The original version of this article, by Carl Haub, appeared on Demographics Revealed.

Few terms in demography can cause more confusion than “urbanization.” News stories reporting projections of world urbanization are nearly always accompanied by photographs of places such as London or Shanghai, and it does seem rather natural to think of urbanization in those terms.

There are really two ways to describe urbanization: urban places and metropolitan areas. Historically, the definition of “urban” has been quite different across countries. In a sense, the urban population was originally more akin to “non-farm,” although not all people in rural areas worked in farming itself.  Considering how the concept of urban-rural began will help in understanding its meaning today.

Urban Places

In the first census of the United States, in 1790, only 5.1 percent of the 3.9 million population was urban and New York was the largest city with 33,000 people. Not until 1920 did the urban proportion pass 50 percent. In 1880, the first figures on the farm population showed that 22 million people lived on farms, 44 percent of the national total and 61 percent of the rural population. The farm population’s peak year was 1910, at 32 million; but today is less than 3 million.

Continue reading on Demographics Revealed.

Photo Credit: “Urbanization,” courtesy of flickr user theperplexingparadox.

Mexico’s 2012 elections were important for a host of reasons: the PRI party returned to power after 12 years of rule by the more conservative PAN; there was the first female presidential candidate from a major political party; and turn-out was historically high. They also proved that Mexico’s young people are not as apathetic as some may have thought, with the emergence of the #YoSoy132 student movement demanding fair press coverage.

Mexico is a young country but is no longer growing rapidly, having completed the demographic transition – when total fertility rates decline, following a similar trend in infant mortality – decades ago. Total fertility is now 2.2 children per woman, according to the latest UN data, and the median age is 25.9. However, the country still has a formidable “youth bulge” of people ages 15 to 29, the echo of previously high growth rates. If harnessed correctly, via well-paying jobs and ample opportunities for social advancement, this youth bulge can lower the country’s ratio of dependents (those outside the labor force) and producers, creating what demographers call a “demographic dividend” or “demographic bonus” of accelerated economic growth.

However, Pedro Salazar Ugarte on Boston Review writes that Mexico is in danger of missing this opportunity and perhaps worse, creating the seeds of further discontent in a country already reeling with violence. “Mexico is going through crucial and unprecedented times,” he writes:

It may take off or it may collapse. And I do not exaggerate or mean this rhetorically. Never before has Mexico had so many young people: nearly 30 million men and women aged 15-29, representing 26.4 percent of the country’s population. They are what we call in Mexico the “demographic bonus,” at first considered a great opportunity to enhance the country’s growth and development, and now a threat to its existence.

Despite improvements in education – 95 percent of the population has at least finished elementary school – and a relatively stable economy, most of these young adults are victims of the inequality and exclusion characteristic of Mexican society. In 2010, when the last census was taken in Mexico, 17.1 percent of the adolescents (15-17 years old) and 24.2 percent of the young adults living in Mexico did not go to school or have a job. Millions of them have been excluded from these key social institutions: learning and work. Young men and women, Mexico’s future, are being left without futures of their own.

Given these demographics, the only way for the country to avert disaster lies in achieving economic and social inclusion for young people. This is a very large challenge considering Mexico’s profound inequality: 52 million people, 46 percent of the population, live in poverty alongside the richest man on Earth – Carlos Slim Helú. These extreme disparities are straining social cohesion.

If Mexico does not guarantee its young people a fair chance at success, it can expect a violent future.

According to political demographer Richard Cincotta’s age structural model based on the historical relationship between median age and democratic governance, Mexico is in the in-between phase between unstable youthfulness and stable liberal democracy. Freedom House currently rates Mexico as “partly free” in its index of political rights and civil liberties.

Ugarte’s full impressions on Boston Review are worth a read. For more on all things Mexico, follow the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

Sources: Boston Review, Freedom House, Mexico Institute’s Elections Guide, UN Population Division.

Photo Credit: #YoSoy132 protesters, courtesy of flickr user Renato Guerra.

Arrayed along India’s southwest coast is a 1,600-kilometer-long mountain chain with forests older than the Himalayas: the Western Ghats. The mountains are one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the world, and UNESCO recently recognized the region as a World Heritage site. They’re also one of the tensest of India’s emerging battlegrounds between development and conservation and a potential recruiting ground for its Maoist insurgency, called the country’s “greatest threat to internal security.”

India’s Amazon at Risk

The Western Ghats are home to more than 1,500 endemic species of flowering plants; at least 500 endemic species of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals; 300 globally threatened species; and many more undiscovered species. They hold one of India’s four watersheds and several national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and reserve forests. Any threat to the health of the Western Ghats will affect the ecological, environmental, socio-economic, and political well-being of the country.

For decades since independence, the Western Ghats have been at the center of several controversies due to a host of developmental projects inside the range or on its fringes. Power projects have, for instance, diverted “large chunks of forest lands either for power plant structures and/or transmission lines,” leading to the “fragmentation of forests, restricted animal movements, accelerated deterioration of forest, and introduction of alien species,” according to the Ministry of the Environment and Forests.

Mining, especially illegal mining, has been another menace. In many pockets, mining activity has led to severe degradation of forests or near-complete loss. Other consequences of mining include biodiversity loss; sedimentation of river beds and estuaries; threats to soil fertility and agriculture due to waste water discharge; threats to hydrology due to over-pumping of ground water; and air pollution triggered by the movement of minerals by road and rail.

Development vs. Conservation

The development vs. conservation argument is epitomized by the dueling recommendations of two government-funded groups of environmental experts and other professionals from both governmental and non-governmental institutions: the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, headed by ecologist Madhav Gadgil, and a High Level Working Group, headed by space scientist Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan.

The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel has called for declaring the entire Ghats an “ecologically sensitive area,” much to the chagrin of pro-development lobbies. The panel produced a report, submitted in August 2011, which divides the Western Ghats into three categories: Ecologically Sensitive Zones (ESZ) I, II, and III. It recommended that the Ministry of Environment and Forests take steps to phase out mining in ESZ I by 2016, to continue existing mining in ESZ II but put an effective system of social auditing in place, and to allow new developmental projects in ESZ III. It also recommended that the ministry not give environmental clearance to two specific hydropower projects – the Gundia hydroelectric power project in Karnataka (home to lion-tailed macaques, cuckoo bees, travancore flying squirrels, and niligiri martens) and the Ahtirapilly dam on the Chalakudy river in Trichur district of Kerala (home to hornbills, torrent frogs, lion-tailed macaques, and cane turtles). The report was rejected by state governments and industry as implementation of its recommendations would curb development in nearly 70 percent of the region.

In response to the Gadgil panel’s recommendations, the government appointed the High Level Working Group to examine the report and find a compromise formula. The Kasturirangan panel mellowed the recommendations to a great extent by, they said, taking into account human habitation and peoples’ livelihoods in the region – giving equal weight to both human and nature. After using satellite data and remote sensing technology to distinguish between “natural landscapes” (undeveloped areas that constitute about 42 percent of the region, by their reckoning) and “cultural landscapes” (human settlements, agricultural fields, and plantations covering 58 percent of the region), the Kasturirangan panel identified only 37 percent of the Western Ghats as ecologically sensitive. Moreover, the panel called for incentivizing green and sustainable practices in the region, rather than banning development outright. The result would reduce the area of the Western Ghats identified as ecologically sensitive by nearly half. Still, certain state governments remain dissatisfied.

A Maoist Threat?

What many analysts in India have not looked at is the close linkages between environmental and human security in the Western Ghats in terms of the growing menace of the Maoist, or “Naxalite,” insurgency.

