ElPunto
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<cite>said:</cite>
What about Pm why are Puntlanders attacking the President only ....?ANY WAYS PUNTLAND NEVER HAD TIES WITH MOGADISHU EVER SINCE LATE PRESIDENT RIP ABDULAHI YUSUF LEFT MOGADISHU.......Puntland does not contribute to the SFG pay tax or provide soldiers ...Let them cut ties until 2016 or pay tax send some troops what are the benefits of having ties with Puntland admin ?It is amazing how the same old hoary and patently nonsensical arguments come back when politics heats up among Somalis. Puntland raises taxes from its residents and port - it is not obliged to give money to the federal government given that no services are provided to it for its moneys. In fact, the federal government ought to be providing moneys to PL since it receives money in the name of ALL Somalis. But that money doesn't leave Mogadishu. The FG can't provide adequate salaries and treatment to the local boys recruited for the military - why would Garowe be duty bound to send them any of its boys? So they can receive the same shabby treatment? Come on.
The only forward for the FG in Mogadishu is to realize there is no dictation to Somalis. The only thing you can do is herd them to a consensus. It will be hard but if Xamar wants to regain stature in the eyes of Somalis - it has to behave humbly and sincerely.
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Malistar,How naive do you think Puntlanders are? Why should we blame the PM for something he had nothing to do with, and if anything why blame him for a moryan concocted dream which was delibrately put into play just to discredit the PM in the eyes of the Somali people?As we know Yuulka is a capable PM, unfortunately he has to work with Culosow who is hellbent on thwarting the implementation of the federal constitution.Malistar, this is politics and never forget that you are dealing with the political masterminds of Somalia.^This is nonsense. Malistar is right. This whole process has been championed by the PM - Culusow has been in the background for this. And criticism of this deal should be rightly directed at the PM if anyone is unhappy. Anything else smacks of clan coddling.
Somalis like drama. And constant, perpetual infighting.
Why did the PM announce the formation of a state where he did not consult with the government of 3 of the 5 districts of Mudug? How can this arrangement satisfy the constitutional requirement if the relevant stakeholders and their representatives have not been consulted or invited? How is it the PM didn't pick up the phone and talk to PL and provide clarifications or assurances or anything to ensure that its arrangement would not be met like this?
It strikes me as near impossible that the PL president Abdiweli did not know about the efforts here to form some arrangement for the central regions. Did he call the PM with his concerns and ask to have them addressed? Did he suggest a way to bring the unruly clans in the central region together without declaration of a state - since it cannot meet the requirements of one? If the PL president was getting stonewalled - why did he not speak to the IC and the media to air his concerns and get changes in the final agreement rather than walking out of the government?
This is a royal cock-up by the PM who has seemed like one who wanted to move the country forward. This arrangement doesn't meet the basic criteria of a state and fails to take into account the key stakeholders required to build a state. Both sides need to find a solution - marginalization/stonewalling and disassociation are not real tactics to move the country forward.
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Mate what I said was some other shit is causing this cabsi, my opinion, whatever its from garowe or hargiesa? We dont exactly know.Not sure what this means. What is the cabsi you're talking about? Are you saying the insecurity in Xamar is coming from Garowe or Hargeysa?
No one can help ppl who won't help themselves. Hargeysa or Garowe can't want security and safety more than the people of Xamar. Ultimately - it is them who have to own the situation and confront the government and other elites to demand results. And citizens have to work with the security services to root out terrorists.
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Communicating with a reporter online, they said they mainly stay in and read the Qur’an unless their husbands take them out.If true - they've got their comeuppance. But it strikes me as flimsy that the whole story is based on 'communicating with a reporter online'. Who is he/she and who is their employer? It's the sort of poorly documented sensationalism that Brit papers like to propagate.
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^How many years will you take to wake up - 23 years is not enough? Is the whole country supposed to be held hostage to this city's inability to act as a national capital and seat of government?
Prior to Hassan Shiekh's reign - assassinations and targeting of individual MPs was rare. The modus operandi of Al-Shabaab was to do a Shamow and blow up any and all they can get their hands on. Now in the past couple of years - the situation has changed. MPs are followed and targeted directly. Who is orchestrating it I don't know. But to blame everything on Shabaab is convenient for those with their own private agendas.
