More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World –By Banerjee & Duflo | Foreign Policy

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did.

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We’ve also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we’ve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn’t necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.

But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, is one such expert. In books and countless speeches and television appearances, he has argued that poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; these factors, however, make it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with such endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investments precisely because they are poor — they are in what economists call a “poverty trap.” Until something is done about these problems, neither free markets nor democracy will do very much for them.

But then there are others, equally vocal, who believe that all of Sachs’s answers are wrong. William Easterly, who battles Sachs from New York University at the other end of Manhattan, has become one of the most influential aid critics in his books, The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man’s Burden. Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to Easterly’s with her recent book, Dead Aid. Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies. The best bet for poor countries, they argue, is to rely on one simple idea: When markets are free and the incentives are right, people can find ways to solve their problems. They do not need handouts from foreigners or their own governments. In this sense, the aid pessimists are actually quite optimistic about the way the world works. According to Easterly, there is no such thing as a poverty trap.

This debate cannot be solved in the abstract. To find out whether there are in fact poverty traps, and, if so, where they are and how to help the poor get out of them, we need to better understand the concrete problems they face. Some aid programs help more than others, but which ones? Finding out required us to step out of the office and look more carefully at the world. In 2003, we founded what became the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL. A key part of our mission is to research by using randomized control trials — similar to experiments used in medicine to test the effectiveness of a drug — to understand what works and what doesn’t in the real-world fight against poverty. In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives.

Excerpt, read: More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World  –By Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo | Foreign Policy

Related: The Food Issue| Foreign Policy

• United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)
• World Hunger Map 2011 (PDF)

 

Gendercide in India| The Economist

The news from India’s 2011 census is almost all heartening. Literacy is up; life expectancy is up; family size is stabilizing. But there is one grim exception. In 2011 India counted only 914 girls aged six and under for every 1,000 boys.

Without intervention, just a few more boys would be born than girls. If you compare the number of girls actually born to the number that would have been born had a normal sex ratio prevailed, then 600,000 Indian girls go missing every year. This is less distorted than the sex ratio in China, but whereas China’s ratio has stabilized, India’s is widening, and has been for decades. Sex selection is now invading parts of the country that used not to practice it.

India’s sex ratio shows that gendercide is a feature not just of dictatorship and poverty. Unlike China, India is a democracy: there is no one-child policy to blame. Although parts of the country are poor, poverty alone does not explain India’s preference for sons. The states with the worst sex ratios—Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat—are among the richest (see article), which suggests distorted sex selection will not be corrected just by wealth or government policy. But it can be corrected.

Parents choose to abort female fetuses not because they do not want or love their daughters, but because they feel they must have sons (usually for social reasons); they also want smaller families—and something has to give. Ultrasound technology ensures that this something is a generation of unborn daughters, because it lets them know the sex of a fetus. Sex selection therefore tends to increase with education and income: wealthier, better educated people are more likely to want fewer children and can more easily afford the scans.

But whereas sex selection may be understandable for a family, it is disastrous for a nation. It is an extreme expression of an attitude that says daughters are worth less than sons—a belief that is damaging both to women and to the next generation, since healthier, better educated mothers have healthier, better-educated children.

If sex ratios stay the same, 600,000 missing girls this year will become, in 18 years’ time, over 10m missing future brides. Robbery, rape and bride-trafficking tend to increase in any society with large groups of young single men. And because in China and India men higher up the social ladder find wives more easily than those lower down, the social problems of bachelorhood tend to accumulate like silt among the poorest people and (in India) the lowest castes. This is unjust as well as damaging.

Excerpt, read: Gendercide in India: Add Sugar and Spice | The Economist

Related: The Ground Zero of India’s Gendercide –By Andrew Buncombe | The Independent

Gendercide Watch

 

Croatian Generals Convicted of War Crimes | Al Jazeera

A United Nations War Tribunal has convicted two former Croatian army generals for the persecution and murder of ethnic Serbs during the 1990′s.

Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were sentenced for their roles in the four-year war between Croatia and Serbia, started when Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia.

In August 1995 they launched Operation Storm, seizing back control of Croatia’s Krajina region from ethnic Serb separatists. More than 300 Serbs were killed in the operation and about 90,000 were forced to flee.

Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennan reports.

