Prof Margret Kamar

The first forum of African Ministers in charge of science, technology and innovation in Nairobi ended with a call by the ministers to increase investment in the sector.

The ministers said, increased investment will strengthen scientific research in Africa at national and regional levels.

Read by Kenya’s Prof Margret Kamar who is in charge of her country’s science and technology docket, the African ministers said time was ripe for the continent to harness science, technology and innovation to solve societal problems such as water, health, energy and agriculture.

They promised to put in place adequate mechanisms that would facilitate knowledge and technology transfer between countries through strengthening regional networks, south to south and north cooperation.

But there were also hard hitting sessions on the failures of Africa in science, technology and innovation.

Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s minister for science and technology said it is a pity that so many years after most of Africa gained independence, many African states have no policy guiding the sector.

“There is experience that use of STI would help Africa gain global respect,” said.

STI, she said, could act as catalyst in creating opportunities for the African youth.

She said as ministers, they must insist and demand governments increased funding for this important sector.

Jean Ping, President of the African Union Commission said through his representative, Erastus Mwencha said science, technology and innovation has the capacity to help AU’s vision of having at least 20 of her 54 members states attain middle income status by 2030 besides boosting the continent’s presence in published journals.

He revealed that at the moment that Africa’s access to university education is just 7 per cent, thanks due insufficient resources and low use of ICT.

Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank urged Africa to make use of science, technology and innovation to explore natural resources to create wealth thereby lessen inequalities in the society.

He said Africa’s reliance on the inherited wealth in oil and natural gas among others has led to conflicts but said science and technology offers Africa the opportunity to create wealth devoid of chaos.

The challenge for Africa however, said Kaberuka, is how to bring her youthful population, estimated to be 200 million aged between 15-24 into economic playground.

According to Kaberuka, although there is massive inflow of the foreign domestic investment into Africa, there is however massive unskilled labour, poor infrastructure.

He said 200 million people in Africa are aged 15-24 years. By 2030, he said, Africa will have world’s leading labour force.

“Africa is in the unique position to reap the demographic dividend….similar to the South East Asia. In the 70s, ASEAN captured this…and demographic dividends contributed up to 45% to the GDPs of the countries in south East Asia.

But investors coming to Africa today are hampered by unskilled manpower and poor infrastructure.

The public sector will never have enough resources to meet the need for STI development.

Quality of education is compromised by the need to meet the need for space for higher education.

But there are continental initiatives to help bridge the gap like the Pan African University.

AUTHOR: Henry Neondo
URL: http:// www.africasciencenews.org
E-MAIL: neondohenry [at] yahoo.com

At a forum that brought together climate scientists from the KMD, community representatives and leaders (including traditional forecasters, religious leaders, chiefs, women leaders, youth leaders and pastoralist and farmer group leaders) ; local government officials (including from the Agriculture, Environment, the provincial administration ,Water, Planning and ASALs), civil society organizations at the community and local levels in Thika, James Muhnidi of the KMD said the situation in the three months appears to be closely related to the devastating drought of 2009.

According to Muhindi, although there was good rainfall the last quarter of 2011 with analysis of the “Short Rains” (October-November-December) 2011 seasonal rainfall indicating that the performance was generally good with all the meteorological stations in Wajir, Lodwar and Mandera recording more than 300 percent of their seasonal (above 75% of the Long-Term Mean (LTM)) rainfall, the pastoralists have however not recovered from the 2009 drought and any rainfall shortfall in the following months will seriously affect them.

Recalling what happened then, communities from NEP said they expect deaths due to starvation, migration in search of pasture and water, conflicts among communities in the province and wildlife human conflicts unless remedial measures are taken.

In 2009, livestock were moved to Lamu, Somalia and few animals that left the province returned. The few that returned came back with diseases.

A combination of drought, high food prices, the lingering effects of post-election violence, a cholera outbreak, and a continued influx of refugees from Somalia left hundreds of thousands of people in the province in need of assistance.

Experts attributed the rise in the shortened cycle of natural disasters to global climate change and environmental degradation.

December, January, February and March have so far been dry. Muhindi said January recorded the highest temperatures in 13 years and some parts of NEP have already started some water stress and reduced pasture.

He urged government agencies not to relax based on the last good rain season last October, November and December warning that pastoralists require two good seasons before they can fully recover.

However, this time round, said Muhinid, pastoralists are likely to be hit with another devastating drought before they are fully recovered.

According to predictions from the global circulations from the Pacific and other factors controlling the weather, the factors indicate the 2009 scenario…meaning that rainfall would be very little. Then rainfall was less than 20%.

The rain is expected on the second week of April and may last barely two weeks to end early May.

Maureen Amabni, Climate and Communication officer, CARE International in Kenya’s Adaptation Learning Programme(ALP) the communities will pick the information and take it down to their communities who will in turn decide what to do with the information.