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<cite>said:</cite>Despite their preposterous believes and distortion of the sacred Islamic truth, the Shias are nevertheless our misguided brothers and do not deserve our hostility. The support Iran gives to Hizbullah, Bashar Al Asad, and Nouri Al Maliki of Iraq is just a response to the long standing Sunni Arab aggression against the Shia Muslims. When the Iranian people revolted against the Zionist led American imperialists, Saudi Arabia and all the other Sunni Arab tyrannical regimes sided with the Americans and their Zionists masters and financed Saddam's Western sponsored efforts to destroy the Infant Islamic Republic. With the help of Allah, the Iranian people prevailed and were victorious. Since their Islamic revolution, the Iranian people sacrificed everything in order to support the Palestinian cause. Whenever, Israel attacks the Palestinian people, the Lebanese Shias are the only Arabs joining in the fight in support of the Palestinian Sunnis. Lebanon was invaded numerous times by Israel because of the Hizbullah Mujahidiin. It is only the Shia Muslims who are paying a heavy prize to support Sunni Palestine. If Iran did not care about the plight of the Sunni Palestinian people, they would have forged ties with the West and prospered more than any other Middle Eastern country. During the Shah rule in Iran, even the Israelis were so willing to provide sensitive nuclear technology to Iran. But the principled Iranian people chose principle over their economy and prosperity. They endured over thirty years of harsh sanctions and constant aggression from the alliance of the Sunnis, Westerners, and the Zionists. But again with the help of Allah, they overcame this open aggression and betrayal of their Sunni brothers and got stronger. Today it is only Iran which sends shivers down the spine of the Zionists. May Allah help our Shia brothers and guide them to the true path of Islam.In foreign affairs - it's best not to be blinkered by idealistic empty rhetoric ie. 'the Iranian people sacrificed everything in order to support the Palestinian cause' etc. After the Iranian Revolution - Khomeni did everything he could to export his revolution to other Muslim countries particularly those with restive Shia populations. This is why the Sunni Arab regimes turned on Iran. They were protecting their own power structure. And the support for the Palestinians is the classic - 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' - and not some underlying Iranian sympathy with the Palestinians. If there was that - it would have been evident during the Shah's time - when Israel saw Iran as the only friend and ally they had in the Mid-east. Say what you will about the corrupt Sunni Arab regimes - they may be American stooges but they have never embraced Israel. Finally - if the current regime in Iran cares about Sunni Muslims - they would let the 1 million sunnis living in Tehran have their own purpose built mosque. At the end of the day - interest trumps morality.
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War hedhe - why are your putting this crime on an entire qabiil??? Stop this.
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If this guy is fired before he finishes out his term - it will go some way to redeeming the disaster that is the Somali politician/oday beleed. I don't hold much hope though.
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AUN to her. This is shocking.
I think it's clearly time to give serious thought to moving the capital at least temporarily. Mogadishu has become a nest of cockroaches - either you get a real exterminator to come in and clean it up [clearly not Qosalaye] or you move house.
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^It's not as simplistic as you portray. If Iran cared about Sunnis then they would not have helped Assad murder 150,000 plus. Iran like Saudi Arabia has interests that they fight to preserve. Iran wants Assad and Hezbollah and Maliki as allies and puppets. And Saudi and the rest are afraid of their dictatorships toppled by Muslim Brotherhood and like groups. None of them really care about the Palestinian issue at the leadership level - it's all about propaganda.
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Nowadays, Islam is transforming to a set of rituals rather than spiritual guidance for Muslims in this life and hereafter.It is not an either/or. Islam is about a set of rituals that stem from and reinforce spiritual guidance. What you are arguing against is narrow-mindedness, establishing pointless litmus tests to praise/condemn someone. And I fully agree with you on that. Somalis are extremely narrow-minded and prone to zealotry - what is needed is education, open mindedness and a focus on the lived experience of early Muslims that embraced diversity of opinion within a consensual framework of Islamic.
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<cite>said:</cite>As I pointed out I don't support their believes which is outragious, but their courage and sense of self-respect. I also hate the way they are mistreated by all the Sunnis. They hate us because the Sunnis not only hate them but persecute them as well. I think we should stop this alienation of the shias and reason with them instead.Your statement shows you lack the reality of Sunnis in Iran - which through cleverness exhibited by the Iranians and apathy from the rest of the Sunni world is not known at all.
"Over one million, yet there is not a SINGLE Mosque for them to perform their religious rites according to their beliefs even though there are plenty of Firetemples, Churches, Synogegues and even SIKH temples in Tehran:"
"It is pertinent to mention that the Sunni community of Tehran is prohibited to build any separate mosque. Sunnis have been offering prayers in some rented places; even, sometimes, the authorities and security officials impose restrictions on their gatherings for prayers on Fridays and Eid days."
