Charles Kenny

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March 11, 2013 | 11:59 AM | By  | 

The dilemma of eating locally and hurting others globally | 

Farmer plants rice in the Philippines. Credit: International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
Farmer plants rice in the Philippines. Credit: International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)

Want to change the world? Many tell you to start at the grocery story…or with your local farmers market.

Eat less meat, go organic, eat local and eat healthier. Such recommendations can be heard just about anywhere and they often end with a call to demand support for American farmers, or politically, renewal of the US Farm Bill. The argument sounds sensible on a quick glance and certainly so from a US-centric, self-serving perspective. But it may not be so sensible and good.

Modern food production and distribution systems are today international in scope and affect almost everyone, everywhere – and in many ways that may surprise you.

As the same time, eating local – locavores – has increasingly become a popular trend in the United States. Farm-to-table restaurants are popping up touting that they source all their products locally. The appeal is that consumers can get fresh (often organic) produce at nearly the same cost while supporting local businesses and reducing the massive carbon footprint produced by shipping food across the United States.

The trend has come with wider public recognition of the downside of industrial food production: The antibiotics used for livestock protect against disease (and boosts production) but this also builds drug resistance that has negative ramifications for people’s health. The high overall consumption of meat hurts the environment – from the methane produced by cows to the amount of land and water needed to care for them. Policies by governments and purchases by consumers have an impact on farmers from Arkansas to Haiti to the Horn of Africa.

The choice between eating cheap supermarket food versus being a sustainable locavore is not really as simple as it looks, at least if your goal is to make the world a better place. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Business, Politics, Bill Clinton, CGD, Charles Kenny, Farm, Farm Bill, Farm Subsidies, food, foreign policy, George Bush, Kojo Nnamdi, Matador Network, Maura O'Connor, NYT
January 9, 2013 | 2:25 PM | By  | 

A renewed push to ban spies from overeas health and aid work | 

Is it foreign aid or covert aid?
Is it foreign aid or covert aid?
Flickr, johanoomen

Co-authored by Tom Murphy

The latest assassination of health workers vaccinating kids against polio in Pakistan may be the tipping point.

Or not.

It remains to be seen if a new surge of efforts — a letter of protest from leading public health experts, a petition — asking the Obama Administration to prohibit spies from pretending to be overseas aid and health workers will force a change in policy.

Such protests didn’t even garner an official response the last time.

When it was learned in mid-2011 that the CIA had conducted a fake vaccination scheme in Pakistan aimed at gathering evidence to locate the then still-alive-and-in-hiding Osama Bin Laden, many in the global health and humanitarian community (including Humanosphere) cried foul and predicted a lot of collateral damage.

The problem, said 200-plus aid groups in a letter of protest sent by Interaction, was not just that this would undermine international vaccination projects in Pakistan, which it arguably did in this nation with one of the world’s highest rates of polio and other infectious diseases.

Many experts said it would more broadly undermine trust and credibility for all humanitarian work – and likely endanger aid workers. Many of these tragic predictions have since come true, prompting many in the global health, aid and development community to push again for policy prohibitions against such schemes.

Frumkin“Public health programs overseas offer a very special opportunity … as a bridge to creating peace and mutual understanding,” said Howard Frumkin, dean of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and a signatory to the letter of protest sent by leading health academics to President Obama. Unlike many other kinds of aid and assistance programs with inherent political or economic complications, Frumkin said, health initiatives done correctly overseas can forge intimate bonds of trust and respect for life that transcend politics.

“This is why it’s so important not to subvert the credibility and integrity of these kind of health programs,” he said. “The recent killings in Pakistan only underline the importance of keeping our intelligence activities separate from our health aid and assistance work.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Brett Keller, Charles Kenny, CIA, foreign aid, Howard Frumkin, humanitarian, Obama Administration, Pakistan, public health, vaccination
November 24, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By  | 

Happy Thanksgiving: Two thought-leaders on things getting better | 

Flickr, ~Sage~

Thanksgiving tends to produce a standard stock (schlock?) of stories that fit the holiday theme and also appear to be produced based on the assumption nobody actually reads them.

Stories about turkeys, shopping, hunger, obesity, the wackiness of American family life or maybe the pilgrims. You can usually guess what they say without even reading them.

But here are two Thanksgiving articles that I think are well worth reading, both of them noting that we should give thanks that the world is getting better.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times asks Are we getting nicer? Yes we are, Kristof says:

It’s pretty easy to conclude that the world is spinning down the toilet.

So let me be contrary and offer a reason to be grateful this Thanksgiving. Despite the gloomy mood, the historical backdrop is stunning progress in human decency over recent centuries.War is declining, and humanity is becoming less violent, less racist and less sexist — and this moral progress has accelerated in recent decades. To put it bluntly, we humans seem to be getting nicer.

Kristof then goes on to cite evidence of increasing amounts of niceness.

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Charles Kenny (author of the book Getting Better) similarly suggests we should all be Counting our blessings. Says Kenny:

It’s been a tough year, and one in which a lot of people around the world might be struggling to find things to be thankful for. In the United States, unemployment remains stubbornly high, growth stubbornly low, and good sense on Capitol Hill stubbornly absent. European debt, meanwhile, looks about as secure as a Las Vegas mortgage. But look more broadly at the state of the world and there’s a lot going right — so give that thanks and pass the gravy.

Kenny then goes on to list 10 facts (the blogosphere likes lists, especially lists of 10, however arbitrary they may be) that demonstrate the world, overall, is on an upswing.

He begins by noting the increased amount of vegetarianism, a trend turkeys — if not turkey farmers — can also celebrate.

FILED UNDER: Basics, Charles Kenny, Nicholas Kristof, Thanksgiving
July 26, 2011 | 9:00 AM | By  | 

Two views on East Africa crisis: Famine is a crime; famine is bad science | 

As the United Nations and the international community ramps up to airlift food and supplies into East Africa, mostly for starving Somali refugees, two perspectives on this crisis seemed especially interesting to me.

In Foreign Policy, Charles Kenny contends that, in this day and age, allowing a famine to occur is basically a crime against humanity:

For all its horror, starvation is also one of the simpler forms of mortality to prevent — it just takes food.  Drought, poor roads, poverty — all are contributing factors to the risk of famine, but sustenance in the hands of the hungry is a pretty foolproof solution.

As a result, famine deaths in the modern world are almost always the result of deliberate acts on the part of governing authorities. That is why widespread starvation is a crime against humanity and the leaders who abet it should be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

That might sound a little melodramatic, but read his argument. Compelling stuff.

On a different line of thought, David Dickson, editor of the Science and Development Network, contends that the UN, Western powers and aid organizations could have been well-prepared for this crisis — if they had paid any attention to the scientific evidence reported by weather and drought prediction experts.

Dickson writes:

Earlier this week, the UN declared the drought in southern Somalia had become so bad that it could be officially declared a famine — the first time the word had been applied to this region in almost 20 years.

The news came as little surprise to agencies that had been monitoring the lack of rainfall over the past year, which is partly linked to the La Niña event in the Pacific Ocean. They had predicted that a widescale shortage of food was highly likely to occur.

FILED UNDER: Basics, Justice, Charles Kenny, David Dickson, famine, human rights, science, Somalia