admin January 25th, 2012
Another famine is looming in Africa’s Sahel region – the third drought in the area in the last 10 years. And the big question facing the international community is whether the lessons of not responding soon enough to the drought in the Horn will be learned – and acted upon – here.
We know already that the European Union has taken a lead. And DFID has announced that it is sending therapeutic food to help 68,000 children in Chad, Mali and Niger, three of the countries worst affected by poor harvests.
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Tags: CERF, Chad, DFID, Drought, Ethiopia, EU, Famine, Kenya, Mali, natural disasters, Niger, Sahel, Somalia, UNICEF, WFP
admin December 8th, 2011
As EU commissioner Georgieva was speaking about the growing frequency and intensity of natural disasters – and linking them explicitly to climate change – the world’s leaders were, in effect, agreeing to do nothing about said climate change at COP 17 in Durban.
Of course, they wouldn’t put it like that, they’re all being very reasonable whilst at the same time doing what they perceive to be their jobs in representing their national interests.
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Tags: Climate change, Copenhagen, Durban, EU, Global warming, Kyoto Protocol, Qatar, UN, USA
admin December 7th, 2011
European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.
She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Disaster Risk Reduction, Drought, EU, Floods, Global warming, Japan, LSE, Mali, Mauritania, natural disasters, Niger, Nigeria, Sahel, Thailand, World Bank
admin November 27th, 2011
Two years ago the COP at Copenhagen was massive news with much made of the fact that this was probably the last opportunity to sort out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out at the end of 2012 and famously remains unsigned by the USA.
That opportunity, of course, came and went, as did COP16 at Cancun in Mexico and now we are on to COP17 in Durban, which opens tomorrow with expectations so low that they are practically invisible. One measure of the failure to get any successor to Kyoto is that no one now seems to expect that to happen.
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Tags: Brazil, Cancun, Climate change, Copenhagen, Drought, Durban, EU, Floods, Global warming, IIED, India, Japan, Kyoto Protocol, Mexico, UNFCCC, USA
admin November 15th, 2010
Hypocrisy is deeply unattractive – especially when it comes in the form of calls by Northern countries for free trade to ‘help the poor’. Calls that totally ignore all of the restrictive trade practices that they themselves maintain in order to protect their voters/farmers/industries from competition from these same poor.
Take cotton. At the G20 meeting in Seoul just a week ago the UK and others called for a free trade area for Africa – in effect a merging of the existing three trade groups, EAC, ECOWAS and SADC.
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Tags: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, China, David Cameron, Doha Round, EAC, ECOWAS, EU, G20, HDI, India, Mali, SADC, USA
admin June 21st, 2010
As famine closes in on Chad and Niger (and Save the Children says that nearly 400,000 children under the age of five in Niger are facing starvation) ActionAid is asking whether the G8 countries have made good on promises made last year to give $22 billion to help small farmers in developing countries.
Key to this proposal was that the money should go not in emergency food aid, or in aid to boost production of cash crops for export, but to help smallholder farmers. The importance of smallholders is that they grow food to feed themselves and their families, with surpluses generally sold in local markets. So this is an important step towards increasing food security and self-sufficiency in food at the local level in developing countries.
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Tags: ActionAid, Australia, Chad, EU, Famine, G8, Germany, Italy, Japan, natural disasters, Niger, Save the Children, Spain
admin June 15th, 2010
It’s no wonder really that there is general confusion about aid and the role that it should, or should not, play in development. Just in the last week there have been two arguments put forward by “people who should know” which put contrasting points of view.
Here at Advance Aid we have always argued that aid has clearly not succeeded in lifting sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty and that therefore a different, more grass-roots approach is needed.
Now, on one side of the argument, AidWatch, a coalition of the great and good from the NGO world, put out its annual report calling for the countries of the EU to live up to their promises and move rapidly towards donating 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) in development aid.
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Tags: ActionAid, Aid, EU, Kenya, Nigeria
admin May 17th, 2010
Whilst East Africa faces natural disaster in the form of floods, West Africa is facing starvation and famine as a result of the irregularity of the rains in 2009. So irregular were the rains, that there was flooding in some countries and drought in others.
Credit: Cristina Vazquez Moreno/Oxfam
This led to a severe lack of pasture, water and a poor harvest. The worst affected country now, according to Oxfam, is Niger where 8 million people are at risk. An additional 2 million people are also threatened in Chad and a substantial number of people are expected to be affected in Mali in the coming months. Parts of Nigeria and Burkina Faso are also at risk.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Drought, EU, Human Development Index, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, UN
