Tag Archives: Aid

Share Your Ideas to Help Solve Global Food Crisis

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Have you watched this?

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Super powerful, right?
Did you know that Heifer International was started from the idea of one man? Dan West, Heifer’s founder, saw a problem and envisioned a solution. Over time, that idea evolved into a model that has helped 13.6 million families lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.
What if you had the next idea?
Dan West lived way before the Internet. Way before institutions like the World Bank asked the question: What’s YOUR Solution?

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Some of those ideas sound familiar? Access to technology. Reducing waste. Safety nets. Storage capabilities. Research and extension linkages. Empowerment of small-scale farmers. Increase food productivity.
These are things Heifer does. So what does this mean? It means we’re on the right track, but there is always room for new ideas. Head over to World Bank’s website, read through the ideas already posted, and post your own. Participate in their Open Forum: Food Crisis April 14-15. And post your ideas here!

NYT on Fasting and Budget Cuts

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It’s worth noting that Food Columnist Mark Bittman of The New York Times joined the fasting trend this week to call attention to U.S. budget proposals that slash programs for the poor and hungry. As he mentions in his Tuesday column “I surprised myself; after all I eat for a living. …

“For me, the fast is a way to demonstrate my interest in this fight, as well as a way to remind myself and others that there are bigger things in life than dinner. (Shocking, I know.)”
Bittman shares his conversation with World Food Prize co-laureate David Beckmann of Bread for the World (Heifer’s President Jo Luck received the prize as well this year).
He posted an update yesterday that tells the story of Heifer International, which as you know started with Founder Dan West, a relief worker during the Spanish Civil War who declared “These children don’t need a cup, they need a cow.” Read the whole column here.
Outraged by the food-related cuts in the House budget appropriations bill, Bittman notes that “one little waste of money that isn’t going to be cut: the millions that the defense department spends to sponsor cars in NASCAR races. Phew.”
Before we run out of space and attention, I’d like to highlight his link to an infographic by the Center for American Progress that shows a side-by-side comparsion of tax breaks for the wealthy vs. cuts to the programs that benefit the poor. Eye-opening for sure, though nothing is as simple as it looks.
Let us know what you think.

How Heifer is Helping the World Feed Itself

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Earlier today I posted about a Heifer project participant being included in The Economist’s report, The 9 billion-people question: A special report on feeding the world. And if you’re keyed in to media coverage of sustainable agriculture, you’ve probably seen the conversation around the web on the United Nations Report, Agroecology and the Right to Food (Mark Bittman has written about it on the New York Times Opinionator blog, and Paula Crossfield for Huffington Post, to name a couple).
Both reports look at the seemingly impossible challenge of feeding all 9 billion people who are estimated to be living on Earth by 2050, and they offer different perspectives. Will we feed the world by investing in the highest-yielding crop or livestock species? Or by investing in agroecology? (Heifer has been practicing agroecology all over the world since the mid 1980s and established an Agroecology Initiative in 2000.)
I worry, though, that the theme of “feeding the world” diverts our attention from the local, on-the-ground work that needs to be done. Heifer takes on the task of ending hunger and poverty with this sort of community approach, and it’s an approach that we’ve proven works.
Ours is a bottom-up approach. We work with the very poor to help them rebuild assets and develop agriculturally and economically active livelihoods. We build strong community groups where people work together to share their limited resources and to plan their vision of a better life. At this stage, much training takes place. Participants learn improved ways to tend animals, how to best use animal by-products, water management and erosion control practices, and often even improved literacy and leadership skills.
A transformation process begins to happen within the community when the members realize that improvements in knowledge lead to improvements in health, income, relationships and eventually to their values. We call this a holistic transformation.
Once this transformation is underway, the community uses their knowledge to impact the policies, systems and practices that impact their surroundings (both societal and environmental). Community empowerment at the grassroots level can lead to changes in infrastructure to help build local commerce–roads, electricity, commodity storage and transportation, as well as market associations and structures.
We’ve seen our model work again and again, in all corners of the world (and even in our own backyard). Our challenge now is to ratchet up this model so we can begin to see our impacts on a larger scale, as we have with our East Africa Dairy Development Project. As communities begin to feed themselves, international hunger statistics will begin to come down. The need for wealthy countries to ship commodities to poor countries will decrease–countries will be growing their own food.
Left: Bolivia (photo by Geoff Bugbee), Top: Cambodia (photo by Matt Bradley)
Botton: Armenia (photo by Russ Powell), Right: Zambia (photo by Jake Lyell
And then the question of whether conventional agriculture is more productive or if sustainable/organic/agroecological agriculture is better will become a non-issue.
Can we do it alone? Of course not. We need help from individuals like you, from partner nonprofits and non-government organizations, and from governments–wealthy and poor alike.