This is a factual statement supported by non-partisan organizations amongst a host of other human rights abuses against Sunnis. And if you want to read more about the oppressed Sunnis in Iran and their situation - you can find out more at this (clearly partisan) website. It certainly makes for sobering reading regarding the purported Islamic solidarity claims of the Shia regime in Iran.
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What utter bollocks! To claim that men habitually in a haze of drug induced stupor will now become Islamic radicals as a result of want of khat? And to argue that khat is 'mild' and harmless when every single developed country has banned it really exhibits the poverty of this individual's reasoning skills.
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^Take your pick of African countries if you don't like Nigeria. South Africa, Senegal etc - all exhibit poor records in lifting citizens out of poverty. And who said there isn't corruption in China? Yet the economic rise of that country despite being a dictatorship is indisputable fact.
Your linking abortions (forced or not) to the general upliftment or lack thereof of women is odd. There have been millions of abortions in the United States since Roe v. Wade - at the same time - opportunities have expanded greatly in education, business and politics for women - a key definition of social progress. The same phenomenon has occurred in China despite the inhumane one child policy and state directed abortions.
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^Poor fellow! It's ok to be mad. I noticed how you used the word 'failed' three times in one paragraph. Talk about projecting - failing for over 20 years is pretty tough to take though - I'll grant you that. 'Abandoned erstwhile republic'? - wasn't a certain Somalilandish first lady opening a hotel in Xamar a few months back? Even with all the insecurity can't keep you away. 'Half the people' of the republic are now Somalilandish eh? It's ok bud - I get it - it will take sometime to get deprogrammed.
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Moronic drivel from a failed wannabe politician aka Political Prostitute of 2013. Little in the way of unbiased analysis or solutions offered. Ultimately, whatever happens in Mogadishu and most of it is bad - this appointment is another building block to the reconstitution of the Republic of Somalia whose territorial integrity and international borders are not in dispute.
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The Next Breadbasket
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
Photographs by Robin Hammond
She never saw the big tractor coming. First it plowed up her banana trees. Then her corn. Then her beans, sweet potatoes, cassava. Within a few, dusty minutes the one-acre plot near Xai-Xai, Mozambique, which had fed Flora Chirime and her five children for years, was consumed by a Chinese corporation building a 50,000-acre farm, a green-and-brown checkerboard of fields covering a broad stretch of the Limpopo River Delta.
“No one even talked to me,” the 45-year-old Chirime says, her voice rising with anger. “Just one day I found the tractor in my field plowing up everything. No one who lost their machamba has been compensated!” Local civil society groups say thousands lost their land and livelihoods to the Wanbao Africa Agricultural Development Company—all with the blessing of the Mozambican government, which has a history of neglecting local farmers’ rights to land in favor of large investments. Those who managed to get jobs on the giant farm are working seven days a week with no overtime pay. A spokesman for Wanbao denied such allegations and stressed that it’s training local farmers to grow rice.
Chirime’s situation is hardly unique. She’s just one character in the biggest story in global agriculture: the unlikely quest to turn sub-Saharan Africa, historically one of the hungriest places on the planet, into a major new breadbasket for the world. Since 2007 the near-record prices of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice have set off a global land rush by corporate investors eager to lease or buy land in countries where acreage is cheap, governments are amenable, and property rights often ignored. Most land deals have occurred in Africa, one of the few regions on the planet that still have millions of acres of fallow land and plentiful water available for irrigation. It also has the largest “yield gap” on Earth: Although corn, wheat, and rice farmers in the U.S., China, and eurozone countries produce about three tons of grain per acre, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa average half a ton—roughly the same yield Roman farmers achieved on their wheat fields in a good year during the rule of Caesar. Despite several attempts, the green revolution’s mix of fertilizers, irrigation, and high-yield seeds—which more than doubled global grain production between 1960 and 2000—never blossomed in Africa, thanks to the poor infrastructure, limited markets, weak governance, and fratricidal civil wars that wracked the postcolonial continent.