Unknown to many Westerners, India’s Maoist insurgency is a serious internal revolt against the state that is at least partially rooted in grievances related to natural resource management and government development policy.

The expansion of the “Red Corridor” – the mostly forested region in the east of the country where the insurgency has been most active – has been in the news especially of late, in the wake of the brutal killing of at least 18 people  in the state of Chhattisgarh, including former Union Minister V. C. Shukla and senior Congress leader Mahendra Karma. Although certainly not entirely to blame, environmental management issues do play a role in driving displaced communities, particularly tribal communities, into the Maoist movement in the Western Ghats. Maoists have been active in the area since at least 2002 and Gadgil’s report certainly has given them more ammunition for new slogans against the so-called imperialists. According to the Home Ministry, there is some evidence that Maoists are in the process of forming a “Western Ghats Special Zonal Committee,” that would include Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.

It is difficult to dismiss the tribal communities’ grievances. In the case of Kudremukh National Park, the national government uprooted the tribal population forcefully from their traditional habitat and took away their livelihoods to protect the forests. It is in situations like Kudremukh that the government needs to take effective measures to prevent conflict by either peacefully resettling the tribes or declaring them as a biodiversity asset so they will not be deprived of their rights to use the forests in traditional ways under the Forest Rights Act of 2006 (e.g., collecting “minor forest produce” –  non-timber forest products, such as medicinal and aromatic plants, oil seeds, fiber and floss, bamboo, reeds, grasses, and so on).

At the same time, the state governments in the region claim that granting the World Heritage tag to the whole area or implementing Gadgil’s recommendations would actually fuel Maoism, as it would prevent the establishment from carrying out development activities. The lack of development and loss of livelihoods, they argue, would then lead to even more “anti-social activities.”

It is an open question whether or not the heritage tag would restrict development. It certainly would not uproot people or destroy their livelihoods, consequences of the current policy which are likely to create recruits for the Maoists as well. However, this debate reflects the complexity of the issue.

The Need of the Hour

The first and foremost step to solving this conundrum would be to implement a community-based approach to the management of the Western Ghats’ forests and their resources instead of the current top-down approach. Local communities that have the best understanding of the region should be part of the decision-making process. When communities are a part of the process, there is also much less risk that they will become disillusioned and feed the Maoist insurgency against the state.

To check illegal activities, like strip mining, logging, wildlife trade, and encroachment that are so destructive to the Western Ghats ecology and its people, law enforcement agencies need to pull up their socks. Although the mountains stretch across several different states, the central government needs to lead by example by strengthening its existing environmental impact assessment mechanism so that not every industry project is given environmental clearance.

Further, whichever set of recommendations – Gadgil’s, Kasturirangan’s, or some combination – is settled on, ecological biodiversity needs to be recognized as an integral part of the human landscape as well as the environmental. A demarcation between the two shifts the focus away from the basic fact that the environment is our infrastructure and that development without ecological considerations is not sustainable.

Saving the entire Western Ghats should be a priority for the government, not saving the remaining Western Ghats.

Dhanasree Jayaram is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations at Manipal University, Karnataka, and an associate fellow at the Centre for Air Power Studies in New Delhi. Her book Breaking out of the Green House: Indian Leadership in Times of Environmental Change was published in 2012.

Sources: Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Deccan Chronicle, Deccan Herald, Down To Earth, The Hindu, The Hindu Centre, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, Mangalorean, Ministry of the Environment and Forests (India), Naxal Revolution, Press Trust of India, Sanctuary Asia, The Times of India, Union Ministry of Environment and Forest’s High Level Working Group, Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, Zee News.

Photo Credit: The Kudremukh range, courtesy of flickr user Karunakar Rayker; India’s Red Corridor, courtesy of Planemad/Wikimedia Commons.

In may not be surprising that China, home to so many other superlatives, also faces desertification on a grand scale. According to China’s State Forestry Administration, over 27 percent of the country now suffers from desertification – more than 1,000,000 square miles, or about one-third of the continental United States – impacting the lives of more than 400 million people.

At the Desert’s Edge, a new short documentary from the Asia Society and filmmaker Jonah Kessel, explains these challenges and efforts to combat it in Kulun Qi, a dry area in northeastern Inner Mongolia.

The film focuses on the perspectives of small, local units of families and farmers. “When my mother was young,” Ma Enqi, a shopkeeper in the film says, “the desert wasn’t so expansive. The land around here all used to be farmland when she was still in her 30s.” Though migration has been the “solution” for desertification in many parts of China, Ma and his family seem to be trapped on the land they have lived for decades. And they have witnessed the desert grows wider and wider.

“You can’t escape it, whether you’re afraid or not,” Maona Mula, a local farmer, says with a bitter smile gazing at the land covered with sand, rocks, and wood chips. His livelihood comes from “some crops, some firewood,” cows, and the pigs behind him. “When you are poor, you can’t do anything else,” he says.

Desertification is a perfect illustration of the water-food nexus increasingly challenging people in China and elsewhere around the world. Without water, farmers cannot grow crops. Yet over-exploitation of land, via overgrazing or overuse of fertilizer, for example, decreases the quality and accessibility of water and soil, making land more vulnerable to drying. Choke Point: China – a joint initiative between the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum and Circle of Blue – highlights how the growing water footprint of coal power development constrains agriculture and exacerbates desertification. But the challenge does not stop at China’s doorstep; according to the UN, desertification and land degradation affects 168 countries and costs $490 billion a year.

Where water is still reasonably accessible, as in the case of Kulun Qi, one way to combat desertification and drought is tree planting. Trees help hold moisture and prevent soil erosion. In the simple words of Xuan Yuquan, a local resident, “if you plant trees, the crops will survive. If there aren’t any trees, the crops will die.”

At the Desert’s Edge highlights the efforts of Shanghai Roots and Shoots, part of the global Roots and Shoots NGO created by primatologist Jane Goodall. Since 2007, volunteers from the megacity of Shanghai have come to desolate Inner Mongolia to plant trees with local farmers. The organization asks farmers to monitor and maintain those trees, engages local students for environmental education, and employs a full-time forestry manager to evaluate and ensure tree growth. To date, they have planted more than 1.2 million trees and are on their way to their target of two million. And the results are visible, as testified by a forester and a longtime resident in the film.

Apart from civil society’s efforts, the central government is also working on an environmental engineering program of unprecedented scale. The Three-North Shelter Forest Program, also known as the “Green Great Wall,” is a 2,800-mile network of forest belts covering all the major deserts and sandy lands in northwest China and over 40 percent of the country’s entire territory. The project is designed to serve as a windbreak to stop sandstorms, halt the expansion of desertification, and to restore land to a productive and sustainable state. To date, the project has re-planted and protected about 10,000 square miles of forest, achieving more than two-thirds of its goal of 14,500 square miles by 2050.

Still, the gains made are fragile. Winter storms can destroy vulnerable new trees. In many places, groundwater availability could actually decrease as trees soak up more. And herders claim that protecting grasslands from overgrazing could also drive certain animal species to extinction.

As we join together for 2013’s World Day to Combat Desertification, we need to realize that this is a long battle on a massive scale. It will take many trees and other much larger behavior changes in communities, businesses, and governments around the world to protect our future from drying up.

Sources: BBC, China Daily, ChinaDialogue, Circle of Blue, The Guardian, Ministry of Land and Resources (China), Science Times, Shanghai Roots and Shoots, State Forestry Administration (China), The Times of India, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, Wired, Xinhua.

Video Credit: “At the Desert’s Edge,” courtesy of Jonah Kessel/Asia Society.

“All through Papua New Guinea, in every province, there is logging and mining, but we are the first conservation area,” says Lisa Dabek in this week’s podcast.

