UN Radio

UN and Africa
Programme Number: 180
Week of: Sunday, 25th November, 2007
Recording Date: Thursday, 29th November, 2007
Topical Issue(s):

" The head of UN peacekeeping operations warns that the deployment of a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur is facing serious obstacles. Jean-Marie Guehenno told the Security Council on Tuesday that there are still serious shortfalls in providing personnel and equipment d for the operation.

" The Food and Agriculture Organization says that farmers should be given financial incentives to encourage them to use practices that are environmentally friendly. Professor Gerald Nelson says that in Africa such a scheme can also help to alleviate poverty while protecting the environment.

" Disease and poverty are problems that continue to interact and plague the African continent, as it struggles to meet the millennium development goals of cutting by half the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

Producer/presenter: Derrick Mbatha
Editor: Ransford Cline-Thomas
Production Assistant: Beng Poblete-Enriquez
Studio Engineer: Willie Correa
Duration: 15'00"

PRESENTER: This is United Nations Radio in New York.

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PRESENTER: Hello and welcome to UN and Africa. I'm Derrick Mbatha.

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PRESENTER: In today's programme, the head of United Nations peacekeeping operations warns that the deployment of a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur is facing serious obstacles.

CLIP 1: Jean-Marie Guehenno
"We have made some real progress at the level of principles but it's not principles that are going to save people, it's men on the ground, it's capacities."

PRESENTER: You will hear more on that in a moment. Also in this edition, the Food and Agriculture Organization says that paying farmers can help protect the environment.

CLIP 2: Gerald Nelson
"What t we can also think about doing in Africa to target payments not only to preserve the environment but to directly address poverty consideration."

And later in the programme, poverty and hunger continue to take a toll on the well being of women and their children in Africa.

So, stay tuned to UN and Africa.

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Head of UN Peacekeeping Says Sudan Creates Obstacle for Darfur Mission

PRESENTER: The deployment of the hybrid United Nations African Union peacekeeping operation in the troubled Darfur region of Sudan is facing serious obstacles, according to the head of United Nations peacekeeping operations. Mr. Jean-Marie Guehenno told the Security Council on Tuesday that with only five weeks remaining before the deployment of the mission known as UNAMID, there are still serious shortfalls in providing what is needed for the operation. UN Radio's Ransford Cline-Thomas reports.

NARRATOR: In his briefing to the Security Council, Jean-Marie Guehenno pointed out that the mission is short of one heavy transport and one medium transport unit, three military utility aviation units and one light helicopter unit. He warned the Council that if no offers for these missing units are identified by early next year, it may become necessary for the Security Council to look at available options, including an increase in troops for the mission which is planned to be 26,000 strong. Later Mr. Guehenno said it's been a long time that preparations for the mission have been going on.

CUT 1: Jean-Marie Guehenno
That started more than a year ago when there was a meeting in Addis Ababa and step by step we have been hoping to make some progress. We have made some real progress t the level of principles but it's not principles that are going to save people, it's men on the ground, it's capacities. And there, we still face considerable difficulties.

NARRATOR: The Sudanese government insists that the mission in Sudan should be predominantly African. According to Jean Marie Guehenno, the United Nations is making serious efforts to address this concern but the government of Sudan, he says, has not yet approved units from Thailand, Nepal and Scandinavia. He said it has also not facilitated the acquisition of land and flight rights for United Nations aircraft. However, the head of United Nations peacekeeping operations acknowledges that some of the obstacles for the mission are not caused by the Sudanese government.

CUT 2: Jean-Marie Guehenno
They are independent of the government of Sudan, the fact that we do not helicopters, that's because troop contributors are not coming forward with helicopters. But there are other issues where we would want more cooperation from the government of Sudan and there that is the strategic issue because for that mission to succeed, it has to be welcomed by the government of Sudan and by the rebels as a mission that is going to help really implement a solid political process, the political process that Jan Eliasson and Salim
Salim are working at.

NARRATOR: For its part, the government of Sudan says that is cooperating fully with the United Nations and the African Union to prepare for the deployment of UNAMID. The country's representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Abdalhaleem Mohamad says his country is being made a scapegoat for the failure to boost the African Union mission in Darfur, AMIS, in what is called the light support package.