Many of those hurdles are now falling. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic growth has hummed along at about 5 percent a year for the past decade, besting that of the U.S. and the European Union. National debts are declining, and peaceful elections are being held with increasing frequency. More than one in three sub-Saharan Africans now own cell phones and use them for mobile banking, to run small businesses, or send money to relatives in rural areas. After 25 years of virtually no investment in African agriculture, the World Bank and donor countries have stepped up. The continent is emerging as a laboratory for testing new approaches to boosting food production. If sub-Saharan African farmers can raise their yields to even two tons of grain per acre using existing technology—a fourfold increase and still a tall order—some experts believe they could not only better feed themselves but actually export food, earning much needed cash and helping to feed the world as well.
It’s an optimistic vision, for sure. Thailand currently exports more agricultural products than all sub-Saharan countries combined, and the specter of climate change threatens to hammer Africa’s yields. But the thorniest question is, Who will do the farming in Africa’s future? Will it be poor farmers like Chirime working one-acre plots, who make up roughly 70 percent of the continent’s labor force? Or will it be giant corporations like Wanbao, operating industrial farms modeled on those of the American Midwest?
Humanitarian groups that deal with global hunger and peasants’ rights call corporate land deals neocolonialism and agri-imperialism. Yet veterans of agricultural development say the massive infusion of private cash, infrastructure, and technology that such deals may bring to poor rural areas could be a catalyst for desperately needed development—if big projects and small farmers can work together. The key, says USAID’s Gregory Myers, is protecting the land rights of the people. “This could significantly reduce global poverty, and that could be the story of the century.”
“If you wrote a letter to God and asked him for the best soil and climate conditions for farming, this is what he’d send you,” says Miguel Bosch, an Argentine agronomist who manages Hoyo Hoyo, a nearly 25,000-acre corporate soybean farm in northern Mozambique. “It is a paradise for growers. I’ve spent many years farming in Brazil and Argentina and have never seen such soil.”
Fertile land, skyrocketing demand for soybeans and rice, and a government willing to cut big land deals have put the former Portuguese colony at the center of the land rush sweeping the continent. In 2013 the nation was the third poorest on the planet, with almost half its children under five stunted by malnutrition. Recent discoveries of world-class coal and natural gas deposits in the north as well as other mining and forestry concessions are slowly changing its fortunes. The rush to tap these hydrocarbons has ignited Mozambique’s economy, which grew by an estimated 7 percent in 2013. Massive infrastructure projects are springing up, many financed largely by loans from nations eager to curry favor with political leaders and get in on the action. Japan is building roads and bridges. Portuguese companies are building ports and rail lines. China has already built a new airport, the parliament building, the national soccer stadium, and even the new presidential palace overlooking the broad bay in the capital, Maputo. In 2013 President Armando Guebuza spent a week visiting the new Chinese president with a ten-billion-dollar wish list of new construction projects in hand.
Little of that bounty has trickled down to the nation’s 24 million citizens, more than half of whom still live on less than $1.25 a day. A return to civil unrest is the only thing that could upset the river of cash flowing into Mozambique. After riots over food prices broke out in Maputo in 2010, President Guebuza fired his agriculture minister and replaced him with Interior Minister José Pacheco, an agronomist, who has continued courting investors at conferences around the world. Of its 89 million acres of arable land, the government deems almost 85 percent “unutilized.” Since 2004 some six million acres have been leased to both foreign and domestic investors for everything from forestry products to biofuels to sugarcane, roughly 7 percent of the country’s arable land—among the highest rates in Africa.
Signing a deal with a ministry official in a swank Maputo hotel is the easy part. Getting a massive corporate farm up and running and turning a profit in the midst of often hostile neighbors is something else entirely. Hoyo Hoyo, located in the nation’s prime soybean-growing region of Gurué, was supposed to be a shining example of the new African agriculture. Instead it became the poster child for how such deals can go wrong. In 2009 Mozambican officials leased the nearly 25,000 acres of an abandoned state farm to a Portuguese company with ties to the government. But local villagers had been growing food for their families there for years. When the Portuguese managers came in, they met with village leaders and promised them double the amount of land to farm elsewhere as well as a school, a clinic, and new wells.
Few of those promises were kept. The school and clinic were never built, though the company did buy an ambulance to take the sick to a hospital in Gurué, an hour’s ride away. Only about 40 men got low-paying jobs as watchmen on the farm, while hundreds were displaced. Those who did receive acreage have found it to be far from home, swampy, and overgrown. Custódio Alberto is one of them. I meet the 52-year-old farmer at a threshing party just outside the Hoyo Hoyo boundary, where two dozen men from the local Roman Catholic church are beating piles of soybeans with wooden clubs. An equal number of women are winnowing the chaff with handwoven baskets. The seven-acre plot, for the moment still controlled by the church, is next to Hoyo Hoyo’s wide-open fields, which stretch toward the green mountains in the distance.
