http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090601/ten_things

From the Nation:

1 Write letters to the editor and op-ed articles in your local paper calling on the government to cut or end subsidies that encourage large agribusinesses to overproduce grains and dump their surpluses on the developing world at sub-market prices. This ultimately places poor communities at the mercy of volatile global commodity prices. Learn more at The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy for more information.

 2 Ask your representatives in Congress to demand that more foreign food aid be in the form of cash and training rather than food. Farmers in the global South know how to grow food but lack the resources, inputs and tools to farm effectively, develop markets and compete in the world marketplace.

 3 Learn the specifics of what makes products “fair trade.” Buy them where available. Download “Green America’s Guide to Fair Trade” for a definition of “fair trade” and a list of organizations that follow these specifications.

 4 Conserve energy. With a reduced demand for fuel, global commodity prices–which spiked as the cost of fuel for shipping rose dramatically last year–can remain more stable. This is important because while sending food to poor countries is not the ultimate solution for ending hunger, Food Aid has a role to play due to the desire for variety in food supplies. And, more importantly, natural disasters or political instability will always cause humanitarian emergencies where the flow of aid is crucial.

 5 Pressure the Obama administration to come up with a renewable energy policy that does not stress ethanol and other biofuels. As demand for biofuels has grown over the past few years, farmers in the developed and developing worlds have set aside more and more land for fuel production, degrading the environment and reducing food for human consumption.

 6 Eat less meat. Every pound of meat produced requires sixteen pounds of grain; food given to farm animals each year could feed the world’s hungry with plenty to spare. Search “Diet for a Small Planet” and “We Feed the World”.

 7 Support grassroots projects that advance sustainable agriculture at the community level. Organizations like American Jewish World Service partner with grassroots organizations in the global South that use sustainable farming techniques.

 8 Persuade your local editorial writers to cover hunger in a way that focuses on economic rights rather than food scarcity. Emphasize that the underlying causes of poverty are political instability, joblessness, gender inequality, illiteracy and limited access to education, loss of land, disenfranchisement, forced migration and preventable epidemics. These hamper local food production and sustainable development. Click here for current coverage.

 9 Demand a worldwide reduction in the sale of pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds, which benefit large agribusinesses like Monsanto because they do not reproduce, forcing farmers to purchase new seeds year after year. Watch Future of Food for more information.

10 Advocate for food security as a human right. Even though the United Nations has declared that nutrition is a universal right, many member nations have adopted policies that reinforce a global system whereby food is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold by speculators.

Read “The Politics of Hunger.” Remember that global hunger is a local problem, a feminist problem, a socioeconomic problem and, most urgently, a political problem that can be overcome.

CONCEIVED by Walter Mosley with research by Rae Gomes

Bring Life Saving Global AIDS Legislation to a Vote Now

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/937494.htmlThe ARDC Refugee shelter story made it into both the English and Hebrew version of Ha’aretz today. ARDC, the African Refugee Development Center, is currently running 3 shelters for 350+ African refugees (mostly from Sudan, Ivory Coast, Eritrea and DRC) in southern Tel Aviv. The conditions are horrible. For photos I took, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrieteicher/sets/72157603146651030/   

From an email from the one.org campaign:

On the Record Petition

As a member of ONE, I write to ask you to go on the record on where you stand on fighting extreme poverty and global disease that affect the one billion people around the world.

Alleviating suffering and tackling the root causes of global poverty will be defining issues for the next President of the United States and deserve your full attention. I hope you will respond to this letter with your plans to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, eradicate malaria, improve child and maternal health, achieve universal primary education, and provide access to clean water and food, as well as a personal message about how you plan to lead on the fight to make poverty history.

We are only one year away from Election Day 2008. The time to go on the record on extreme poverty and global disease is now. Thank you for considering this request and I look forward to your response.

http://www.one.org/ontherecord/ 

I think you should do something. I do not expect everyone to go off and spend time/their entire life living in a mud hut without running water and electricity (though you might be surprised how much you like it). You are not expected to quit your job and go and work for one of these organizations (http://www.idealist.org/if/as/Org/npo), nor do I expect you to live in here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrieteicher/1579314906/in/set-72157602170287079/). I constantly hear people saying they don’t know what to do or where to start. So here’s a place to start. Go to this site and be an advocate for health in Africa (http://actnow-phr.org/campaign/support_african_health_workers) or go here (http://www.savedarfur.org/content?splash=yes) and see what you can do to stop genocide in Darfur. Just do something.  

