Business fights poverty in South Sudan

July 17, 2011 By ethnicsupplies 2 Comments

Cassava is an important food crop in the Repub...

Cassava plant Image via Wikipedia

South Sudan is the newly formed country in Africa and has been recognised by the UN and the international community unlike Somaliland . But the question on everyone’s lips is WHAT NEXT FOR SOUTH SUDAN? this 25 minute video clip from the Broadcaster Aljzeera articulates the challenges and in part opportunities that lay ahead fro this newly formed nation.

One way that South Sudan will rebuild itself will be via inward investment and some businesses have been quick off the mark and headed down to South Sudan to seize those new opportunities.

With that out of the way this post is part of the #30dayblog challenge and for this task I am looking at someone else’s post and giving it my own slant. The post I have selected was posted on Business Fights Poverty

Business investment and expertise can play a significant part in the future of South Sudan

I applaud SABMILLER‘s innovation by way of coming up with products that mean local people can be included in their business strategy as suppliers. By so doing this makes them a responsible and inclusive business. But I have one major concern here

FOOD SECURITY!

and if you follow/read this blog regularly you will note that this is a subject that is close to my heart and one that I keep returning to time and time again. In my last post I addressed the question- what is the role of NGO’s in the distribution of food.

In South Sudan SABMILLER have taken a food crop Cassava and used it to come up with a new product (a brand of beer) in Uganda they used sorghum for the same purpose. Whilst this brings a new products to which value has been added at source, creates new jobs and includes local farmers in the supply chain both Cassava and Sorghum are food crops.

Questions that spring to mind

this region is susceptible to food shortages- should food crops be diverted to other uses such as beer or even bio fuels?
What is being done about food security?

I note from the article that SABMILLER has teamed up with FARM AFRICA and NGO that works with farmers in this part of Africa. Unfortunately the article does not tell us much about this relationship especially as it affects food security. OK, one might argue that the article was not about food security in South Sudan but in my mind this is probably going to be one of the greatest challenges this new country faces

So over to you folk, have you got a view on any of the issues raised here? If so please do leave me a comment if not please consider sharing this post with someone who might have a view

Filed Under: Business, food distribution, Latest Tagged With: Africa, FARM AFRICA, food security, SABMILLER, Somaliland, Southern Sudan, Sudan

Food, Disease and Poverty in Africa

May 31, 2011 By ethnicsupplies 3 Comments

Today we are looking at TAGS in Nikki P’s 30 day blogging challenge and oh if you missed yesterday’s post here it is . Nikki describes TAGS as key words for your blog and advises that each posts should have 4 or 5 .

A quick scan of the posts here and I came up with these tags FOOD, DISEASE AND POVERTY IN AFRICA and there are the basis of today’s post

Food- The poor are paying more for their food, population growth will affect food availability and food availability faces anew challenge from the desire for biofuels. If you would like more details on this issue I would strongly recommend The Guardian’s Poverty blog

The issue off food availability is one I return to on this blog time and time again previous posts have included

The Oxfam boss Barbara Stocking raised some interesting points in her report

there is enough food to feed the world , but the challenge is the poor cannot afford it and they spend 80%of their income on food
small farmers should not be driven off their land as they are capable of contributing to world food shortages and all that happens is that they end up in urban areas as the urban poor
food should not be traded on the derivatives markets

I would agree with the Oxfam boss on all 3 points and I covered some of those points in the 8 posts listed above. Evidence on the ground especially Uganda – where I hail from shows that a lot of food goes to waste in some parts of the country whilst in others folk are literary starving, the growing of Pine appears to have given way to food growing in some parts, urban areas are busting at the seams as folk leave the rural areas in search of a better life in the city. These very folk soon discover that there is nothing for them to do in the city and take to hanging around at street corners.

Point number 3 concerns me for 2 reasons

a new phenomena called Land grab or the scramble for Africa’s land- whilst this land is take up for bio fuels/to grow food for the wealthy of Europe, Asia and the Arab world the Africans are going hungry
whilst agricultural /farming methods in some parts of Africa should be brought up to date to increase output – none of that food goes towards the hungry and poor of Africa. How can we moral justify the trading of food in such away as to leave some hungry and starving

In one of the posts I wrote about a point raised by the think Tank CHATHAM – who said that in order to address the issue of food shortage, we need to work out how to secure the food we have- in the west food is wasted between the fridge and the plate whilst in developing nations food is wasted between the fields and the plate. In developing nations there is an urgent need to come with ways to preserve food once it leaves the fields/farms.

Disease- The disease I write about the most here is MALARIA but have you heard about the NEGLECTED TROPIC DISEASES ( NTDs) and how they impact economic development. A few weeks ago I attended an event at The London School of Economics and Prof Tim Allen took us through the impact of parasites on their hosts. Since then this topic has been covered by in The Guardian and by Sight Savers . But if these diseases are treatable and have such impact on people’s lives why are they neglected?

Elephantiasis- image from wikimedia.org

According to Prof Tim Allen, the answer lies in the fact that these diseases affected neglected people and as such they are diseases of the neglected people or the poor! But if someone is riddled with parasites such as worms that they cannot work should we not spend some of the Aid money on treating/eliminating such parasites?

Poverty in Africa: this is the tag I use the most and the explanation is here but that aside, as shown in the other tags- the poor in Africa are likely to go hungry, be neglected and suffer ill health.

When fighting poverty should we seek to eliminate causes of poverty and is this about throwing money at problems or are there steps we could take to secure good health and access to food for all? It would also appear we already have an answer to the food crisis- resolve the waste and get the food to those that need it. The question is why are we not doing it?

Please share your views

Filed Under: food distribution, Latest, Poverty, Poverty in Africa Tagged With: Africa, Barbara Stocking, Food Crisis, food security, Oxfam, Poverty, Poverty in Africa, Tim Allen

Being food poor

April 11, 2011 By ethnicsupplies Leave a Comment

We are at day 12 of the 30 day blog challenge and if you missed day 11 you can catch up here .

Today’s challenge is about revisiting some old posts and bringing them into one post.

This is something I have done before in a couple of posts. I am not sure what methods other folk use but I prefer to bring together posts I have written on a given subject matter. My most recent such was a collection of posts I wrote about International Women’s day and gender equality

For this post, I have brought together the issue of FOOD AVAILABILITY as it affects Africans in Africa. Food availability and poverty are interlinked and in fact the poor are the most likely to go poor and therefore find themselves needing and or being given Food Aid.

Being Food Poor- I am not even sure if this is correct terminology as in the sense of say folk being described as being as “cash poor but asset rich” or “time poor” but the posts I bring together here cover this very idea

Matoke

My first post on this matter is way back in 2008- Food distribution in Uganda – in this post I covered to issues Food Aid to a school at the source of the Nile- at time of visiting the school had just been removed from the World Food Promgram and the school governors were not very happy.

A few days later I came across peas for sale in a Kampala market. These peas had been donated by the Canadian government to the people of Rwanda who had been deemed as in need of food Aid. The other point I cover is Food distribution. This plays out very well in Uganda, in some parts food is going to waste whilst in others parts folk are starving to death.

The story of the Canadian peas got even more interesting and in this post AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY BY CANADIAN PEAS – the peas donated to Rwanda s food Aid made their way to a market stall in Uganda and finally to a Ugandan shop in Isleworth Middlesex England.

I recently revisited the issue of Food distribution in Uganda amidst reports of food shortages in North East Uganda and the big experiment by the WORLD FOOD PROGRAM

The issue of being food poor is one I will revisit from time to time because it has taken on an interesting twist. Europe fetching food from Africa- Yes Really.

With Europe running out of space to grow food for her growing population there is a new scramble for Africa called Africa Land grab. African land is being taken up by commercial farmers from Europe to grow food not for the Food poor of Africa but for Europeans, Arabs and Asians.

As if grabbing land from the food poor is not enough African waters have also been invaded. In this post SHOULD EUROPE BE TAKING FISH FROM SENEGAL I discuss the tough choices that we have to make in order to ensure that we do not threaten the food and water security of the Food Poor.

As if that all that was not bad enough some staples the food poor depend such as bananas have been hit by disease

So as you can see folk I am not quite done with this topic. I would appreciate your point of view on this issu of being food poor

Filed Under: food distribution, Latest Tagged With: Africa, Business and Economy, Kampala, Nile, Uganda, World Food Programme