POVERTY: SOUTHERN AFRICA: Floods leave Angolan returnees stranded

JOHANNESBURG, 6 January 2012 (IRIN) -

 Photo: Tomas de Mul/IRIN
The Zambezi is prone to flooding annually
Several thousand Angolan returnees from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are stranded by floods in northeastern Angola. They are among the first casualties of what promises to be a very wet rainy season in parts of southern Africa.
“At least 50,000 people - 24,000 of them returnees - in 10 villages in Uige Province [northeastern Angola near border with DRC] have been affected by the flooding, rains and hailstorms in the past four months,” said Antonio Maiandi, head of the Evangelical Reformed Church of Angola, which has been trying to help those affected. The rainy season here tends to be longer than elsewhere in Angola.
“It is still pouring hard. At least 1,142 houses have been destroyed by the rains. Each family with shelter is now hosting other families,” said Maiandi, adding that the returnees, who had sought refuge from the civil war in Angola which ended in 2002, were putting enormous pressure on locals, and organizations such as his.
“The local population who are mostly farmers have been severely affected. Their cassava [staple food in Angola] and groundnut crops have been destroyed, so there is not enough food to go round.”
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) restarted formal repatriation of Angolans in November 2011 after logistical and other problems forced the process to stop in 2007. DRC is home to some 80,000 Angolans refugees, according to UNHCR.
The new return initiative comes after a UNHCR survey in 2010 found that 43,000 wanted to return home, and following a tripartite agreement between Angola, DRC and UNHCR (signed in June 2011), around 20,000 people signed up for help to return. The agreement came about after years of tense relations between the two countries: Angolan and Congolese nationals have been expelled from the two countries regularly.
Each family with shelter is now hosting other families
“The local population is extremely poor and unable to support the returnees,” and “people are still coming in every day,” said Maiandi.
UNHCR in Angola told IRIN they took a break in December 2011 and would resume formal repatriation on 17 January, but did not have an update on the number of people who had already arrived.
According to aid workers, increasing instability in the DRC following the recent disputed elections could be prompting more people to leave.
Maiandi said the returnees had not received adequate support from the authorities and church organizations had limited resources.
Meteorologists for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have predicted normal to above normal rains for most of the region from January to March 2012 largely because of the continuing effects of the 2011 La Niña event. Thousands of people in the region were displaced and scores killed in early 2011 as a result of heavy rains and flooding associated with La Niña.

Zimbabwe
As the rainy season begins here, aid workers and disaster prevention teams are closely monitoring water levels in the all-important Zambezi river, the continent's fourth largest.
The authorities have issued a flood alert after being forced to release water from the swollen Kariba Dam on the Zambezi earlier than usual in the rainy season.
The Zambezi River Authority (ZRA) which usually opens the spillway gates of Lake Kariba in the last two weeks of January was forced to open one of the gates on 3 January. It has advised people living downstream to evacuate their homes.

Zambia
Zambia is in for a mixed season. Dominicano Mulenga, national coordinator of Zambia's Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit, said a plan had been drawn up to help 368,953 people likely to be affected by rain and dry spells. While northwestern and western parts of the country had seen heavy rain, southern, eastern and parts of central Zambia were likely to receive little or no rain, he said.
The water level in the Zambezi was higher than at the same time in 2011, he added. “We have had three seasons of heavy rainfall and the ground is saturated with water, making it more prone to flooding.”

Namibia
Namibians, currently experiencing a heat wave, are eager for rain, said Guido van Langehove, chief of the Namibia Hydrological Services. Southern African Development Community (SADC) meteorologists have forecast normal to above normal rains for Namibia over the next three months. “It was the same forecast last year and we recorded three times the normal rain,” van Langehove pointed out.
The Caprivi Region, Namibia’s poorest area, is prone to annual flooding.
Japhet Itenge, director of Disaster Risk Management in the Office of the Prime Minister, said they were prepositioning essential commodities and relief tools as part of their contingency plans.

Lesotho
Lesotho has not received adequate rainfall in the past few months, a spokesman for the country’s meteorological services told IRIN. “SADC has forecast heavy rains for Lesotho in the coming weeks. We are worried it can cause early frost and destroy crops that have already been planted,” he said.
Lesotho and Namibia have food insecurity levels greater than their five-year averages due to the severe flooding experienced during the last growing season, according to FEWSNET.

Mozambique
The Mozambican authorities have begun to release water from the Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi. People living mainly along the lower Zambezi basin and in Buzi, Save, and Pungue basins, including Beira city, are on alert.
Sofala Province in central Mozambique is currently distributing items such as bicycles, stretchers, masks, gloves, megaphones and boats, according to the Mozambique Red Cross; and members of seven local disaster risk management committees established in Beira City are cleaning the drainage system.
The National Institute of Disaster Management (INGC) is monitoring the rivers Montepuez, Licungo, Mutamba, Pungué, Buzi, Save, and Maputo, said FEWSNET. In the Zambezi and Limpopo river basins, FEWSNET warned of a near-average-to-high probability of flooding.
João Bobotela, CARE’s emergency response coordinator in Mozambique, said INGC and local authorities had been running flood simulation exercises since November 2011 to prepare communities for sudden evacuations.

