Showing posts from category humanitarian.
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An (Un)natural Disaster in Nicaragua
›October 26, 2007 // By Rachel WeisshaarNicaragua is currently struggling to cope with the effects of a double environmental disaster. In September 2007, Hurricane Felix tore through the country’s impoverished northern Caribbean region, killing more than 100 people, leaving 220,000 homeless, and destroying vast amounts of agricultural land and forests.
But that wasn’t all. Fifty days of heavy rains—starting just before the hurricane hit—have continued the destruction, causing flooding in large areas of the country’s Pacific regions. In response, President Daniel Ortega’s government declared a state of national disaster on October 19. SINAPRED, Nicaragua’s disaster relief agency, estimates that the rains destroyed the homes of another 216,000 people.
The international response has been rapid, with numerous countries, international agencies, and NGOs sending aid to Nicaragua. But Laura de Clementi, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization representative to Nicaragua, warns that unless seeds are quickly purchased, distributed, and planted, parts of the country could face severe food shortages in the coming months.
These natural disasters have an unnatural component, however, reports Inter Press Service: deforestation. Of the 8 million acres of forest in the country in 1950, only 3 million remain, according to the country’s Environment Ministry. Deforestation exacerbated the damage done by Hurricane Felix and the rains, increasing the level of soil erosion and boosting the likelihood of landslides. Ironically—and unfortunately—a government plan to reforest 60,000 hectares each year that began just before the hurricane hit has since been put on hold.
“Nicaragua is not to blame for the hurricanes and storms, but it is responsible for the destruction of its forests, which form a protective barrier. Rain causes greater damage to land stripped of its trees than to forested areas,” biologist and geographer Jaime Incer Barquero told IPS. Yet the people who cut down trees are often impoverished, possessing few other ways to earn a living. An effective plan to combat deforestation will need to establish alternative, environmentally sustainable livelihoods for Nicaragua’s poor communities. These sustainable ways of generating income would also bolster—rather than undermine—the country’s natural protections against disasters, contributing to the security of all Nicaraguans. -
Frist Returns to the Health Fray
›September 13, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeFormer Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who was a practicing surgeon before his political career, announced last week that he would return to medicine—in a big way. The New York Times reports that Frist will lead Save the Children’s new “Survive to Five” initiative. This program aims to reduce the number of children—estimated at nearly 10 million annually worldwide—who die before they turn five years old. Save’s website describes five solutions to the five biggest contributing factors to child mortality. By applying these solutions—all of them proven, and most of them very inexpensive—they hope to save as many as 6 million children every year.
The Times mentions that other American politicians, such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have dedicated much of their post-political lives to global health, with excellent results. Perhaps even more encouraging is that some current world leaders are addressing these issues as well. Last month, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed “urgent action” on health issues in developing countries. Their International Health Partnership, which began on September 5, will address child mortality, as well as maternal mortality and HIV/AIDS prevention and education.
The Times notes that Frist is playing a key role in a similar campaign with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with former rival Senator Tom Daschle—although it doesn’t mention that while majority leader, Frist broke with political tradition by campaigning against his counterpart. It is encouraging that they have put political differences behind them and are working together on a new campaign that could save and improve the lives of millions of children around the world. Hopefully, they will be successful in persuading Americans and their elected officials that child mortality is not only unacceptable and preventable, but that reducing it is a worthy use of taxpayer dollars.
This effort may seem daunting, given that less than one-half of one percent of the U.S. budget goes to international assistance. Frist was successful in ushering through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which dedicated $15 billion over five years to fighting AIDS, principally in Africa. This was a major victory for global health, but there is room in the budget and the priorities of American leaders for more global health programs—especially if PEPFAR is doubled, as is now being considered, to $30 billion over the next 5 years. Campaigns to reduce childhood mortality do not face the political scrutiny of HIV/AIDS programs such as PEPFAR, but it will still be important that Frist and others involved allow science-based medicine to dictate funding priorities; one of PEPFAR’s main failings is that it has caved to ideology in placing an unadvisedly large emphasis on abstinence education.
Frist and his colleagues certainly have a difficult battle against child mortality ahead of them. But Frist—a surgeon, politician, and businessman—has an impressive range of skills and an equally enviable Rolodex of supporters to call upon. -
Closing the Floodgates: Reducing Disaster Risk in South Asia
›August 16, 2007 // By Karima TawfikFlooding causes massive damage each year in South Asia, but this destruction will not be diminished without more comprehensive disaster preparedness, says a new report by Oxfam International entitled Sink or Swim: Why Disaster Risk Reduction is central to surviving floods in South Asia. The report comes halfway through a monsoon season that has already harmed the livelihoods of 20 million people in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India, crumbling homes and schools, sweeping away crops, and crippling the region’s already-weak infrastructure.