AUTHOR: Henry Neondo
URL: http:// www.africasciencenews.org
E-MAIL: neondohenry [at] yahoo.com

1.  No single engineering/technological intervention can solve the problem.
2. When you cannot beat it you have to live with it – the best possible way.

The first makes any high carbon technology like pumping out water through huge tunneling and pumping projects like Saint-Gervais-les-Bains in France by Mont Blanc, impractical for HKHR. The second brings us to the more practical aspect of risk reduction and mitigation measures for GLOFs.

The most important aspect of risk reduction and mitigation measures is the understanding of the scale and geophysics behind formation of GLOFs. There had been substantial work in this field by international communities and valuable insights can be gleaned from those works, some of which I referred in my GLOF Part 1 post. But these studies and recommendations will not likely bear fruits unless the knowledge disseminates down to people at the grass roots or in other words for the best remedy of GLOF related hazards can only be achieved if monitoring, observing, networking and maintaining early warning systems is made community based activities of day to day lives. I see a very important role of platforms like Climate Himalaya as an interface between the scientific communities of the world and indigenous communities of the Himalayas.

The next most important and a bit less discussed aspect of the risk reduction and mitigation measures is the encouragement of the community wisdom and local innovations. Incentivizing such actions, in my opinion, can enable magnificent life changing experiences in the Hills. In this context, the GEF sponsored project for Lake Thorthormi in Bhutan can be an eye opener for everybody.

This is real people power and fresh beacon of hope in a world of endless seminars and policy bickering. I reckon this to be a true human response to an adversity posed by nature.

There is also another interesting line of thinking which I am very keen to know if other thinkers and experts have considered. All the high altitude glacial lakes are located in arid, if not cold desert, areas where supply of water for agriculture is an issue. If I am not wrong, the terraced cultivation patters of the Himalayas are almost entirely rain fed and therefore subject to climatic variability which, trends show, are becoming increasingly uncertain.  I find it quite ironical that within this setting the Glacial Lakes sit with high storage of water and threaten us with possible devastation. Are we missing a blessing in disguise?

Leaving aside cryoseismic or geoseismic reasons, the most obvious cause of a GLOF is a moraine collapse under hydrostatic pressure and such failure is due to lack of drainage of accumulated water in the lake. While draining the lakes through moraines is mentioned as one of the mitigation measures in ICIMOD paper “Formation of Glacial lakes in Hindu Kush Himalayas and GLOF Risk Assessment”, I have yet to come across any study or project where such ‘leeching’ of Glacial Lakes are directly connected with irrigation and agriculture. When draining of glacial lakes have such local incentives, we can likely turn the dice from a defensive to a beneficial approach and risk mitigation can take on a self sustaining mode.

Ants then will eat the dead elephant when jackals have given up.

This will call for innovation by the hill people and I am sure they will not be short on support and advice by world communities.  And I shall refuse to accept that the soils of the Hill cannot foster such innovation. We have already seen it.

READ MORE
* GLOF part 1– A threat present and real: Indian summary (VIDEO)

This articles was first published in Climate Himalaya.

AUTHOR: Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
URL: http://pabitraspeaks.com
E-MAIL: mukhopadhyay.pabitra [at] gmail.com

The government targets revenue income at $16.01 billion in the coming fiscal year, from nearly $13 billion in the current fiscal year.

In a move to end a serious of power outage, the power production saw an increase of almost 20 percent as the finance minister outlined a plan to increase power generation by almost three times adding 7,800 megawatts to the national grid by 2013, write news portal bdnews24.

The minister set a 7.0 percent growth target for the gross domestic product (GDP) starting on July 1.

The budget holds down the rising inflation, principally blamed on price spirals and depreciation of the local currency, he explained.

Economic think-tank Unnayan Onneshan in a quick assessment on Thursday said the government might face extraordinary challenge to reach the growth target as quoted in the budget document of fiscal 20111-12 due to lack of supporting base in the overall economy of Bangladesh.

The budget was placed in the parliament on Thursday amidst boycott of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalists Party.

The fiscal space squeeze and IMF condition for accessing one billion dollar loan to Bangladesh might also pave the way for increasing different type of inequality; such as geographical inequality, income inequality and social inequality in the country, the think-tank said.

Finance Minister almost echoed with the think-tank and said that the next fiscal year would be challenging for the economy. “Recovery from the recession and political instability pose a great risk for the economy and we’re going to form a taskforce to deal with it,” he told journalist on Friday.

He does not hesitate to blame that the economy has fallen into trouble after recovery from recession due to commodity crisis and in Bangladesh political stability rubs salt to the injuries.