Dabek is the director of the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Project (TKCP), an effort of the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo that works to protect tree kangaroos while empowering communities in Papua New Guinea’s YUS Conservation Area to manage their natural resources, health care, and food security.

The original version of this article, by Keith Schneider, appeared on Circle of Blue. Choke Point: India is a research and reporting initiative produced in partnership between Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum and Asia Program.

Perhaps because India is so big, so bewildering and chaotic, and so determined to update its elusive rural identity with sleek urban flare, Indians and the national press are fascinated by how the nation’s wild animals are faring amid the dizzying change. In many cases, not well.

Elephants, chased out of their natural habitat, trample forest hamlets. Tigers hunt outside of national reserves and are killed by poachers. Monkeys, hungry and thirsty in an era of declining water reserves, steal food and drink from festival banquet tables.

But of all the allegorical reports about wild animals confronting the ruinous consequences of modernization, none so pointedly define India’s erratic and risky patterns of growth, or attract more attention, than the regular stories of sleek, stealthy, powerful leopards that become trapped in wells.

On December 8, 2012, for example, newspapers in northern India’s Punjab state reported on a team of rescuers in Ratta Khera that pulled an eight-year-old male leopard out of a seven-meter-deep (22-foot) irrigation and drinking well. The leopard, thirsty and pacing precariously on the well’s narrow wall, had apparently slipped and fallen to the bottom. Though he was not injured, the powerful cat could neither claw his way up the well’s slick walls, nor launch himself out of the narrow space. Despite his strength and drive to succeed, the young leopard was, in a word, stuck.

As a metaphor for modern India, the story of the leopard in the well is especially apt. This is a 66-year-old democracy, touched by boundless energy and driven by endless ambition. But it also is a nation trapped by seemingly inescapable walls of resource waste, management disarray, and cultural divides of its own making.

During the last week of November and the first three weeks of December 2012, a Circle of Blue team studied the heroic and the enormously unstable paradox that is modern India. As our teams have done in Australia, China, the United States, and most recently in Qatar, Circle of Blue focused on India’s formative and globally significant contest between water, food, and energy in a nation that has doubled in population since the 1970s.

Circle of Blue’s research encompassed the businesses, think tanks, and government agencies in New Delhi, the rice farms and mills of Punjab and Haryana in the north, and the open-pit coal mines and the renewable energy fields of Chhattisgarh in the east. Over the next four weeks, in comprehensive articles, infographics, and photographs, Circle of Blue will report our findings in Choke Point: India, the fourth major project in our Global Choke Point series, done in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, based in Washington, D.C.

India’s Internal Indecision

In interviews with government experts, academics, business leaders, farmers, and citizens, all acknowledged that, in myriad ways, India’s water-food-energy choke point is steadily ruining the nation’s air and water, slowing its economy, and testing its cultural and political stability. But as we spent more time and talked to more people, Circle of Blue also learned that India’s resource choke point was just one crisis among a select group of interrelated structural clashes that are impeding the nation’s development.

In every case, the source of the constraint turns out to be India’s indecision about its national goals:

• Efficiency in India’s governing systems is blocked by layers of offices, divisions, review panels, and administrators in ornate bureaucracies.
• Though defining itself as a market-based economy, India’s resource industries – water, food, energy, mining – are thoroughly controlled by state-owned companies.
• Bribery and corruption are so endemic that warnings of prosecution and appeals to transparency are posted prominently in the lobbies of big companies.

Unlike China, Australia, the United States, and Qatar, in particular, India’s ever-fiercer competition for water by the agriculture and energy sectors is not the result of battling for scarce resources. Water reserves are ample. Soil is fertile. Reserves of coal are among the world’s largest.

Rather, India uses its resource management practices as a social welfare policy to feed and support the nation’s poor. Electricity and water are provided free of charge to India’s grain farmers. That, in turn, produces enormous grain harvests that rot in storage before they can be distributed in the cities. It has also led to the proliferation of millions of electric water pumps that deplete groundwater supplies in the fertile northern grain-growing region. So much of the country’s electricity is used to power water pumps that India’s coal-fired electrical sector and government-owned coal mines cannot keep up with demand, forcing some new plants not to open, reducing the generating capacity of existing coal-fired power plants, and requiring ever-expanding and expensive imported coal to keep the lights on and the pumps running.

India is now the world’s third-largest grain producer, fourth-largest energy consumer, and will soon pass China as the largest population. But in dozens of interviews and visits to critical food and energy installations, Circle of Blue also learned that India’s economy is slowing, even as its share of global pollution grows.

Heavy reliance on coal to fuel 65 percent of India’s electricity – with plans to continue to push a coal-fueled future for at least the next three decades – has turned India into the fourth-largest producer of climate-changing emissions. The warming climate, in turn, is producing erratic rain and snowfall in India’s grain-producing states, reducing moisture and water that is available to recharge vital aquifers. As a result, farmers are drilling deeper wells and adding more powerful pumps to reach these new depths, a practice that consumes even more electricity and produces even more climate-changing gases.

And though seemingly everyone from the farmers to business executives to government officials know that this cyclical system is unsustainable, solutions are both readily apparent and practical – like gradually charging farmers for electricity and water – and politically unattainable. Free water and power are so politically popular and deeply embedded in the economies of farm states that leaders who suggest a change have no possibility of gaining elected office.

Food Production: Government Policy for Waste

The broad outlines of India’s paradox are best defined by the country’s insistence on removing as much risk from the grain-producing economy as possible.

India’s central and state governments manage the water supply, agriculture, and energy sectors as social services. Electricity to pump that water is free, too – all subsidized by a government that provides seed, fertilizer, and farm chemicals at little to no cost. And not only are the inputs free, but India also guarantees that it will purchase every kernel of wheat and almost every grain of rice grown in its fields, though much of what is produced is not reaching the hundreds of millions of poor Indians who need it, especially in the nation’s teeming cities.

The effect on a nation that has known food shortages and starvation as recently as the 1960s has been profound.

India’s grain production last year reached a record 247 million metric tons. So much rice has been harvested that 62 million metric tons – about 60 percent of the annual rice harvest – is stored in mountains of stacked burlap sacks under plastic tarps in hundreds of mills and storage depots across India.

But the consequences to the water, air, and soil are significant and are growing increasingly dire in the era of climate change.

Most of Punjab’s rice and wheat harvests are produced on land that is irrigated by groundwater. The excessive use of water is steadily draining water tables in Punjab and Haryana, pushing levels deeper into the ground and requiring farmers to dig deeper wells and use more powerful pumps to draw it to the surface. Nearly 40 percent of Haryana’s electricity is used just to transport water to farm fields. In Punjab, as much as half the electricity consumed during the spring and summer growing seasons is needed to operate pumps that draw water from 1.3 million wells.

With free electricity to run pumps, and no cost for water, farmers irrigate day and night. The whir of pumps and rush of running water is part of the soundtrack of the region. So much electricity is required in a country that is not producing enough that Punjab and Haryana utilities schedule regular hours for brownouts and blackouts. Rice mills, for instance, operate at night, when electricity is available; if they require power during the day, they turn on generators that are powered by expensive diesel fuel.

Water-wasting farm practices, moreover, are drawing salts to the surface and damaging soils in both states. Climate change is reducing rainfall in the Himalayan foothills and in the rivers that supply the region’s reservoirs and irrigation canals and that recharge groundwater aquifers.

Coal and Electricity Shortages: Endemic Blackouts

India’s leaders have long promised to electrify the entire country. Still, more than 400 million Indians do not have power in their homes. Some 65 percent of India’s electricity is generated from coal, with the balance supported by hydropower, biomass, natural gas, and nuclear energy. And India’s newest Five-Year Plan calls for coal mining production to climb almost 80 percent by 2017.

