Still not my grand return, but I saw this on Aid Watch’s twitterfeed, and wanted to comment.
The Bumpers Amendment is in no way a support of international development. To refuse to allow aid money from USAID aka United States Agency for International Development to be used to fund agricultural development is counterproductive.
The goal of aid, especially aid directed towards development should be to make itself obsolete. Refusing to allow development aid money to develop is a waste of resources and in no way useful in the big picture.
OK. I’ll step down from the podium, now.
Pointing to Africa as the epicentre of the global food crisis, the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General today called for an African Green Revolution, urging the international community to double food yields across the continent through sustainable agriculture.
Because the article is pretty self-explanatory, I’ll leave my commenting to one line.
It’s about time.
Very good conversation on micro-finance (i.e. Grameen and its ilk).
Yunus makes a wonderful point in his reference to Grameen not being affected by the international economic crisis. They’re not tied into the world economy and the money (over $1 billion lent per year) comes from the locality. It’s a wonderful real world example of how developing countries suffer from the economic actions of the rest of the world when a culture of government to government aid dependency is nurtured. Conversely, micro-financing institutions, like Grameen, aren’t affected because they get the money to lend from the local communities to which they lend.
I really like the point made by Yunus concerning how everyone is currently worried about getting back to a financial system like we had before the meltdown. Why not take this situation as a chance to grow? As Yunus says, why go back to a system that ignores two-thirds of the world.
—-
BBC Newsnight - Dambisa Moyo discusses microcredit with Muhammad Yunus (viadambisamoyo)
In 2000, Africa became the focus of orchestrated world-wide pity, and not for the first time. The Nigerian humanitarian catastrophe of Biafra in 1971 (the same year as the Beatle George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh) had demanded that the world respond to human catastrophe. Consciousness was raised several notches with Bob Geldof ’s July 1985 Live Aid Concert where, with 1.5 billion people watching, public discourse became a public disco.
—
An excerpt from Dead Aid.
I really want, neigh need, to read this book.
The World Bank just released the second edition of their Atlas of Global Development.
This is a very interesting take on the sustainability of supposedly sustainable development projects. I’m not sure if I agree wholeheartedly with everything she says, but it definitely adds to the intellectual debate.
