as something of a win-win, planning and construction are likely to move forward over the coming years.
Sources: Financial Times, Foreign Policy, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Los Angeles Times, Mekong River Commission, National Geographic, New Asia Republic, Phnom Penh Post, Population Reference Bureau, Stimson Center.
Photo Credits: “Xiaowan Dam Site (Yunnan Province, China, 2005),” (Top) courtesy of flickr user International Rivers; Map (Middle) courtesy of International Rivers; “Thailand – Isaan, Mekong River,” (Bottom) courtesy of flickr user vtveen. -
IGWG’s K4Health Gender and Health Toolkit Is a One-Stop Shop for Integration
›November 30, 2010 // By Ramona Godbole
Addressing and analyzing gender norms, roles, and relations is increasingly viewed as critical in the development of equitable, effective, and sustainable health care. However, there has been relatively little integration of gender into health policies, programs, and systems.
The Interagency Gender Working Group (IGWG) – founded in 1997 as a way to bring together NGOs and parts of USAID to share best practices – has partnered with K4Health to create a Gender and Health Toolkit specifically designed to bridge this gap.IGWG’s Gender and Health Toolkit provides access to hundreds of tools, databases, training modules, websites, and publications in one place. Broadly divided into sections including program design, implementation approaches, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation, health systems, best practices examples, and even country-specific case studies, the toolkit provides nearly everything needed to begin integrating gender into new or existing public health programs.
Practitioners can also post questions and comments about the toolkit through an integrated discussion board. The toolkit even has a database to share gender-related photos.
While designed primarily for gender and health specialists and practitioners, the scope of the toolkit extends beyond typical public health issues like maternal health, family planning, HIV/AIDS, and reproductive health. The toolkit links to resources and training modules covering a wide range of cross-cutting topics including gender-based violence; nutrition and food security; integrated population, health and environment; and conflict/post-conflict humanitarian assistance.
The accumulated wealth of knowledge presented in the IGWG Gender and Health Toolkit is an impressively comprehensive resource, and it should be bookmarked by environment, health, and gender specialists and interested policymakers alike.
Image Credit: K4Health. -
Food and Environmental Insecurity a Factor in North Korean Shelling?
›November 24, 2010 // By Schuyler NullJust two days before dozens of North Korean artillery shells fell on the island of Yeonpyeong off the west coast of Korea, a UN study reported that the DPRK was facing acute food shortages heading into the winter.
In a New York Times report, Choi Jin-wook, of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, called food “the number one issue.” While Choi just last month praised the resumption of food aid from the South to the North as a “starting point of a new chapter in inter-Korean relations,” she told the Times Wednesday that the North is “in a desperate situation, and they want food immediately, not next year.”
North Korea’s motives are notoriously indecipherable and this latest incident is no exception, but the regime has in the past sought to distract from domestic problems by inciting the international community (the sinking of the Cheonan being the other latest prominent example).
Infrastructure has always been primitive in the North under the DPRK regime, but the country’s tenuous food security situation was made worse this last year by an unusually long and severe winter followed by heavy flooding in the summer. Flooding was so bad during August and September, that the normally silent regime publically announced details of rescue operations around the northern city of Sinuiju. The joint FAO/WFP report put out by the UN does not predicate production will significantly recover in the next year and estimates an uncovered food deficit of 542,000 tons for 2010/11.
“A small shock in the future could trigger a severe negative impact and will be difficult to contain if these chronic deficits are not effectively managed,” Joyce Luma of the World Food Program told The New York Times.
For more on the severe weather events of this summer, including the flooding that impacted the DPRK and pushed the Three Gorge Dam to its stress limits in China, the impact of scarcity and climate change on the potential for conflict, and the intersection of food security and conflict elsewhere, see our previous coverage on The New Security Beat.
Sources: Christian Science Monitor, Food and Agriculture Organization, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, UN, Washington Post, World Food Program.
