POVERTY: MADAGASCAR: Schoolgirls catch gold fever

ANKAVANDRA, 9 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN
For many young girls in Ankavandra, gold prospecting has taken priority over their education

 There is a touch of gold fever in the small western Madagascan town of Ankavandra and schoolgirls are being affected.
Rural poverty coupled with record world gold prices is proving an irresistible pull for young girls in and around Ankavandra who are being lured away from class and into the foothills of the central plateau area by the promise of a few flecks of gold.
Nearly every day a group of five girls, all related and aged 8-15, wake at dawn to begin a two-hour brisk walk up steep goat tracks to one of the many tributaries of the River Manambolo. As they draw closer to their destination their numbers swell to about 20 people, as parents with young children and other groups of girls, some appearing to be as young as five, join them.
On their heads - and to protect them from the scorching sun - they place the gold-panning bowls, which are made locally of wood and cost the equivalent of about US$5 each.
Cattle thieves (`Dahalo’) in search of `zebu’, Madagascar’s distinctive hump-backed cattle, frequent these hills, but so far there have been no reports of them switching into the gold-panning trade.
The girls, who asked not be named, told IRIN they were by no means the only ones from the district engaged in gold panning. “Girls do this because the boys usually have to look after the `zebu’,” they said.
The work is physically demanding. The sides of the river bank are hacked out with shovels and iron bars and the soil and rocks piled onto the wooden bowls, which are then taken to the nearby stream to be panned.

 Gold Panning Girls of Madagascar

During the couple of hours IRIN spent with the girls, they probably dug out a couple of hundred kilograms of mud each, and never stopped for a break. They spend about six hours a day panning, and with the travelling time that makes for a more than 10-hour working day. They brought no food with them.

Mining permits
According to Madagascar’s mining code, gold panners have to purchase an annual permit for a few dollars, while gold dealers collecting the gold pay about US$50 for an annual permit. These taxes are supposed to go into district coffers for the improvement of local services, but the girls IRIN spoke to said they had never paid any dues.
The website of Paris-based mineral exploration company Zamarat Mining, which has established a local subsidiary, Zamarat Mining Madagascar, estimates there are about 150,000 gold panners in the country, producing 3-4 tons of gold annually, although it acknowledged “gold smuggling is a major problem.”
The UN Development Programme Human Development Index, which ranks Madagascar at 135 out of 169 countries, estimates nearly 70 percent of the island’s 20 million people live on US$1.25 a day or less.
In their best week in the past few years the girls made about US$14 each, working a six day week - more than double what they could have earned doing other menial tasks like washing clothes.
The girls say they do the work with their parents’ blessing and the proceeds are used to buy clothes and food.
A gold fragment half the size of a rice grain still arouses great excitement among the panners. The gold is sold at general trading stores in Ankavandra for 70,000 Malagasy ariary (US$36.50) a gram; the minimum quantity they can sell is one tenth of a gram.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92938

POVERTY: AFRICA: Sleeping sickness in cattle

JOHANNESBURG, 20 May 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Chris/Flickr
Hardier Zebu in the not too distant future

New research on sleeping sickness in African cattle is holding out the possibility that in the not too distant future Africa could start seeing the introduction of cattle resistant to sleeping sickness - a disease which kills billions of dollars worth of livestock every year.
The research claims to have isolated two genes critical in the development of disease-resistant cattle.
Harry Noyes, lead author of a paper on this published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) on 16 May, told IRIN their research had been prompted by the fact that while East African humped cattle breeds are susceptible to trypanosome parasites which cause sleeping sickness, the N’Dama, a humpless West African breed, is not seriously affected by the disease.
African animal trypanosomosis - also known as `nagana’ (Zulu: "to be depressed") or tryps - is transmitted through the bite of an infected species of the tsetse fly and is endemic from Senegal to Tanzania, and Chad to Zimbabwe (an area almost the size of the USA).
“The humped cattle [zebu] originated in India, where the tsetse fly is not found, while N’Dama, which probably had been exposed to [the] trypanosome parasite for thousands of years had developed a mechanism to control the impact of the disease,” explained Noyes, a senior researcher at Liverpool University.
Over the past two decades the researchers found at least 10 genes which control the impact of the disease in the N’ Dama breed.
This, of course, does not mean that poor farmers will soon have cattle that are resistant to sleeping sickness
“Out of those resistant genes we isolated what we feel are the two most significant ones for our purposes,” said Steve Kemp, a geneticist with the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), who also collaborated on the study.
Now that the scientists know what they are looking for, they have embarked on the task of isolating humped cattle breeds which also carry the two genes.
Over the next three years, ILRI intends to breed humped cattle varieties with at least one of the genes. The humped cattle breeds produce more milk than the N’Dama.

