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| Easter Basket for Raramuris girl (Photo courtesy of Victoria Tester) |
Summer Associates will work with low-income children in the Albuquerque and Las Cruces areas to ensure that they have access to the Summer Meals Program and other nutritional opportunities. Children will also be able to participate in physical activities. 
Why buy food closer to the emergency? Purchasing locally and regionally has been proven to be more cost-effective and efficient than shipping US-grown food across the globe. It also benefits local developing country farmers and strengthening poor economies. In the 2008 Farm Bill, the US increased its support for local and regional procurement of food aid (LRP) in a pilot program. According to an evaluation by Cornell University of the pilot, buying cereals like wheat and corn locally can save taxpayers over 50 percent, shorten delivery time by 62 percent and help poor farmers significantly. With this in mind, ONE is asking Congress to allow the US government to purchase up to 25 percent of food aid closer to its destination. Read moreThe letter also asks for a second important change: monetization. This a a process whereby organizations are granted food to ship overseas and sell in order to fund development projects. Here's what ONE says about this practice:
It is a pretty inefficient way to fund development (not to mention the market distortions that result). According to a Government Accountability Office report, when organizations sell food aid to fund development projects, they typically recover between two-thirds and three-fourths of what it costs to buy and ship the food. As long as this practice exists, ONE advocates that organizations should recover at least 80 percent of the costs to taxpayers. Many organizations already achieve this and the US government used to require it.Below is the letter from ONE to Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, and to Sen. Pat Roberts from Kansas, ranking Republican on the same committee.
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| Ellen chats with OL workshop speaker Adolphe Pierre-Louis |
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| A meeting at Sen.Tom Udall's office in Albuquerque |
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| Meeting with State Sen. Eric Griego |
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| With former State Rep. Janice Arnold-Jones |
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| Fair Trade Coffee from Haiti |
Representative grower data from Mexico and Peru, two global leaders in certified coffee, show that yields rather than price premiums are most important for increasing net cash returns for coffee growers. To the extent that any existing certification norm limits yield improvements, they may create “traps” for marginal low intensity growers, especially if price premiums are small and decrease over time with more competition. By contrast, to the extent that enhancing yields and productivity is critical to the well-being of coffee growing households, any “sustainability” initiative must consider embracing advances in geographically appropriate best management practices. We close by considering the implications of the limits of our current knowledge on what is “sustainable” to advancing the dialogue on what comes next for certification schemes.And from a discussion in Economics Applied..
Coffee growers must earn competitive returns from participating in certification programs, which promote principles like environmental stewardship, or participation will decline. While the promise of higher prices for certified coffee often motivates growers to participate initially, are price premiums the main determinant of grower profitability? What are the cost and benefits of organic certification standards that prohibit inorganic fertilizers, in contrast to other standards like that used by Rainforest Alliance. We find that...
Better yet, here is a short video (8 minutes) that goes with the book.Africa's small farmers, who comprise two-thirds of its population, toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as they did in the 1930s. Without mechanized equipment, fertilizer, or irrigation; using primitive storage facilities, roads, and markets; lacking capital, credit, and insurance; they harvest only one-quarter the yields of Western farmers, half of which spoil before getting to market. But in 2011 one group of farmers in Kenya came together to try to change their odds for success—and their families' futures.
Roger Thurow spent a year following their progress. In The Last Hunger Season, the intimate dramas of the farmers' lives unfold amidst growing awareness that to feed the world's growing population, food production must double by 2050. How will the farmers, Africa, and a hungrier world deal with issues of water usage, land ownership, foreign investment, corruption, GMO's, the changing role of women, and the politics of foreign aid?
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| Poster created from a drawing by a Palomas child. Click on image to enlarge |
This is a call-to-action for Americans to speak up and tell their members of Congress that we’re sick of these special interest giveaways that cost lives and tax dollars. Thousands have already signed our petition calling for reform. The push is part of Oxfam's GROW campaign to tackle the politics behind hunger. We grow enough food on this planet to ensure everyone has enough to eat, but political obstacles, like unnecessary food aid regulations, get in the way.
