POVERTY: Egypt faces huge problems of overpopulation, poverty

Joe Guzzardi
 March 19, 2011
Although America's attention has shifted to Japan's devastation, a look back at the recent Egyptian crisis proves that it was more about failed population than misplaced leadership.
For the last several years, former President Hosni Mubarak had been locked in a philosophical debate with Egyptian academics about family planning. Although the Egyptian total fertility rate has declined steadily since the early 1960s from a high of 7.2 children per woman and is anticipated to keep falling until it reaches 2.0 in 2025, Mubarak's government wisely endorsed continued spending on population control. Mubarak's approval of family planning comes as little surprise, since Egypt's population doubled to 82 million since 1981 when he took office.
Mubarak's opponents, however, claimed that when the Toshka Project is completed in 2020, it will have transformed half a million desert acres into arable land, thus reducing high density population pressures in the Nile Valley.
But whatever may happen to the Toshka Project, the inevitability of increased population growth, generated by the existing 8 million Egyptians, means huge challenges lie ahead. Demographics control destiny.
Here, in part, is what Egypt still has to overcome.
In Cairo, Egypt's capital and the seat of the citizens' revolution, some districts hold more than 41,000 people per square kilometer, or 100,000 per square mile. Manhattan, by comparison, has about 27,000 people per square kilometer.
More than 15 million Egyptians live on less than $1 a day, a key factor driving last month's protests. The divide in Egypt between rich and poor, where resistance to birth control is high, is startling.
Even though Egypt has severely limited resources, especially fertile land and water (only 3 inches of rain falls annually), the numbers of poor steadily increases.
In past years, the Egyptian government mounted an aggressive but unsuccessful advertising campaign to limit new births. One motto: "Before you add another baby, make sure his needs are secured."
Despite Egypt's progress in reducing its total fertility rate, currently estimated by the Population Reference Bureau at 3.0, that total is still unsustainably high. As long as Egypt's base population increases, no meaningful headway on critical social issues like education can occur.
Egypt offers free education and well-established literacy programs. But the numbers of Egyptian illiterates, one in every four or nearly 17 million, remains unchanged over the last two decades. Ghada Gholam, an UNESCO Egypt literacy specialist, said: "There are lots of successful efforts, but with the increase in the population growth it is really difficult to decrease the number of illiterates."
Population statistics reveal the grim story. Educators must teach 1.4 million Egyptians to read and write annually simply to keep up with the country's population growth. And for every 700, 000 who learn to read, the literacy rate is only reduced by one percent.
Other variables that limit access to education include the high post-puberty drop out rate for teenage girls and the inability of poor parents to pay for transportation or the textbooks. Nearly 70 percent of women, Egypt's mothers and future mothers, are illiterate.
Each year, Egypt's population swells by approximately 1.5 million. The United Nations projects that Egypt will grow from 95.6 million in 2026 to 114.8 million in 2065 when it will finally stabilize.
Egyptian high fertility has imposed costly socioeconomic burdens on the nation. Economic development is stalled and quality of life eroded because of reduced access to jobs, education, water and food.
Little wonder Egyptians took to the streets. But too many decades ignoring an exploding population have left Egypt with few options for future improvement.

Joe Guzzardi is a Senior Writing Fellow at Californians for Population Stabilization. He retired from the Lodi Unified School District in 2008. Contact him at joeguzzardi@capsweb.org.

http://www.lodinews.com/opinion/columnists/joe_guzzardi/article_a7290969-9429-5279-b8a1-438ecc79140b.html

POVERTY: UK aid budget refocuses 'on areas of greatest need'

 Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent guardian.co.uk,  27 February 2011
UK aid budget refocuses 'on areas of greatest need', including YemenEnd of aid to Russia, Serbia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Moldova, as poorer or failing nations prioritised