CUT 3: Abdlhaleem Mohamad
We are now in November 2007. We agreed to a very light support package to AMIS from the UN. I think the number is 130 elements form the UN. They failed to do that. They failed to implement the heavy support package to AMIS. And with such a complex and big operation like the UNAMID, they are also entertaining the habit of accusing Sudan whenever there is failure. So it's very much upsetting, for them to talk about. Sudan has done everything.

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, on the political front, Jan Eliasson, the United Nations Special Envoy for Darfur, says that that the peace process for Darfur, which started in the talks held in Sirte, Libya last month is irreversible. Mr Eliasson and his counterpart, Salim Ahmed Salim representing the African Union, are trying to get the Darfur movements to agree a common position when they negotiate with the Sudanese government. Some of these movements did not attend the talks in Sirte.

CUT 4: Jan Eliasson
Many would have liked to see wider participation in the talks in Sirte, but it was indeed the beginning of the process and now I think we have to exercise influence on both the government of Sudan and the movements to prepare for the substantive round of talks that we hope to start as soon as possible.

NARRATOR: The talks between the Sudanese government and the Darfur movements are expected to be held next month. Since the crisis began in Darfur in 2003, more than two hundred thousand people have lost their lives and over two million others forced to flee their homes. Reporting for UN Radio, I am Ransford Cline-Thomas.

STING UN AFRICA THEME MUSIC

Agriculture Agency Says Paying Farmers Can Protect the Environment

PRESENTER: A report recently published by the Food and Agriculture Organization says that paying farmers to use environmentally friendly practices will help to protect the environment. One of the experts who worked on the report is Professor Gerald Nelson of the University of Illinois in the United States. He told me that in the past, coercive methods have been used to try to get farmers to change their farming practices and that should change.

NELSON: The question is how do we capture the economic cost effects of those farmer activities so that farmers can be either persuaded or encouraged to reduce the negative effects to others. We have told farmers, don't do this, we've told you to leave your land and go some else. But the new thinking is to think about ways to encourage farmers with financial incentives to do things that are less environmentally damaging.

MBATHA: This is a more positive thinking.

NELSON: Exactly.

MBATHA: Yes. Now, how can we apply that on the African continent if I may ask?

MBATHA: In Africa, we have the potential to improve water quality by changing production practices, to sequester carbon, which is an important greenhouse gas with changes in agricultural practices. But what we can also think about doing in Africa is to target payments not only to preserve the environment but to directly address poverty consideration. In other words, we find places in Africa where there are potentials to have farmer change their production practices and pay those, and also aid places where there is lot poverty and transfer money to those regions.

MBATHA: Can we talk about specific areas if it's possible?

NELSON: One example is long string bean. And there is a big market in the European Community for these high end string green beans. So what the private sector has done is that they work very closely with the farmers to monitor their production practices to meet the European Community standards. But as a part of that activity there are positive spill overs to the rest of the agricultural practices. For example, if you put particular kinds of fertilizers on which meet European standards, they stay in the soil and are then good for the subsistence crop, the commodity crop, the rice for example.

MBATHA: Let's talk about some of the different forms that this payment could also be given to the farmers in Africa.

NELSON: In a classic example of payments and one that might become a classic and not yet applied to agriculture is a payment that is given every year to a farmer to sequester carbons in the soil. So the farmer would change the production practice, so for example, leaving more litter on the field that would then be incorporated into the soil and as it decomposed, part of the carbon that was in that litter would stay in the soil and the payments then that the farmer would get would be every year someone would come to the field, check the soil carbon level. If it has gone up, write a check. Another example would be that there is a farmer field that's on a hillside and at the bottom of the hill there is a river where the water from the river runs into a drinking source for a major city. When you cultivate that hillside without special practices, you will have soil running into the river, polluting the water supply. You may end up applying agricultural chemicals that will go into the water supply as well. So, a way to deal with that would be to do a one time payment to the farmer to put in terraces. So instead of having a sloping hillside, you have a series of terraces. And that one time payment, a capital payment to invest in that technology would then stop the soil runoff, would stop the chemical runoff. A third thing that you can do is to set up standards, environmental standards that are labelled in the product where it sold. So an example that I see in my home town here in the United States is shade grown coffee. I can go to a grocery store, a coffee store and I can buy a coffee that was certified to be produced by farmers in Africa in a shade grown conditions. Now why would I want that? Well one reason I might want that is actually that it might make the coffee taste better. The other reason might be that if you have shade grown coffee you have more niches for animals to live and particularly migrating birds. Some of the birds from Europe fly down to Africa in the winter time and are looking their sort of native eco-systems in Africa to live and many of those things require different levels of trees and different kinds of vegetation. So by growing shade grown coffee, an African farmer is contributing to bio-diversity, in this case talking about migrating birds.