The anti-tobacco lobby expressed mixed reaction, when the government increased tax to 42.5 percent to discourage smoking. The activists were expecting strict economic restrictions of the tobacco growers.

Bank stocks went up Wednesday and Thursday riding largely on report that corporate tax will go down to 40 per cent for commercial banks.

AUTHOR: Saleem Samad
URL: http://bangladeshwatchdog.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: saleemsamad [at] hotmail.com

The mix cropping system where cereals, pulses, vegetables and oilseeds were grown together, are nowhere in existence in this region, leading to food insecurity and higher malnutrition manifestations. It has also been established that, the traditional food habit had the positive aspects in qualitative and quantitative terms, towards food availability, mineral and nutritional requirements. The elderly people in the region say that, there were seldom incidences of health problems like; cancer, kidney stone, blood pressure, diabetes, heart and gall bladder, etc.

It seems that, sooner the existence of cereals like; amaranthus, buckwheat, chenopodium, etc, Millets; finger millet, kodo, etc, Pulses; lentils, chickpea, etc, Oil seeds; yellow sarson, brown sarson, litsea, etc, Vegetables; okra, lai, elephant foot yam, etc, Spices; cleome, coriander, fenugreek, etc, Fruits; loquat, walnut, pear, apricot, peach, etc. and wild edible fruits and vegetable will be in the history of mountain food habits.

The new generation youth is even not aware about the traditional food habits, their health and nutritional benefits, as they are not at all promoted in the region as required. While there is the need to encourage such food habits through government canteens, mid-day meal programs, food served in various trainings and workshops, and putting such stalls in various exhibitions and trade fairs.

One of my colleagues Dr. Preetam says that, “Government has the record of people admitted in their hospital from each village, but, no record related to the people with good health due to their traditional food habits”. He further mentions that, “to encourage nutritional security for better health through food habits, people and organizations should be identified, involved and appreciated at each level”.

The Climate Himalaya Initiative’s partner ‘Beej Bachao Andolan (Save the Seeds Movement, Link: http://beejbachaoandolan.org), is working since 1980s in Uttarakhand mountains of India on various agro-biodiversity conservation initiatives. The focus of the movement is to draw links between the erosion of agricultural biodiversity and rural livelihoods, in promoting traditional agriculture and crop varieties. It promotes the method called ‘barahnaja’ (12 grains), where a number of cereals and legumes are inter-cropped. Due to consistent efforts of BBA, today it could diversify about 100 varieties of paddy, 170 varieties of kidney beans, eight varieties of wheat, four varieties of barley and about a dozen varieties of pulses and oil seeds. The BBA initiative considers important aspects related to; traditional knowledge, enabling self-sufficiency in food, conserve traditional biodiversity to enhance food security and promote healthy food habits, among others.

It is evident that, the food and agricultural innovation can help at large in reducing health and nutrition security vis-à-vis poverty targets, but, the need is that our scientific findings, research outputs, innovative ideas and extension services go hand-in-hand, and they are communicated timely and effectively.

One could also refer the study carried out by Dr. P.S. Mehta et al in 2009 (Download Link http://bit.ly/fMF9qC) about various agriculture crops by the farming communities.

AUTHOR: K. N. Vajpai
URL: http://vajpai.org
E-MAIL: knvajpai [at] climatehimalaya.net

If privatizing water were to result in greater conservation and greater availability to more people at a lower cost that would be wonderful. Just the opposite has been the practice of multinationals that control water and sanitation that are vital to survival and health. According to the World Health Organization, in 2005 at least 1.1 billion people had no access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lacked basic sanitation, both catalysts to infectious diseases that kill mainly the impoverished and mainly children.

Considering that just one percent of the world’s water if fit for human consumption, and given that water use has risen sixfold in the last one hundred years, the potential for profit is immense as the population is rising fastest where water shortages are most acute, namely in Africa and Asia. In just fifteen years, one-third of the world’s population will be facing moderate to severe water shortages, including in heavily populated countries like China, India, US, Mexico.

Among other companies, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Vivendi-Generale des eaux, Suez-Lyonnaise des eaux, Nestle, Danone, International Waters Ltd of London. IWL, a subsidiary if San Francisco-based construction giant Bechtel, and chemical giant Monsanto have been planning for more than a decade to make billions in profits by making certain that water is a private commodity from which they can make billions in profits throughout the world. In order for the multinational corporations to achieve the goal of securing control of water resources so they can sell at a premium, they need governments to make sure that water is subsidized by taxpayers but is in private hands, and they need public investment in infrastructural development at the taxpayers’ cost.