With 67 billion metric tons in proven reserves still to be mined, according to the World Energy Council, India has the world’s fifth-largest coal reserves. Last year, India mined 540 million metric tons of coal, ranking it third in production behind China and the United States, according to the World Coal Association, the industry’s London-based trade group. But since national demand for coal reached 652 million metric tons last year, India had to import 112 million metric tons. Still, it was not enough.

Even though India’s coal-fired capacity is currently growing by nearly 20,000 megawatts annually, much of the nation still suffers from widespread blackouts. The reason: consumption of electricity is growing more than 10 percent annually, while the domestic fuel supply – even with growing imports – is increasing by less than 4 percent annually.

Half of India’s newest coal-fired plants are idle, in whole or part because they cannot secure adequate supplies of coal to fuel them. Last summer, half the nation went dark for days in July, an event that attracted global attention but was shrugged at by Indians who are accustomed to frequent and lengthy power outages.

Coal industry executives told Circle of Blue that the process to open a new mine or to expand an existing mine includes a flurry of land, water, and air permits, which typically takes most of a decade to secure. But once the mine is open, environmental reviews are infrequent and enforcement is spotty. In addition, the industry is warped by corruption that turns permits into revenue-generating schemes for fraudulent Indian government officials. For example, a particular egregious case of favoritism in mine leasing and permitting is under investigation now in Delhi.

Solutions Are Difficult

Endemic problems caused by mismanagement can be solved with better management practices and government decisionmaking. For instance, India is missing a golden opportunity to electrify its rural villages and modernize its manufacturing economy by building and distributing decentralized clean energy electrical technologies, particularly wind and solar equipment that consume virtually no water.

Providing Indian villages with electricity that is generated from localized clean energy sources could be a more efficient, less costly, and far less polluting alternative to coal, which now makes up the bulk of India’s electricity production. Extensive and expensive high voltage transmission networks are not needed, and they tend to be highly inefficient, anyway – nearly one-quarter of the electricity sent through India’s centralized grids is lost.

Yet, with the exception of its plans to build more than 200 hydropower generating stations in the northern states near the border with China – proposals that come with their own distinctive ecological and diplomatic risks – India is largely disregarding clean energy as a mainstream source of power.

Why? India views Western-style energy and electricity development as superior to decentralized power grids. Federally owned Coal India, the world’s largest coal producer, also is intent on developing its mineral resources and the big power plants they fuel. Both sectors support millions of jobs and the adult voters who Indian politicians rely on to stay in office. Meanwhile, though India’s national government has approved formal policies to aggressively develop wind and solar energy, as well as pursue energy efficiency measures, all three objectives are not yet mainstream goals. The constituency for clean energy in India, as well as alternative energy development and manufacturing jobs, while solid in government circles, is still scant in cities and the countryside.

Like the leopard in the well, India is a nation deeply frustrated. Obsolete strategies in its management and resource policies and practices damage water and soil and encourage waste. Corruption is a second economy. Solutions, such as actually requiring farmers to pay a price for water and energy, remain out of reach for political reasons. India claws at the slick walls of change. Progress is grudging. Old policies take precedence. The consequences are impeding India’s development, damaging its treasure of natural resources, and risking the new wealth and global standing India has accumulated over the last generation.

Future stories in the Choke Point: India series can be found on Circle of Blue.

Keith Schneider is a Traverse City-based senior editor for Circle of Blue. He has reported on energy, water, and climate change from four continents. Circle of Blue was founded in 2000 to provide front-line reporting on water and its relationships to food, energy, and health.

Photo Credit: Irrigation well in Punjab, used with permission courtesy of J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue; Asia’s largest open-pit coal mine, Gevra, used with permission courtesy of Aubrey Ann Parker/Circle of Blue. Video: “India: A Nation Heading towards an Energy and Water Choke Point,” courtesy of Allison Vogelsong/Circle of Blue.

Physical, sexual, or psychological harm by a spouse or partner is a major factor in maternal and reproductive health, said Jay Silverman during an event at the Wilson Center last month.

Silverman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cited a 15-country study of both developed and developing countries that found 25 to 75 percent of women have suffered from intimate partner violence at least once. And the effects are very significant, both in terms of the health of mothers and their children. [Video Below]

Women suffering from intimate partner violence are less likely to adopt contraception and are 46 to 69 percent more likely to have an unintended pregnancy, Silverman said. Abusive partners are 83 percent more likely to coerce a pregnancy, through forced intercourse or birth-control sabotage, and women in abusive relationships are 2.7 times more likely to seek an abortion. Women suffering from abuse are twice as likely to have a miscarriage and their children are 3.9 times more likely to have a low birth weight, while infant diarrheal diseases are 38 to 65 percent more common in children born to mothers suffering from abuse.

“There are incredible vulnerabilities that we have to address immediately,” said Anita Raj, also from the University of California, San Diego. “Gender-based violence and gender inequities work together to heighten the vulnerability of girls [and women].”

Slow Change in Jordan

Cari Jo Clark, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has worked extensively in Jordan and the Middle East on intimate partner violence. It’s an “extensive problem in the Middle East, as it is in the rest of the world,” she said.

In Egypt, 33 percent of women have experienced physical abuse at one point in their relationship, as have 36 percent of Turkish women and 21 percent of Jordanian women. Seven percent of Egyptian women and 11 percent of Palestinian women specifically report sexual abuse in their marriages.

In Jordan, 97 percent of women who participated in Clark’s survey reported that their husband’s exhibited “controlling” behaviors, 73 percent reported psychological violence, 31 percent admitted having experienced physical violence, and 19 percent reported sexual violence, she said.

The contexts impacting the occurrences of intimate partner violence in Jordan are complicated and determined by the norms of society, communities, particular relationships, and the individuals involved, said Clark. For example, according to some studies, 90 percent of Jordanian men view spousal abuse as socially acceptable in certain circumstances, such as when the wife is perceived to have committed a transgression. In the Palestinian Territories, 60 percent of men view spouse abuse as acceptable and 62 percent of women agree, Clark said.

Family ties also affect partner violence, said Clark. Living with an in-law increases exposure to intimate partner violence for women, for example, but the survey found that marriage to a close cousin is associated with a reduced risk of violence. Male members of extended families are “key partners” in ending violence against women, she said. Because of social stigma, “the family is the best – and for most women – the only source of assistance.”

Although the numbers may seem grim, “change is happening,” Clark said. More and more, women in Jordan and elsewhere are getting out of abusive relationships and creating and encouraging support networks. Forty percent of women surveyed experiencing intimate partner violence sought help outside the family, which is “actually high,” she said.  Even though divorced women experience an “intense social stigma” and perhaps financial difficulties, they “knew they were exactly where they needed to be, for themselves and for their children,” said Clark.

In India, Involving the Community

“Improving the equity and value of women and girls is a very important means of improving population health,” said Anita Raj, who has recently done work on these issues in Mumbai and rural India.

Raj surveyed and worked with approximately 200 women in Mumbai slums who were at high-risk for HIV. The women participating in the project, called RHANI (Reducing HIV Among at-risk Wives in India), attended individual and group sessions to discuss the causes of gender-based violence and its connections to their health.

“We felt it was very important to have a perspective that women should have the capacity and support to affect their lives and health,” Raj said. And, encouragingly, “a lot [of women] felt they could affect their marital relationship by talking about these issues and implementing these strategies on their own.”

