The massive earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010 devastated rural areas as well as urban, destroying crops, farm buildings, equipment, and infrastructure. Indirect effects touched almost every corner of the nation, as 600,000 people migrated to the countryside, increasing pressure on already stretched food and fuel resources. Internal displacement worsened food insecurity, which affected six out of ten people even before the disaster.
In 1976 the noted Catholic ethicist J. Bryan Hehir expressed concern about the waning sense of moral urgency over the existence of nuclear weapons with each passing year that superpower nuclear war was avoided. Acknowledging that international ethicists had justifiably turned to other global problems, such as world hunger and poverty, Hehir still worried that the relative exile [of the ethical analysis of the nuclear] issue [that] has endured in the academy . . . , if not in government during the last decade, is not healthy. The price of error on this issue is still catastrophic; the chance of redress is minimal. Yet each year the genie kept in the political bottle contributes to our confidence of control and can contribute to our lack of attention. But the complexity of the issue and the costs of ignorance require attention, ethically and politically.
Ten years have passed since the United Nations member states committed themselves to the Millennium Development Goals, central among which are the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger worldwide by 2015. Two recent books, Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account and Darrel Moellendorf's Global Inequality Matters, serve as timely reminders that progress toward meeting these morally urgent goals has been minimal. Rich with empirical detail, these books bridge the gap between theory and practice in presenting carefully crafted accounts of the obligations we have to non-compatriots and by offering practical proposals for how we might get closer to meeting these obligations.
Johannes F. Linn, Richard Kohl, Homi Kharas, Arntraud Hartmann, and Barbara Massler
Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Brookings Institution
Abstract:
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has for many years stressed innovation, knowledge and scaling up as essential ingredients of its strategy to combat rural poverty in developing countries. This institutional review of IFAD's approach to scaling up is the first of its kind: A team of development experts were funded by a small grant from IFAD to assess IFAD's track record in scaling up successful interventions, its operational policies and processes, instruments, resources and incentives, and to provide recommendations to management for how to turn IFAD into a scaling-up institution. Beyond IFAD, this institutional scaling up review is a pilot exercise that can serve as an example for other development institutions.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, and Food
Using a micro-level approach to poverty traps, this paper explores welfare dynamics among households in post-war rural Mozambique. Conceptually, the paper builds on an asset-based approach to poverty and tests empirically, with household panel data, for the existence of a poverty trap. Findings indicate that there is little differentiation in productive asset endowments over time and that rural households gravitate towards a single equilibrium, which is at a surprisingly low level. The analysis shows that shocks and household coping behavior help to explain the observed poverty dynamics. The single low-level equilibrium points to an overall development trap in the rural farm-based economy. This is attributed to the long-term impact of the civil war, which has consolidated unfavorable economic conditions in rural areas and limited new economic opportunities outside of the agricultural sector.
In 1986, when The Carter Center decided to take on the challenge of eradicating Guinea worm disease, outside observers probably believed success to be impossible. After all, there were 3.5 million cases of the disease spread across 20 countries in impoverished areas and no vaccine or medicine to stop the scourge. Not to mention that The Carter Center was a four-year-old organization with just a handful of staff.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Development, Diplomacy, Human Rights, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, and Foreign Aid
Men and women around the world, many of whom live on less than a dollar a day, volunteer their time to knock on a neighbor's door to distribute medicines that prevent horrible diseases or sit watchfully at a polling station to ensure each person's vote is counted. Networks like these of active citizens across the globe are vital to the Carter Center's impact and reach.
Topic:
Human Rights, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, and Foreign Aid
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of internal migration and remittance flows on wealth accumulation and distribution in 22 rural villages in Nang Rong, Thailand. Using data from 943 households, the study constructs indices of household productive and consumer assets with principal components analysis. The changes in these indices from 1994 to 2000 are modeled as a function of households' prior migration and remittance behavior while correcting for potential selectivity bias with propensity score matching. The findings show that rich households face a decrease in productive assets due to migration of their members, while poor households with migrants gain productive assets and improve their relative status in their communities. These results suggest an equalizing effect of migration and remittance flows on wealth distribution in rural Thailand.
This paper is intended for senior managers in all companies that source goods from developing countries. Examples are drawn mainly from the garment and agriculture industries but the learning is transferable to other industries, including electronics, construction, and services.
Topic:
Development, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, Poverty, and Labor Issues