A Humanitarian's worst nightmare:Zimbabwe

NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.

In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.

And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. "If you get that, you have a meal," said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.

The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.

Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.

But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/africa/22zimbabwe.html?pagewanted=all

Recipe for Famine

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=specialreport&srnum=2

 

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The bag of green peas, stamped "USAID From the American People," took more than six months to reach Haylar Ayako.

For seven of his grandchildren, that was a lifetime.

They died as the peas journeyed from North Dakota to southern Ethiopia. During that time, the American growers, processors and transporters that profit from aid shipments were fighting off a proposal before Congress to speed deliveries by buying more from foreign producers near trouble spots. As a result of legal mandates to buy U.S. goods, the world's most generous food relief program wasn't fast or flexible enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia's drought-ridden South Omo region this year.

"I am so grieved that I lost those children," said Ayako, a Bena tribesman, speaking in his local Omotic language. "They died of the food shortage."

The dry peas Ayako took home almost eight weeks ago had traveled more than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) by rail, ship and truck, starting 15 miles south of the Canadian border with their harvest in August 2007. Stops included Lake Charles, Louisiana; Djibouti, the small African country whose capital on the Gulf of Aden serves as a port for food aid; and Nazareth, Ethiopia, two hours south of Addis Ababa, the capital. Warehouse stays punctuated each leg until the peas finally arrived in the village of Shala-Luka.

'Behind Closed Doors'

U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved, said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.

"No one can take the high moral ground against it, so they hide behind closed doors and kill it," he said. "It's all done behind the scenes."

Flunking the Intelligence Test

Flunking the Intelligence Test

The only real question about the Mumbai attack was just when it would come.

Sudip Mazumdar

NEWSWEEK

Published Nov 29, 2008 | Updated: 12:25  p.m. ET Nov 29, 2008

The hostage takers in Mumbai didn't need to wonder how large an armed rescue team the Indian government was sending, or when to anticipate its arrival. They had only to click on the nearest TV set, and there was the federal home minister, Shivraj Patil, obliviously telling viewers that 200 commandos had taken off on the two-hour flight from New Delhi at 2:30 a.m. Even after the aircraft had landed in Mumbai, the gunmen had plenty of time to get ready, as the troops were herded aboard rickety transport buses to be hauled from the city's northern edge to its southern tip. The commandos finally reached the scene about 6:30, roughly nine hours after the terrorists had launched their murderous attacks in the financial capital of India. The battle would drag on for the next two days while the body count reached 195 before the last gunman went down.

In Mumbai and throughout India, people reacted the way Americans did after September 11: they demanded to know why their government had failed to protect them. "Since November last year I have been drawing attention to the iceberg of jihadi terrorism," says B. Raman, a former top official at India's equivalent of the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). "The government of [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh reacted to the repeated warning signals of the moving iceberg in the same way as the Bush administration reacted to reports about the plans of the Al Qaeda for aviation terrorism in the U.S.—it just didn't react. It was in a denial mode."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/171366/output/print

Fixing Indian education

Private sector education entrepreneurs experiencing "schadenfreude" (German for joy in other people's misery) in the Manipal group's confrontation with the medical education regulator have much to learn from a poem written after World War II by a German pastor called Martin Niemöller about the Nazis. He wrote, "First they came for the Communists,/ and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist/ Then they came for the Jews,/ and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew/ Then they came for the Catholics,/ and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant/ Finally they came for me,/ but by that time there was no one left to speak up."

 

Irrational, corrupt and autocratic regimes must always be stood up to because there is no place to hide from them. Making peace (or an off-balance sheet settlement) only makes things worse because this beast feeds on itself. Medical education in India is regulated by an autonomous body called the Medical Council of India (MCI). MCI, like other vertical ayatollahs of education, has created a toll gate in milking education institutions with irrational capacity licensing norms around infrastructure sharing, faculty, curriculum, governance and much else. In true licence raj tradition, they have draconian inspection powers that create regulatory arbitrage with an answer looking for a question. MCI has arbitrarily halved the number of medical seats for Manipal and continues to make public noises about derecognition. Being singled out for selective enforcement means that an institution with students from 53 countries now mostly spends its energy (and money) expanding overseas because of regulatory cholesterol in India.

 

http://www.livemint.com/articles/2008/11/12225433/Fixing-education8217s-chole.html

India's Colleges Battle a Thicket of Red Tape

MUMBAI -- P.M. D'Mello, the principal of a pharmacy college here, wants to double student enrollment, fill the empty space in her building and help remedy the shortage of skilled workers that plagues India's economy.

The government won't let her.

Dean M.L. Shrikant, left, has been trying for years to expand the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai.

Under the labyrinthine regulations that govern technical colleges nationwide, the Principal K.M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy must provide 168 square feet of building space for each student. The rule is intended to ensure students have enough space to learn. But it effectively caps enrollment at 300, even though students are spread so thinly in the eight-story building that the top floor remains unused, its lecture halls padlocked.

The rules also stipulate the exact size for libraries and administrative offices, the ratio of professors to assistant professors and lecturers, quotas for student enrollment and the number of computer terminals, books and journals that must be on site.

"I am not free to run this school as I wish," Ms. D'Mello, 51 years old, says. "I am at the whim of unrealistic demands."

Loosening the Indian government's famously bureaucratic "License Raj" when it comes to governing businesses has helped spur an economic surge that has transformed the country and its standing in the world. In contrast, critics say India's educational system remains mired in red tape that stifles expansion and innovation.

The system falls far short of meeting the demand among young people for places in good colleges and universities. And it deprives India of the ranks of well-educated graduates it needs to supply crucial industries such as information technology and pharmaceuticals.

The mandate that pharmacy colleges must provide 168 square feet per student, for instance, meant that nearly 75% of the 25,000 people who took the pharmacy-college entrance exam this year in the state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, were turned away because there weren't enough seats, according to Ms. D'Mello.

The regulatory restrictions are especially severe in technical fields such as engineering, pharmacy, business administration and computer science. Almost every aspect of operations for about 8,500 private and public colleges and universities is overseen by the All India Council for Technical Education, a New Delhi-based government body empowered by law in 1987.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652421295221817.html