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	We must support smallholder farmers by Ertharin Cousin World Food Program   A large swath of Southern Africa has been hit by a double whammy of epic floods followed by a miserly drought -- a phenomenon that has affected countless people in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Meanwhile, the fledgling nation of South Sudan is in the throes of a major hunger crisis as conflict has pushed the country’s population to the brink of famine. As different as these two scenarios appear, the head of the UN’s World Food Program said both crises grow from the same roots. WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin, said the damage caused by climate change, coupled with a lack of development -- both agricultural and economic -- perpetually keep small-scale farmers on the edge. In underdeveloped nations like four-year-old South Sudan, conflict feeds into that downward spiral. Anita Powell, spoke to Cousin, in Lilongwe, Malawi.   Q: “You’re in Malawi right now, there have been some devastating floods and some food security problems there. What’s the situation?”   A: “Well, the situation is that we’re working to address the recovering needs of those who were the victims of the flood and now we are providing support to many smallholder farmers who are trying to plant for the short winter season in hopes of addressing food security needs. Our challenge now is that we’re also now facing a drought in Malawi, which will compound the food security challenge in this country.”   Q: “How did this happen, and what do we need to do to keep this from happening again?”   A: “The global community is well aware that climate change is impacting sub-Saharan Africa. Erratic rains have become more of a reality for across the entire continent... The vulnerable people around the world need a strong global response to address the issues of climate change to ensure that we can minimize the impacts in the future.   But today, what we must do is implement disaster risk mitigation strategies that will support vulnerable populations. We must build resistance, resilience in vulnerable people to climate impacts on agriculture. Over 95 percent of all agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa is rain-fed today. As long as that is the case, we know that when the rains don’t come, the crops will fail and people will go hungry.   So we must begin to address these challenges in a scaled-up manner to support vulnerable people across the entire continent to ensure we minimize the potential impact from erratic rains and other challenges as related to climate change.”   Q: “We understand that you were fairly recently in South Sudan, a country that’s been grabbing headlines for its own hunger issues and food insecurity. Can you tell us a little bit about what you saw there?”   A: Well, this was my fourth trip to South Sudan in less than three and a half years. And I always say to my teams and to governments when I visit a country, ‘you don’t want me to come more than once, because that means that there’s a real problem.’ And there’s a significant problem in South Sudan. We are, today, WFP is feeding 2.5 million people in a country where three and a half years ago, we were planning for agricultural development programs, the kind of programs that we’re talking about here today in Malawi.   And now we’re back to general food distribution programs in three states where they are suffering because of the ongoing conflict. I’ve met with women who walked hundreds of kilometers in search of food and safety. I witnessed one mother lose her baby after she had walked over a hundred kilometers because there wasn’t enough food for the child to eat during that period.   And when I talk to these women, when I ask them what they want, they say they want peace and they want the ability to feed their children.”   Q: “One of the consistent themes that you’ve brought up, in talking about both southern Africa and South Sudan, is the need for agricultural development. Can you tell us why this is so important to you, as the head of the World Food Program?”   A: Seventy percent of the people who are food insecure in the world today live in rural areas. And if we don’t address the challenges of unproductive agriculture, we cannot add the issue the issue of food security or the issue of hunger.   So we must increase the ability of smallholder farmers to scale up their agricultural yields and provide markets for them to sell those yields to ensure that we can create sustainable and durable agricultural value chains that support the food security of families, as well as the economic viability of those families. That is the only way that we are going to make progress.”   http://www.wfp.org/countries Visit the related web page
	Put inequality, climate change, tax dodging at the top of the agenda by Oxfam International   April 2015   The World Bank and the IMF must seize their early chance in what could be a watershed year to end extreme global poverty by putting the battle against inequality, climate change and tax dodging at the very top of its Spring Meetings’ agenda this week.   Oxfam says they could send a strong signal into the three major Summits later this year that will seek to secure ambitious new sustainable development and climate change goals, and long term financing to help a billion poor people work themselves out of poverty.   The international agency says that the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s plan announced last week, Growth, Invest and Insure is a start, but it will not succeed in ending extreme poverty within the next 15 years, unless both he and the IMF’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde show the world that fighting inequality and climate change are a vital part of this plan.   Nicolas Mombrial, Head of Oxfam’s Washington Office, says: “Poverty, inequality and climate change go hand in hand. Only by loosening their grip will the near billion people living in extreme poverty have the chance to build brighter futures.   “It is scandalous that we are bound by a flawed international tax system that makes poor people poorer and a small elite wealthier. The Ebola crisis is a stark reminder of what that means, where the amount of tax lost in tax exemptions for a handful of big foreign companies in Sierra Leone was more than 8 times the government’s spending on health.   On current trends, the wealthiest one per cent will own more than everyone else next year while we still have some billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. Meanwhile, the gathering pace of climate change threatens to put development in reverse.   The World Bank and the IMF should also influence how the sustainable development goals could be financed by unlocking the enormous potential resources from an improved international tax system that penalises corporate tax dodgers. Developing countries lose at least $100 billion annually to corporate tax dodging, enough for every child in the world to go to school four times over.   Oxfam says they should support a clamp down on corporate tax dodging and lobby governments to support a World Tax Summit. Governments must put fixing the broken international corporate tax system at the forefront of talks at the Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa in July. There, Oxfam wants to see governments change rigged tax rules and act to create fair and inclusive international tax reform to finance sustainable development.   Mombrial said: “The World Bank and the IMF have the authority and membership to ensure this is high on the agenda but the World Bank especially seems fixated on leveraging private finance to fund. Private finance has a role to play but is no panacea.”   Oxfam wants to see the World Bank and other donors commit to more funding to help tackle the ongoing Ebola crisis and work towards a ten-year plan to rebuild free and public national health systems that serve everyone.   The Bank must also do more to improve land rights for vulnerable communities. Its private sector lending arm (the IFC) currently cannot properly track its investments into third-party developers or know whether these downstream projects are helping or harming poor communities.   Oxfam is also calling for Jim Yong Kim and Christine Lagarde to pressure national governments to make sure that poor people who are most affected by climate change are central to an agreement at the UN Paris climate talks, starting in November. Rich countries must be pressed to stand by their current commitments to mobilise $100bn per year by 2020 to help poor countries fight climate change, and to lay the ground for a new round of finance commitments to be struck in Paris for the post-2020 period.   The World Bank can itself help to build momentum for success in Paris by more urgently shifting its investments away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable renewable alternatives.   http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2015-04-15/three-pronged-attack-poverty-needed-make-year-historic-turning
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