“For us as small farmers, the production of this soy guarantees the family income, even enough for us to send our children to college so they can become engineers or even doctors,” Alberto says. “Fields are fundamental for us. No fields, no life.”
The displaced villagers, who survived 16 years of war, are poor but far from powerless. Soon after the Portuguese got the lease to Hoyo Hoyo, which means “welcome” in the local language, the farm began having trouble with its equipment. John Deere tractors imported from the United States mysteriously failed to start. I ask a farmer working nearby what the problem was.
“I don’t know how it happens,” he said with a knowing smile. “Maybe African magic.”
The conflict over Hoyo Hoyo pales in comparison with what’s coming down the road. In 2009 the government signed an agreement with Brazil and Japan to develop an agricultural megaproject dubbed ProSavana, which would make almost 35 million acres of northern Mozambique available for industrial-scale soybean production, possibly the largest such land deal ever reported. The plan is inspired by a Japanese-Brazilian project that transformed Brazil’s cerrado grasslands into one of the largest soy-exporting regions in the world, with the bulk of its yield going to feed Europe’s and China’s livestock. The North Carolina–size corridor would be dotted here and there with modern, 25,000-acre farms run by Brazilian agribusinesses and with technical centers to educate local farmers on how to boost yields of cassava, beans, vegetables, as well as soy—or so the initial vision went. But when a group of Brazilian farmers toured the region in 2013, they had a rude awakening.
“They saw good lands, but everywhere was a community,” says Anacleto Saint Mart, who works with farmers in the region for the U.S. nonprofit TechnoServe. “They were seeing a reality very different from what they were told in Brazil.” Development experts who’ve pored over maps of the area say most of it is already leased for mining or logging, is protected as wildlife reserves, or is already being cultivated by local farmers. Only about 2.2 million acres are currently unutilized, and those are the worst lands for farming.
“When you look at ProSavana, who is winning?” asks Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, the nonprofit that first focused the world’s attention on corporate investments in farmland. “The land is currently worked by small farmers, and [yet] the government is placing it in the hands of corporations. I’m sure there are some companies with good intentions. But they’re still profiting from low wages and low land prices. Industrial agriculture will just lead to more exploitation.”
With the right policies, small farmers can be extremely productive, Kuyek says, pointing to the rice farmers of Vietnam or the small dairy farmers in Kenya, who supply more than 70 percent of the nation’s milk. Simply providing women—who make up the majority of African farmers—the same access to land, credit, and fertilizer as men could boost food production by as much as 30 percent. The government of Mozambique doesn’t see it that way. Though food production by small farmers has improved over the past few years, 37 percent of the population is undernourished, and the country’s southern region is plagued by droughts and floods. Despite its mineral wealth, Mozambique remains one of the hungriest nations in the world. The government thinks bigger farms are the answer.
“I look at ProSavana along with the Zambezi Valley region as the food store of the country,” says Raimundo Matule, the national director of economics at the Ministry of Agriculture. “I don’t envision huge farms like in Brazil, but more medium-size producers of three to ten hectares [7 to 25 acres]. The Brazilians have knowledge, technology, and equipment that we can adapt and transfer to medium-size farms. If ProSavana doesn’t contribute to better food security, then it will not have government support.”
A few miles down a washboard dirt road from Hoyo Hoyo, a soybean farm run by a retired schoolteacher is an example of a productive middle path. Armando Afonso Catxava began growing vegetables in his spare time on a small plot of land and over the years has cobbled together about 64 acres. He now grows soybeans as an “outgrower” under contract with a new company called African Century Agriculture, which provides him with seeds and mechanical weeding. In return he sells his soybeans to the company at an agreed-on price, minus the cost of the services provided. So far both have profited from the arrangement.
“I think middle-size farms are the secret,” Catxava says. “Big farms take too much area, and there is nowhere for people to live. If everybody had five hectares [12 acres] of soy, they would make money and not lose their land.” Outgrower arrangements have been successful with poultry and high-value crops like tobacco and even organic baby corn grown for export to Europe. Now Mozambique’s farmers are starting to raise soybeans for feed to supply the booming chicken industry.
