It was with enormous sorrow that ONE learned of Laurence’s passing. Aside from being a budding musician, a soccer player, and a bit of a comedian, we at ONE were proud to know Laurence for his role as philanthropist and deeply devoted activist for the world’s poor. Laurence came to the ONE community at age 14 – already in a fight for his own life – and brought with him an enormous passion for equality and a tireless energy in the fight against extreme poverty and disease.
In his short life, Laurence helped to raise thousands of dollars for the world’s poorest, and inspired everyone around him to look at the world through a global perspective. His tenacity for justice wowed us all, and his amazingly positive outlook will continue to inspire us for years to come. The world needs more Laurence Carolins.
ONE’s sister organization (RED) just released this great new video. It comes just days before Arsenal hosts Manchester United at Emirates Stadium which will turn (RED) as a display of both teams’ commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa.
Tune in this Sunday at 11 AM EST on Fox Soccer to watch the match. You can read more about the event here.
On Wednesday, ONE members in Winter Park, Florida gathered at Rollins College to talk about President Obama’s State of the Union Address. The conditions in Haiti seemed to be at the top of everyone’s minds and conversations.
But, as the President reflected on 2009 and spoke about U.S. goals for 2010, what stood out to this group is the need for greater bipartisanship in order to increase America’s global leadership on development issues. In 2010, we look forward to continuing to work across party lines here in Florida and around the country as we advocate for efforts that save lives, fight disease and strengthen our national security.
Please welcome Emily Alpert to the ONE Blog! Emily is ONE’s new Senior Policy Manager for Agriculture, and will no doubt have many more great contributions in the coming days and weeks. -Chris
If you haven’t yet read the second annual letter from Bill Gates, please do. I just read it and I was so glad to see how important investing in agriculture is to the Gates Foundation. Not only are more than 1 billion people suffering from hunger as I write, but the large majority – about 75 percent – of poor people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and their own food security. So when they can’t harvest their crops, can’t get them to market or can’t get a decent price for what they produce, their well-being is severely jeopardized. To top things off, development aid for agriculture has been neglected for the last few decades. That’s why the Gate’s Foundation’s work on agriculture is so important. Along with others, they are putting agriculture back on the map of the development agenda.
How much you invest in agriculture is also as important in how you invest in agriculture. So when Bill Gates talks about funding projects based on the “specific growing conditions in developing countries” and “the crops that are grown by poor farmers,” I know the Gates Foundation approach is going in the right direction. First of all, most of the research and development in agriculture over the years has been devoted mostly to rich country crops and environments. And sometimes there are payoffs from that work for poor countries too, but not always, and definitely not enough. So getting these investments right by listening and learning to poor farmers in developing countries and investing in ways that meet their needs is critical for helping farmers grow their way out of poverty.
Sustainable agriculture production is also an issue that has been on my mind lately. It’s no secret that some of key ingredients for growing food – healthy soils and fresh water – are in high demand and short supply. So with scarce resources, continuously threatened by climate change, it’s even more important that we come up with new and innovative ways to farm sustainably. This is yet another way in which the Gates Foundation is making headway by investing in better seeds, training for farmers on how to manage their land and access to inputs, markets and information.
As ONE members you can add to this momentum by supporting ONE’s efforts to encourage the U.S. Government to invest more and in better ways to developing country agriculture, and to push donor governments to fulfill the commitments to agriculture that they made at the G8 meetings in L’Aquila last year.
You can check out our agriculture issue page here to learn more.
The World Economic Forum currently ongoing in Davos today held a panel with Vikram Akula, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Helen Clark, Morgan Tsvangirai, and Michel Kazatchkine. The discussion focused on the Millennium Development Goals. I haven’t had a chance to watch the panel in its entirety, but wanted to make it available as soon as the video went up:
The blog Marginal Revolution has a really great round-up of some charts illustrating who’s donating aid to Haiti, how much, and how much per capita. One such graph suggests that the largest donor to Haiti per capita GDP is Ghana– a statistic that may surprise some people.
You can read Marginal Revolution’s full post here.
On the Global Food for Thought blog which we spotlighted a couple weeks ago, Roger Thurow has a great piece looking at the role of Kevin Farrell, the special envoy for hunger in the Irish government. In doing so, Thurow reaches the conclusion that more developed countries should have a such a system.
He singles out the US:
In the U.S., a hunger envoy – a hunger czar! – would train a spotlight on the Obama administration’s nascent global food security initiative, which aims to reduce hunger and boost food production in the poorest nations through increased agriculture development. Such a position was proposed in the Roadmap to End Global Hunger unveiled by a coalition of humanitarian aid groups and U.S. politicians one year ago. It called on the administration to create a White House office on global hunger and appoint a Hunger Coordinator.
So far, the National Security Council has been leading the interagency hunger effort involving, among others, the State, Agriculture, Treasury and Defense Departments. A hunger czar would push to keep the effort a top priority, and ensure that the intention of the President to “make farms flourish…to nourish starved bodies”, as he pledged in his inaugural address, doesn’t get diminished in the daily crush of issues clamoring for political attention.
And, as Farrell has done, a hunger czar would carry the campaign beyond the halls of government to humanitarian agencies, religious gatherings, philanthropic foundations, universities and corporations. The goal: create the grassroots support needed to drive the work in Washington.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
Recently, the ONE Blog had the great honor of hosting 