Kisumu, Kenya

Kisumu is the third largest city in Kenya, but feels more like a sleepy town in the middle of no where. (I keep needing to redefine where “the middle of no where” is located, because once you’ve been to The Middle Of Nowhere, it is no longer a Nowhere but a Somewhere. Like since I’ve been to Timbuktu– it can’t possibly be no where…)

Anyway, Kisumu apparently was a hot spot to be in at the height of the Ugandan trans-east African railroad’s heyday because it connected land locked Africa with the port of Mombasa on the Eastern Kenyan coast. Kisumu though just has not had as much luck since the advent of better means of transportation of goods and people. It also hasn’t helped that the train has more or less discontinued service through Kisumu.

I spent time both at the Provincial and District hospitals of Kisumu. The Nyanza Provincial General Hospital (known locally as the “Russian Hospital” because it was apparently funded by the Russians back when making Africa red was a real concern) is somewhere it seems that one goes to when there are no other options left. It is more of a place of death than life, which is not so shocking when you have 4 beds in a room, each with 2 people per bed, plus another 4-6 people sitting on the floor–all admitted patients.

The first thing you notice at the hospital in the surgery ward is that the door to exit/enter the ward is a metal bar prison door that is locked from the inside with a hospital guard posted by the lock. Apparently the lock is both to keep patients in and to keep people who are not suppose to be in the hospital ward out (it is common for people to traditionally when staying in the hospital to bring their own food, etc with them and in recent years the hospital has decided that it wanted to curb this practice–yet has not taken up the slack often enough to provide food all the time, so many people still try to have relatives bring them food). Now why would you want to keep patients inside the hospital? Well naturally to ensure that they pay. One patient came in with a festering wound–just imagine necrosis of all the tissue in his arm that was already forming scar tissue ontop of all the embedded dead and bacterial laden tissue, and the wound needed to undergo surgery if the patient wanted to live and not die of sepsis. So because his case was deemed as an emergency they did the surgery, but he couldn’t pay for it. So rather than letting him go and try to find the money, he is being kept more or less a prisoner inside the hospital to ensure that the hospital gets paid. He can’t pay so he sits in the same room with other patients who have various degrees of gangrene and sepsis waiting. Eventually, I am told, the hospital realizes after a few months that they won’t get paid and will let him go. Another woman there had a similar story. She had meningitis and was given penicillin, even though she said she had a known allergy to penicillin. So she naturally went into shock and had to be intubated. She recovered from the shock, was given another non-penicillin antibiotic–but was not allowed to leave the hospital until she paid for the care that she received. Yes, it was care that she needed only because the medical officer on duty didn’t listen to her and caused her to need treatment, but she was apparently still responsible to pay. However, she wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital to go ask family and friends to borrow the money because she hadn’t paid. So when she finally borrowed the 8000 kenyan shillings and went to pay the hospital cashier–they told her that she now owed roughly 5 times that amount for the several weeks that she had stayed in the hospital as their prisoner. And so the cycle continues…

Coptic Mission HIV Clinic, Nairobi.

This morning the doctor saw a 34 year old woman at the HIV clinic. In the waiting room, there were already roughly 40 people waiting to be seen at 8:30 am. For patients who fit the algorithm they get ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs) at no cost. Of course many of them also have TB and malaria and all those NTDs that everyone is slowly starting to talk about in the discourse on global public health. Many of those other drugs however to treat all the other infectious diseases of course cost money–something which is clearly not abundant here in Kenya. One-third of the city’s population lives in the Kiribi slums I was told today. That is over 1.5 million people. 1.5 million people crammed into a not-so-large area in conditions that you can’t imagine unless you’ve had the opportunity to spend some time in a developing world African slum. And a really bad, dirty, violent one at that. Most of these people aren’t starving and Kenya is not war-torn. These 1.5 million people just have endemic diseases that have long been eradicated from the developed world and live on less than $1 USD a day.  However, this is nothing new. Every year more and more people live in urban slums because they offer the best opportunities for employment and education. But this is all obvious and known. How do we fix this? Whose job is it to fix it?   Can something be done? Why is it not being done?