NEWSECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND CULTURAL RIGHTS

Ever since taking office in 2009, the Obama Administration has been engaged in an all-out offensive to redefine the way America does its business abroad. Specifically, Obama has elevated development and diplomacy as both essential pillars of our national security and economic answers to the world’s challenges and opportunities. That strategy became ever more apparent in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest essay in Foreign Affairs magazine.

What makes this approach so different from what we had before?

First, the sheer breadth of engagement this administration has taken with the rest of the world has been unprecedented, or at least was simply unheard of in the previous administration. From a speech in Cairo and a town hall event with students in Shanghai, to delving into the emerging mobile market in Africa and much more, America’s international rock stars have taken rather unconventional approaches to the act of diplomacy.

They’ve found ways, through technology, to communicate directly with the citizens of countries where high level diplomatic engagement has been difficult, and even in places where it’s been solid in the past.

When he was 21 years old, Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu founded an organization that may just change the way farming is conducted in Africa.

Nnaemeka, who grew up on a farm in Nigeria, recognized that African farmers rely on traditional farming methods, and are often cut off from basic tools such as storage facilities, markets and bank accounts. As a result, some farmers are unable to grow enough food to sustain themselves and their families.

Why, Nnaemeka thought, should this be the case when the know-how and tools are out there?

In 2003 he founded the Smallholders Foundation, an organization aimed at providing Nigerian farmers with information over the radio. Nnaemeka chose radio, he explains, because it is "the most pervasive, accessible, affordable and flexible medium for mass communication, and the best way to penetrate rural communities."

The year 2008 was a perfect storm for hunger in Africa.

Our readers may remember the spikes in food prices around the world, brought on by a combination of drought, rising oil prices, the explosion of investment in biofuels (eating up land otherwise used for food production), falling grain stockpiles and commodity speculation. Rising food prices prompted riots and insurrection around the globe, particularly in Africa.

Following the crisis, the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) became the leading institutional vehicle for agricultural research and policy in Africa. AGRA is a $400 million dollar effort headed by Kofi Annan and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It focuses on agricultural development as a key to hunger and poverty relief.

But while Kofi Annan and Bill Gates are hoping that 'Green Revolution' might strike a cord with all you ec0-friendly folks out there, AGRA's name doesn't have much to do with environmental sustainability. Rather, it is a reference to the original Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, which centered around the development of new wheat, corn and rice varieties that not-coincidentally required the use of chemical inputs and industrial farming techniques, all with the aim of increasing crop yields in order to decrease hunger.

The first Green Revolution did in-fact initially boost food production, but the ultimate result was to increase the cost of production, degrade the environment and push small farmers off their land. AGRA isn't as overt in its support of industrial methods, but it is still marked by extreme confidence in technology and market-based solutions to hunger, and boosting crop yields is still its main priority.

But African farmers are saying no thanks to the AGRA strategy. Although new technologies can promote higher crop yields, small-scale farmers recognize that hunger isn't just about how much food the world can produce. In a report released last week, West African farmers came down firmly against the research and policy priorities of initiatives like AGRA.

It's not every day that the tech world is abuzz with social change, but there is a bit of a debate of late as to the value of crowdsourcing in helping to solve global challenges.

Crowdsourcing is when a group, rather than an individual, uses the Internet to collectively solve a problem or task at hand (check this video for an intro).

Change.org bloggers have discussed the many opportunities crowdsourcing presents before, for example here, here and here.

But what are some examples of cases in which this exercise in virtual collaboration has successfully made an impact on global development?

Development work takes as given that its ultimate aims are achievable.

I was recently in London, and one of the joys of that city is the second floor of Foyles bookshop, dedicated to history, international relations, economics and development. Browsing through the books there, I came across an arresting title: The Myth of Development. Written by the Peruvian Oswaldo de Rivero, it poses a startling question: what if the whole concept of development is flawed? What if the countries we refer to as ‘developing’ are not developing and will never develop?

The first part of this question is nothing new: I myself prefer the term ‘less developed country’ (LDC) to ‘developing country’ because the latter implies a progress that may not always be evident. What de Rivero postulates is that this might not be a temporary state, but that these economies will never develop.

His basic argument is that development as we know it is not inevitable or simply a matter of policy. Rather, a number of economies in different stages encountered conditions that, coupled with the right policies and some natural endowment, experienced massive material expansions that provided the basis of their modern economies. These circumstances sometimes involved violence and coercion: the slave trade, colonialism and so on. The world economy has also developed as these economies have reached ‘developed’ status; it in turn has reached a sort of maturity in which the developed and less developed countries interact according to specific power relations and rules that derive from these.

Recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pushed the boundaries of our national conversation by daring to suggest that not all Muslims think and act alike.  He’s worth quoting at length:

“Many Americans honestly believe that Muslims are prone to violence, but humans are too complicated and diverse to lump into groups that we form invidious conclusions about. We’ve mostly learned that about blacks, Jews and other groups that suffered historic discrimination, but it’s still O.K. to make sweeping statements about 'Muslims' as an undifferentiated mass…. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs."

Kristof is right to call out the American public, and the American media, for its monolithic portrayal of Muslims and Arabs.  So monolithic is that image, in fact, that this simple and really not all that surprising fact bears repeating:  Not all Arabs are Muslims, and the majority of American Muslims are not Arab.

Finding stories that treat Muslims and Arabs as people, rather than objects, can be a tall order in the current media market.  I suggest starting with author Alia Malek’s book, A Country Called Amreeka, which uses profiles to tell a hundred years’ of history of Arabs in America, or The Mosque in Morgantown, a documentary about one woman’s challenge to her West Virginia community's narrow interpretation of Islam.

Without it they’d be in the dark. With it, their food production system buckles. This is the dilemma the Toubul village has to endure at the foot of a dam in the northern Indian state of Manipur.

As in many cases of development gone wrong, the hydropower dam fuels the region with electricity. Because of it, a few roads were also built. But instead of paving the way to responsible industrialization, the dam has severely endangered the livelihoods of Toubul’s families.

According to an article at Infochange, the major setback for this agricultural community is the floods caused on the village’s arable land. To keep the dam operational, the adjacent Loktak Lake is kept at levels that inundate a total of 80,000 hectares of land, according to the Loktak Lake Affected Areas Peoples’ Action Committee.

But it does not stop there.

Earlier this week, fellow blogger Andrew Green wrote about the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting -- an initiative that is increasingly focusing on women and girls as the key to poverty relief. From domestic violence to cleaner burning cook stoves, females are taking center stage in development agendas.

Making women and girls the center of a development initiative is impressive, but it  isn't groundbreaking. Gender inequality has long been recognized as a significant cause of underdevelopment and poverty. Of the 1 billion people living in poverty, 70 percent are women and girls. Strengthening women's rights and investing in girls' futures can dramatically impact economic progress, education, and health. So far, most of the focus of women-centered development has taken place within the rural landscape: getting girls into schools, spreading HIV/AIDS education to remote areas, expanding micro-credit to agricultural groups, etc. But a new report from Plan International reminds us that the landscapes of gender-based inequality and injustice are changing.

Each year, Plan releases an annual report through their Because I Am a Girl campaign -- each report spotlighting a specific theme in the relation to the state of the world's girls.  This year, the "Digital and Urban Frontiers: Girls in a Changing Landscape"  (PDF) highlights the impact of  two of the fastest growing arenas on adolescent girls around the world. As Plan points out, the digital world and the urban environment present a conflicting dynamic of both opportunity and danger.

Fairly early into the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof issued a tweet that this year’s conference seemed “focused on investing in girls as a cost-effective strategy to fight poverty.” He was only part of the way there.

If there was a theme to the day, it was that improvement in any field -- education, global health, poverty -- depended on recognizing and removing detriments to the health, safety and success of girls and women.

A quick rundown of some of the highlights:

One word. Then everyone knows.  Soon, families suffer. Neighbors discriminate against you, and finding employment becomes a daunting task. It might sound a bit preposterous, but in the Caribbean, small islands of near-feudalistic societies, these could be the consequences if people find out you’re HIV positive.

Given that, who’d want to get tested -- or treated?

Last week at a symposium on AIDS and HIV, the heads of state of several Caribbean nations discussed how ignorance still makes HIV a public health issue in the region. During the junction -- directed by the University of the West Indies, UNAIDS and other international entities -- the Caribbean leaders pointed out this and other problems the region faces in their plight to stop the disease.

Like most aspects of the Caribbean (where I live and work) the public outcry is a delayed reaction of the global discontent on the inadequate response to AIDS. Last July, during the global conference on AIDS in Vienna, activists complained that nations had failed to improve the methods to curtail the disease, causing the slogan "Broken Promises Kill"  to become the unofficial emblem of the conference.  In America, as discussed at length here on Human Rights, many believe President Obama has also faltered in its promise to increase funds significantly to attack AIDS worldwide.