PRESENTER: That was Professor Gerald Nelson of the University of Illinois in the United States.

STING UN AFRICA THEME MUSIC

Poverty and Diseases Interact in the Poverty Dilemma of Africa

PRESENTER: Disease and poverty are problems continuing to interact and plague the African continent. Although many African countries have made progress in meeting the millennium development goals of cutting by half the number of people living in extreme poverty, overall the continent is not on track to reach the target by 2015. UN Radio's Diane Bailey reports.

NARRATOR: As the clock continues to tick to 2015, a year which world leaders chose as the target for meeting the goal of reducing the number of extremely poor people in the world, the situation continues to look grim for millions of Africans. Professor Onesmo ole Moi Yoi of Kenyatta University in Kenya says that for one thing, the continent is facing three main diseases and this adds to the difficulties it is facing in its efforts to fight poverty.

CUT 1: Onesmo ole Moi Yoi
The first one of this is malaria. Instead of decreasing, malaria is increasing in Sub-Saharan Africa and has had a tremendous impact on the welfare of the people, the economic development on the continent. The second group of diseases are the infestations, the intestinal ones of which there are many and these are a major cause of diahrroea and malnutrition which makes malaria worse. And the third group of diseases are s the African sleeping sickness.

NARRATOR: A recent symposium at the United Nations focusing on how food production affects health and nutrition talked about some of these linkages. Professor Ole Moi Yoi who has studied resistance to malaria, made a connection between poverty, food availability and good health.

CUT 2: Onesmo Ole Moi Yoi
The anaemia of malaria makes it difficult for adults to have enough nutrition. They cannot carry enough oxygen. It is a factor especially noticeable in pregnant women who are anaemic and who also have difficulty delivering oxygen and other nutrients to the foetus. When these children are born they already have problems having not fully developed during pregnancy.

NARRATOR: Another expert who has researched poverty, hunger, food security and economic policy agrees that poverty and hunger do affect the well being of both women and their children. For instance, Professor Christopher Barret of Cornell University points out, women who don't get enough to eat can't take good care of children in the uterus.

CUT 3: Christoper Barret
Those children are typically born with low birth weight, have reduced health performance, reduced cognitive development and so, present hunger both through the immediate effects on people's ability to work, their stamina and energy as well as through the inter-generational transmission through women and the children they bear and raise, hunger winds up giving rise to poverty.

NARRATOR: As several reports have pointed out, African countries need support and assistance to tackle the problems they are facing in their efforts to eradicate poverty and hunger. Professor Barret says that various regions of the continent need strategies that deal with their particular problems. For instance, in Madagascar, people depend heavily on producing rice seasonally in difficult environments.

CUT 4: Christopher Barret
People simply need to be producing more rice per day worked, more rice per hectare cultivated and the problem is that all of the varieties developed internationally for improving rice output have failed in Malagasy context because of local soils, pest loads, temperatures, etc. We simply need to be investing in developing better germ plasma for that setting.

NARRATOR: Dr. Barret points out that in places like northern Kenya, it's a completely different setting of dry lands where pastoralists are facing the problem of insecurity and scarcity of grazing lands for their animals, a situation caused by drought. Reporting for UN Radio, I am Diane Bailey.

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PRESENTER: And that's all for this edition of UN and Africa. Our Production Assistant was Florence Poblete Enriquez and our sound engineer was Willie Correra. I am Derrick Mbatha saying bye bye.

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