Britain is to stop sending aid to a series of relatively affluent developing countries as the government focuses resources on countries with the highest levels of poverty, and failing states that have become havens for Islamist fundamentalists.
A review of Britain's £8.4bn international development budget will herald the end of aid to Russia, Serbia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Moldova.
Aid to Yemen, regarded by Britain as a failing state whose lack of economic development provides a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaida, will instead be doubled from £46.7m this year to £90m by 2015.
The changes will be announced by Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, who established separate reviews into Britain's bilateral and multilateral aid budgets after the general election.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) could be a victim of the review of Britain's support for multilateral organisations. Unesco, which was boycotted by Britain for 12 years between 1985 and 1997 on the grounds that it was "pro-Soviet", will have to meet a series of targets to justify its aid after the review found that it wasted the £12m it receives from Britain each year.
Mitchell told the BBC Politics Show that the reviews would lead to Britain's aid budget being "much better focused" on areas of greatest need. "People who live in conflict states are very much part of that," he said.
The reviews are designed to answer opponents on the right and left who have criticised the government's approach to aid from different angles.
A focus on developing countries in greatest need, with a hard-headed payments by results system, is meant to show sceptical Tories that the aid budget is being spent in a sensible way. Many Tories believe it was wrong of David Cameron to ringfence the aid budget, after the prime minister pledged to maintain Britain's commitment to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid by 2013.
Targeting resources at a country such as Yemen, some of whose territory is used by al-Qaida as a training ground, is also designed to show that concerns on the left about the securitisation of Britain's aid budget are unfounded.
Charities have warned that aligning aid priorities with Britain's overall foreign and trade policy could lead to a return to the 1990s when the Pergau dam in Indonesia was funded with British aid money. Harriet Harman, the shadow international development secretary, voiced these fears when she warned of "subsuming aid activities into military activities".
Mitchell said it was in Britain's interests to help countries which present a threat. "It's very much in our national interest to tackle these effects of dysfunctionality and poverty, such as piracy, migration, terrorism and disease in Somalia," he told the Sunday Times. "Tackling the causes of poverty upstream is much less expensive than sending in troops."
Mitchell also tackled one of the main criticisms from the right, that it is wrong to provide aid to India, whose economy is growing at such a fast pace that Delhi can afford a space programme. "The fact is that if you want to reach these [UN] millennium development goals, which we are also keen to do by 2015, you have to operate where poverty is greatest," he told the Politics Show. "In India there are more poor people in three states than there are in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Operating there in the way that we do is extremely effective in poverty alleviation."

The reviews, which have been subject to independent peer review, will have four main themes:
• A complete overhaul of the way in which Britain distributes aid. Mitchell believes that Gordon Brown announced an overall figure for a grant to a particular country without working out what exactly that would deliver. "Now it is going to be payment by results, so money will only be granted if it is clear how many more children will be educated in a given country and how much clean water will be supplied, for example," one source said.
• Independent evaluation. A four-strong independent panel, including the Kenyan anti-corruption expert John Githongo, will monitor aid spending. The panel will report to parliament.
• Britain has a moral duty to help those in need in line with its values. Mitchell frequently quotes the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce to support the aid cause. "You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again you did not know," Wilberforce said.
• It is in Britain's own national interests to help countries which present a threat, however indirectly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/feb/27/uk-aid-budget-andrew-mitchell

POVERTY: “Magic tree seeds” to purify dirty water

 Photo: Courtesy of Educational Concerns For Hunger Organization
Water before being treated and afterwards

BANGKOK, 10 February 2011 (IRIN) - One solution to the water woes of many of the world’s poor may lie in the pea-sized seeds of the widely grown Moringa oleifera tree, experts say.
“The Moringa oleifera [seed technique] can be an important, sustainable and affordable method towards waterborne disease reduction and can improve the quality of life for a large proportion of the poor,” Micheal Lea, author and researcher with Clearinghouse, an Ottawa-based organization researching low-cost water purification technologies, told IRIN.
According to Lea’s 2010 publication, seeds from the Moringa, a tree (also described as a shrub) which grows in Africa, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, can be crushed into a powder and mixed with surface water to produce a 90-99 percent bacterial reduction, making untreated water safely drinkable.
The technique is not new. Communities in Sudan have been using the multi-purpose Moringa tree as a source of food and as a water purifier for centuries.
The plant is fast-growing, nutritious, edible and drought resistant, and can be grown in your backyard. Its seeds are soft and can be crushed using everyday tools, such as a spoon and a bowl. (see video)
The ability to purify water using such accessible techniques, and others has significant life-saving potential.
Globally, approximately 1.1 billion people do not have access to drinking water and diarrhoea remains the leading cause of illness and death, according to the latest UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report.
With the number of people without access to safe water expected to rise to two billion by 2025, several independent Moringa tree cultivation projects have started in the past few years.

Moringa plantations in Ghana
In the Breman Baako village of Ghana, the Moringa Community organization has cultivated Moringa plantations which several thousand people live off as a food source.
“The Moringa is protein and vitamin rich, so people eat the leaves and use the seeds as a spice on food,” said Abu Bakkar Abdulai, Ghana country director of the Moringa Community. “But there is a need for clean water so we are trying to inform the communities about this other technique as well.”

Limitations
While the technique has potential, Kebreab Ghebremichael, a water purification expert with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Water Education, says it would be best used at the household level.
“The technique is easy and inexpensive and many people already have this tree in their backyards,” said Ghebremichael, who studied the Moringa tree seed purifying technique for his PhD. "However, non-processed Moringa cannot be used in centralized large water systems… because the organic content from the seed may give taste and odour problems if it stands for a long time before consumption.”
The Moringa seed purification technique works best for purifying surface water, such as rivers, streams, lakes and ditches, but not for underground water sources. So it would not be able to resolve the problem of natural arsenic poisoning that afflicts many populations in Asia.
“This method is not a silver bullet, but could be used during emergencies and where people have no resources to treat the water they drink from,” Lea said.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=91879

MALARIA: CAMBODIA/THAILAND: Border row could aid spread of drug-resistant malaria

 Photo: Swiss Radio

PHNOM PENH, 4 February 2011 (IRIN) - Health officials warn that an ongoing border dispute and subsequent military build-up along the Thai-Cambodian frontier could undermine global efforts to contain drug-resistant malaria, citing limited access for surveillance, early diagnosis and treatment.


