Overpopulation myths

By Obadias Ndaba,from The African Executive

There is no relationship between population size and development. When people are educated and earn high income, authentic development occurs. However, today, illiterate people in villages across the developing world are being taught, through different government or donor funded programs, that birth control is the way to development.This is just placing emphasis where it shouldn’t be.

When people are provided with good education, security, healthcare services that reduce child mortality and opportunities to exercise their talents, they will make free choices, and as history has shown, they will responsibly determine the spacing of their children according to their needs, desires, hopes and dreams.

This mindset of “managing population” has shifted attention away from more pressing issues like education, healthcare services and transfer of technology that would boost economies in poor countries. This is easily done by associating population growth with every other problem from food shortages to environmental degradation. Though the world population has more than doubled since 1950, food supplies have more than tripled globally in the same period.

----------------------------
the tragedy in Zimbabwe is that they are exporting their best minds because of the bad government doesn't allow democracy or opportunities for the educated.
We have a similar problem in the Philippines, where an oligarchy of rich families means the middle class like our family have to emigrate to get good paying jobs, and the widespread corruption means that many industries won't invest here.

What Africa needs

Reason.com links to this UN report on what Africa needs.

Obama pledges 73 million to Zim

from the Washington Post:

President Obama announced today that the United States will provide $73 million in aid to Zimbabwe, saying the economically-wracked nation has made progress since Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai entered a power-sharing arrangement with longtime President Robert Mugabe four months ago....

The $73 million in assistance will not be going to the government but directly to services for citizens, Obama said, because "we continue to be concerned about consolidating democracy, human rights and rule of law." Obama renewed sanctions against Zimbabwe in March, in an effort to press Mugabe into making changes to improve human rights.

To Aid or not to aid?N

NYTimes editorial HERE

...The reluctance of Western governments and human rights groups to embrace the current Zimbabwean government is understandable. There is, in particular, no real reason to believe that Mr. Mugabe, after decades of dictatorial rule and abuse, has suddenly embraced multiparty democracy. If he had, after all, he would not be president now.

But Zimbabwe may well be a case where the best is the enemy of the good. Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, went into the unity government with its eyes open. “We had won the election but we did not have the support of the military,” Mr. Tsvangirai told us this month in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. “We did not want to be the authors of chaos. Instead we need to soft-land the crisis, stabilize the situation through peace and stability and democratic consolidation.” Accordingly, he views Mr. Mugabe as “both part of the problem and part of the solution: we cannot untangle the tentacles of the state without him.”...

Humanitaria aid used to pay government salaries

from SWRadioAfrica

...Mutambara announced that through a strategy he has dubbed ‘humanitarian plus’, the government would receive money under the banner of humanitarian assistance, to “pay for grants to students who are going to college, to pay for the salaries of teachers in higher education, to pay for salaries of teachers in the primary schools and secondary schools.”...

since the switchover to foreign currancy, the government has lacked the foreign currancy to pay civil servant and teachers. The real worry is that the money will be diverted into certain people's bank accounts, something that happened with previous aid that the government was given...

alas, such diversion is common in many countries...

Will aid money get stolen?

UKTelegraph:

actually headline is:
Zimbabwe: Corruption fears over £300m UN aid

Zimbabwe is set to receive almost $500 million (£307 million) of aid for its health system, with the money going through President Robert Mugabe's Reserve Bank, raising fears that his regime will benefit. ....

But Zimbabwean law states that all foreign exchange must be deposited with the Reserve Bank. Gideon Gono, its governor and one of Mr Mugabe’s closest allies, routinely delays releasing any funds.

The Reserve Bank held on to $600,000 for one aid programme for several months. A senior official with one donor organisation in Harare said that some funds had actually gone missing after arriving at the Reserve Bank.

“The next round of money is desperately needed in Zimbabwe, but no one will feel good about any going into the RBZ [Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe],” he said.