 

Earth Day 2011: A Billion Acts of Green®

Earth Day, April 22, 2011| Earth Day Network
The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, activated 20 million Americans from all walks of life and is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement. The passage of the landmark Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and many other groundbreaking environmental laws soon followed. Growing out of the first Earth Day, Earth Day Network (EDN) works with over 22,000 partners in 192 countries to broaden, diversify and mobilize the environmental movement. More than 1 billion people now participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance in the world.

But Earth Day Network does not stop there.

All of EDN’s activities, whether greening schools or promoting green economic policies at home and abroad, inform and energize populations so they will act to secure a healthy future for themselves and their children. With its partner organizations, EDN provides civic engagement opportunities at the local, state, national and global levels. At every turn, EDN works to broaden the definition of “environment” to include all issues that affect our health, our communities and our environment, such as greening deteriorated schools, creating green jobs and investment, and promoting activism to stop air and water pollution.

Over the last 40 years, EDN has executed successful environmental campaigns on issues ranging climate change and drinking water to voter registration and saving the whale. EDN is a recognized leader in creating civically–oriented innovative programs with partners outside of the environmental movement to tackle new challenges. Our core programs today focus on:

Greening Schools and Promoting Environmental Education

In partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council and The Clinton Foundation, EDN’s Green Schools Campaign, aims to green all of America’s K-12 schools within a generation.  Green schools save money, conserve energy and water, and foster better-performing, healthier students.  EDN’s Educator’s Network, used by over 30,000 teachers and administrators nationwide, provides innovative tools and resources to promote civic participation and to develop a sense of environmental responsibility among students of all ages. Together, EDN’s Education and Policy Teams organize federal and state legislative campaigns to green school facilities, improve school food, and enhance environmental education and civic engagement.  These include the Healthy Schools Act, No Child Left Inside, the National Civic Education Project, No Idling and the Climate Change Educators’ Grant.  EDN is also working internationally to promote green schools and improve environmental education.

Accelerating the Global Green Economy

For years, EDN has created dialogues and conferences engaging civil society, corporate, and government leaders on how to transition from a traditional, fossil fuel-based economy to one based on renewable energy, energy efficiency and other sustainable development principles. Our Global Day of Conversation continues to provide local government leaders with an opportunity to engage with their constituents in a dialogue about renewable energy, sustainability and the green economy.  As in 2010, EDN will co-host the Climate Leadership Gala with Sir Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room at the Creating Climate Wealth Conference, convening the world’s most successful green business leaders. EDN’s newest initiative, Women and the Green Economy (WAGE™), is promoting the unique leadership role women bring to advancing green economic and investment policies at the international, national and local levels.

A Billion Acts of Green®

From greening schools to hosting town hall discussions on clean energy investment and green jobs, Earth Day Network leads its network in thousands of Earth Day events and actions worldwide each year.  To catalyze global environmental activism, Earth Day Network has chosen A Billion Acts of Green® as the theme for Earth Day 2011. A Billion Acts of Green®–the largest environmental service campaign in the world–inspires and rewards simple individual acts and larger organizational initiatives that further the goal of measurably reducing carbon emissions and supporting sustainability. The goal is to register one billion actions in advance of the global Earth Summit in Rio in 2012.

 

Death Sentences & Executions in 2010 | AI

Countries which continue to use the death penalty are being left increasingly isolated following a decade of progress towards abolition, Amnesty International has said today in its new report Death Sentences and Executions in 2010.

A total of 31 countries abolished the death penalty in law or in practice during the last 10 years but China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Yemen remain amongst the most frequent executioners, some in direct contradiction of international human rights law.

The total number of executions officially recorded by Amnesty International in 2010 went down from at least 714 people in 2009 to at least 527 in 2010, excluding China.

China is believed to have executed thousands in 2010 but continues to maintain its secrecy over its use of the death penalty.

“The minority of states that continue to systematically use the death penalty were responsible for thousands of executions in 2010, defying the global anti-death penalty trend,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

 

Wilbert Rideau, Former Angola Prisoner, Receives Polk Award –By Trymaine Lee | HuffPost

At a podium inside the Roosevelt Hotel last week, Wilbert Rideau, 69, stood before an audience of academics and journalists, as he prepared to deliver a speech more than three decades in the making.

“After 31 years they invited me back,” Rideau said. “They remembered me.”

Thirty-one years ago, while Rideau was serving a life sentence in prison for murder, he was awarded a George Polk Award for his work in journalism, one of the most coveted awards in the industry. He was not able to receive the award in person, until just last week.