Life-saving food aid represents a tiny fraction, just .05 percent, of the federal budget. Yet every year, millions of dollars end up in the pockets of special interest groups instead of helping to feed hungry people.
Right now Washington is playing with our global food aid programs, with regulations that protect special interests at the expense of hungry people. These regulations cost taxpayers up to $500 million per year. It’s time to put an end to the wasteful special interest deals by reforming food aid programs in the 2012 Farm Bill. If we cut the red tape we can reach up to 17 million more people with life-saving aid at no additional cost to taxpayers. Save millions more lives, without spending a dime. It’s a no-brainer.
The Circles® model matches volunteers (Allies) with low-income families to expand their resources for greater networks into the community to reach economic stability. Everyone in the Circle works together and in doing so, identifies and dismantles the systemic barriers that keep people stuck in poverty.
This strategy has made great strides in 62 communities around the country. Early results demonstrate that for every $1 spent on the Circles, $2 in welfare and food stamp subsidies are returned to the state, and $4 to the community as new earned income.
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It was important to walk in silence and listen in silence. Otherwise, how could we hear the voice of God? 
But those were our own words about  |
God's answer came in a gust of wind that seemed to say "You are right to urge the church authorities, with all their power and influence, to speak out for those who are suffering in many ways." 
Even as we focus on the big picture, our Creator also wants our attention to the here are now. 
God spoke to us in many, many other ways, and not just at the stations. For example, it was the joy (and admiration) of seeing an old friend who was just back in the country after serving as a nurse for a couple of years at a hospital in Haiti.
The target set at the 1996 World Food Summit was to halve the number of undernourished people by 2015 from their number in 1990-92. (FAO uses three year averages in its calculation of undernourished people.) The (estimated) number of undernourished people in developing countries was 824 million in 1990-92. In 2010, the number had climbed to 925 million people. The WFS goal is a global goal adopted by the nations of the world; the present outcome indicates how marginal the efforts were in face of the real need. So, overall, the world is not making progress toward the world food summit goal, although there has been progress in Asia, and in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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If you don’t work in politics, this graph is probably pretty striking. If you do, it’s probably either familiar or terrifying, or both. Members of Congress interact with constituents in a variety of ways: in person, both in their districts and in Washington; over the phone when people call their offices; and through the mailing of letters. We can’t say for sure how many people a Member meets in person or how many phone calls come to the Hill each day. But I think it’s safe to say that, traditionally, neither of those forms of communication ate up nearly as much time as the mail did in a congressional office. The mail comes three times a day in Congress, and it’s unrelenting.
With postal mail, it was always easy to know if you were being written to by a constituent or by someone from outside your district. The rule of thumb for sorting such mail is typically something like this: if it’s a constituent or interest group from our district, put it in the pile for things that we will promptly respond to; if it’s a constituent from outside our district, put it in another pile for things that we will promptly deliver to the correct office; if it’s a interest group from outside our district, look through it quickly and see if it’s personal or a form letter / mass spamming. If it’s the former, consider responding. If it’s the latter, definitely trash it.
The problem with email...is that you can’t tell if the sender is from the district or not. And there are quite obvious incentives to not exclude anyone who might be a constituent. And so the incoming email has a tendency to nationalize the constituent communications techniques used in most Member offices; there’s just isn’t a sorting algorithm that lets you separate your constituents from other citizens.*** Which means that the information context Members are facing in their offices is much more national in scope, even after they’ve tried to filter it. This has consequences. For one, it forces a complete rethinking of an office communications strategy. But it also distorts one’s perspective of district opinion, and tends to orient Members toward national public policy; people from outside the district are much more likely to communicate about policy issues than distributive politics such as grants or earmarks.
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| Michelle Lujan Grisham (center) |
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| Martin Chavez (2nd from left) |
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| Eric Griego (center) |
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| Sunset at the Grand Canyon |
