I14 - React to News about Global Issues

Africa's hunger - a systemic crisis
By Martin Plaut
BBC Africa analyst

The number of Africans needing food aid has doubled in a decade
More than half of Africa is now in need of urgent food assistance.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is warning that 27 sub-Saharan countries now need help.

But what appear as isolated disasters brought about by drought or conflict in countries like Somalia, Malawi, Niger, Kenya and Zimbabwe are - in reality - systemic problems.

It is African agriculture itself that is in crisis, and according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, this has left 200 million people malnourished.

It is particularly striking that the FAO highlights political problems such as civil strife, refugee movements and returnees in 15 of the 27 countries it declares in need of urgent assistance. By comparison drought is only cited in 12 out of 27 countries.

The implication is clear - Africa's years of wars, coups and civil strife are responsible for more hunger than the natural problems that befall it.

Critical issues

In essence Africa's hunger is the product of a series of interrelated factors. Africa is a vast continent, and no one factor can be applied to any particular country. But four issues are critical:


•Decades of underinvestment in rural areas, which have little political clout.
Africa's elites respond to political pressure, which is mainly exercised in towns and cities. This is compounded by corruption and mismanagement - what donors call a lack of sound governance.

"Poor governance is a major issue in many African countries, and one that has serious repercussions for long-term food security," says a statement by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

"Problems such as corruption, collusion and nepotism can significantly inhibit the capacity of governments to promote development efforts."

•Wars and political conflict, leading to refugees and instability.

In 2004 the chairman of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, reminded an AU summit that the continent had suffered from 186 coups and 26 major wars in the past 50 years. It is estimated that there are more than 16 million refugees and displaced persons in Africa.
Farmers need stability and certainty before they can succeed in producing the food their families and societies need.


•HIV/Aids depriving families of their most productive labour.

This is particularly a problem in southern Africa, where over 30% of sexually active adults are HIV positive. According to aid agency Oxfam, when a family member becomes infected, food production can fall by up to 60%, as women are not only expected to be carers, but also provide much of the agricultural labour.

•Unchecked population growth

"Sub-Saharan Africa 's population has grown faster than any region over the past 30 years, despite the millions of deaths from the Aids pandemic," the UN Population Fund says.


A decline in soil quality makes land less productive
"Between 1975 and 2005, the population more than doubled, rising from 335 to 751 million, and is currently growing at a rate of 2.2% a year."
In some parts of Africa land is plentiful, and this is not a problem. But in others it has had severe consequences.

It has forced farming families to subdivide their land time and again, leading to tiny plots or families moving onto unsuitable, overworked land.

In the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea some land is now so degraded that there is little prospect that it will ever produce a decent harvest.

This problem is compounded by the state of Africa's soils.

In sub-Saharan Africa soil quality is classified as degraded in about 72% of arable land and 31% of pasture land.

In addition to natural nutrient deficiencies in the soil, soil fertility is declining by the year through "nutrient mining", whereby nutrients are removed over the harvest period and lost through leaching, erosion or other means.

Nutrient levels have declined over the past 30 years, says the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Consequences


The result is that a continent that was more than self sufficient in food at independence 50 years ago, is now a massive food importer. The book The African Food Crisis says that in less than 40 years the sub-continent went from being a net exporter of basic food staples to relying on imports and food aid.

In 1966-1970, net exports averaged 1.3 million tons of food a year, it states.


"By the late 1970s Africa imported 4.4 million tonnes of staple foods a year, a figure that had risen to 10 million tonnes by the mid 1980s."

It said that since independence, agricultural output per capita remained stagnant, and in many places declined.

Some campaigners and academics argue that African farmers will only be able to properly feed their families and societies when Western goods stop flooding their markets.

I14 - AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD

Global Village is a term closely associated with Marshall McLuhan,[1] popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). McLuhan described how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology[2] and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.[3] In bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, electric speed heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.[4]

Marshall McLuhan predicted the internet as an "extension of consciousness" in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man thirty years before its invention.

The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.[5]

Today, the term "Global Village" is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web.[citation needed] On the Internet, physical distance is even less of a hindrance to the real-time communicative activities of people, and therefore social spheres are greatly expanded by the openness of the web and the ease at which people can search for online communities and interact with others that share the same interests and concerns. Therefore, this technology fosters the idea of a conglomerate yet unified global community.[6] Due to the enhanced speed of communication online and the ability of people to read about, spread, and react to global news very rapidly, McLuhan says this forces us to become more involved with one another from countries around the world and be more aware of our global responsibilities.[7] Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together. This new reality has implications for forming new sociological structures within the context of culture.

[edit] From Global Village to Global TheatreNo chapter in Understanding Media, or later books, contains the idea that the Global Village and the electronic media create unified communities. In fact, in an interview with Gerald Stearn,[8] McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the Global Village. McLuhan argued that the Global Village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions. The Global Village is far more diverse.

After the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan starts to use the term Global Theater to emphasise the changeover from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement, from job holding to role playing, stressing that there is no more community to clothe the naked specialist.[9]

(excerpted from wikipedia)

THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1st Ed. McGraw Hill, NY, 1964; reissued MIT Press, 1994, with introduction by Lewis H. Lapham; reissued by Gingko Press, 2003 ISBN 1-58423-073-8) is a pioneering study in media theory written by Marshall McLuhan. In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study. McLuhan's insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[1] More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.

I14 - UNREAL CODITIONALS SUMMARY

The Unreal Conditional

Present Unreal Conditional



The present unreal conditional is used to express a present (or future) condition. We call it unreal because it tells us what would happen or how things would be if the situation were different:




I don't have a car. I don't visit you often.
If I had a car, I would visit you often.



The present unreal conditional is made up of an if-clause (if I had...) plus a main clause with would (I would visit).




You work so hard. You're tired all the time.
If you didn't work so hard, you wouldn't be tired all the time.

Fur coats are so expensive. I don't have one.
If they weren't so expensive, I would have one.



The form of the verb in the if-clause is the same as the past tense form of the verb. There is one exception, though: the verb be takes were for all persons:

I am / if I were

You are / if you were

He is / if he were.




If I were you, I would be more careful.
If you were leaving earlier, I would go with you.
What time would we get there if we took the subway?




Past Unreal Conditional



The past unreal conditional consists of two clauses, an if clause and a would clause.



The if-clause refers to an unreal past event or condition:

If I had arrived on time... (I didn't)
If it hadn't rained yesterday... (it did)



The would clause describes the consequence:

...I wouldn't have missed the train.
...we would have gone to the beach.



It wasn't warm yesterday. We didn't go to the beach.
If it had been warm yesterday, we would have gone to the beach.



An unreal past condition may have a consequence in either the present or the past.




If you had listened to my advice, you wouldn't be in trouble now. (now)
If it had rained an hour ago, we would have stayed inside.
If it had rained an hour ago, the streets would be wet. (now)