Behind the podium, his shoulders slumped a bit, the way you’d expect an old prizefighter’s shoulders to slump. The long years showed in the specks of gray sprinkled throughout his mustache, and in the deep grooves in his face.

“When I won the George Polk Award in 1980, a reporter had to explain to me what it was,” Rideau said, the audience hushed. “It’s difficult to overstate what the award meant to me, a 9th grade dropout and self-taught journalist who had once sat on death row.”

In 1979 when the award was first announced, Rideau joined a distinguished cast of journalists to win that year, including reporters from ‘The New York Times,’ ‘The New Yorker’ and Ed Bradley from ’60 Minutes.’

Rideau was being honored for a series of essays he wrote entitled ‘The Sexual Jungle,’ an in-depth look at the paradigm of prison sex and the power it held behind bars. He interviewed the “slaves” who had been “turned out,” who were no longer considered men, but property. He interviewed rapists, other prisoners, prison guards and wardens.

“Back then prison authorities nationwide did not speak of sexual violence in their prisons. They presented it to the public as something being done by homosexuals, gays, freaks,” Rideau said. “But the reality of it was it was pretty prevalent and it wasn’t isolated — it wasn’t done by gays and homosexuals, the rape and enslavement was done by heterosexuals, and it was done with the tacit approval of prison authorities. It was part of the internal power structure and overall inmate economy.”

The work was raw and groundbreaking, said Ed Hershey, a judge on the Polk Awards committee who voted on Rideau’s series.

“It could have appeared in ‘Harpers,’ ‘The Atlantic’ or ‘The New Yorker,’” Hershey said. “The fact that it was done by and for inmates, was startling.”

As word of that year’s winners spread and newsrooms erupted in cheers, handshakes and hugs, Rideau was called down to the prison’s administrative office, where a reporter waited with the good news.

“He asked me how I felt,” Rideau recalled in a phone interview from his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “But, I had never really heard of the Polk Awards so, I didn’t feel much.”

In 1993, ‘Newsweek’ magazine called him “the most rehabilitated prisoner in America.” But long before that, Rideau was a 19-year-old who grew up poor in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and eventually went on to make the worst decision of his life.

He armed himself with a gun and a knife and decided to rob a bank.

Rideau took three white bank employees hostage and forced them into one of their cars. Once they neared the edge of town, they came upon an old gravel road near a swamp. There, the hostages jumped out of the car and made a break for it. Rideau panicked and squeezed off several shots, striking two of the hostages. He caught the third and stabbed her in the chest. News accounts of the story say Rideau also cut the woman’s throat, a claim he vehemently denies.

All-white, all-male juries convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death in three separate trials, twice in the 1960s and once in 1970. But each time the verdict was thrown out on appeals, the courts citing misconduct by the government.

As the appeals process wore on, Rideau remained on death row, where he came to the conclusion that he wanted to be a writer.

“I was a fairly good observer of human nature and figured maybe I could explain things that puzzled people about criminal behavior,” he said.

Rideau remained on death row until 1972, when the United States issued a moratorium on executions. His death sentence was then commuted to life in prison.

Off of death row he continued to write. First he started an underground prison magazine called ‘The Lifer,’ which the administration quickly shutdown. Then he became editor of the ‘Angolite,’ the first black editor of a prison publication in the country. At that time there were few, if any, black editors editing publications outside of the black press.

While in prison, he eventually became a correspondent for NPR’s ‘Fresh Air,’ appeared on ABC’s ‘Nightline’ and co-directed a couple documentaries, including ‘The Farm: Angola, U.S.A.,’ which was nominated for an Oscar.

Rideau was released in 2005 after a fourth trial, where a mixed-gender, mixed-race jury found him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. He was released on time served after spending 44-years in prison.

Last year he released a critically acclaimed memoir, ‘In the Place of Justice,’ published by Knopf, and he also writes the occasional column and book review.

In 2008, he married Linda LaBranche, a former college professor who first saw him on a television program 25 years ago and ultimately joined the fight to free him.

But of all the awards and accolades, he said, being honored with the George Polk award after all these years is perhaps most special.

“One of these days you’re going to be old,” he said, “and really thrilled when someone reaches back and remembers you.”

