Green revolution

Amid the general gloom, here is a good news story from a few days ago about a green revolution in Malawi which, I believe, illustrates some important principles.

Malawi, a thin sliver of a country between Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique is the thirteenth poorest country in the world. It has experienced six consecutive years of food shortage from 2000 resulting in widespread hardship and starvation.  Traditional farming techniques and seed strains could simply not produce enough food.  

The answer: give villagers vouchers exchangeable for fertilizers and improved higher-yielding seed varieties and help with crop diversification, irrigation (most of the country spreads out along the shores of Lake Malawi) and some basic science. 

The result has been rapid and dramatic.  Malawi has emerged as a regional food exporter sending maize all the way to Kenya even though the improved seed varieties are not particularly new and have been around for years. 

Inevitably, not everything in the garden is rosy.  High export prices means that there are still big pockets of food shortage among those Malawians who do not have access to suitable land (or alternative paid employment).  Yet the country is clearly far better off than it was only two years ago.  What was lacking was organisation and information.

So what lessons can we draw from Malawi?  I think there are two.

Firstly, a good analysis of the problem followed by iniatives that address the real isues gives a big return on effort.

Secondly, empowering ordinary people is the key.  Bottom-up, not top-down approaches work best. 

Needless to say both these principles are highly relevant to sorting out the credit crunch.

Message to Tweedleother

An interesting thought from Prof David Byrne writing in yesterday’s (Newcastle upon Tyne) Journal.

He points out that hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs have been lost over the last few decades in the Greater Tyneside area.  Many of these are not just skilled manual jobs but the, “technical expertise of real engineers, which [means] that this was far more a knowledge based place 40 years ago than it is today for all the guff about Science City“.

He’s right about this.

He’s also right when he goes on to say, “… all the great and the good … have got it absolutely, magnificently, totally as wrong as they damned well could“.

Sadly, tragically, he’s also right when he later says, “… so far as the major parties go we have a choice among tweedledee, tweedledum and tweedleother“.

Ouch!

Could this view be fairly widespread?  Could it be why Lib Dems are flatlining in the polls?

You bet!

The Amazing Mr Ponzi

We had all better learn this simple definition of a Ponzi Scheme.

A Ponzi scheme offers a high return to investors using the funds of newcomers to make payments to earlier subscribers, and collapses when the supply of suckers runs out.

It is a succinct definition of how a large part of the UK (and indeed world) economy has worked over the last few years.

A Tribute to Xi Zhou

Newcastle University student Xi Zhou and her boyfriend, Zhen Xing Yang, were savagely murdered in their home some time towards the end of last week. 

By chance my wife and I were served by Xi Zhou at the city centre restaurant where she worked only the Sunday before and we were both hugely impressed by her charm, vitality and efficiency.  The BBC reports that her colleagues at the restaurant found her a ‘joy to work with’ which I can well believe.  Near neighbours confirmed that they too had the highest possible opinion of the couple but were to upset to talk to the media except for the briefest of interviews.

Their untimely death is a great loss to the University, the City of Newcastle and, most of all, their families.

Good luck to the police in tracking down this evil killer.

Plastic, not fantastic

Normally driving through England in the spring is a delight with trees and hedgerows bursting into the delicate greens of new growth soon to be followed by the blossom of the early-flowering species.  But this year has been different—or at least I noticed it as different.

 

Plastic has taken over.  Even in deeply rural North Yorkshire the trees and hedges are festooned with the wretched stuff and the verges are a sea of abandoned crisp packets, cans and bottles.  More populous areas are even worse.  I stopped at one lay-by on the A1 in the East Midlands which can only be described as disgusting.  There was a small litter bin but it had clearly been full a long time and there was more rubbish round it than in it.

 

Presumably litter works like graffiti; ignore it and it becomes the norm dragging the whole area down into a slum.  Is that really what we want for England’s formerly green and pleasant land?  Will the tourist industry soon have to advertise “Visit our slummy Country”?

 

Coincidentally (or perhaps not) CPRE has just started a ‘Stop the Drop’ campaign.  Apparently the amount of litter has increased by 500% since the sixties and is 70% food-related; the general level has dropped from ‘satisfactory’ to ‘unsatisfactory’ over the last 12 months by the Government’s own measure and litter now costs over £500 million pa to clean up (not including public parks).  It is one of the public’s top concerns as evidenced by opinion polls and letters to councillors and MPs.

 

Picking the stuff up after the event is sadly necessary, but hardly sufficient.  Is it time to legislate for a (say) 10p deposit on convenience and take-away food and drink packaging (yes, including crisp packets) unless it is rapidly biodegradable?  And of course bring in that plastic bag tax the Government can’t quite seem to get round to.