Creatively, the program implemented street theater as a means to address gender-based violence and reduce social stigma around talking about the issue. It also created a sense that preventing spousal abuse was a community-wide effort, she said.

Surveys conducted three months after RHANI was completed revealed a reduced rate of unprotected sex (and therefore exposure to HIV/AIDS), reduced rate of spousal abuse, and reduced rate of sexual coercion.

Child marriage also plays a large role in intimate partner violence and child health in India, Raj said. “Those who marry as children are more vulnerable to intimate partner violence,” she said. Due to high rates of girl child marriages, rural India has a high and early fertility rate. In 2012, 150,000 infant deaths were attributed to young motherhood.

A preference for sons can lower the rates of contraception for women – young and old alike – in hopes of conceiving a son.

Raj studied youth capacity-building programs to address the health issues of early marriages and early fertility. She said surveys found 19 percent of young girls in rural areas believe they should have no choice in deciding who to marry, and 10 percent believe they should have no choice in when to marry. Eighty-six percent of young women believed that contraception should not be used in marriage.

However, community and clinical interventions are showing “amazing promise” in addressing issues of sexual and reproductive health, gender-based violence, and child marriage, Raj said.  Most importantly, they are showing progress among a wide audience, including women, men, and youth.

Transforming Attitudes

“Intimate partner violence is not just something that happens to a particular small group, who happens to be at higher risk,” Silverman emphasized, and is not unique to the Middle East or India. In 2010, according to the U.S. Justice Bureau, there were more than 900,000 reported cases of intimate partner violence in the United States.

We need to identify the programs that work successfully and adapt and scale them up in development planning, Silverman said.

Globally, there needs to be greater awareness of the pervasiveness of intimate partner violence and its effects on the health of women and children, said Clark. In Jordan, innovative and multi-sector programs, such as UNFPA and USAID initiatives can generate awareness and change, she said.

“They have the potential to transform attitudes,” Clark concluded, which is the root driver of these inequities.

Event Resources:

• Cari Jo Clark’s Presentation
• Anita Raj’s Presentation
• Jay Silverman’s Presentation
• Photo Gallery
• Video

Sources: Population Council, US Justice Bureau, World Bank.

Photo Credit: Three women in Aurangabad, India, courtesy of Simone D. McCourtie/World Bank.

Despite the appearance of a new, “greener” economy, extractive industries – mining, oil, and natural gas – are now responsible for “moving more earth each year, just for mining and quarrying, than the global hydrological cycle,” writes the Transatlantic Academy’s Stacy VanDeveer in a recent paper, Still Digging: Extractive Industries, Resource Curses, and Transnational Governance in the Anthropocene. The costs of this activity are high and extend well beyond the wallet, he explains.

It is impossible to comprehend modern societies without understanding the influence of extractive industries and the commodities they produce, VanDeveer writes. Organized into seven sections, Still Digging first gives an overview of the environmental, humanitarian, and security challenges caused by extractive industries before taking a closer look at the connection between oil and gas and human rights violations and the high ecological and human costs of mining. The final two sections go into a discussion about the “resource curse,” possible solutions to it, and existing state and non-state efforts to improve governance.

Meet the New Resource Economy…

“Those little graphics of the hydrological cycle in children’s basic science textbooks, that most of us saw in school, explaining how the natural systems move water and earth around the planet to form and reshape the environments in which we live, are now outdated,” writes VanDeveer. Humanity now plays a much bigger role in the Earth’s systems, prompting some scientists to dub the current era the Anthropocene, or “age of man.”

On the surface, we’ve entered a period of high-tech innovations that appear more sustainable. Yet, VanDeveer points out that “our ‘old’ consumer driven, manufacturing economy and our ‘new’ high technology, ‘green economy’ both demand ever-more.” Resources that are used more extensively now, like coltan, lithium, and rare earth minerals, are still mined and processed using highly destructive and energy-intensive methods.

What’s more, these resources are vulnerable to the same kinds of boom-and-bust cycles that have characterized high-value commodities in the past, like oil and coal, and have contributed to social and political instability. This instability, coupled with the humanitarian, environmental, and governance challenges posed by the creep of mining into previous undeveloped areas, contributes to the association between violent conflict and high-value commodity markets. VanDeveer highlights a long list of sample extractive industry-related conflicts and tensions since 2010, including competition over the estimated $1 trillion worth of unexplored mineral deposits in Afghanistan; labor unrest in South Africa’s mining sector that resulted in more than 40 deaths; and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which resulted in criminal charges for British Petroleum.

Everyday Disasters and Ungovernable Spaces

VanDeveer also explores specifically how oil and gas intersect with politics, arguing that “oil politics among states is often quite national security-oriented – or realist-based – in nature”:

This does not mean war over oil is common. It means that war between states, and within them, is a serious risk, in part because states associate oil access with national security. States have indeed used raw and overwhelming force to secure access to oil and other valuable commodities. But quite often they choose to cooperate and trade instead.

VanDeveer points out that while the environmental costs of oil and gas are immediately apparent in large-scale disasters (e.g., Deepwater Horizon, Exxon Valdez, etc.), “the everyday environmental ‘externalities’ of oil and gas – the slow violence they mete out on millions of people and environments year after year – are far worse.” For example, he points out that “the normal, everyday conduct of the oil industry and the region’s inhabitants” results in more oil spillage in the Niger River Delta every year than the entire Exxon Valdez accident.

The ecological and human costs of mining are also high, writes VanDeveer. Global price competition, economies of scale dynamics, and high regulatory standards in OECD countries have “driven a growing share of global mining operations to the developing world,” where state and civil society institutions often lack the capacity to adequately regulate industry practices. This can lead to irrevocable destruction of land and ecosystems on which nearby communities depend, corruption, and a host of adverse health effects.

The mining industry is also enormous – “larger than the GDP of over 150 countries, and these sums do not include the (certainly much larger) economic value of the thousands of products requiring mined materials in their production,” writes VanDeveer. Governing these large mining firms is tricky as “many mining concessions are owned by a complex and dynamic set of international and domestic companies and individuals with operations tasked to a contractor or some subset of the owners. Clear lines of authority over operations, management, mine security, and other on-the-ground practices are frequently difficult to discern.”

The maelstrom of conflict and insecurity that has developed around coltan and other minerals in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo “illustrates the dangers of boom-and-bust commodity price cycles,” he writes, “as well as accompanying unregulated, ungoverned mining interests and the scramble by well-armed state and non-state actors over resources.”

Addressing the Resource Curse

VanDeveer follows this broad look at the current state of the extractive industries with a closer look at both sides of the debate on the “resource curse.” As he defines it, the curse “refers to the correlation between a country’s high level of dependence on high-value resource exports and the likelihood that the country will exhibit subpar economic performance over time and have undemocratic, corrupt, and/or ineffective governing institutions.”

He uses petro-states as an example, pointing out that in 2000, “18 of the world’s top 20 oil-exporting nations were run by non-democratic regimes.” This lines up somewhat with research by Wilson Center Fellow Jeff Colgan, who found that states where oil exports account for more than 10 percent of GDP are more than twice as likely to engage in inter-state conflict than non-petrostates, and those with relatively recent, post-revolutionary governments have an even higher propensity for aggression.

However, some disagree with the resource curse framing, arguing instead that ownership structures of extractive industries (whether state-owned industry, private, etc.) and policy failures are more relevant to whether or not a country experiences political or economic instability than the presence of valuable resources themselves.

What does all of this mean for a “greening” economy? VanDeveer suggests that these dynamics are not likely to go away and that the resource curse may continue to play out with a new set of commodities.