Rachel Grobbelaar is a tall, tough Zimbabwean who left a good job in London’s financial district to run African Century, which works with more than 900 outgrowers—a mix of smallholders and medium-size growers—on nearly 2,500 acres. Farmers each get seven visits a season from the company’s extension agents, who teach them the basics of conservation agriculture and the use of inexpensive seed treatments, instead of expensive fertilizer, to boost yields.
“I was visiting one of our small farmers up on the mountain yesterday, and he grew 2.4 tons per hectare [one ton per acre],” Grobbelaar says, referring to last year’s harvest—more than double the average yield. “He couldn’t believe it. He made 37,000 meticais [about $1,200] profit. That’s a lot. I’m very supportive of the outgrower model in Africa. Commercial farms may give them a job, but it takes away their land and typically pays them bare-minimum salaries. I honestly believe we can increase production this way.”
When done right, larger-scale farms can benefit locals too. Dries Gouws, a former surgeon in Zambia, planted 30 acres of banana trees on a bankrupt citrus farm outside of Maputo 14 years ago. He slowly grew the operation into what he now calls Bananalandia. At 3,500 acres, it’s the largest banana farm in Mozambique and one of the nation’s largest employers, with 2,800 year-round workers. During that time Gouws’s farm helped turn Mozambique from a banana importer into a banana exporter. As the farm grew, Gouws paved roads, built a school and a clinic, dug wells, and ran 34 miles of electrical lines that not only power his irrigation but also supply the surrounding villages where his employees live. His lowest paid workers make 10 percent more than minimum wage; his tractor drivers and plantation managers make more than double that.
Gouws believes in a mix of big and little farms, with small farmers raising cattle and tending plots of land as a safety net and source of pride, and big farms like his bringing in roads, power, and infrastructure that the government does not provide. Big farms supply employment for some; other people make it on their own. The key to corporate farms winning over local communities, he says, is simple: Keep your word.
“I built this power line for the village,” Gouws says, as we follow a wire along a red-dirt path toward a cluster of huts amid the banana fields. “I’ve never been asked to do it or expected to do it. But at some point, not to get too philosophical about it, we want to make the world a better place, don’t we? It can’t just be about the money.”
Yet make no mistake, money—not some noble idea of feeding the world—is driving the land rush in Africa. A recent conference for agricultural investors in New York drew some 800 financial leaders from around the globe who manage nearly three trillion dollars in investments. These included giant pension funds, life insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity funds, and sovereign-wealth funds, which currently have about 5 percent of their combined assets allocated to investments in agriculture. That number is expected to triple over the next decade. Such a massive infusion of private cash, technology, and infrastructure is exactly what global agriculture needs, according to FAO experts, who estimate we’ll need to invest $83 billion a year in agriculture in developing countries to feed two billion more people by 2050.
The key is leveraging that investment to yield benefits for all, ensuring secure land rights, thriving markets, and increased productivity on all farms, big and small. “If we could do that, we’d have a triple win,” says Darryl Vhugen, a lawyer with Landesa, a Seattle-based nonprofit that helps poor farmers in developing countries defend their land rights. “Investors benefit, local communities benefit, and nations benefit from jobs, infrastructure, food security. That’s gold.”
On a long road in the heart of the proposed ProSavana project, I stop at a mud-brick hut to talk with Costa Ernesto, a 35-year-old farmer, and his wife, Cecilia Luis. They have never heard of ProSavana. They are simply trying to feed their family on two and a half acres of corn, and selling bamboo poles for thatched roofs on the side. Their five children range in age from six months to 11 years. The eldest, a shy girl named Esvalta, is pounding corn with a wooden pestle as tall as she is, just as her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother did before her. My guide, who has worked in agricultural development for 20 years, says the children and parents appear to be stunted from malnutrition. I ask Ernesto if he has grown enough corn to eat that year. “Yes,” he says proudly. After some prodding, Cecilia adds: “When we keep ahead of weeding, we produce enough for the whole year.”
Two other men walk up during the conversation, and I ask if they would give up their small farms for a job on a big farm. Given their ragged clothing, their swollen bellies, their sod houses, their obvious poverty, the question seems almost unfair. Yes, they say, without the slightest hesitation.
“I have been praying that something like this would happen,” the oldest of the three men replies. “Because I really need a job.”
Whether Mozambique’s future farmers will look more like industrial farmers in Iowa or the small but productive rice farmers of Vietnam remains to be seen. But all sides agree on one thing: The status quo is unacceptable.
