Home
Weiye Loh's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
the world’s half-billion small farms account for 60% of global agriculture production and provide up to 80% of the food supply in developing countries. Together, they manage vast areas of our planet, including 80% of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Can we really count on these farmers, many of them desperately poor, to take a leading role in addressing the twin challenges of food security and environmental sustainability? Can they produce more food while protecting the natural environment?
-
Rwanda’s efforts to promote climate-smart agriculture are supported by a wider policy and investment framework that seeks to ensure that all farmers, however small, have access to improved seeds, technical know-how, and a market for their output. Every developing country must understand that we can ensure that smallholders produce more food in sustainable ways only if their farming is profitable.
Indeed, increasing environmentally sustainable farming among smallholders around the world will require reshaping national policies and the architecture of public and private investment so that farmers can learn these techniques, witness their value, and employ them profitably.
-
The lesson is simple: identify the climate-smart farming practices and techniques that can boost agricultural production, convey the relevant know-how to smallholders, support them as they make the transition, and create a policy environment that enables them to take advantage of this knowledge.
If national policies and international development initiatives support the transition to climate-smart agriculture in these ways, we have no doubt that smallholders everywhere will step up and do their part to help save the planet.
[F]or the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty — on less than $1.25 a day — fell in every developing region from 2005 to 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate.
The progress is so drastic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline.
India has always believed that legal form should follow the substance. A legally binding agreement, by itself, is no guarantee for increased ambition or its implementation. Some Kyoto Protocol Parties have recently made unilateral announcements to renounce their legal obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. This is a clear pointer to the fact that a legal form is useful only as long as the party is willing to abide by it. Moreover, India has always taken a stand that India cannot agree to a legally binding agreement for emissions reduction at this stage of our development. Our emissions are bound to grow as we have to ensure our social and economic development and fulfill the imperative of poverty eradication.
Some Parties led by the European Union wanted to delete the option relating to ‘legal outcome’ which was originally mooted by India., We successfully resisted this pressures and in turn suggested a similar expression ‘agreed outcome with legal force’ which found acceptance with all the Parties. The post 2020 arrangements, when finalized, may include some aspirational CoP decisions, binding CoP decisions, setting up of new institutions and bodies, and new protocols or other legal instruments as necessary to implement the decisions covering various issues with various degrees of binding-ness as per domestic or international provisions of law under the Convention.
I must clarify that this decision does not imply that India has to take binding commitments to reduce its emissions in absolute terms in 2020
“Food is always more or less in demand,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. While the founder of modern capitalism pointed out that the wealthy consume no more food than their poor neighbors, because the “desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach,” the desire for material luxury “seems to have no limit or certain boundary.” Hunger, therefore, is the foundation of wealth.
“The poor, in order to obtain food,” Smith wrote, “exert themselves to gratify those fancies of the rich.”
The modern investor, epitomized by the insatiable appetite of Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street, has taken Smith’s advice to heart. But new financial instruments have now been introduced that have taken food inequality to levels unheard of in the eighteenth century. As it turns out, there is a downside to playing with your food.
Bad design kills people.
That's right. It's not a matter of aesthetics, or of politics, or of opinion. It's a plain fact: When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.
Don't believe me? Well, let me refresh your memory about Raquel Nelson, the Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted of vehicular homicide, second degree -- but not for anything she did behind the wheel. No, she was crossing a busy road with three children when her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed.
You might have heard about the story of Raquel Nelson — nearly a year ago, her 4 year-old son was killed by a drunk driver as they crossed the street with the rest of their family. Nelson and her daughter were injured, too. The drunk driver ended up serving six months of prison, and was released, despite having two prior hit and run violations on his record — Nelson, meanwhile, was charged for manslaughter because she failed to use a crosswalk that was a third of a mile away. She faces up to three years in prison.
Outrageous absurdities abound in this case — punishing a mother more than the killer chief among them — but there’s one that hasn’t gotten due attention. And that’s the absurdity of building and maintaining communities in which it’s not only difficult to walk, but downright dangerous to do so — and then favoring the drivers within the legal system. As Grist’s Sarah Goodyear points out, bad city design literally kills.
-
Nelson lived in the neighborhood right across the street, but that street happened to be a relatively busy four lane road. But the nearest crosswalk was a third a mile down the road — meaning they’d end up adding nearly an entire mile in order to circumnavigate the road as per the community’s design. The kids were tired, and it was getting dark — would you blame her for crossing that street, if you didn’t know what was going to happen next? She’d done it safely hundreds of times before.
But this time, a speeding, out-of-control driver (he was also on pills and legally half-blind), slammed into the family.
And yet our society still allocates an equal amount of blame to the mother.
