From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

FROM POVERTY TO POWERfirewood for sale in towns, and sold a couple of her goats (for ameager return, since the market was flooded with distressedrural people selling animals). She finally made it to a relief campin June, just before the rains were due, and collected one set ofrations. With a couple of kilos of sorghum on her back, Aminaand her two other children promptly left the camp and walkedhome (it took one week), dug up the seed Amina had buried theprevious fall, planted it, and watched it grow for another threehungry months (again living off wild foods plus the milk from theherds of camels and goats that the Furawiya residents werebringing back from southern Darfur). Finally she harvested herfirst post-famine crop, which she was threshing the day I arrived.‘A remarkable story of sheer toughness and survival skill,Amina’s story brought home to me just how marginal we outsideragents of relief are to the survival of ordinary Darfurian villagers.We provide little help and even littler understanding. A Zaghawarefugee in Chad today, looking across the border to the smalltown of Tine, with its gracious mosque, sees not a desert but aland in which she can survive, if only given the chance.’Source: Alex de Waal, ‘Tragedy in Darfur, On understanding and ending the horror’,http://bostonreview.net/BR29.5/dewaal.htmlUndernourishment cripples individuals and society. At its mostextreme it kills, with young children and babies often the first to die.More commonly, it weakens people, draining them of the energy thatthey need to work, and making them more prone to disease. Severemalnutrition in children increases the likelihood of future illness anddeath, reduces school performance, causes long-term brain damage,and reduces future potential and incomes. The UN calculates that theloss of productivity due to malnutrition costs the developing worldbetween 5 per cent and 10 per cent of its GDP every year. 44Somewhere around the middle of the current decade, a majorchange hit the global food system. After 25 years of steady decline, theprice of the main global food crops – rice, wheat, and maize – rocketed.The trigger was a combination of long-term factors, notably the risinguse of cereals to feed growing demand for meat in China and otherdeveloping countries and the decision by the USA and a number of226