Dr Greg Powell, a human rights campaigner in Harare, said that large sums of donor money in foreign currency had been taken from the accounts of local aid agencies during this year’s bitterly contested presidential election, which is yet to be resolved as Mr Mugabe clings to power. “During the election period, foreign money from a number of NGOs [non-governmental organisations] disappeared from their bank accounts,” he said.

“They were told they could be paid out at the official rate of exchange in Zimbabwe dollars - at a very low rate of exchange at that time, or that they will get it back some time in the future.”,.....

How Green Activists harm Africa

from the UKTimes:

Western do-gooders are impoverishing Africa by promoting traditional farming at the expense of modern scientific agriculture, according to Britain's former chief scientist.

Anti-science attitudes among aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green activists are denying the continent access to technology that could improve millions of lives, Professor Sir David King will say today.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from Europe and America are turning African countries against sophisticated farming methods, including GM crops, in favour of indigenous and organic approaches that cannot deliver the continent's much needed “green revolution”, he believes.

Speaking before a keynote lecture tonight to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he is president, Sir David said that the slow pace of African development was linked directly to Western influence. “I'm going to suggest, and I believe this very strongly, that a big part has been played in the impoverishment of that continent by the focus on nontechnological agricultural techniques, on techniques of farming that pertain to the history of that continent rather than techniques that pertain to modern technological capability. Why has that continent not joined Asia in the big green revolutions that have taken place over the past few decades? The suffering within that continent, I believe, is largely driven by attitudes developed in the West which are somewhat anti-science, anti-technology - attitudes that lead towards organic farming, for example, attitudes that lead against the use of genetic technology for crops that could deal with increased salinity in the water, that can deal with flooding for rice crops, that can deal with drought resistance.”

--------------

I agree...we grow organic rice, but do use hybrid high yield seeds; our fertilizer is organic, but we add minerals as needed; and we use hand plows (large rototillers) that save a lot of energy in preparing the fields.

When we harvest, we use a thresher to separate the grain from the stem...but we still dry on the road (in the sun) but there are grain driers if a typhoon is around and theatening to keep the grain wet and prone to mold...

and with proper irrigation, we get two crops a year...and are trying to figure out if we could get three crops, as is done in the Mekong Delta.

The problem with foreign aid to Africa

From the Seattle WA USA PI newspaper.

Summary: Aid projects that ignore local culture and situations, corrupt dictators that oppose building roads, steal aid money, or fail to keep them in repair, aid money spent for foreigners to be consultants or to buy supplies from foreign firms, etc.

Conclusion: not much. but they comment that in the future most money will go to democracies where gov't is more likely to make sure it gets to the voters, not their own pockets.

food for votes in Zimbabwe

Local relief groups complain that government pressure is compromising their ability to feed a hungry population.

By Nonthando Bhebhe in Harare (AR No. 113, 24-May-07)

The Zimbabwean authorities have a history of controlling access to food for political purposes. As the ongoing drought adds to the food shortages, and the 2008 elections draw closer, the government is once again focusing its attention on distribution.

By imposing restrictions on non-government organisations, NGOs, officials are curbing their ability to provide food aid. And as international donor find that their local partners are less and less able to operate freely, there is a danger they will divert food aid to countries where it can be distributed effectively.

During the liberation struggle in what was then Rhodesia in the Seventies, Ian Smith’s white minority regime withheld food from rural areas in an attempt to starve out rebel guerrilla groups.

Soon after independence in 1980, the new administration of President Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party again used food as a weapon against political opponents. During the Gukurahundi campaign, in which thousands of civilians in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions died, shops were closed and relief aid was halted to these drought-stricken areas, just to prevent a few hundred armed dissident fighters from accessing food....

As well as selective distribution through its own food aid centres, the government has tried to influence the way international relief groups manage distribution.

In the run up to the 2002 presidential election, ZANU-PF members warned local chiefs and headmen in some areas that they would be denied supplies of food aid for their communities if they did not deliver an electoral victory for Mugabe. ...