A fisherman plying his trade on the waters of the Tonle Sap lake, Cambodia.


“I hope the critical importance of a global health emergency takes precedence over a political conflict,” Robert Newman, director of the Global Malaria Programme for the World Health Organization (WHO), told IRIN.
His comments follow a three-day visit to what WHO calls the epicentre of the public health emergency: the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin on the Thai-Cambodian border.
Health officials are concerned that along this forested and mountainous border the parasite that causes malaria is increasingly becoming resistant to the most effective drug they have for treating it, artemisinin.
They are most concerned that the parasite might become completely resistant to the drug, and that this drug resistant parasite could reach Africa.

 Photo: Geoffrey Cain/IRIN : A strong military presence is making surveillance efforts difficult

In January, WHO launched a US$175 million global containment plan, in partnership with Roll Back Malaria.
Worries about drug-resistant malaria reaching Africa “wake me up in the middle of the night,” Newman said.
A failure of current containment efforts had the potential to be “a public health disaster”, he added.
Recent tests had found that in some villages it was taking twice as long for the drug to clear the parasite from an infected patient, and that in some clusters more than one third of those infected were showing resistance to the drug. The drug resistance was first detected in 2009.
“We need to stop it in its tracks,” Newman warned.
Cambodian warning
His comments follow a similar warning on 1 February from Doung Socheat, the director of the National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria that the containment effort could be hampered by the border dispute.
After noting correlations between rises in the number of malaria cases along both sides of the border as the conflict escalated over the past three years, Socheat said the containment effort could be delayed if conflict flared again.
The situation was too unpredictable to provide a timeframe, he said.
Socheat also said he had no direct access to data on the incidence of malaria among Cambodian soldiers, as the military operates its own health system, which reports to the Ministry of Defence.
Some health data, primarily reports on fatalities and injuries, is reported to the Ministry of Health.

Epicentre
WHO is working closely with the Thai Ministry of Health as well as their Cambodian counterparts, but public health sources in both countries say they are concerned their respective militaries are reluctant to share medical data due to perceived security concerns.
The first phase of the containment project has received $22.5 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is focused on the area of the border believed to be the epicentre of drug resistant malaria, and first detected in 2009.
This area encompasses Pailin and several districts of Battambang, Pursat and Banteay Meanchay provinces in western Cambodia, as well as districts on the Thai side of the border.
A section of Kampot Province near Cambodia’s Vietnamese border is also included.

Temple
The majority of troops from both countries are believed to be stationed on each side of the disputed ruins of the Preah Vihear temple along the border.
Both sides have, however, placed reinforcements at other sites along the 800km frontier.
In 2008 Cambodia applied to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to have the temple - to which both countries lay claim - declared a World Heritage Site.
The application was backed by the Thai government at the time, but was sharply opposed by those who said it threatened Thailand's sovereignty.
Since then, strong nationalist sentiment continues, and there have been sporadic exchanges of fire in areas around the disputed site.
According to WHO, about 3.3 billion people - half the world's population - are at risk of malaria. Every year, this leads to about 250 million malaria cases and nearly one million deaths.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91827

MALNUTRITION: India, Scheduled tribes

TODAY MAUSAM will not eat. There is just enough wheat flour left for three rotis but she stretches the dough thin to make four. She grinds a chutney of raw green chillies with salt and spreads it on each roti – one roti each for her two, three, five and sixyear- old. They eat slowly and despite the struggle to swallow the spice, waste no morsel. The bread it covers is the only solid food they will get for the next day. They finish in a few minutes – mouths on fire and stomachs numb. Hunger has vanished. The chillies have served their purpose. Water will fill the rest of their stomachs. One more day has passed. Mausam has to wait until her husband returns from town with wages to buy this month’s food grains from the ration store.
In 2010, a report published by the Asian Legal Resource Centre, a human rights organisation with a General Consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, stated that 71.4 percent of tribal children in Madhya Pradesh are malnourished. The figures pose pressing questions to the state. How has Madhya Pradesh really dealt with its tribal population in the face of new development and wildlife conservation projects? What is the root cause of malnutrition – is it a lack of proper government schemes, an unsustainable source of income, poor agriculture or abysmal healthcare facilities? Can the state conceive of an inclusive policy where the tribal population contributes to its development, instead of being hand-held to even pass the basic benchmark of survival?
http://rohitkumarsviews.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/tribals-battling-hunger-and-starvation-in-the-heartlands-of-madhya-pradesh/