Botswana
Arid Botswana has not received good rains in the past few months. “We are expecting average rains which might help crops,” said a spokesman for the Botswana Meteorological Services.

Malawi
More rains have been forecast for southern Malawi, where land adjacent to the River Shire, one of the most food-insecure parts of the country, is prone to flooding. Parts of the region, which has seen an outbreak of foot and mouth disease and a hike in food prices, are in crisis mode, warned FEWSNET.

South Africa
Much-needed rain has fallen in South Africa’s major maize-producing northern Free State area in the past few weeks. The government and USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) say the country has adequate supplies, but global maize stocks are low, putting considerable upward price pressure on South African white maize.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94598

POVERTY: Developing countries hardest hit by wildfires

BANGKOK, 28 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Johann G. Goldammer, GFMC
Slash and burn methods pose a significant risk

Wildfires burn several hundred million hectares of vegetation around the world each year and appear to be growing in number and extent, but their impact on developing countries is particularly worrying, experts say.
Subsistence or impoverished populations can find it much more difficult to recover from a serious wildfire. “Fires affecting developing countries impact the livelihoods of people much more than those in wealthy and `insured’ countries,” said Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Centre (GFMC) in Germany. “A small fire in a developing country may cause much more havoc than it would in a wealthy country.”
Fires used for slash-and-burn agriculture and as a common method of clearing land in developing countries - and important to their economies - pose a significant risk, experts say. “More and more we are seeing pastoral fires get out of hand… We need to do more to educate and inform people about fire risks,” said Pieter van Lierop, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forest officer and one of 10 contributors to a new global assessment of “mega-scale fires”.
The assessment - by FAO and presented at the 5th International Wildland Fire Conference in May - examined recent fire disasters in Israel, Russia, Australia, Botswana, Greece, the USA, Brazil and Indonesia, and found that humans negligently or intentionally were to blame for causing the fires.
Most fires are unmonitored and undocumented so the full record of wildfires around the globe is incomplete.
However, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) international disaster database, EMDAT-CRED estimates that 2,000 people have been killed and US$49 billion lost in 339 major fires worldwide since 1970, making them among the world’s costliest disasters.
“It appears that fire activity, or total land area burned each year, is increasing in many global regions, for many different reasons, including climate change, changes in vegetation, and changing impacts of people,” said Bill de Groot, scientist and team leader with the Canadian Forest Service. “We are concerned about disaster fires, or wildfires that cause loss of life, property, or livelihood.”
Weather, wind and terrain conditions all contribute to fire risk, but humans started most of the past decade’s wildfires.

Recent examples
In 2008, after an unusually wet rainy season led to more abundant grass (a fire fuel source), fires lit by humans spread along the dense grassland savannah of Ghanzi, Botswana. For 50 days the fire burned over 3.6 million hectares of tribal grazing land and national park, considerably disrupting a fragile local economy dependent on indigenous thatch collection and tourism.
In 1998, hundreds of intentionally lit fires for large-scale land-clearing for pulp and palm oil plantations, spread out of control destroying 9.7 million hectares of forests in Indonesia’s Kalimantan Province, and emitting 700 million tons of greenhouse gases.
In the same year, land-clearing fires in Brazil’s Roraima State - exacerbated by limited road access, severe drought and strong winds - burnt out of control for over 30-days, destroying 11,000 hectares of forest.

Managing land, educating people
Both developing and developed countries struggle to suppress such large-scale fires which often cross land ownership boundaries and require the involvement of different jurisdictions of police, fire and emergency services.
“Simply investing in mechanized firefighting is not a solution. The deeper issues are land use and changes in fire policy and practice,” said Steve Pyne, an environmental historian and professor at Arizona State University.
The FAO report lauds Australia’s use of the controlled burning of shrubs to prevent the spread of wildfires in the southwest of Western Australia which is at high risk of fire, but in many developing countries, which lack the technology or infrastructure to carry out such pre-emptive action, prevention has to be done at grassroots level.
“Environmental education would go a long way to improving awareness of fire in forest and agriculture,” said José Carlos Mendes de Morais, pre-fire specialization chief with Brazil’s National Forest Fire Prevention Centre, who studied the Roraima fires.
“We are trying to work with the national governments and local communities to establish community-based fire management programmes,” said FAO’s Van Lierop, adding that appropriate attention to prevention at the local level was critical.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93072

POVERTY: Reducing Global Poverty - Back to the Future?