Reprint: Wilbert Rideau, Former Angola Prisoner, Receives Polk Award  –By Trymaine Lee | HuffPost

Related: Wilbert Rideau (Website)

 

Rasema Handanovic, Bosnian War Crimes Suspect, Held in Oregon –By Steven Gorman | Reuters

Rasema Handanovic is accused of committing war crimes in the Balkans was ordered held without bond on Friday to await a hearing on a request for extradition to her native Bosnia and Herzegovina (AP).

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters/Dan Cook) – A single mother accused of committing war crimes in the Balkans was ordered held without bond on Friday to await a hearing on a request for extradition to her native Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A U.S. magistrate judge ruled that Rasema Handanovic, 39, who moved to the United States in 1996 and became a naturalized citizen in 2002, was a flight risk and danger to the community.

She is accused of killing 15 to 16 unarmed Croat civilians and prisoners of war in the village of Trusina as a member of the Bosnian army’s special Zulfikar unit in April 1993, according to witness statements cited in her extradition request. Prosecutors said the witnesses had served with her in the Bosnian military.

Assistant U.S. Attorney David Atkinson told the judge that Handanovic had threatened suicide while in custody, and he referred to her suffering a “psychotic event” just before her initial court appearance on Wednesday.

Handanovic, dressed in a blue prison uniform, said nothing and appeared calm during her hour-long hearing on Friday, in marked contrast to her demeanor on Wednesday when the judge ordered the defendant to compose herself.

Defense attorney Lisa Hay argued that her client suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a war victim herself. “She suffered sexual assault at the hands of law enforcement personnel (in Bosnia), and her fiance was murdered,” Hay said.

Hay also told the judge that disability payments received by Handanovic, a former security guard, were the sole source of financial support for her 11-year-old son and elderly parents who lived with her in the Portland suburb of Beaverton.

But prosecutors say her extradition request painted Handanovic as a cold-blooded killer who “committed abhorrent, wanton crimes, especially serial murder.”

“She is readily capable of intimidating (or worse) the witnesses who gave statements against her,” prosecutors said in their court filings. All the witnesses reside overseas.

Handanovic was arrested on Wednesday, at about the same time as the arrest of a man from Everett, Washington, Edin Dzeko, 39, accused of similar atrocities as part of the same army unit.

The charges stem from a 1993-94 war between Bosnians, Muslims and Croats that was ended by a Washington-brokered peace deal. A Bosnian state war crimes court was set up in 2005 to try thousands of suspects and take over mid- and low-ranking cases from a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Handanovic’s extradition hearing was tentatively set for June 28.

Reprint:  Rasema Handanovic, Bosnian War Crimes Suspect, Held in Oregon –By Steven Gorman | Reuters/ HuffPost

 

Birthright – Right to Life in Guatemala | Al Jazeera (Video)

Today, illegal abortions are the leading cause of death among young women in Latin America. Whether they are performed in major cities or in the isolated countryside, these ‘back room’ abortions are leaving thousands of young women dead each year. Guatemala has the highest fertility rate among women and yet it remains the poorest country in the region where women can ill afford large families. Unwanted pregnancies, couple with the forces of tradition and politics, leave few options for these families. Through the work of an activist and the medical team she leads, this film explores the questions of family planning, which many see as the right to life.

 

Europe’s Shame: 10 Million Roma Face Discrimination (Videos)

There are more than ten million Roma across Europe who are being systematically discriminated against, excluded from society and attacked. Last month the European Court of Human Rights began hearings in the case of a Romani woman from Slovakia who says she was sterilized against her will. And France’s decision to expel Romani immigrants living in temporary settlements was met with consternation by human rights activists. In such an environment, even Romani children have been targeted and segregated.

In the UK, animosity between the country’s largest Gypsy community and a nearby town has come to a head. The travellers, who’re being told to leave their home of decades, say they won’t go down without a fight. And as RT’s Laura Emmett reports, human dignity is being sacrificed simply to increase house prices.

Related: American Gypsies Face Challenges (Video)

Campaign to End Discrimination Against the Romani People

 

Omar Barghouti, Palestinian Advocate of Israel Boycott, Finally Granted US Visa| Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! speaks to Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, author of the new book, “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.” After months of extended delays and an international public pressure campaign, in March the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem granted Barghouti a visa to visit the United States for his book tour.

OMAR BARGHOUTI is an independent Palestinian commentator and human rights activist. He is a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University, NY, and a master’s degree in philosophy (ethics) from Tel Aviv University.