Could Fish Pay for Food Aid?

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Author and Oxford economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion: Why The Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, discusses market friendly food aid, how current food-price increases mirror the crisis of 2008 and why even booming economies need help to bring down malnutrition. He also discusses his new book, The Plundered Planet, and presents a “modest proposal” to fund food aid with fish.

Natural Disaster Giving: Haiti v. Pakistan

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Remember the earthquake in Haiti? Of course you do, and there’s a good chance you donated money to relief efforts. Now, remember the flooding in Pakistan? Maybe, since it was just last summer, but did you also give to it? Chances are you didn’t. In fact, not nearly as many people did. Just take a look at this new infographic from Good magazine that compares donations—both individual and organizational—for the two disasters.

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Why do some natural disasters get more media attention and donations? The easiest explanation is that the more devastating the disaster, the more people donate. Too often, we measure devastation by looking at one figure—the number of people killed. And while it’s true that the Haiti earthquake killed more than 200,000 and the Pakistan floods killed about 2,000, the floods in Pakistan displaced more than 21 million people, set the economy back two generations, and brought instability and poverty to a region already associated with terrorism.

Another theory, spelled out in a recent New York Times article, is that people give more to immediate, quick-hitting disasters, such as an earthquake or tsunami. We can see the crumbled buildings; it all happens at once. Whereas a slow-building disaster, such as a flood, occurs over weeks and months. By the time a final tally of the human and economic toll is available, our attention has moved on.

Five weeks after the Haiti earthquake, 48 aid groups polled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy had collected three-quarters of a billion dollars. Five weeks after the flooding in Pakistan, a similar poll found 32 aid groups had collected just $25 million.

In all, $3.4 billion has been collected for the victims of the Haiti earthquake as of October, with more than $1.1 billion coming from private donations, according to figures compiled by the United Nations. Close to $1.7 billion has been pledged for Pakistan, but less than $300 million came from private donors. The United States government pledged almost one-third of the total.

Humanitarians have long struggled with this paradox. The number of dead, along with the swiftness and drama of their demise, trumps almost any amount of agony among those who survive a disaster, particularly a creeping one. [emphasis mine]

Bono on the End of Aid

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Bono had a great op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times introducing us to some of the most important players in African development–business people, artists and activist who are working toward a new kind of hope.

Toward the end of the piece Bono begins to wonder if the idea of aid for Africa is outdated with so many indigenous leaders.
He concludes:

Aid, it’s clear, is still part of the picture. It’s crucial, if you have H.I.V. and are fighting for your life, or if you are a mother wondering why you can’t protect your child against killers with unpronounceable names or if you are a farmer who knows that new seed varietals will mean you have produce that you can take to market in drought or flood. But not the old, dumb, only-game-in-town aid — smart aid that aims to put itself out of business in a generation or two. “Make aid history” is the objective. It always was. Because when we end aid, it’ll mean that extreme poverty is history. But until that glorious day, smart aid can be a reforming tool,demanding accountability and transparency, rewarding measurable results, reinforcing the rule of law, but never imagining for a second that it’s a substitute for trade, investment or self-determination.

Refering to Mo Ibrahim, an innovative leader fighting corruption in Africa, Bono concludes:

I for one want to live to see Mo Ibrahim’s throw-down prediction about Ghana come true. “Yes, guys,” he said, “Ghana needs support in the coming years, but in the not-too-distant future it can be giving aid, not receiving it; and you, Mr. Bono, can just go there on your holidays.”

This sentiment is exactly what we are working for at Heifer. Already, in communities from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, Mo Ibrahim’s prediction is coming true. Through Heifer’s model of Pass on the Gift development recipients are becoming donors, year after year. With a rising generation of leaders and donors an end to aid is on the horizon–soon we will have only the exchanging of gifts.