Decades away?
“This, of course, does not mean that poor farmers will soon have cattle that are resistant to sleeping sickness,” said Kemp. ILRI scientists will only be able to test resistance in the humped cattle after three years.
Thereafter it will take decades before sleeping sickness resistant breeds find their way down the chain to small farmers, the researchers believe.
“We can make the sperm and semen available for dissemination,” said Noyes, adding, however, that it was up to governments and extension services to make it accessible to all farmers.
Developing a resistant breed is critical as most of the drugs claiming to offer immunity to the disease are proving ineffective as new and drug-resistant strains of the disease evolve, according to the researchers. Furthermore, many of the new drugs are unaffordable for poor farmers.
In the week the discovery was published, the Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines (GALVmed), announced a five-year plan to help livestock keepers in Africa access better drugs, diagnostics and maybe even a vaccine to deal with the disease.
Initially, the programme will identify ongoing research which could help livestock farmers.
At least three million cattle die from the disease in Africa every year, according to GALVmed. An estimated 50 million cattle and 70 million sheep and goats are at risk of tryps every year. Although best known for causing human sleeping sickness, the trypanosome parasite’s most devastating blow to human welfare comes when farmers have sick, unproductive cattle, said PNAS in a press release.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92773

POVERTY: MADAGASCAR: A financial crisis on the hoof

AMBOHITSAHATAZA, 1 June 2010 (IRIN) - Far from the world's financial centres, isolated from sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations and collapsing investment banks, Madagascar is going through a financial crisis of its own, and stock prices are plummeting. As in most of rural Africa, wealth is measured in livestock. Joseph Rabemamamtsoa, leader of Ambohitsahataza village in Amphany district in the southwest of the island, told IRIN that the value of his zebu - sturdy cattle with long horns and a fatty hump on their shoulders - had halved. "Normally, we could get up to 300,000 ariary [US$140] for a good animal; now we are lucky to get 150,000." Not only has the value of individual animals dropped in the past few years, the average size of herds has also dwindled. "In a good period one rich family will have between 20 and 40 animals, now they have only 10," Rabemamamtsoa said. Poorer families - most of the roughly 1,700 villagers - now had none. The Malagasy government's Early Warning System (SAP) noted that the average price of a zebu in southern Madagascar had dropped from A221,000 ($103) in March 2008 to A110,000 ($51) in March 2010, which was in line with the 50 percent devaluation experienced in Rabemamamtsoa's community. Breaking the bank In local terms this is a financial meltdown: people in the south of Madagascar depend on their zebu for more than just meat, milk and draught power to pull carts and plough the fields; their herd of zebu are their life's savings, insurance, their standing in the community. "It is what we value most," Rabemamamtsoa said. Lundi Perole, a civil engineer and head of Hiara Hampandroso (Develop Together), a local NGO that helps communities build resilience in the harsh dry conditions of the region, said a large herd of zebu meant social prestige and importance. He has helped build water harvesters with the help of UN World Food Programme (WFP) Food-for-Work projects, in which a community works on projects geared to restoring self-sufficiency in exchange for food aid. On his desk there is a huge pile of envelopes with requests from communities. "Most are for water catchment basins for cattle," he said. "The decision of what to build is taken by the community. We are in the south, [where] water is the big problem. They prefer not having water to drink for themselves than having their zebu without water." The importance that Malagasy attach to their zebu cannot be underestimated: "It is their life and their death," Perole commented. Cultural practice dictates that a deceased person's zebu be slaughtered and the skulls set to decorate the tomb - the more skulls on a tomb, the greater the wealth and status - although outsiders often consider the practice destructive. A buyers market Drought lay at the heart of this local recession, and the consecutive years of scant rain had pushed families beyond their ability to cope, Perole said. By the end of April 2010 the government projected that a record 65 communes in the south would face hunger in the coming months - surpassing the 45 of the previous year - and some 866,000 Malagasy would probably need assistance by June 2010. "Food prices are increasing beyond the purchasing power of the population, reducing their access to food," said Krystyna Bednarska, head of the WFP in Madagascar. Official figures indicate a rising cost of living in southern Madagascar: the price of one kapoaka (a small tin can) of maize, the staple food, rose from A130 ($0.06) in July 2009 to A230 ($0.11) by February 2010 in some areas. Alexandre Huynh, Emergency and Rehabilitation Coordinator at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said poor harvests meant families were forced to sell off assets - like their prized zebu - to make ends meet. "Zebu provide a solution to purchase food during lean seasons and food shortages, but ... as the sale becomes critical to the family, and as numerous households sell their animals at the same time, prices [fall] extremely low," he said. "When the crisis has passed, [people] try to repurchase animals, but at the normal, and higher, market price, which directly contributes to their increasing destitution and current heavy de-capitalization." The loss of local wealth is keenly felt. Rabemamamtsoa said the zebu were being bought and trucked to cities, like Tulear on the southwest coast, "But even up to Antananarivo [the capital, in the north]."