-
The system is penalizing a woman for failing to successfully evade a speeding car. Despite there being no good way for that woman to navigate her community without a car — the implication here is that you can be punished for not having one. All this despite the fact that we’re told to ingrain the mantra ‘Driving is a privilege, not a right’ into our heads when we apply for our drivers’ licenses. Our society indeed treats driving like a right.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
In May, the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change made media waves with a new report on renewable energy. As in the past, the IPCC first issued a short summary; only later would it reveal all of the data. So it was left up to the IPCC’s spin-doctors to present the take-home message for journalists.
The first line of the IPCC’s press release declared, “Close to 80% of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies.” That story was repeated by media organizations worldwide.
Last month, the IPCC released the full report, together with the data behind this startlingly optimistic claim. Only then did it emerge that it was based solely on the most optimistic of 164 modeling scenarios that researchers investigated. And this single scenario stemmed from a single study that was traced back to a report by the environmental organization Greenpeace. The author of that report – a Greenpeace staff member – was one of the IPCC’s lead authors.
The claim rested on the assumption of a large reduction in global energy use. Given the number of people climbing out of poverty in China and India, that is a deeply implausible scenario.
-
This sort of behavior – with activists and big energy companies uniting to applaud anything that suggests a need for increased subsidies to alternative energy – was famously captured by the so-called “bootleggers and Baptists” theory of politics.
The theory grew out of the experience of the southern United States, where many jurisdictions required stores to close on Sunday, thus preventing the sale of alcohol. The regulation was supported by religious groups for moral reasons, but also by bootleggers, because they had the market to themselves on Sundays. Politicians would adopt the Baptists’ pious rhetoric, while quietly taking campaign contributions from the criminals.
-
Of course, today’s climate-change “bootleggers” are not engaged in any illegal behavior. But the self-interest of energy companies, biofuel producers, insurance firms, lobbyists, and others in supporting “green” policies is a point that is often missed.
- 3 more annotation(s)...
-
The idea of depletable self-control has been around for awhile now. Basically, exerting willpower in one area makes it harder to exert it in others, or in other words, you can essentially “use up” your willpower.
-
Mostly because poor people end up exerting a lot of mental energy on almost every financial decision.
Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”
- 2 more annotation(s)...
Minuscule literacy rates and prevailing poverty may not be conditions particularly conducive to publishing entrepreneurship, but they were no hindrance for Monrovia’s The Daily Talk, a clever concept by Alfred Sirleaf that reaches thousands of Liberians every day by printing just once copy. That copy just happens to reside on a large blackboard on the side of one of the capital’s busiest roads. Sirleaf started the project in 2000, at the peak of Liberia’s civil war, but its cultural resonance and open access sustained it long after the war was over. To this day, he runs this remarkable one-man show as the editor, reporter, production manager, designer, fact-checker and publicist of The Daily Talk. For an added layer of thoughtfulness and sophistication, Sirleaf uses symbols to indicate specific topics for those who struggle to read.
The common man in society can’t afford a newspaper, can’t afford to buy a generator to get on the internet — you know, power shortage — and people are caught up in a city where they have no access to information. And all of these things motivated me to come up with a kind of free media system for people to get informed.” ~ Alfred Sirleaf
-
Handwritten newspapers.
-
- 1 more annotation(s)...
The anti-poverty industry is a multibillion-dollar money spinner. You can go to conferences and talk all day about growth, trade, debt restructuring, aid effectiveness, tax holidays, international financial architecture and supply chains, and then, as you're leaving the posh hotel you've been staying in, realise that you haven't once even mentioned the word poverty, let alone thought about poor people.
-
Of course you can never understand poverty by spending a few days with poor people. But you have to start somewhere, and there is no better place to begin. Most people in rich countries have no idea what extreme poverty is like, and knowing a little bit is better than knowing nothing at all.
-
the important thing is not actually being there in person, but the ability to empathise. Most people never see extreme poverty first hand, but are still able to empathise, just by hearing about it, or seeing it on television.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
-
- It is realistic to think that poverty can one day end?
- What, in your view, are the best global solutions?
- How urgent is it to act (in the context of climate change)?
A reporter emailed me this morning to see if I could answer a few questions about poverty. Sure I said. The emailed questions that followed?
-
My first reaction: thanks for asking the easy questions, lady. Was this serious? How can one possibly answer the grand questions of development in a few sentences?
- 6 more annotation(s)...
-
The Brookings Institution has a new report out by Lawrence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz (here in PDF) on trends in global poverty
-
The new estimates of global poverty presented in this brief serve as a reminder of just how powerful high growth can be in freeing people from poverty. In the span of a decade, the share of the world’s population living in poverty could be cut by two-thirds, the number of countries where more than 1 in 6 people live in poverty could drop from 60 to 35, and 19 countries are poised to eliminate poverty altogether.
- 3 more annotation(s)...
A Culture of Poverty
-
When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.
-
It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. Of course, most white people only pay attention when Bill Cosby or Barack Obama are making that criticism. The problem is that rarely do such critiques ask why anyone would embrace such values. Moreover, they tend to assume that there's something uniquely "black" about those values, and their the embrace.
- 7 more annotation(s)...
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Poverty
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo