Coming Soon: Global Citizen Festival

Saturday, September 24, 2016 is the day to be at the Global Citizen Festival. (MSNBC will carry the festival on TV. Check local listings.) On the Great Lawn at New York's Central Park, the agenda will include solutions to world problems, especially poverty, and performances by Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Demi Lovato, and Metallica.

    Global Citizen is a worldwide effort that mixes music with actions to support girls and women, health, education, food and hunger remedies, water and sanitation, and the environment.

     Speaking at the UN General Assembly on September 20, 2016, President Obama echoed the ideas of Global Citizen. He repeatedly said young people throughout the world have unprecedented access to information and ways through social media to express themselves. They care about the environment, and they are more tolerant than previous generations of differences in religion, race, sex, sexual orientation, and ethnic and historical backgrounds. Technology and their own eyes enable them to see the contrast between poor and rich, slums and skyscrapers. They want greater control over their own lives and to share the benefits of free trade and advances in technology. They are not satisfied to let 1% of humanity control the world's wealth.

      When global citizens take actions (emails, tweets, petition signatures, phone calls) to fight poverty and worldwide injustices, they earn points they can redeem for tickets to attend shows, events, and concerts, such as Bieber's Helsinki on Sept. 26, 2016 and Sia's in Boston on October 18, 2016. Details are available at globalcitizen.org.

   

Can Small Farms End Poverty?

Before performers, men, women and young people gather, at the Global Citizen Festival in New York City's Central Park on September 26, for the purpose of ending extreme poverty, let's look at a few of the factors contributing to world hunger. Silo thinking, where everyone focuses on their own problems and solutions, is undermining the need to feed and employ people, provide export revenue from agriculture, and protect the environment.

     Small farms provide employment that prevents a country's rural population from flocking to urban areas that are not ready to provide sufficient jobs, sanitation, housing, transportation, and education. David Hoyle, deputy director of ProForest has pointed out how small farms would benefit from governments willing to engage in land-use planning. What governments need to do is designate specific areas where: 1) villagers can farm and live, 2) concessions are leased to large scale export producers of, for example, palm oil and timber, and 3) forested areas needed to sop up greenhouse gases are protected. Water use planning to prevent pollution and supply sufficient water for sanitation, cooking, and crops is also necessary.

     Without land-use planning, plantations governments are counting on to provide agricultural export revenue are in constant competition and conflict with local farmers. Moreover, plantation owners need government help to provide the housing and sanitation facilities, schools, and clinics that are a constant source of complaints by the laborers they employ.

     Countries have tried to coordinate local production and crop exports by providing villagers with fertilizer, seeds, technical assistance, and credit. In exchange, under contract state-owned enterprises buy, at fixed prices, what the farmers produce. As earlier posts for Nigeria, coffee, and cocoa reveal, this process has been financially unsuccessful to both governments and small growers. Modifications have led governments to provide farmers with vouchers they can use to buy their own supplies, and private companies or coops have taken over the task of buying commodities from farmers.

     Chemical companies in a position to perform research for the precision farming that provides seeds, fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides adapted to local soil and climate conditions in global areas of extreme poverty now concentrate their efforts on profitable corn, soybean, and cotton crops important to American agriculture, not, for example, cassava, which feeds the poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

     Instead of engineering crops to provide added vitamins and minerals to first world consumers, in areas of extreme poverty the same objective could be achieved by introducing small farmers to new crops they could plant and bring to their local markets. Not only would a greater variety of produce improve nutrition, but crop rotation could improve soils and increase a farmer's income. Farmers might save money by controlling weeds with mulch rather than chemicals, and they may even be able to make additional money by using weeds to weave baskets (see baskets for sale at serrv.org) or make bio-fuel.

(Farming topics also are covered in the earlier posts, "World (Food) Expo, Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices" and "Back to the Land.")