Then in 2004, months before the crucial 2005 parliamentary election, the authorities introduced the controversial Non-Government Organisation Bill which restricted the activities of NGOs and human rights groups, particularly those financed from abroad....


As a result, an estimated 2.3 million rural people in need of food aid had to rely completely on government assistance programmes. Food imports arranged by the MDC were seized at the border and distributed by government.

In autumn 2006, the government lifted a ban on NGOs handing out food. But as the country heads towards next year’s make-or-break presidential and parliamentary election, the government is again trying to control NGOs, particularly those involved in food aid, human rights, civic education and election monitoring.

Local aid groups are now jittery after Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said all NGOs had been "deregistered" and must apply for new licenses to operate....


The government is shipping state-subsidy grain for public distribution – but only to ZANU-PF strongholds. Given the state Grain Marketing Board’s history of discriminatory allocation, supporters of the opposition are likely to suffer.

“Food distribution has been made political,” Fambai Ngirande, spokesperson for the National Association of NGOs, told IWPR.

“Distribution organisations have been compelled to give food only to card-carrying members of the ruling party. These agencies have been denied access to some areas, and told to leave the food with government distribution arms.”...

Bush admin starts new approach for food aid

.....

It was here in Kansas City, at the 2005 food aid conference, that the Bush administration pushed for a fundamental change in food aid that would have diminished profits to domestic agribusiness and shipping companies. It proposed allowing a quarter of the Food for Peace budget to be used to buy food in poor countries near hunger crises, rather than buying only American-grown food that had to be shipped across oceans.

And Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns spoke at the conference on Wednesday to again make the administration’s case for the same idea, contending that such a policy would speed delivery, improve efficiency and save many lives.

Congress in each of the past two years killed the proposal, which was opposed by agribusiness and shipping interests who stood to lose business, even as it won support from liberal Democrats like Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Earl Blumenauer of Oregon — generally not a subset of lawmakers found in the president’s corner.

But there are signs that the frozen politics of the issue are beginning to thaw, especially as evidence of flaws in the current aid system mounts.

A Government Accountability Office report released on the eve of this conference described in stark detail a system rife with inefficiencies: the amount of food shipped over the past five years has fallen by half as shipping and other logistical costs have soared. Only a little more than a third of federal food aid spending actually buys food. The United States feeds about 70 million people a year now instead of the more than 100 million it fed five years ago.

And experts worry that the food aid budget will feed even fewer of the world’s 850 million hungry people as soaring demand for corn to make ethanol drives up the cost of that staple, a mainstay of food aid programs.

This year, some farm state lawmakers are for the first time considering backing a pilot program to test buying food overseas....

Some researchers and advocates say it is time to rethink the American approach to fighting world hunger.

“Are we committed to eradicating hunger because it’s feasible, not terribly expensive and our moral obligation as the richest society in human history?” asked Christopher B. Barrett, a Cornell University economist and the co-author of “Food Aid After Fifty Years.” “Or are we just trying to placate a few agribusiness, shipping and NGO constituencies with a handout?” referring to nongovernmental organizations.

But some in Congress, as well as lobbyists for interest groups that benefit from food aid, warn that untying aid from requirements that the food be grown in America and mostly shipped on American-flagged vessels would shatter the political coalition that has sustained the program for decades and made the United States the world’s largest food aid donor. They also warn that cash sent to poor countries can be misused or stolen, and that a mismanaged program to buy food in poor countries could drive up food prices...

PBS discussion on foreign aid

Lots of pros and cons...

Do you make people buy things to help themselves (but some are too poor to do so) or do you give them away (and they end up on the black market used for other reasons).

It's late and I don't think it says anything profound...

Wonder if they would do something useful, like ask the Chinese merchants to set up factories...

Naaah...don't think so, since the article keeps refering to the "white man's burden"...