Mooning the world

"FITTING easily into the most conservative wing of the Bush administration, Josette Sheeran was from the outset an unlikely candidate to run the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian aid organization, which has frequently been at odds with Washington.

But what made her more unusual was her long tenure as a major figure in the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church — she left it in the late 1990s — a conservative church that many Americans distrust.

She was appointed the World Food Program’s executive director in November, having been nominated and aggressively promoted by the Bush administration over vociferous objections from the European Union."

Kofi to save Africa

“The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) on Monday pledged to increase agricultural productivity of the continent's small farmers and lift tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty in the near future.

Addressing a press conference in Nairobi, AGRA chairman Kofi Annan said the organization has invested $150 million to support the development of new seed systems better equipped to cope with the harsh African climate. ‘Africa is the only region where overall food security and livelihoods are deteriorating. We will reverse this trend by working to create an environmentally sustainable, uniquely African Green Revolution. When our poorest farmers finally prosper, all of Africa will benefit,’ Annan told journalists in Nairobi.

Reuters reports that “… Annan said the Nairobi-based group hoped to replicate farm changes that boosted agricultural productivity in countries like India in the 1970s. … He said the group would focus on helping Africa's millions of small-scale farmers fight poverty and boost productivity by providing stronger and more resistant seed varieties, and improving access to farm inputs and markets. …” [Reuters/Factiva]

Where it will get really funny is when he will start asking for an end to market distorting Western agricultural subsidies. The Green revolution in India was highly controversial Mr. Annan. Small farmers have been made poorer, seeds have been stolen and patented by corporations, people have become slave labourers on their own lands, water resources have been exhausted and fertilizers and pesticides have polluted soil and water. The list is endless, all in the name of productivity while in reality it is in the name of cheaper food to compete with subsidized Western foods on the global market.

Just when we thought the world had become safe from this corrupt politician, he emerges to destroy what is left of Africa. Why didn't he get so excited about african agriculture when he was UN secretary general and had all of the FAO and UNDP under his command? Could it be because it was not on his US-compiled to-do list?

UNreliable

"Sadly, the UN family is better at making goals than meeting them. In 1977 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the world urged itself to provide safe water and sanitation for all by the end of the 1980s. In 1990 the UN renewed the call, extending the deadline to the end of the century. In 1978 in what is now Almaty, Kazakhstan, governments promised “health for all” by 2000. In 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand, they called for universal primary schooling by 2000, a goal pushed back to 2015 ten years later. Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN's yearly Human Development Report, worries that the pledges the UN mints so readily may become a “debased currency”. In the summer of 2005, at the height of a campaign to “make poverty history”, only 3% of Britons thought the world would meet the 2015 goal of halving poverty, defined as the proportion of people who live on less than the equivalent of a dollar a day."

...and the author of the economist article goes on to tell us that all is well and uses Mali's example to show that if you're a good boy/girl, then money will pour in. This looks like it has been concocted from donor reports.