Building, not Re-Building in Haiti

Haiti's infrastructure and economy were so poor even before the earthquake that building from the ground up seems the right way to go [foreignpolicy.org]:

In Haiti, neither relief nor reconstruction will be enough: Restoration should not be the goal. The earthquake is not the first natural catastrophe that Haiti has faced. In 2008, four hurricanes wreaked devastation. Since 1994, five major natural catastrophes, an average of one every three years, have hit Haiti's population centers. Worse, these spikes of disaster have punctuated a long-term downward drift. To exit from this spiral, relief is not enough: A coordinated and targeted multibillion dollar Haiti fund now has to bring real hope of change to the country's youth.

Crucially, the fund's mission would not be reconstruction, but paving the way for lasting change. This means spreading opportunity and generating jobs in urban centers less vulnerable to storms, floods, and seismic activity. It means communicating clear targets and progress daily to a public in need of good news. It means modernizing agriculture so farmers can earn a decent living. The promise of food and shelter in Port-au-Prince might otherwise perversely attract rural migrants from the impoverished Central Plateau, adding to a drain on resources and further diminishing local food production at a time when it is most needed. Meanwhile, existing development plans must be scaled up to the new realities and swiftly set into motion.

Over the past year, Haiti has emerged as a country that holds real economic potential in areas as diverse as tourism, light manufacturing, biodiesel, and agriculture. Strategic investments in these sectors will ensure that Haitians can better help themselves once the humanitarian relief has moved on.

Norman Borlaug - Father of the Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug, who revolutionized agriculture, increasing crop yields to feed millions of people died last week. As the world continues to confront expanding populations and increasing environmental degradation, what will be the next wave of agricultural innovation?

Here's a bit of his obituary from Economist.com:

As a boy, he hadn’t known what hunger was. He came from a small Norwegian farm in Iowa, the land of butter-sculptures and the breaded tenderloin sandwich. But on his first trip to “the big city”, Minneapolis, in 1933, grown men had begged him for a nickel for a cup of coffee and a small, dry hamburger, and a riot had started round him when a milk-cart dumped its load in the street. He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was impossible “to build a peaceful world on empty stomachs”.

Crop diseases drew his attention first, inspiring him to turn from forestry to plant pathology under Charles Stakman, a lifelong mentor, at the University of Minnesota. Rusts especially exercised him: how they lived, under the green live tissue of stems, how they spread, travelling for miles on the jet stream, and how they fell from the sky to infect even the healthiest crop, if the moisture and temperature were right. Rust had devastated the Midwest in the 1930s, and Mexico shortly before he went there. So Mr Borlaug first bred wheat cultivars for rust-resistance, a ten-year task, and then crossed them with Norin, a dwarf Japanese variety, to produce a shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which, when properly charged with water and fertiliser, gave three times the yield.

This was the wheat that swept India in its “Green Revolution”, raising yields from 12m tonnes in 1965 to 20m by 1970, causing the country to run out of jute bags to carry it, carts and railcars to transport it, and places to store it; that made Pakistan self-sufficient in wheat by 1968; that almost doubled yields even in Sudan, on the edge of the Sahel. The famines and huge mortality that had been predicted for the second half of the 20th century never came to pass. More food led not to more births, but fewer, as the better-fed had smaller families. Global grain production outpaced population growth, and Mr Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Greens attacked him, saying his new varieties used too much water and costly chemical fertiliser; his link with DuPont was noted. They complained that traditional farming was disrupted and diversity replaced by monoculture. Mr Borlaug called them naysayers and elitists, who had never known hunger but thought, for the health of the planet, that the poor should go without good food. Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming. Inorganic fertiliser just replaced natural nutrients, and more efficiently than manure. As for cross-breeding, Mother Nature had done it first, cross-pollinating different wild grasses until they produced a grain that could eventually expand into modern bread.

Genetic engineering of plants greatly excited him. The risks, he said, were rubbish, unproven by science, while the potential benefits were endless. The transfer of useful characteristics might now take weeks, rather than decades. More lives would be saved. The gene for rust-resistance in rice, for example, might be put into all other cereals. He hoped he might live to see it.

Meanwhile what he called the “Population Monster” was breathing down his neck, or rather ticking, like Captain Hook’s crocodile. Every second brought two more people, crying to be fed. By 2050, he wrote in 2005, the world would need to double its food supply. Some 800m were malnourished as it was. Mr Borlaug loved to talk of reaching for the stars, but his day-to-day motto was an earthly one. Get the plough. Start growing now.

Girl Effect in Economic Development

There's an article in BusinessWeek on the effects of providing girls with economic opportunities, both in terms of overall economic development of the country and improved quality of life for the girls themselves.... For more info, also check out girleffect.org.

There are 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries, but they are largely invisible to the world at large. Included among them are girls affected by armed conflict, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, and internal displacement, as well as girls in child-headed households or locked in early marriages. To ignore them is to miss the "girl effect," which could be an unexpected answer to the global economic crisis.

Here's why: When a girl benefits, so does everyone in society, including business. Girls as economic actors can bring about change for themselves, their families, and their countries. Conversely, ignoring the girl effect can cost societies billions in lost potential.

• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later, on average, and has 2.2 fewer children.

• An extra year in primary school statistically boosts girls' future wages by 10% to 20%, and every additional year a girl spends in secondary school lifts her income by 15% to 25%. The size of a country's economy is in no small part determined by the educational attainment and skill sets of its girls.

• Young women have a 90% probability of investing their earned income back into their families, while the likelihood of men doing the same is only 30% to 40%.

• A girl's school attainment is linked to her own health and well-being, as well as reduced death rates: For every additional year of schooling, a mother's mortality is significantly reduced, and the infant mortality rate of her children declines by 5% to 10%.

• If educated, girls can get loans, start businesses, employ other women, and reinvest in their families—when they're ready to have them. That means their children can also have an education.

Micro-franchising

Here's a piece in Business Week about a group in Colorado developing franchises for the <$1/day billion people on the earth:

Most of us look at the 1 billion men, women, and children in the world who live on less than a dollar a day and see poor people. Paul Polak sees market failure. He sees 1 billion potential entrepreneurs who would rather earn money than accept handouts, if given the opportunity. And if companies would develop the products these people needed, he sees 1 billion potential customers as well.

It may seem obvious that poor people are poor because they don't have enough income, but most anti-poverty programs don't actually focus on helping people earn more. "So much money is wasted on big infrastructure projects and government-run programs," says Polak, from his airy office in Denver. "We need to change the way we approach development. We need to see the poor as customers rather than charity recipients." On a roll, he adds, "we need a revolution in how multinationals design, price, and market their products. There is a huge virgin market out there!"

"Windhorse is a combination of disruptive technologies and microfranchising," he says, offering the example of a "Windhorse Energy" franchise. The company has developed a cheap device made of plywood and mylar that will reflect sunrays on a solar panel, intensifying the light by a power of 10. The concentrator essentially turns a 20-watt solar panel into a 200-watt unit for marginally higher cost. Customers who buy the $200 setup become micro-utilities, reselling the electricity to anyone who needs to charge, for instance, a cell phone or a motorcycle battery and, says Polak, earning back their initial investment within six months.