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There has been a lot of social progress in China particularly for women coupled with the economic boom of the 20+ years. Political progress is overrated. When you have a vibrant democracy like Nigeria unable to alleviate extreme poverty and China with its totalitarian government removing tens of millions from poverty - I'm pretty sure the average person will take the latter.
I couldn't agree more about the African land grabbing. When they've sold off everything - they're selling the very land underneath their citizens' feet. There is a fascinating piece in the National Geographic magazine in July about it. I will post a topic with the full article but here are snippets:
The Next BreadbasketBy Joel K. Bourne, Jr.Photographs by Robin HammondShe never saw the big tractor coming. First it plowed up her banana trees. Then her corn. Then her beans, sweet potatoes, cassava. Within a few, dusty minutes the one-acre plot near Xai-Xai, Mozambique, which had fed Flora Chirime and her five children for years, was consumed by a Chinese corporation building a 50,000-acre farm, a green-and-brown checkerboard of fields covering a broad stretch of the Limpopo River Delta.“No one even talked to me,” the 45-year-old Chirime says, her voice rising with anger. “Just one day I found the tractor in my field plowing up everything. No one who lost their machamba has been compensated!” Local civil society groups say thousands lost their land and livelihoods to the Wanbao Africa Agricultural Development Company—all with the blessing of the Mozambican government, which has a history of neglecting local farmers’ rights to land in favor of large investments. Those who managed to get jobs on the giant farm are working seven days a week with no overtime pay. A spokesman for Wanbao denied such allegations and stressed that it’s training local farmers to grow rice.Chirime’s situation is hardly unique. She’s just one character in the biggest story in global agriculture: the unlikely quest to turn sub-Saharan Africa, historically one of the hungriest places on the planet, into a major new breadbasket for the world. Since 2007 the near-record prices of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice have set off a global land rush by corporate investors eager to lease or buy land in countries where acreage is cheap, governments are amenable, and property rights often ignored. Most land deals have occurred in Africa, one of the few regions on the planet that still have millions of acres of fallow land and plentiful water available for irrigation. It also has the largest “yield gap” on Earth: Although corn, wheat, and rice farmers in the U.S., China, and eurozone countries produce about three tons of grain per acre, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa average half a ton—roughly the same yield Roman farmers achieved on their wheat fields in a good year during the rule of Caesar. Despite several attempts, the green revolution’s mix of fertilizers, irrigation, and high-yield seeds—which more than doubled global grain production between 1960 and 2000—never blossomed in Africa, thanks to the poor infrastructure, limited markets, weak governance, and fratricidal civil wars that wracked the postcolonial continent.The country has leased roughly 7 percent of its arable land—among the highest rates in Africa.Many of those hurdles are now falling. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic growth has hummed along at about 5 percent a year for the past decade, besting that of the U.S. and the European Union. National debts are declining, and peaceful elections are being held with increasing frequency. More than one in three sub-Saharan Africans now own cell phones and use them for mobile banking, to run small businesses, or send money to relatives in rural areas. After 25 years of virtually no investment in African agriculture, the World Bank and donor countries have stepped up. The continent is emerging as a laboratory for testing new approaches to boosting food production. If sub-Saharan African farmers can raise their yields to even two tons of grain per acre using existing technology—a fourfold increase and still a tall order—some experts believe they could not only better feed themselves but actually export food, earning much needed cash and helping to feed the world as well.It’s an optimistic vision, for sure. Thailand currently exports more agricultural products than all sub-Saharan countries combined, and the specter of climate change threatens to hammer Africa’s yields. But the thorniest question is, Who will do the farming in Africa’s future? Will it be poor farmers like Chirime working one-acre plots, who make up roughly 70 percent of the continent’s labor force? Or will it be giant corporations like Wanbao, operating industrial farms modeled on those of the American Midwest?Humanitarian groups that deal with global hunger and peasants’ rights call corporate land deals neocolonialism and agri-imperialism. Yet veterans of agricultural development say the massive infusion of private cash, infrastructure, and technology that such deals may bring to poor rural areas could be a catalyst for desperately needed development—if big projects and small farmers can work together. The key, says USAID’s Gregory Myers, is protecting the land rights of the people. “This could significantly reduce global poverty, and that could be the story of the century.”
