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News on Poverty in Africa
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Poverty and Hunger in Africa. We will post African Poverty News on this page.
AFRICA: 28 days to save a life
DAKAR, 16 June 2009 (IRIN) - More than 1,500 babies born on any given day in sub-Saharan Africa will die within 24 hours, according to a recent report by UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the non-profit Save the Children, which measured African government’s progress on improving child health.
EAST AFRICA: Banana blight puts livelihoods at risk
“BXW is the most serious threat to banana production in East Africa,” Wafa Khoury, a plant pathologist and agricultural officer in the Plant Production and Protection Division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told IRIN. “BXW is very serious because it could wipe out all cultivars planted in the continent, with almost no resistance detected... "The plants wilt and eventually die. They either do not produce fruits, and when they do, they are hard and inedible to either humans or animals and they cannot be processed even," Khoury said. Bananas and plantains are the world’s fourth most important food crop after rice, wheat, and maize. BXW symptoms include premature ripening of fruits, pale yellow ooze from cut surfaces, wilting of bracts and male buds, and progressive yellowing leading to complete wilting. Plants generally show symptoms within three weeks of infection. Fields infested with the bacteria cannot be replanted with banana for at least six months due to carry-over of soil-borne inoculum, according to a report titled Xanthomonas wilt, a threat to banana production in East and Central Africa, by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Once BXW occurs in a field, there is no remedy other than to cut down all infected plants, completely dig out the rhizomes, and place the field under at least a six-month fallow period or a prolonged crop-rotation regime. "... If uncontrolled, BXW would spread at a rate of 8 percent per annum in cooking banana plantations, causing an estimated production loss of about 53 percent over a 10-year period," stated the report.
BXW has devastated plantations in the central, western and southern regions of Uganda, Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, head of banana research at Uganda’s National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO), told IRIN. At least 50 percent of plantations in the affected districts have been wiped out, threatening the food security of up to 14 million people, according to NARO. Uganda is the world’s second-largest banana producer after India. In 2005, Uganda produced 650,000 metric tonnes of bananas; however, output is estimated to have dropped to about 400,000MT in 2008, according to the agriculture ministry. East Africa is the largest banana-producing and consuming region in Africa. NARO predicts land under banana cultivation could drop another 20 percent in 2010 without adequate funding for disease control. The potential economic impact of BXW is high. "Based on estimates of the Ugandan government, BXW caused yield losses of up to US$75 million in 2006 with a projected overall economic loss of $2-$8 billion in the next 10 years," said FAO's Khoury. However, no other impact studies have been done. Disease control “Luckily, and despite the fact that the disease can spread like fire... BXW could be contained using proper field management practices,” he said. These include removing male buds, which are the entryway for new infections, destroying infected plants, using clean field tools and planting material, as well as not using banana remains from unknown sources as mulches. “Wherever these simple management recommendations have been practised by farmers in a consistent way, the disease has been completely eliminated from their fields.” Local government authorities have passed by-laws including fines and penalties for farmers who do not heed similar directives in Uganda. Countries afflicted In Rwanda, BXW is devastating plantations, especially in the north. According to Rwanda’s institute of statistics, banana production has maintained an average growth of around 5 percent in the last three years, but this may be affected by the disease. Kagera region, northwest Tanzania, is among areas affected, Khadija Rajab, research coordinator and deputy head of the plant protection division in Zanzibar's Ministry of Agriculture told IRIN. "Unlike black sigatoka, which affects mostly the Cavendish and dwarf Cavendish varieties, and Panama disease, which affects the Bluggoe and Silk varieties, Xanthomonas can affect all the banana varieties in the region." Leena Tripathi, a biotechnologist with IITA, told IRIN that in the short term, decapitating male buds and cutting and burying infected banana plants, are recommended. "But most of the farmers are reluctant to apply these as they are labour-intensive," Tripathi said. "Farmers prefer resistant varieties. So developing resistant varieties is [the] long-term solution," she said. However, conventional breeding of bananas is a difficult and lengthy process due to the sterility of most cultivars, coupled with long generation times. "To circumvent these difficulties, transgenic technologies may provide a cost-effective alternative solution to the BXW pandemic," she said. Source: http://www.irinnews.org KENYA: From prison to pigs
"We got together and decided that living hand-to-mouth was hard enough without the label of an ex-convict; we had to do something on our own, even if it took years for it to become profitable," group chairman Peter Ngigi said. "That is when we opted for pig-rearing; it was easy to find food for the animals as we go round scavenging from hotel bins for their feed. We later bought two cows and some goats." Ngigi, 21, and his friends, who grew up in the slums, had several brushes with the law for petty crimes. Some of them served time in prison. The place they call home is called Kosovo in reference to intense gang fighting in 2002, when the area became a no-go zone for the Mungiki, a proscribed quasi-religious militia group that controls other slum areas in the city. Like most slums in the city, conditions in Kosovo are terrible; unplanned and congested houses, open sewers, few toilets for hundreds of people, no running water and the polluted Nairobi River running through it.