Perhaps the value of the resource curse debate is that it pushes us to look not just at the role of valuable resources in a “cursed” country, but more importantly, its governing institutions. As VanDeveer points out, state and civil society capacity are critical to producing “human and economic development and good governance.” The presence of valuable natural resources merely exacerbates and highlights weaknesses.

Surviving and Thriving in the Anthropocene

“We humans are not likely to stop extracting resources from the earth anytime soon,” VanDeveer writes. “However, it is possible to substantially reduce the environmental externalities and humanitarian side effects of extractive industries.”

To do so requires understanding that many of the same governance challenges that applied to “old” strategic minerals and energy sources will continue to apply to the new. VanDeveer emphasizes how initiatives like the Natural Resources Charter, Kimberley Process, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act have been somewhat successful at promoting more effective governance and offer many lessons for future efforts.

Ultimately, however, in the Anthropocene, it will not be enough even to improve the industry’s record on worker safety, environmental clean-up, and poverty alleviation, he writes. In order to “produce additional wealth and human progress without continuously accelerating material consumption,” the extractive industries must be pushed to “internalize all of the environmental and human costs of their operations.”

Sources: Transatlantic Academy.

Photo Credit: “Bingham Canyon Mine,” courtesy of flickr user arbyreed.

The original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on The Diplomat.

On May 11, Pakistan’s Election Day, approximately 60 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. This figure far exceeded the 44 percent who turned out for Pakistan’s previous election in 2008. Media reports have featured moving accounts of the elderly being carried to the polls, and of women standing in the heat for hours to cast their ballots.

Yet one of the most defining features of the voting population was its youth. About a fifth of Pakistan’s 85 million registered voters were between 18 and 25 years old, with another 15 percent between the ages of 26 and 30.

Young people represent, by far, Pakistan’s largest demographic. The statistics are striking: Two thirds of the country’s approximately 180 million people are not yet 30 years old, and the median age is 21. As a percentage of the total population, only Yemen has more people under 24.

Little wonder youth were courted so aggressively on the campaign trail – from Imran Khan’s social media-fueled populist calls for change to Nawaz Sharif’s distribution of free laptops.

Continue reading on The Diplomat.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Chatham House, The Express Tribune, International Herald Tribune.

Photo Credit: “Wagah celebrators,” courtesy of flickr user Luke X. Martin.

The international community should start strategizing now to manage the ambitions of circumpolar states and minimize the potential for conflict, write authors Rob Huebert, Heather Exner-Pirot, Adam Lajeunesse, and Jay Gulledge in a report. Published by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Climate Change and International Security: The Arctic as a Bellwether explores the geopolitical implications of climate change in the Arctic and puts forth several recommendations for policymakers to consider. Huebert et al. write that “maintaining security and peace in the Arctic will require adapting policies and institutions to the emerging environment there.” They recommend that Arctic states strengthen existing multilateral agreements by, for example, advocating the accession of the United States into the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Further, they propose that the Arctic Council lifts its ban on discussing security issues in order to become a forum for meaningful discussion.

Predictions of shadowy geopolitical maneuvering and future conflict have overshadowed the potential for Arctic cooperation, writes ETH Zurich’s Jonas Grätz in The Arctic: Thaw With Conflict Potential. “This is particularly apparent when considering ‘soft’ security concerns such as environmental pollution resulting from the extraction of raw materials,” he says. Grätz explores possible avenues for cooperation between the circumpolar states themselves and the broader international community. Much like Huebert et al., he recommends an expanded role for the Arctic Council, through which the eight Arctic states can coordinate their activities, and an emphasis on structuring international law to more effectively facilitate multilateral cooperation.

‘Toward Resilience’ is a series on the meaning of global resilience and vulnerability today. The original version of this article appeared on International Alert.

Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.

Resilience is not necessarily a good thing, of course. Patrimonialism and corruption can be resilient to change, as can power dynamics which sanction the marginalization and harm of women, children, or vulnerable people. American academic Andrew Nathan writes of the Chinese Communist Party’s “authoritarian resilience,” i.e. its ability to adapt and continue to thrive despite its authoritarian, undemocratic approach to power. But most often resilience is used to describe positive and useful features of society.

“Good Governance Is Good for Resilience”

International Alert is a peacebuilding organization. We say peace is when people anticipate, manage, and resolve the inevitable conflicts which arise in and between societies, and do so without violence; and we describe communities and societies as resilient when they do so. Their resilience in the face of stress is largely due to the nature of relationships and institutions, which provide them with tensile, rather than brittle strength. Freedom and equality of opportunity are key indicators of relationships and institutions conducive to peace.

Organizations and thinkers in the humanitarian sector have long seen resilience as a quality to be sought after by communities vulnerable to natural disasters: the storms, droughts, floods, and famines after which they need to bounce back. Resilience is central to the idea of disaster risk reduction. My colleague Janani Vivekananda, in her research in South Asia over the past couple of years, has looked at how households and communities respond to environmental stress linked to climate change. She finds that communities most able to cope with stress are resilient in terms of their economic and physical assets, but also their range of opportunities and choices, their access to social capital, their links to relatives elsewhere, and in terms of the quality of governance. Good governance is good for resilience.

The 1990s vogue for livelihood security among international development organizations also made a great deal out of the need for resilience. Economic assets, knowledge, access to services, good governance, gender equality, and social capital were all seen as elements of resilience to insecurity.

Meanwhile the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, a club of rich and poor nations and intergovernmental organizations, identifies reducing fragility and promoting resilience as key to the emergence of peaceful and developmental states and societies.

Nassim Nicolas Taleb (author of Anti-Fragility: Things That Gain From Disorder) explains that resilience is demonstrated best in decentralized and organic societies which can flex and respond locally to stress, and least in over-centralized and rigid societies where individual and local initiatives are discouraged. This is no doubt one reason why, as Andrew Nathan recently wrote in the Journal of Democracy, “the resilience of the authoritarian regime in China is nearing its limits.”

Fading Out of Favor?

So, resilience is not merely a useful metaphor, but one which expresses a powerful idea which we would do well to try and understand. If societies resilient to stress are less vulnerable to disaster and violent conflict, and if critical factors in their resilience include freedom and equality, then building resilience to stress must presumably be an ambition worthy of us all.

Even so, resilience seemed to go into hibernation among international development actors a few years ago, before coming back in to fashion again more recently. Now, according to an article published by IRIN, it may be fading out of fashion again. Resilience, as an idea, seems to lack resilience. Or perhaps in Darwinian terms its own resilience resides in its ability to hunker down or hibernate from time to time…

If resilience is such a useful analytical concept, and such a critical feature of human security, why is it going out of fashion again, just at a time when international discourse implies there ought to be a growing consensus on the need to promote resilience as an antidote to the fragility and brittleness which – it is widely agreed – affect too many countries and regions and blight the lives of those living there?

The IRIN article implied some development experts feel resilience is too plastic a concept to be relied on. Others were concerned that “resilience” in the wrong hands can be applied at too coarse a scale of analysis, and give rise to programming which is insensitive or blind to the vulnerability of some members of society, and which may thus unintentionally reinforce their vulnerability or marginalization. An example was given of a family’s coping strategy in which a daughter is married off at a young age.

Not Built to Order

These are valid points that require a response. To my mind they are a good reminder of the need for accuracy in describing analytical concepts, and the need to combine values with intellectual tools. If actual coping strategies have a negative impact on vulnerable people, then policy and program responses can seek ways to mitigate or prevent that outcome.