Michael Edwards,
10 September 2010
Ten Years of War on Poverty, 2010
When I was a PhD student in the late 1970s I was taught that there was no one route to poverty-reduction, but that since some countries had already reduced poverty pretty well we should learn from their experience. Not exactly rocket science is it?
The so-called East Asian Tigers, mirrored by Brazil, Botswana, China, Vietnam and a few others in more recent years, tackled their development problems through a combination of strategic direction by their governments, a gradual expansion and opening of their economies to world trade, heavy investments in health and education (as universal as resources would allow), and social contracts between different sectors of society that were strong enough to keep these processes moving forward. The role of international assistance was simply to support these self-directed efforts by helping to fill temporary gaps in resources and protect them from the destabilizing effects of international economic and other shocks.
Listening to the presentations on day three of the Manchester conference, I have a distinct sense of déjà-vu, since all of them seem to be rejecting the bureaucracy and technocracy that have come to dominate the international poverty-reduction industry in the last twenty years. Rather than fancy innovations, I’m hearing a continual re-affirmation of an older set of ideas and (since one can’t afford to be too romantic about the past), a debate about the unfinished agendas they reveal. Take, for example, a new report from UNRISD in Geneva that was discussed last night, entitled “Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Policy and Politics,” or “how to transform world capitalism” in shorthand as UNRISD’s excellent new director, Sarah Cook, confided to me later in the conference bar. Citing the need to re-distribute resources so that poverty and inequality are attacked together, institutionalize human rights in every area of life, and focus on the quality of economic growth and employment and not just the amounts of these things, it’s a report that draws heavily from recent history but that also re-surfaces some deeper questions about what the “East Asian Miracle” left out.
Notable omissions include the environment, addressing social violence, and – in one of the few conference presentations to take a gendered perspective – the issue of “who cares,” which Naila Kabeer from SOAS raised in her response to the UNRISD report. Citing evidence from India and South Africa, Kabeer explained why increasing women’s paid employment may not result in poverty-reduction, in part because their unpaid work is not factored into the equation, an issue of enormous social significance that has all-but disappeared from the official poverty-reduction debate and is nowhere to be seen in the UN Millennium Development Goals. Given the deep inequalities and injustices created by this omission, one might have thought that they would be front and center in any attempt to reduce poverty and discrimination.
The avuncular Angus Deaton from Princeton University continued the conversation by shredding the credibility of income-based measures of poverty – another old debate that is re-surfacing in the conference with a vengeance. The dapper Deaton (wearing the only bow tie witnessed since Wednesday), achieved the considerable feat of weaving ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ and its limitations into an entertaining presentation. International poverty statistics, he concluded, are basically meaningless (“nonsense on stilts”), because there are no shared consumption patterns between countries on which to base a rigorous comparison. So, “how about we replace all the experts and just ask people how their lives are going?” Even the experts themselves laughed and clapped at that one, which I thought was commendably un-self-interested. The serious point is that such measures are dangerous when applied in practice, and should be replaced by indicators of “multi-dimensional” poverty such as those that have been developed by Sabina Alkire from Oxford University, who was one of the respondents to Deaton’s presentation. UNDP are already using them to improve their next Human Development Index, soon to be released.
In all these respects, maybe the conference has been miss-named. It isn’t so much “what we have learned about poverty” but what we have forgotten that really matters, and what we need to remember, reaffirm, and re-interpret in the different contexts and conditions of today. Poverty-reduction is not a technocratic exercise for billionaires and bureaucrats but an exercise in human solidarity that aims to liberate all of us from conditions of oppression. But what kind of international machinery could possibly encourage such a thing?

Michael Edwards is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action, in New York, and the author of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World. He was formerly a director at the Ford Foundation. His website is www.futurepositive.org
http://www.opendemocracy.net/michael-edwards/reducing-global-poverty-back-to-future

TUBERCULOSIS: South African miners at risk

Poor living and working conditions for miners of gold, diamonds and other precious metals have contributed significantly to tuberculosis (TB) epidemics across Africa, scientists said on Tuesday.
Researchers from Britain and the United States said their study suggested that crowded living and working conditions, dust in mines, and the spread of HIV mean Africa's mining industry may figure in up to 760,000 new cases of TB each year.
Men traveling from afar to work in mines, such as from Botswana to South Africa, are at the greatest risk of getting TB, the researchers wrote in a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
But their wives, children and friends are also at high risk of catching the disease when miners travel back and forth to work, often many times a year.
"Improving living and healthcare conditions for miners may be necessary not only for the miners, but for controlling tuberculosis epidemics throughout sub-Saharan Africa," said Dr David Stuckler from the Department of Sociology at Oxford University, who led the study.
Tuberculosis killed 1.8 million people worldwide in 2008, or nearly 5,000 people a day.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65060120100601