Two years after they started their project, Ngigi and his friends have 22 pigs, three goats and three kids as well as two cows, housed in an unfinished, semi-permanent building. "The recent swine flu scare has been the greatest setback [because] we are not able to sell the pigs," Ngigi told IRIN on 26 May. "We hope the disease does not break out in Kenya; we would be finished." The Kangaroo Youth Self-Help Group project is restricted, however, because most members have limited knowledge of animal husbandry and marketing. "We had hoped this project would lift us out of poverty; although we have yet to depend on it entirely for our upkeep, we are not giving up," Hillary Wachira, 25, said. He said they were motivated to start pig-rearing by another young man, who has since left the slum. "Kariz [a nickname] even managed to buy himself two matatus [taxis] by rearing pigs here in Kosovo, which he would then sell to butchers in the area and to those in other parts of the city. So we thought, why not embark on something similar, perhaps we could also make something of our lives," Wachira said. The main challenge, Ngigi said, was finding space for the animals. They only got lucky when a fellow slum resident, who had reared pigs in the past, allowed them to use her unfinished building for their project. "The woman who owns this building is helping us; we pay about 1,000 shillings a month [US$13] which is really not the going rate for rent in this area," Ngigi said. "She also gave us advice on how to take care of the pigs; the right time to de-worm them, the right amount of food for the piglets and even showed us the agro vet shop from where we buy drugs."
Lack of training
SUDAN: Thousands homeless as shelters demolished in Juba
"More than 30,000 people, many of them internally displaced, have been left homeless and are living in poor sanitary conditions with all the health and environmental risks this entails," the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) said in a statement on 25 May. International standards include reasonable prior notification and the possibility for the affected to challenge the decision. They also include provision of alternative land and compensation. "Most of these standards recognised in Southern Sudan’s laws have not been met," UNMIS said. "With the rainy season approaching, the UN is worried that there may be a sharp deterioration in the living conditions of these populations." The forced demolition of several small settlements in the Southern capital has been going on for four months, with bulldozers - supported by large numbers of armed police and soldiers - knocking flat thatched or tin shelters. There was no immediate comment from the Central Equatoria State authorities that organised the exercise. They have, however, previously said they were only bulldozing houses built by squatters without permission. Those affected said they had been left homeless with their livelihoods destroyed. "My shop was destroyed with my goods inside," said Selim Lado Carlos, who claimed he received no warning of the clearances. "Many people, not only me, lost their property. We lost what we were hoping could improve our lives." Land ownership questions Many of the tightly packed settlements were settled during Sudan’s long civil war. At that time, Juba was a garrison town for northern government forces, surrounded by the then southern rebels. Other areas were settled more recently, as former refugees returned home to try to rebuild their lives with the end of Sudan’s civil war in 2005. When they settled in the area during the chaotic years following the peace deal, locals said, there was little formal system to land ownership. Some said they had documents proving ownership, but were ignored by soldiers and forced to leave anyway. Since the demolitions began, many of those affected have moved to Gudelle area on the very edge of Juba, some 6km from the town centre.
The original settlements had few services, but the new areas being settled lack any at all, the locals said. Many cannot afford the higher transport costs to reach their work in central Juba. "Everywhere there are now houses being built in Gudelle, every day you see 10 new houses," said Emmanuel Ayon, who works in a school in the rapidly growing area. "You hardly find a pit latrine - even at the school here – and yet the people still come because of the destruction." Ayon helped run the Mother and Children NGO, which supported school construction in Juba’s suburbs. Its office was destroyed in the demolitions – despite Ayon claiming the group had legal papers. In recent months, the number of pupils at the school in Gudelle has doubled. "We have received no support from the authorities," Ayon added. "Many people here are suffering very badly indeed." Demanding that the demolitions stop, UNMIS criticised the lack of alternatives that authorities should have provided to those forced to move, warning of the humanitarian impact. The authorities, it said, should "take prompt and necessary steps to provide alternative land, adequate housing, access to basic services, and compensation to the large numbers of families who have been suddenly uprooted from their homes in the past four months". source: http://www.irinnews.org
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Absolute Poverty In developing countries, poor and needy people spend up to 80 % of their disposable income on food. There is no buffer to modify their food costs. Those who always lived on the edge of starvation have been tipped over that edge by spiraling prices. Economic theory known as Engel’s Law notes that the proportion of a nation’s income spent on food is a good measure of the nation’s welfare. This is part of an article from the July issue of Spotlight on Orphans newsletter. Read Spotlight on Orphans newsletters to see how Hearth to Hearth Ministries is fighting poverty in Africa by working to feed hungry children.
Poverty in America The US is now in a depression and the poverty rate of poverty in America is probably much worse now.
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