But if “resilience” is indeed headed for another period of hibernation, I suspect there is a deeper reason why. It is a very powerful conceptual approach and analytical tool, allowing a broad, comprehensive analysis of the extent to which households, communities, regions, countries, societies, or states are able or unable to deal with, survive, and bounce back from natural or man-made stress. For those with patience, the concept lends itself to participatory approaches to identify factors which increase or limit resilience (or, for those who prefer the glass half-empty approach, factors which increase or reduce fragility and brittleness). So far, so good.

The problem is, those seeking levers through which to make significant changes which can be measured in terms of the typical lifespan of development projects, are unlikely to find them easily in a resilience analysis. Resilience is – almost by definition – not something that can easily be “built,” and certainly not built to order.

The clue is in the word itself – resilience is something to be found in the nature of societies, hence a quality which grows organically. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains, it is the effect of finely woven networks. Resilience comes from education, and especially the kind of education which helps young people develop their curiosity and ability to adapt and continue to learn. It is to be found in networks of diverse reciprocal relationships between individuals and groups, on which they can draw to get ideas, help and resources in time of need. It is to be found in the freedom of men and women to make their own informed choices and to participate in politics. It is to be found in competent and accountable governance, in a free, functioning press, in fair systems of justice, and so on. And from the interwoven combination of all of the above.

Unfortunately, those in power in more fragile, less resilient societies often see these kinds of features as good in theory, but unwelcome in practice. Rather like St. Augustine who prayed for chastity – “but not yet, O Lord” – they’d often prefer to enjoy the spoils of power for now. Meanwhile those in international development organizations who support these kinds of features in principle, are unable to promote them because they simply do not lend themselves sufficiently to logical frameworks, short-term projects, and the like. Our development institutions and organizations may not be adequate to the task of promoting resilience in fragile societies. And so “resilience” may be destined to pass back into hibernation. That would be a shame. Because ironically, it describes the problem of underdevelopment, human insecurity, and inadequate governance too accurately to be useful.

Phil Vernon is the director of programs for International Alert.

Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization, IRIN, Johns Hopkins University Press, Journal of Democracy, Taleb (2012).

Photo Credit: Flooding in Bangkok, courtesy of Nicolas Asfouri/Asian Development Bank.

The original version of this article, by Eugenie Maiga, appeared on the Wilson Center’s Africa Up Close blog.

With the 2011 and 2012 food crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, calls for urgent action and sustainable solutions to food insecurity in Africa have intensified. While many factors, like rising commodity prices, have been contributing factors, land degradation stands out as a main catalyst. In the search for a solution, indigenous farming techniques may offer some quick wins.

The challenge of fixing the problem of degraded lands in famine-prone regions is a huge one. In many parts of Africa, land degradation has already reached crisis proportions, leading to famine, land erosion, erratic rainfall, recurrent drought (particularly in East and West Africa), food insecurity, and sometimes death of the most vulnerable individuals. In 2011 in the Horn of Africa, for example, an estimated 12 million people faced severe malnutrition in the region, while 90 percent of the livestock died. For a region whose populations engage primarily in farming and animal husbandry, this holds dire implications.

Given how devastating the food crisis continues to be, there is not a more timely moment than now to refocus ideas and resources on addressing land degradation. To this end, modern solutions exist, such as irrigation and re-fertilization, but governments and development partners need to deepen investment in these proven techniques and work with communities to make sure such schemes deliver sustainable results. The issue of the availability of sufficient financial resources to invest in these tactics, which are typically scarce for both farmers and governments, remains salient. As a result, it can take painfully long for such resources to reach the doorsteps of communities.

So what about solutions that already exist in vulnerable communities? The good news is there are time-tested indigenous techniques that can be implemented on already cultivated or eroded land in need of restoration for agricultural production. Here I want to focus on two such techniques: zaï and stone bunds. Although they are labor-intensive, indigenous techniques like these can be implemented as low-cost solutions to low yields and land degradation in Africa.

Continue reading on Africa Up Close.

Photo Credit: Stone bunds on degraded land in Ethiopia, courtesy of Trees for the Future.

1. Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation (ECSP Report 14), Geoff Dabelko

2. What Does It Take to Cooperate? Transboundary Water Management Around the World, Carolyn Lamere

3. Looking Back to Get Ahead: FEMA’s Strategic Foresight Initiative on Natural Disaster Preparedness, Alan M. Wright

4. National Intelligence Council Releases ‘Global Trends 2030’: Prominent Roles Predicted for Demographic and Environmental Trends, Schuyler Null, Katharine Diamond

5. Urban Health and Demography Trends: More Cities, More Problems? Carolyn Lamere

6. Band of Conflict: What Role Do Demographics, Climate Change, and Natural Resources Play in the Sahel? Graham Norwood, Schuyler Null

7. Avoiding the Resource Curse in East Africa’s Oil and Natural Gas Boom, Jill Shankleman

8. Spring Thaw: What Role Did Climate Change and Natural Resource Scarcity Play in the Arab Spring? Schuyler Null, Maria Prebble

9. Taming Hunger in Ethiopia: The Role of Population Dynamics, Laurie Mazur

10. Lessons From Kenya and Malawi on Combining Climate Change, Development, and Population Policy, Maria Prebble

The 2011-12 West African food crisis led to riots in Senegal and Burkina Faso as well as food insecurity for millions of rural and urban poor across the region. The crisis emerged from a number of factors, including instability in northern Mali, increases in global food prices, and low rainfall in the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 growing seasons. Many countries in the region are now reassessing and expanding domestic agricultural capabilities. At the top of the agenda for Senegal, a democratic republic on track to reach many Millennium Development Goals, is reducing youth unemployment and increasing domestic agricultural capacity.

Youthful Labor Force

Senegal has a population of about 13 million, and the UN estimates it may reach 29 million by 2050. Sixty-three percent of Senegalese are under the age of 24 and 20 percent fall between the ages of 15 and 24 – a similar demographic to that which captured the world’s attention in the Middle East and North Africa during the spring of 2011.

Despite a 3.3 percent annual urbanization rate, driven in part by young people flocking to cities to hawk fruit or electronics on the street, agriculture still occupies about 78 percent of Senegal’s labor force. Well-educated youth from the national university system – one of the strongest on the continent – enter the job market at a pace of about 100,000 graduates a year, according to USAID and the International Youth Foundation, while the formal private sector creates fewer than 30,000 new jobs annually. High government officials have referred to the rising tide of educated and uneducated youth alike as a “time-bomb,” to which the 2011 food and gas price riots was perhaps a preview.

It is in this context that Senegal is discussing initiatives that simultaneously diversify the rural economy, improve food security, and gainfully employ young people. Two of the most promising responses, we argue, are expanding farming in southern Senegal and fish farming in eastern Senegal.

A Casamance Agricultural Boom?

A low-level separatist conflict has simmered in southern Senegal, a region known as the Casamance, since 1983. Ethnically and linguistically distinct and geographically separated from the rest of the country by The Gambia, the Casamance has seen economic stagnation since independence.

Still, the region has incredible agricultural potential, with copious water resources and a semitropical climate. A recent boom in cashew exports to India – facilitated by English speaking Gambians – confirms this potential.

In September several American non-governmental organizations in conjunction with the Senegalese Ministry of Youth began discussions about investing in a widespread agricultural training program for Casamance youth. The discussions derived from a mandate put forth in the 2006 Senegalese action plan for youth employment. With a population of 1.8 million, it would be feasible to formally train a substantial number of the region’s young people in irrigation, agricultural product transformation, accounting, and English (to limit the influence of middle-men in the India-Casamance exchange).

The initiative is on track to open a center by 2014 and complete an academic and service program with its first cohort of youth by mid-2015. Annual Casamance service days, focused on engaging youth, are planned to follow.

