Mali: Restoring Lake In Desert, Farmers Keep Hunger Away

Read at : Friends of WFP

http://www.friendsofwfp.org/site/c.hrKJIXPFIqE/b.5692551/k.12CE/Mali_Restoring_Lake_In_Desert_Farmers_Keep_Hunger_Away.htm?msource=NEWS&tr=y&auid=5735517

Many farmers who abandoned the remote Lake Faguibine region in Mali a few years ago have come back recently. The lake, which three years ago was dry and surrounded by advancing desert, has again become an area of fertile land around a system of lakes offering water for farmers and a plentiful supply of fish.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) played a key role in this transformation by supplying local farmers with food as they worked on clearing the channels that feed into the lake. Working with the local government, WFP continues to supply food to people who work to maintain the channels.

“The vegetation you see now is thanks to water because if we had not had water you couldn’t do anything here – no farming nothing, it is thanks to the water,” says Ibrahim Mohamed Ag Hasan, 70, one of the farmers who has benefited from the clearing of the channels that feed Lake Faguibine.

COTE D’IVOIRE: User fees hamper malnutrition fight

Read at : IRIN
humanitarian news and analysis
a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Photo: Anna Jefferys/IRIN
MAN, 22 December 2009 (IRIN) – Health user fees in Côte d’Ivoire are hindering the fight against child malnutrition in the west, health officials and aid workers say.

Acute malnutrition in the west and north are on average at 3.6 percent and 5.4 percent respectively; while chronic malnutrition is at over 40 percent on average in both regions, according to preliminary results of a 2009 nutrition study done by the Health Ministry, with help from UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

NIGERIA: Farmer-pastoralists’ clash leaves 32 dead

Read at : IRIN

Access to pasture continues to be eroded in central and northern Nigeria, say nomads (file photo)KANO, 22 December 2009 (IRIN) – A tense calm has been restored following clashes between pastoralists and farmers in central Nigeria’s Nasarawa State which left 32 people dead, scores of houses burned, and several farms destroyed, officials told IRIN.

Violence erupted on 18 December when pastoralists attacked the farming village of Udeni Gida – two weeks after a clash with farmers on 6 December when herdsman led their cattle into rice fields resulting in the death of a farmer, according to Mohammed Baba Ibaku, a local member of parliament.

“On Friday [18 December], herdsmen from neighbouring Kogi and Taraba states armed with guns stormed the [Udeni Gida] village and opened fire on unsuspecting villagers and by Saturday [19 December] we counted 32 dead bodies from the attacks”, Ibaku said.

“Scores of houses were completely burnt and crops on several farms were destroyed”, he added.

Police deployed in the area during the 6 December violence were withdrawn a few days ago as the authorities thought the fighting was over, Ibaku told IRIN, but the nomads then attacked again, he said.

Military troops and police have been re-deployed but tension remains high, he said.

Nomads’ viewpoint

Hame Saidu, a pastoralist from Wase District of neighbouring Plateau State told IRIN: “Every time there is [a] clash between nomads and farmers we nomads are labelled the aggressors. Nobody cares to look at the problem dispassionately and apportion blame fairly.

“Our herd is our life because to every nomad life is worthless without his cattle. What do you expect from us when our source of existence is threatened? The encroachment of grazing fields and routes by farmers is a call to war.”

Clashes between farmers and pastoralists over grazing fields – common in northern Nigeria – are on the rise throughout the country as pastureland shrinks, according to environmental consultant Kabiru Yammama.

(continued)

NIGERIA More than 30 killed in Nigeria clashes over land

Read at : NIGER1

http://niger1.com/

ABUJA (Reuters) – More than 30 people were killed and scores of homes set alight in clashes in the past week between nomadic herdsmen and farmers in the central Nigerian state of Nasarawa, police said on Tuesday. Hundreds of people are killed every year in fighting between nomadic Fulani herdsmen and subsistence farmers over farmland and grazing rights in the mainly agrarian central region. Police said the latest clash erupted on Sunday when herdsmen attacked villages to avenge the killing on December 6 of a Fulani nomad by farmers who said his cattle had destroyed crops.

Read at :

AfricaFiles

Title: World Bank and China have plans for Africa
Author: Mark Allix
Category: Economic Justice
Date: 12/19/2009
Source: Daily Maverick
Source Website: www.thedailymaverick.co.za <http://www.africafiles.org/database/www.thedailymaverick.co.za>

African Charter Article# 20: All peoples shall have the right to existence and self determination and the right to free themselves from the bonds of domination.

