Updated 11 Jan 00 * Copyright 1999-2000 by Andrew Homer.
Webmeister -StarHeart Web Designs
33% of those in developing countries don't have clean drinking water. - UNDP factoid
How technology can feed the poor
by Michael Fitzgerald, ZDNet News, October 14, 1999
Can you feed people through the Internet?
Maybe not directly, but in the wake of last weekend's NetAid concert, which aimed to fight world hunger, Hewlett-Packard
Co. (NYSE:HWP) is trying to make its e-services concept work to help feed the millions of Americans who go hungry
every day.
HP will team with America's Second Harvest, the largest operator of food banks, to put
together a Web site called ResourceLink to make it easier for companies to deliver surplus
food or donate, then do dynamic supply, demand and transport linking.
"There's a misconception in America about hunger," said Deborah Leff, president and
CEO of America's Second Harvest, which runs 189 food banks, with operations in every
state and Puerto Rico. "We think about a stock market over 10,000 and unprecedented
prosperity and that there can't be hunger. But we don't have enough food currently
available in our food banks to fulfill that need.
"Even though we're distributing one billion pounds of food and reaching 26 million
Americans, we still are turning people away," she said.
35M hungry Americans The issue is huge. Some 35 million Americans go hungry each day.
At the same time, 91 billion pounds of food wind up in landfills every year. ResourceLink
aims to change that.
ResourceLink is meant to complement -- and perhaps ultimately replace -- a paper, phone
and fax system currently used to get extra food distributed. Also participating are the
National Transportation Exchange, which is an online transportation trading exchange
based in Downer's Grove, Ill.; and Cyber Surplus, which has a matching-and-alert
technology for food manufacturers.
HP has a history of philanthropy, but the company acknowledges that the move makes
good business sense, too.
"This is a very clear, simple, easy way to demonstrate the power of our e-services vision
and the underlying technology that makes it happen," said Madge Whistler, general
manager for e-services at HP.
Year-long project Whistler said that HP personnel had been working on the site, which
went live Thursday, for nearly a year, and that the company had invested perhaps a couple
of million dollars in building the portal, a figure she termed surprisingly small.
"A lot of the pieces were already here. This is about forming the connections," she said.
"The pieces have been here and the humanitarian efforts have been here and this should make it much easier."
HP will continue to manage the portal on an ongoing basis. Within 60 days, it should
deploy its e-speak dynamic brokering technology to improve the efficiency of getting items delivered.
If it works, it could transform the way national nonprofits distribute goods.
Said Leff: "Nonprofits frequently do not realize what benefits technology can bring in terms
of meeting their vision."
Million pounds promised She said that ResourceLink already had a million pounds of food promised, but she wouldn't
predict how much more food the organization would be able to distribute using the new system.
"The fact that we have a million pounds already gives us a sense of its promise," she said
"But we think it's going to dramatically improve the amount of food available. This is going to transform
the way hungry people get food."
IMF Said Ill-Equipped
To Tackle Poverty
by Mark Egan, Sept 24, 1999
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund is ill-equipped to deal with world poverty
and should be cut down to size to end its stranglehold on poor nations, critics of the lending body said Friday.
The criticisms by charities and recipient countries came ahead of next week's annual meetings of the IMF and the
World Bank.
Aid agency Oxfam said the IMF has worsened poverty problems in Africa and that its "one-size-fits-all policies"
employed after the recent financial crisis in Asia plunged millions more into desperate poverty.
African finance ministers called for more input into their own development policies and said they would like to
see radical reform of the fund's much maligned low-interest loan program -- the Enhanced Structural Adjustment
Facility.
Critics have long maintained that the IMF uses ESAF to foist overly restrictive economic policies on poor countries
at the expense of social spending such as education and health. They also say ESAF puts the IMF in the business
of development economics, an area where it does not belong.
In preparatory meetings this week, the IMF went to great lengths to show a softer, more caring approach to economics,
with more focus on poverty and a revamp of ESAF. Managing Director Michel Camdessus defended ESAF earlier this
week saying, "it will be much more and better centered on social issues, better linked to debt reduction,
and, we believe, more efficient in promoting high-quality growth."
On the agenda of the annual meetings are exactly how to pay for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative
which will cut the debts of the world's poorest nations and is the cornerstone of the fund's poverty reduction
plans.
The $27.4 billion scheme was agreed by the Group of Seven industrial nation in Cologne, Germany earlier this year.
Critics have said the debts of the poorest nations should be wiped out -- which would double the cost of the scheme.
Oxfam's Kevin Watkins kicked off the charity's news conference in a church across the street from the IMF by holding
up a box of "IMF pills." He joked that the charity was planning to "Sell these pills to finance
HIPC debt relief which has taken a very long time."
The "pills" were labeled "IMF -- Bitter Economic Medicine for the Third World -- Do Not Expose to
Reality."
"We believe that the IMF has fundamentally failed," said Watkins." It has failed in its ESAF program
in low income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere, and it has failed in East Asia," Watkins said.
In a report called "The IMF: wrong diagnosis, wrong medicine", Oxfam suggested that the IMF be removed
from development economics completely.
Watkins said poor nations should develop their own economic and poverty reduction strategies in conjunction with
the World Bank and others and that the IMF should merely advise on the monetary alternatives available to implement
the plan.
Benin's Minister of Finance, Bio Tchane, tempered his criticism of the fund, noting that he was also an IMF governor.
Nevertheless, he said he would welcome reform of ESAF, given "intolerable" poverty in his country.
"The Africans have been asking for a total cancellation of debt for a long time," Tchane said, adding
that HIPC initiative was at least a start toward that goal.
"Of course we would hope that greater levels of funds be freed up (for debt relief,) of course we would hope
that ESAF could be really revamped so we would be able to truly attack poverty," he said.
"Our wish list is one thing, reality is another. We're not asking for money to reward laziness or to subsidize
laggardly activity of a country, we are asking for the minimum necessary to do what we have to do."
Tchane's sentiment was echoed by finance ministers from Chad and the Ivory Coast, who said the most important thing
was that governments be responsible for formulating their own strategies.
Cancel the Debt of the World's Poorest Nations
A billion people are trapped in poverty that they can do nothing about and
trapped under a mountain of debt they can never pay back. Rich nations take back $3 in debt repayments for every
$1 given in aid. Debt relief by the Year 2000 could save the lives of 21 million children.(Human Development Report UNDP 1997)
Celebrate the millennium by cancelling the unpayable debts of the world's poorest countries.
The rainforests are being destroyed to provide timber to earn foreign currency to pay back debts. Over 500,000
children die each year due to cutbacks to health services. 95% of debts owed to Britain are for loans used to promote
British trade, especially arms.