Under the label ‘global water crisis’, the World Bank is working with various US government agencies and private corporations to help with water and sanitation, aquifers, drought and flooding. Linking water and sanitation to global poverty, the World Bank stresses that at least 2 million death annually are linked to water-sanitation-related illnesses. Besides drinking water and sanitation, the World Bank and 17 US government agencies as well as a number of EU agencies are linking water to agriculture, energy, environment, industrial development and urban planning. All of this is great indeed if the benefits accrued to people and not multinationals owning water and sanitation rights as a means of capital accumulation that results in lack of access to the world’s poor.

If Monsanto is using its considerable reach in everything from agrochemical and seeds to land reclamation and water to corner the market in India, Mexico, and other countries it is doing so for the benefit of its investors and not for farmers and water household users. Monsanto is no more interested in the welfare of Indian and Mexican peasants than Vivendi-Generale des eaux and Suez-Lyonnaise des eaux that together control at least 40% (70% according to some sources) of the world’s commercial (privatized) water market in 130 countries cashing in on more than 110 million customers.

Given that 85% of the world’s water utilities are under public control, this is the most lucrative market that is ripe for exploitation; it is a market that governments, the IMF and World Bank are preparing for privatization and a means for capital accumulation. To make certain that privatization of water and sanitation proceed as planned, the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and USAID have spent billions of dollars in the last ten years around the world to achieve that goal.

Contrary to the reports from World Bank, US, and Western governments supporting privatization, will not solve the problem that millions of poor people face regarding clean water and sanitation problems. French-based SAUR, one of the largest water and sanitation companies in the world, admitted to the World Bank in 2002 that private water companies could not meet the needs of the world’s poor, given that the investment was too great to be recovered from low-income countries. SAUR demanded government subsidies and soft loans to continue privatization ventures in poor countries.

How do private companies secure soft loans and government subsidies? They make generous contributions to politicians legally and illegally. Both Suez and Vivendi have already been convicted for corruption in bribery and illegal donations to political parties in connection with projects in central Asia and Latin America. In cases where governments have tried to cancel contracts with multinational corporations, they have found that host governments of the multinational (US, UK, France) working together with the IMF and World Bank apply immense pressure to provide massive compensation. This was the case of Tanzania that canceled the contract of UK-based Biwater that did not do anything to improve the water supply as promised. By court order, Tanzanian taxpayers were required to pay $140 million to Biwater that had provided nothing to improve water services for the nation. Similar cases abound in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Water privatization is an integral part of the larger issue of globalization under the neo-liberal model that the multilateral agencies like the World Bank are promoting as the panacea. Water is a way for capital accumulation by Western multinationals seeking to squeeze as much capital as possible using existing natural resources that they intend to continue commercializing. Given that the opportunities for squeezing profits from many poor countries are limited, multinationals with the help of western governments and the World Bank, are focusing on how to commercialize a product that nature freely provides, a product essential for sustaining life.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com

Given the scenario of Black Carbon, it was emphasized that there is the need of depth scientific understanding of the sources and role of this short-lived atmospheric pollutants. The need of depth understanding on Black Carbon science, building capacities in the region for monitoring the issues and implementation of mitigation measures were among the other highlights of the consultation.

The moot question here is that, are we equally concerned about various other scientific phenomena and socio-environmental processes in Himalayan region.

At first hand, this may be related to disasters in the region, when we lost thousands of people during last flood in Pakistan, India and China. There is scope that, we form a similar scientific committee that could try to understand the science behind such calamities. We can also emphasize that how the displaced families would be coping with the aftermath situation and how many of them still have health, agriculture, food and water related problems and what are the possible workable solutions.

This should be among our major concerns! And to avoid such situation in near future, we should host similar consultation in the region to secure the lives of people and develop a robust disaster preparedness plan!

Another concern could be swelling urban population and urban settlements in Himalayan region due to mass migration, which is taking place at an unprecedented rate! We must be concerned about the dramatic settlement transition in Himalayan region and factors leading to this situation.

We can have enough studies on this emerging issue and could seek cooperation projects to cope the situation.

The third important issue in my view is that; we must emphasize upon our outdated library management system in Himalayan region based research institutions and universities to make them more effective by piloting a few models. There should be emphasis on knowledge networking, which is very much needed for information sharing among the community for various decision-making processes.

The fourth issues is about the various extension wings in our research institutions in the region, those need to be revived at a level where the research project team start sharing the scientific findings for the benefit of the communities. Therefore, there should be a mechanism in place that ensures science is communicated effectively and in timely manner.

There are issues related to wise water management, livelihood opportunities, reducing mass migration, improving environmental impact assessment processes, effective networking and sharing knowledge on various scientific issues, promoting agriculture technologies, safe water and adequate sanitation, among others.

So that the coping mechanism of Black Carbon could become part of sustainable development process in black and white!

AUTHOR: K. N. Vajpai
URL: http://vajpai.org
E-MAIL: knvajpai [at] climatehimalaya.net