Jeremy Hobbs: Staples

Augustine Musoni Dept: This campaign against anemia will cut the risk of women dying in childbirth, and will bolster kids physical and mental development in a country where half the preschoolers are anemic, researcher Augustine Musoni told the London-based SciDev.Net website, a clearing-house for scientific development news. It s an African success story, funded by HarvestPlus, which is working in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere to use the technology on other staples, including rice and pearl millet, according to The Star. This cut in aid is a global scandal, Oxfam International executive director Jeremy Hobbs says, given that the major economies managed to earmark $18 trillion to bail out their financial sectors after the 2008 economic crisis, and spend $1 trillion a year on their militaries. Even small cuts in aid cost lives as people are denied life-saving medicines and clean water, Hobbs says and in Rwanda, food scientists are battling hidden hunger among young mothers and children by adapting X-ray fluorescence technology from the mining industry to improve the quality of beans and maize, two locally grown crops. By analyzing the mineral content of crop strains they can identify staples that are richer in iron and zinc, micronutrients that are critical to good health. Sadly, the pool of money available to support food production, health care, schooling and other good works in poor countries is shrinking. Global aid bottomed out at $133.5 billion last year, a drop of $3.4 billion in real terms, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has reported. It s the first such rollback since 1997, Oxfam noted last week. Aid as a share of national income fell back from 0.32 per cent to 0.31 per cent. While not yet a crisis, it is an ominous precedent. The rich countries, Canada included, have all but abandoned their pledge to give 0.7 per cent to the very poorest. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.