Picture of plantations and small farms outside MaputoThis land outside Maputo provides a snapshot of Africa’s agricultural choices: Will its food be produced on giant, leveled plantations like Bananalandia (at left) or on small farms, called machambas? “It must be a mix of big ag and small,” says Dries Gouws, the sprawling banana farm’s founder.“If you wrote a letter to God and asked him for the best soil and climate conditions for farming, this is what he’d send you,” says Miguel Bosch, an Argentine agronomist who manages Hoyo Hoyo, a nearly 25,000-acre corporate soybean farm in northern Mozambique. “It is a paradise for growers. I’ve spent many years farming in Brazil and Argentina and have never seen such soil.” -
There is no parliament. Parliament holds the executive accountable. An absent drunk is the speaker of the parliament. This organ of governance has absolutely no relevance. Even members from areas that would seem to be antagonistic to Culusow and his thieving band are unable to coalesce together on a regular basis to demand accountability/embarrass Culusow/burnish their own political careers and name recognition. Anytime - a mooshin is tabled - the drunk and his master disband the naked attempt at extortion with money and threats.
There is no media. Anything that resembles a responsible media is completely absent. No one in Mogadishu asks Culusow and company any hard questions - no one covers the failures and missteps vigorously and relentlessly. No one seems to bother to do any investigating or real reporting. Crap opinions and useless controversy from farting politicians and pseudo politicians like Faisal Warabe and Ahmed Diriye get airtime and are sought out. Useless nonsense is reported constantly - ie a training is held in Puntland and hebel minister opens the training. This training is organized by, funded by, managed and run by NGOs and other international donors. What is this minister doing there? And why is it useful to mention him or the government in light of this reality - they are irrelevant.
Such is the state of the country.
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Even so, the number one determinant of family size is not contraception availability but the education and status of women, followed by economic security and infant and child mortality. Contraception became an issue in the developed world once women had a reason to wait, i.e education. The social and cultural evolution that preceded contraception is paramount to decreasing family size permanently. The developed world, however, has propelled the idea that contraception can take the place of social progression when evidence points to the contrary.I would like to point out - China's one child rule - is a way to bring down family size through enforcement and did not hinge on the education and status of women. Additionally - most of India has a lower fertility rate than Africa - but education and status of women is marginally better than other more fertile African countries.
Ultimately aside from personal considerations - African governments must be cognizant of the need to plan for and take advantage of the increasing population - only then can they turn this potential into success. But if things continue as is - you will have legions of young, hopeless Africans flooding into Europe and other developed countries seeking a fulfilling life.
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From everything I've read - the consensus is if your retirement/pension savings are involuntary or automated - that is you don't actually see the money and you don't control the money - ie buy and sell securities - then you can defer zakat. But if you take a sum of money under your control and buy Microsoft stock with it - you should be paying zakat on it provided you meet the requirements of paying zakat.
It seems access and control would define whether zakat is owed in a current period or a future period. Ultimately when you get access and control - you must pay zakat. This is a common sense religion. I would also advise people to pick and choose halal investments(where you have a choice) - and/or a mix with the vast majority halal investment. There are a lot of fixed instruments (ie interest bearing) or financial securities (ie banks) that should be avoided.
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Doing a simple google search shows that these are perfectly safe to swallow. Not sure where he is getting this. And why it made news. Nobody is asking Culusow to account for Villa Somalia attacks but these makes it as news?! Sad state of Somalia.
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Dr Bashiir Cali Biixi oo kamida dhakhaatiirta Puntland marna so ahaa wasiirka caafimaadka puntland ayaa waxaa uu ka digay in marka la cunayo qaraha ama xab xabka la liliqo mirtiisa waxaana uu sheegey inay sababto xanuuno ku dhaca qabsinka dad badan ay qaleen ay ku arkeen qanjirka dhexdiisa mirta qaraha ama xab xabka oo qofka uu cunay.
Dr bashiir Cali biixi ayaa waxaa uu sheegey in miraha la calaliyo marka la cunayo ay wanagsan tahay balse mirta oo nool hadii laliqo ay keeneyso in qofka uu qabsin ku dhaco qanjirkana marka ay mirta gasho aysan dib uga soo bixi karin halkaasna cabuq uu ka dhasho Radio Gaalkacyo ayuu la hadlay
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1- Grow a backbone
2- Tell people you make those decisions and unsolicited advice is not needed
AMISOM cancels planned troop rotation by Sierra Leone as fear of Ebola outbreak grows in Somalia
in Politics
Posted
Wow. 10 years ago Sierra Leone was famous for child soldiers cutting off peoples' hands. And now they are 'peacekeepers' in Somalia. This is the result of the complete disfunction and destructive tendencies of what Xaaji refers to as Konfuria.