Summary & Comment: China, Africa’s biggest trading partner, pledged low-cost loans, an end to tariffs on 60% of exports, and debt forgiveness at a recent China-Africa Summit in Egypt. China will also fund and provide the technology transfer needed to kick-start the economies of the continent. The author cautions and seems to prefer World Bank conditionalities. DN

---

World Bank and China have plans for Africa. Anybody surprised?

http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2009-12-14-World-Bank-and-China-have-plans-for-Africa.-Anybody-surprised-

Valley in Jordan Inhabited and Irrigated for 13,000 Years

Read at :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215155956.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) — You can make major discoveries by walking across a field and picking up every loose item you find. Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering — based on 100,000 finds — that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities.

Archaeologist Eva Kaptijn has given up digging in favour of gathering. With her colleagues, she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they’d pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just a few decades old.

Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kaptijn succeeded in working out the extent of habitation in the Zerqa Valley in Jordan over the past millennia. The area where she undertook her research is also called the Zerqa Triangle; it is bounded by the River Zerqa and forms part of the Jordan Valley. The area covers roughly 72 square kilometres. Kaptijn discovered that the triangle had been inhabited, on and off, for thousands of years, but that this habitation was always highly dependent on the irrigation methods used by those who lived there. While the soil in the valley is very rich, there was usually not enough rainfall to cultivate plants without some additional irrigation.

NASA Tech Zooms in on Water and Land

Read at :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091215141520.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2009) — In a pilot project that could help better manage the planet’s strained natural resources, space-age technologies are helping a Washington state community monitor its water availability. NASA satellites and sensors are providing the information needed to make more accurate river flow predictions on a daily basis.

“World leaders are struggling to protect natural resources for future generations,” said Jeff Ward, a senior research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle. “These tools help us sustainably use natural resources while balancing environmental, cultural and economic concerns.”

Stop the global land grab!

Read at : GRAIN

http://www.grain.org/o/?id=87

GRAIN statement at the joint GRAIN-La Via Campesina media briefing

Rome, 16 November 2009

(see also GRAIN and Via Campesina’s invitation to a press conference)

For over a year a half now, we have been watching carefully how investors are trying to take control of farmland in Asia, Africa and Latin America as a response to the food and financial crises. In the beginning, during the early months of 2008, they talked about getting these lands for “food security”, their food security. Gulf State officials began flying around the globe looking for large areas of cultivable land that they could acquire to grow rice to feed their burgeoning populations without relying on international trade. So too were Koreans, Libyans, Egyptians and others. In most of these talks, high-level government representatives were directly involved, peddling new packages of political, economic and financial cooperation with agricultural land transactions smack in the centre.

But then, towards July 2008, the financial crisis grew deeper, and we noticed that alongside the “food security land grabbers” there was a whole other group of investors trying to get hold of farmland in the South: hedge funds, private equity groups, investment banks and the like. They were not concerned about food security. They figured that there is money to be made in farming because the world population is growing, food prices are bound to stay high over time, and farmland can be had for cheap. With a little bit of technology and management skills thrown into these farm acquisitions, they get portfolio diversification, a hedge against inflation and guaranteed returns — both from the harvests and the land itself.

To date, more than 40 million hectares have changed hands or are under negotiation — 20 million of which in Africa alone. And we calculate that over $100 billion have been put on the table to make it happen. Despite the governmental grease here or there, these deals are mainly signed and carried out by private corporations, in collusion with host country officials. GRAIN has compiled various sample data sets of who the land grabbers are and what the deals cover, but most of the information is kept secret from the public, for fear of political backlash.

The international food system and the climate crisis

Read at : GRAIN / Seedling

http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=642

“Small-scale family farming should become the cornerstone of food production again.”

Today’s global food system, with all its high-tech seeds and fancy packaging, cannot fulfil its most basic function of feeding people. Despite this monumental failure, there is no talk in the corridors of power of changing direction. Large and growing movements of people clamour for change, but the world’s governments and international agencies keep pushing more of the same: more agribusiness, more industrial agriculture, more globalisation. As the planet moves into an accelerating period of climate change, driven, in large part, by this very model of agriculture, such failure to take meaningful action will rapidly worsen an already intolerable situation. But in the worldwide movement for food sovereignty, there is a promising way out.

Small Scale Sustainable Farmers Are Cooling Down The Earth

Read at :

http://viacampesina.net/downloads/PAPER5/EN/paper5-EN.pdf

November 2009 Via Campesina Views