Oxfam America Blog

Severe deforestation is one of the underlying causes of poverty in Haiti. Photo by Abbie Trayler-Smith/Oxfam.

The earth was still shaking in Haiti when the questions started. Among the toughest and most important: Just why is Haiti the poorest country in the western hemisphere?

Economist Tyler Cowen offers a few theories in his blog Marginal Revolution. (Thanks to Yale economist Chris Blattman for the reference.) Cowen proposes the historic (premature independence), financial (huge debt to France that took 100 years to pay off following the revolution), agricultural (ways of growing coffee and sugar cane).  And of course, there is the political (the Duvalier clan wrecked Haiti). Cowen concludes that he is not particularly satisfied with any of these reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

We will need to make a significant commitment to address poverty in Haiti lest we simply reconstruct the conditions of poverty already there before the earthquake. Photo by Jeff Antebi.

We are privileged here at Oxfam America to have some photography from Haiti taken by photojournalist (and music producer) Jeff Antebi last year, so we are incorporating his images in an audio slide show on our web site. Please have a look and a listen, the images show how poor people are working to survive in Haiti, and the audio explains some of the particular challenges they face every day.

Recovering from Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti will not be easy. We are going to have to take a hard look at what it will take to address the chronic level of pre-earthquake poverty in Haiti, instead of simply rebuilding what was already there.

Those inclined to help can contribute to our Haiti Earthquake Response Fund. If you have already donated, we thank you and ask you to share this url with others willing to help the people of Haiti:

Oxfam America Haiti Earthquake Response Fund: https://secure.oxfamamerica.org/site/Donation2?df_id=3560&3560.donation=form1

Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

I frequently have an awkward moment when I interview women, particularly in some parts of Africa, when I ask them how many children they have. Some hesitate, because speaking about your children in public may be seen as boasting. It invites bad luck on your family.

Sometimes, a woman will look at me and ask if I want to know how many children she has who are still living, or should she include the ones that have passed away?

When we write stories here about women who have five, seven, nine, or even more children, some of our readers have a strong reaction. How can we eliminate poverty when people are having so many children? To them, it seems like the obvious place to start. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Danish artists Soren Nielsen, Morten Moller and Mikael Plougstrup Nielsen have been sculpting two huge statues of two Maasai warriors — a  man and a woman holding a baby — out of ice just outside the Bella Center (the venue of the climate talks). The statues, carved on behalf of Oxfam, will melt away over the next two days, just in time for the end of the first week of international climate treaty negotiations.

The process is meant to symbolize the precarious situation of the Maasai tribes of Kenya, which are being hit hard by changes to the climate. One of the worst droughts in living memory has devastated the Maasai’s herds of cattle, and their livelihoods.

Each ice block is about 3 feet (or 1 meter exactly) tall and wide, and come from a river in Sweden. After being stacked three blocks high, the sculptors set to work with chainsaws and enormous chisel-like tools, expecting the entire process to take about 12 hours.

The process might go on a bit longer, however, because the pounding and roaring of the saws and tools was leaking through to meetings underway inside the conference center, forcing the staff to halt the artistic proceedings.

Eventually a compromise was worked out, and the carvers have been able to set to work periodically (presumably when the nearest rooms were not being used).

Indigenous leaders at the Copenhagen talks remain guardedly optimistic that the human rights of their peoples will be recognized in an international climate agreement.

They’re just not particularly upbeat that it will happen here.

“Human rights should be an integral part of any climate response: the right to life, adequate housing, food, an adequate standard of health,” said John Henriksen, a Saami of Norway and human rights legal expert.

Along with these rights, Henriksen said, indigenous peoples have internationally recognized rights to live according to their traditional cultures and practices, and need to have these rights acknowledged as well in any international climate agreement.

Henriksen spoke to a packed room on Wednesday, as part of a panel representing indigenous peoples of Kenya, Peru, the South Pacific, the Arctic and other regions.

John Henriksen, a Saami of Norway and human rights legal expert. Photo by Emily Gertz.

The speakers charged that their communities are not consistently included in the deliberations toward a new international climate treaty, even though they are already being affected by the impacts of climate change.

Many of these communities still rely heavily on the world’s remaining forests for their subsistence and livelihoods.

Some of these same forests capture and store massive amounts of carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere; how to place a value on that ecological service is a key pont of contention at the climate talks.

Another divisive issue at the talks is how much financial support the industrialized nations (which are historically responsible for most of the excess greenhouse gases in the atmospere) will provide for developing nations to adapt to changing climactic conditions.

It’s not yet clear how or if indigenous peoples will be included in programs and projects funded by these monies.

Read the rest of this entry »

In August, I found myself sitting on the damp earth of Dida Liben, a once-flourishing pastureland in southern Ethiopia where animals, both wild and domestic, thrived. Today, it’s mostly hard-packed dirt, pocked with patches of stubby grass and thorny bushes—except where I was perched with a small gathering of local elders.

Around us, the grass had grown tall and thick, the result of an Oxfam-supported conservation effort that had set aside 275 acres of pasture and fenced it off with a bramble enclosure to give the land time to recover. And it had, gloriously—prompting the elders to luxuriate in the feel of the grass swallowing them, as it had when they were children. Even some of the wildlife was coming back—antelopes, rabbits, boars.

But a tinge of fear colored their reminiscences. What if someone were to see how good all of this had become—and take it away? That was the first thing Kotola Buyale, wrapped tight in a red shawl, wanted to talk about as we sank into the tall grasses to get out of the wind. What if? Read the rest of this entry »

Violeta Sithole, with her son on her back, prepares her field to plant beans. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America.

When the lights went out at 9pm last Wednesday with a loud click, I was just finishing up in the shower and was a little late getting out in time to find my flashlight. I was in a comfortable concrete house in the village of Inhassune, Mozambique, recently vacated by the South African manager of a 250-acre jatropha plantation run by ESV Group. Since he and the rest of the officials had cleared out, there was no electricity unless you can buy the fuel to run the generator, which costs about $10 an hour. I paid for three hours a night, from six to nine.

Jatropha trees produce seeds you can press to make biodiesel: it is one of the new biofuels we are hearing so much about as an alternative to oil. Oxfam is looking at how growing biofuel crops affects poor agricultural communities, and I interviewed a few farmers to see what they have to say about it all.

Read the rest of this entry »