The reasoning stands that by providing economic opportunity to Casamance youth and reasonably priced food to families, two of the major tenants of the conflict seen in the last two years would be diminished.

Fish Farming in the East

Eastern Senegal is characterized by a few things: quintessential sub-Saharan vistas, a surprising slew of large rivers, and high fish prices.

The national dish of Senegal is ceeb bu gen, literally translated as “rice and fish.” Fish accounts for about 60 percent of Senegalese’s protein intake, with artisanal fishing around the major port cities of Dakar and St. Louis accounting for the bulk of consumption. However, transportation to Senegal’s eastern regions is expensive due to high petroleum prices (a co-instigator, along with food prices, of the 2011 riots), which makes the price of fish quite high there.

As a national gastronomic staple and essential protein in an otherwise monotonous diet of grains, Dakar has a vested interest in ensuring eastern Senegal has better access to reasonably priced fish.

Currently a feasibility study is being conducted by the Centre de Recherche Ouest-Africain in conjunction with the national university, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, to explore optimal locations for fish farming hubs. Farming fish in or around rivers in the east poses an attractive alternative to maritime fishing, as it reduces dependence on a stretch of coast that is already aggressively over-fished by foreign industrial fleets and eliminates much of the petroleum needed in the supply chain at both the fishing and transportation stages. In turn, the magnitude and variability of fish prices would be diminished.

Fish farming is already successful elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, notably in Kenya where it has been linked to improved nutritional outcomes. It is done in Senegal as well, but minimally and in ad-hoc, small- and medium-scale instances that range in sophistication from cages in lakes to tilapia farming in cement-lined beds.

Besides the food security and petroleum reduction benefits, fish farming is a vocation that promises to engage young people across the spectrum of education because of the range of technicalities and scales at which it occurs – there is space for highly technical, industrial-level farming alongside fairly simple, smaller-scale efforts.

The feasibility study currently being conducted is intended to inform high-level decision making in aquaculture efforts already begun, including the proposal of a training center by an American non-governmental organization and several nationally sponsored pilot projects. A major goal of the study is to broaden the purpose of Senegalese fish farming to include improving domestic food security, rather than being solely export-oriented.

Double Bottom Line

Installing agricultural training centers and scaling-up fish farming promises to help Dakar address the twin hazards of disenfranchised youth, unable to find jobs with or without college degrees, and food insecurity. Both pose a threat to healthy democracy, as evidenced by the last West African food crisis.

To be sure, neither agricultural training in the Casamance nor fish farming in the east provide all-encompassing solutions, but they are locally relevant, scalable, and market-oriented responses to systemic issues that face Senegal and many other countries in the Global South. As decision-makers around the world examine similar liabilities, like dependence on petroleum imports and over-fished seas; vulnerabilities, like mass unemployment and food insecurity; and opportunities, like technically educated youth and agricultural- and aquaculture-friendly ecosystems, we hope they take these interventions into consideration.

While the West African food crisis showed the interconnected and formidable nature of Senegal’s dependencies and vulnerabilities, we hope a coming era of targeted and well-informed interventions will demonstrate Senegal’s potential for sustainable agricultural and demographic growth.

Mark Brennan is a post-bachelors Margaret Walsh Fellow from the Johns Hopkins University studying food security, and Kody Emmanuel is a National Security Education Program Boren Fellow from New York University studying youth. Both are studying at the Centre de Recherche Ouest-Africain in Dakar, Senegal, for the 2012-2013 academic year.

Sources: All Africa, Bloomberg, The Brookings Institution, CIA World Factbook, The Economist, Fall (2011), International Youth Foundation, IRIN, Nature, The Star, Thomson-Reuters Foundation, USAID, World Fish Center.

Photo Credit: Soumbedioune fish market in Dakar, courtesy of flickr user Jeff Attaway.

The disempowerment of women and girls is the single biggest driver of inequality today, said Helen Clark, administrator of the UN Development Program, during a plenary on the final day here at the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, where more than 4,500 people from 149 countries and 2,200 organizations gathered to discuss women’s health, equity, and international development.

But there has been significant progress in the last 20 years: “Millions of lives have been improved, and millions of lives have been saved” due to the sexual and reproductive health and rights framework established by the first International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994, said Crown Princess Mary of Denmark speaking during the morning plenary.

Kavita Ramdas, the Ford Foundation’s representative in New Delhi, called the global struggle for gender equality the largest and most consequential in history. Women and girls should ensure that in striving for equality, they approach the world differently – shape it to your vision, she urged the attendees.

The Drive to 2015

So where should  advocates for women focus their energies going forward? Clark hammered home the importance of speaking up to shape the new global development agenda that will replace the Millennium Developments Goals (MDGs) in 2015. The process has three tracks: a high-level UN working group appointed by the Secretary-General, which just launched a new report; an open UN working group that meets regularly in New York; and of course input from the member states, which will ultimately approve or reject any proposal.

“Thus, advocacy for sexual and reproductive health rights, gender equality, and girls’ and women’s empowerment will need to be maintained at a high level for close to two more years,” Clark said. “I hope that the energy emanating from this conference will help make that possible.”

Fortunately, said Clark paraphrasing Hillary Clinton, “investing in women is not only the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing to do.” As Karen Grépin and Jeni Klugman made clear in their report launched at Women Deliver, investing in girls and women can pay huge economic dividends for families and societies.

“We need to convince decision-makers, especially in this time of financial constraints, that it’s something that they should and can do,” said panelist Tarja Halonen, former president of Finland and co-chair of the UN’s high-level task force on the follow-up to the 1994 ICPD. “You don’t need to choose whether you do right or do smart, you can do both.”

Re-Thinking the Framework: A More Holistic, Innovative Agenda

“When the evidence is so clear, why is this agenda so far from being completed?” asked Princess Mary, pointing out that globally, the targets of MDG 5 – improve maternal health – are unlikely to be met. The answer lies in part, that “we’ve been using largely the same arguments and rhetoric since Cairo,” she said, “which begs the question of scalability…how can we effectively reach larger targets?”

“There has also been a strong call for a more transformational, universal, and holistic agenda which does not place challenges in silos but, rather, recognizes the links between them,” said Clark. For example, under the worst case climate change scenarios, human development will slow and perhaps even reverse in some parts of the world, she said, and the poor and marginalized – of which girls and women represent a disproportionate number – are the most vulnerable to these effects.

Similarly, “adolescents and youth are largely missing from the current MDGs,” said Princess Mary, but “we cannot afford to leave this resource untapped.” The freedom to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights allows young people to plan their lives, she said, as expressed in the Bali youth declaration.

Many of us feel like we came late to the MDGs and didn’t have a voice in their creation, said Theo Sowa, chief executive officer of the African Women’s Development Fund.“But the real danger will be if we drop the MDGs entirely and start over with a whole new framework,” she continued. “Let’s remember what works, and let’s build on that.”

“Let’s be bold,” Sowa urged, pointing out that when you talk to someone making $1 a day, they don’t want to make $2 a day – they want much more. “Let’s be imaginative, let’s be innovative, and let’s work together.”

Panelist Karl Hofmann, president and CEO of PSI, emphasized the need to work with those outside the normal audience for gender issues. In order to change people, he said, you have to understand where they’re coming from and connect with them.

“I think the vision needs to be ‘this can be done,’” Clark said. “You can help – you can be part of something that brings transformational change.”

“We live in important times,” said Halonen, and it’s incumbent on us to, as Ghandi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.”

Read the Global Health Initiative’s full coverage from Women Deliver, part of our Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health series with the Maternal Health Task Force and UNFPA.

Photo Credit: The Kuala Lumpur Convention Center, courtesy of Women Deliver.