The power of working together: International day of Cooperatives, July 2nd 2016

By Alice Marks, @alicemarks0

Camaraderie in South Sudan – Credit UN Photo, Isaac Billy

The International Day of Cooperatives is the perfect time to celebrate the power of pulling together in the face of adversity. Working together can create social capital that enables individuals to achieve goals that they may not be able to achieve alone. Although ‘Social capital’ might sound like something intangible, it has a huge value. It is a measurement of connections between people – the glue that binds people and the reason to work towards common goals. In other words, it’s the value of ‘who you know’ rather than ‘what you know’ and evidence shows that communities with high social capital are more able to become economically and sustainably prosperous.

A group of people that is cohesive, value each other and stick together through hardship, is more able to work together to overcome challenges. The ability to do this is particularly important for communities with low incomes, limited education and few physical assets because it can create a social safety net that helps mitigate shocks or stresses. This is where cooperatives can come in and form a framework through which people can unite under shared needs and aspirations. Agricultural cooperatives work in a number of ways that can be beneficial to individuals and communities. A group of farmers make a more attractive customer than a single farmer because they spread risk amongst them, so facilitating access to finance, agricultural inputs and external markets.

Cooperatives support one another

For example, the Association pour la vision des Eleves de Nyonirima (AVEN) is a group of twelve young men and women from northern Rwanda. The AVEN members decided to form a cooperative after participating in Technoserve’s STRYDE training program, which equips school-leavers with training in business management skills, financial literacy and personal development, then links them to financial services.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s annual report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) aims to raise awareness about global hunger issues, to identify causes of chronic hunger and malnutrition and to record the progress being made towards reaching global hunger reduction targets.

This year’s report, Strengthening the Enabling Environment to Improve Food Security and Nutrition, provides not only current estimates of undernourishment around the world and progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets but also presents the experiences of seven countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malawi and Yemen) in developing an enabling environment for food security and nutrition.

As the report states, 805 million people, or 1 in 9, are estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2012–14. This is a reduction of over 100 million people over the last decade and 209 million fewer than in 1990-1992. In the last two decades, the prevalence of undernourishment has dropped from 18.7% to 11.3 % globally and from 23.4% to 13.5% in developing countries alone. Latter figures show progress towards the MDG of reducing the proportion of people suffering hunger by half is within reach but in terms of the WFS target of halving the number of people chronically hungry, we are still a long way off.

Progress towards these targets is uneven geographically with only Latin America and South Eastern Asia having reached the WFS target. The highest numbers of hungry people live in Asia while the highest proportions live in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that is seeing relatively low levels of progress in tackling hunger.

The report also explores a range of indicators of hunger that try to encompass the multiple components of food insecurity, namely:

Availability or the quantity, quality and diversity of food. Indicators include the average protein supply and the average supply of animal-source proteins.

Access or physical access and infrastructure. Indicators include railway and road density and economic access, represented by domestic food price index.

Stability or the exposure to food security risk and the incidence of shocks. Indicators include cereal dependency ratio, the area under irrigation, domestic food price volatility and fluctuations in domestic food supply.

Utilization or the ability to utilize food and outcomes of poor food utilization. Indicators include access to water and sanitation and wasting, stunting and underweight measures for children under five years old.

Results from this wide range of indicators show that food availability in still a problem in poorer regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. Access has improved considerably in many places largely where economic growth, rural infrastructure development, social protection programmes and poverty reduction have occurred. Utilisation is identified as the largest challenge for food security and levels of stunting, wasting and malnutrition in children remain high. Stability is also challenge particularly in regions that are heavily dependent on international food markets for domestic supplies and have limited natural resources with which to produce food such as the Middle East and North Africa. The report summarises that “the greatest food security challenges overall remain in sub-Saharan Africa, which has seen particularly slow progress in improving access to food, with sluggish income growth, high poverty rates and poor infrastructure, which hampers physical and distributional access”.

World Water Day 2014

By 2025 1.8 billion people will be living in regions of absolute water scarcity. Global water use grew at more than twice the rate of human population increase in the last century. Of the world’s population without access to clean and safe water, 37% live in sub-Saharan Africa. These are just some of the shocking statistics that highlight the urgent need to ensure access to clean and safe water for people across the world.

Tomorrow is World Water Day 2014, a day that aims to increase global recognition of the water resource scarcity challenges we face. It seems that more and more we are hearing reports of water scarcity leading to transboundary conflict, particularly in regions that may already be politically unstable. For example, in 2006, Israel bombed irrigation canals that supplied water from the Litani River to 10,000 acres of farmland in Lebanon. And these conflicts are not new, the fight over the water of the Jordan River was one of the causes of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria. In a 2012 report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council entitled, “Intelligence Community Assessment on Global Water Security,” North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia were identified as regions that are likely to face serious challenges managing water resources.

Water stresses have also led to cooperation though, and much more often than they have led to conflict. How this will change as water scarcity intensifies is unknown. Something like 3,600 agreements and treaties on water have been signed to date including the establishment of the 1957 Mekong River Commission between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, an ongoing partnership held up as being successful. The UNESCO–Green Cross International project entitled “From Potential Conflict to Cooperation Potential” (PCCP), launched in 2006 aims to help parties negotiate and prevent conflict over water.

In their 2006 International Herald Tribune article, “A global problem: How to avoid war over water“, Watkins and Berntell suggest a four-part solution based on:

1) Improving domestic water policies that support efficiency and conservation;

2) Negotiating with other nearby countries when planning such things as river alterations and shared groundwater usage;

3) Establishing intergovernmental river-basin institutions; and

4) Bringing together political leaders and technical experts to find solutions and promote cooperation.

Of course it isn’t just water scarcity that can pose a threat to national and international security. Conflict over energy is just as evident, if not more so in the media, and this year’s World Water Day has a theme of “Water and Energy”. The UN launched their World Water Development Report today. Key messages for this year’s report on water and energy include:

• Water requires energy and energy requires water
• Supplies of both are limited and demand is increasing
• Saving energy is saving water. Saving water is saving energy
• The “bottom billion” urgently needs access to both water and sanitation services, and electricity
• Improving water and energy efficiency is imperative as are coordinated, coherent and concerted policies

World water day celebrations are taking place in Tokyo today and tomorrow. Information resources on water and energy can be found here.