Current flood control efforts are often ineffective and can even exacerbate the problem, says the report. For instance, poorly designed and broken culverts and embankments often flood roads and downstream areas. One embankment in Bihar, India caused a flood-prone area to expand from 2.5 to 6.9 million hectares over the course of fifty years.
In the report, Oxfam recommends that governments implement local emergency plans; avoid building additional dams and embankments; equip communities with preparedness capacities such as early warning systems and first-aid skills; provide community assets such as flood shelters, raised homesteads, and motorized boats; and mainstream disaster preparedness into government policy. Furthermore, the report urges donors to increase funding for disaster risk reduction, which is a strong long-term investment.
Governments and NGOs should also note that lower-income groups and women are more vulnerable to disasters—and tailor their programs accordingly. Poorly built houses are easily destroyed, the landless have reduced access to post-flood aid, and women struggle with malnutrition and disease in displacement camps. Reducing disaster risk—especially for the most vulnerable members of the population—is an important step in raising the standard of living in South Asian countries afflicted by flooding. -
Warming Up to Migration: Labor Mobility and Climate Change
›August 1, 2007 // By Karima TawfikTraveling across national borders to find work should be treated as a legitimate response to climate change, says the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Oli Brown in a new policy paper on climate change and labor mobility.
Both Brown and ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko, who recently weighed in on climate change and migration on The New Security Beat, believe that climate change is an increasingly important driver of migration. However, it is difficult to isolate a causal relationship between climate change and migration because other factors—such as population growth, economics, and politics—are inextricably intertwined with climate’s impact on migration patterns. Brown and Dabelko both stress that the difficulties of measuring climate change’s effect on migration should not prevent policymakers from addressing the relationship between the two, however.Brown explains that labor migration has become an important coping strategy in drought-stricken Africa. During dry periods, young adults leave their rural homes and head for the cities, hoping to earn money for their families. Brown recommends increasing the flexibility of international migration laws to make it easier for people to travel across national borders to earn a living, but he also urges developing nations to curb the “brain drain” phenomenon by adopting incentives for workers to remain in their home countries. Moreover, he argues that wealthy developed countries, which tend to see migration as a failure of adaptation and often oppose relaxing immigration or refugee policies, should accept environmental stress as a legitimate reason for migration.
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Underground Lake in Darfur: Fertile Ground for Cooperation or Conflict?
›July 26, 2007 // By Rachel WeisshaarThe recent discovery of a vast underground lake in Darfur has prompted hope for a resolution to the region’s terrible conflict, which is partially rooted in tensions over scarce resources—particularly water. Yet the lake is not a silver bullet. First of all, there may not be any water in it. Alain Gachet, a French geologist who has studied mineral and water exploration in Africa for 20 years, told BBC News that he thinks the lake is probably dry.
In addition, as The New York Times astutely observed, it is the way in which natural resources are managed—not simply their scarcity or abundance—that determines whether they further peace or conflict. Time and again, inexpert or corrupt management of plentiful natural resources has plunged nations into violence and poverty, rather than granted them prosperity. In Africa, this “resource curse” has been a regrettably common phenomenon.
A report released by the UN Environment Programme last month and an opinion piece by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also highlighted how environmental factors have contributed to the crisis in Darfur. -
A Hurricane’s Uneven Silver Lining
›July 10, 2007 // By Rachel WeisshaarIn October 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Choluteca, an impoverished province in rural Honduras. The hurricane claimed human lives and damaged homes, agriculture, and industry. But Mitch’s effect on Choluteca was unusual, because economic revitalization followed this destruction. The Washington Post recently detailed how investors and developers have seized on Choluteca’s advantageous location—between El Salvador and Nicaragua, and close to the Pan-American Highway and a Pacific seaport—to transform it from an underdeveloped agricultural region into a hub for international trade.
So far, Honduran entrepreneurs have achieved considerable success in the region, finding foreign backers to invest in new high-tech melon and shrimp processing plants. Choluteca’s formerly sleepy capital has become a bustling town, attracting businesspeople with expensive tastes, as well as symbols of American capitalism: the local Wendy’s is packed every day for lunch.
Some ordinary farmers and workers’ lives have improved since the hurricane. For instance, the influx of post-hurricane foreign aid provided many working-class people with better houses than the ones the hurricane destroyed—the floors in their new homes are made of cement, rather than dirt. However, the gap between the rich and the poor has not narrowed since the hurricane. In fact, for the most part, it has widened.