Image Credit: Google Maps. -
The Ultimate Weapon Is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace
›To understand the security concerns of the developing world, we must understand that lack of institutional capacity has created a “house of cards,” said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Shannon Beebe, speaking at the Wilson Center on October 19. “When that card gets pulled out, the house is going to fall.”
Beebe, a senior Africa analyst for the Department of Defense, and Mary Kaldor, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed their new book, The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace, in which they argue for a broader conception of human security. “The world is suffering from a lack of a security narrative,” said Beebe.
“The ultimate weapon is not the F-22,” said Kaldor, “it is a change of mindset.”
Creating Pirates: Threats vs. Vulnerabilities
“What happens when a man is already a fisherman and you take all his fish away? You create a pirate,” said Beebe. The environmental and human security threat of overfishing in Somalia was not taken seriously as a security threat until it was left unchecked for 20 years and developed into a “real kinetic threat” of piracy, he said.Beebe spent a year interviewing 80 to 90 Africans in 13 countries, including military leaders, academics, NGO leaders, and even Somali cabdrivers in the United States, about how they view their security. “What came back was resounding, sobering, and confusing,” said Beebe. Amongst those interviewed, few expressed traditional “kinetic” security concerns stemming from physical threats. Instead it was the “conditions-based vulnerabilities” — such as poverty, health, water and sanitation, gender equality, and climate change — that were identified as primary security threats.
“Until we stop giving Africans and the developing world our definition of what is right for their security and start listening to what they are saying is relevant to their security, we are going to continue to marginalize ourselves,” Beebe said.
Filling The Security Gap
There is currently “a profound security gap,” Kaldor said, and a failure to meet the diverse needs and root causes of violence in much of the developing world. Filling the security void has been an array of both good and bad actors – NGOs, humanitarian agencies, militias, and warlords. If we do not adapt our own security strategies to fill this gap, “it will be filled by someone [else],” Beebe warned.
Human security must be incorporated into our security narrative, Beebe and Kaldor argue in their book, which means addressing the security needs of individuals and communities, not just the state. It also involves protection from violence, material deprivation, and natural disasters. They advocate for more robust global emergency forces that would act as a global national guard or police force.
Integrating Human SecurityPromoting the rule of law domestically and shifting interventions “from a war paradigm to a law paradigm” is crucial, said Kaldor. Furthermore, we must change our mindset so that we value the lives of those in foreign countries as highly as we value American or European lives. “You can’t bomb your own people,” she said.
Our greatest challenge, Beebe explained, is to shift our language from “siloed approaches” to create an interconnected, coherent security narrative. Beebe cited former General Anthony Zinni’s UMC (Ret.) incorporation of environmental security into U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) strategy during his tenure in the late 1990s as evidence of the possible success of integrated approaches. More recently, the Belgian High Command adopted a human security policy, said Kaldor.
While human security is already being taken into account on the ground, “it is very much organic, rather than institutionalized…we understand that there is an imperative but again it is the security narrative that is lacking,” said Beebe. Only by engaging with individuals and taking their needs into account with a more comprehensive security narrative can we foster lasting and sustainable security, he said.
Photo Credit: “Elderly Woman Receives Emergency Food Aid,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Mapping World Bank-Funded Projects
›The World Bank recently released their interactive “Mapping for Results Platform” that allows users to see where and how World Bank funding is being spent. Users can view project costs and expenditures by sector at sub-national levels and overlay this with human development data such as poverty, population, and health indicators. In the current beta version, interactive maps and downloadable data are available for Kenya, Bolivia, and the Philippines.
The example map shown above shows all of the World Bank’s 38 active water and sanitation, health, and agricultural projects in Kenya, as well as malnutrition rates by district. Clicking on any of the projects on the map displays the project name, financing amount, and exact location of the program.
Presumably, in the final version, all 2,669 active World Bank projects and 15,246 project locations – accounting for $136.91 billion – will be included.
Image Credit: World Bank Mapping for Results Platform.