The continuing poverty of the majority of Cholutecans will likely be exacerbated by plans for a new free-trade zone, nicknamed “Zip Choluteca.” This spring, the Honduran government and developers signed an agreement to keep wages below the legal daily minimum for 5 to 10 years, in an effort to make this economically underdeveloped region more attractive to investors and entrepreneurs.
Although natural disasters cause great damage to societies and individuals, they are not always as disastrous in the long run as we might think. Natural disasters can revitalize economies, as in Choluteca, and can encourage peace, as in Aceh after the 2004 Asian tsunami. Yet economic success in Choluteca can only truly be accomplished if the Cholutecans whose work fuels the region’s growth benefit adequately from their labors. -
Climate Change Possible Culprit of Darfur Crisis
›March 15, 2007 // By Karen BencalaWhile the crisis in Darfur is often characterized as an ethnically motivated genocide, Stephan Faris argues in April’s Atlantic Monthly (available online to subscribers only) that the true cause may be climate change. Severe land degradation in the region has been blamed on poor land use practices by farmers and herders, but new climate models indicate that warming ocean temperatures are the culprit behind the loss of fertile land.
Faris says:“Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. ‘This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,’ says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses.”
Furthermore, Faris points out that the violence is not necessarily merely between Arabs and blacks, but between farmers (largely black Africans) and herders (largely Arabs). Historically, the two groups shared the fertile land. Now, however, farmers—who once allowed herders to pass through their land and drink from their wells—are constructing fences and fighting to maintain their way of life on the diminished amount of productive land.
If climate change is the real cause of the conflict, Faris concludes, the solution must account for this reality and address the environmental crisis in order to make peace. And he calls on all of us to accept some of the blame for the crisis:“If the region’s collapse was in some part caused by the emissions from our factories, power plants, and automobiles, we bear some responsibility for the dying. ‘This changes us from the position of Good Samaritans—disinterested, uninvolved people who may feel a moral obligation—to a position where we, unconsciously and without malice, created the conditions that led to this crisis,’ says Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. ‘We cannot stand by and look at it as a situation of discretionary involvement. We are already involved.’”
That said however, researchers at the African Centre for Technology Studies an international policy research organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, say that while environmental changes have decreased agricultural production, these problems must be examined within the wider context of a long history of discrimination and governance problems: “The legacies of colonialism, political discrimination, and lack of adequate governance in Darfur should not be underestimated in favor of an environmental explanation-particularly as it serves the interests of some actors to use environmental change as a non-political scapegoat for conflict.” (forthcoming ECSP Report 12) -
A Diversified Agenda for the New Africa Command
›March 5, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoBuilding things rather than blowing them up is how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes a primary approach of one U.S. military base in the Horn of Africa. In his March 3 column, Kristof, who regularly writes on humanitarian, poverty, health, and development issues in the region, writes approvingly of the recognition within the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) that force and fear alone are not going to win the war on terror. As evidence Kristof cites the actions and words of the U.S. military.“The U.S. started to realize that there’s more to counterterrorism than capture-kill kinetics,” said Capt. Patrick Myers of the Navy, director of plans and policy here. “Our mission is 95 percent at least civil affairs. … It’s trying to get at the root causes of why people want to take on the U.S.”
Kristof describes the possibility of the traditional warfighting mission coexisting alongside increased humanitarian roles.The 1,800 troops here do serve a traditional military purpose, for the base was used to support operations against terrorists in Somalia recently and is available to reach Sudan, Yemen or other hot spots. But the forces here spend much of their time drilling wells or building hospitals; they rushed to respond when a building collapsed in Kenya and when a passenger ferry capsized in Djibouti.
Kristof suggests this muscular humanitarian mission should be central to the new Africa Command the U.S. military recently announced. Standing up this regional command will mean breaking most of sub-Saharan Africa out of European Command where most of it save the Horn and North Africa has historically been situated. While some may question whether outside military interventions aren’t more the problem than the solution, the emphasis on a military humanitarian role recognizes security and stability as a necessary precondition for lasting development.
Rear Adm. James Hart, commander of the task force at Camp Lemonier, suggested that if people in nearby countries feel they have opportunities to improve their lives, then “the chance of extremism being welcomed greatly, if not completely, diminishes.”
For the historically inclined, it is worth remembering that General Anthony Zinni, the Marine four star who headed CENTCOM just before the war in Iraq, had internalized these lessons and practiced humanitarian and development engagement to support his stability missions. Unfortunately it was thinking like his that was jettisoned when the Iraq war started.
