MORINGA TREE documentary

By the time shortages and hunger reach "emergency" levels and warrant aid; families, communities, agricultural practices and lands will have suffered greatly.

Plant moringa trees to avoid this to happen

http://miracletrees.org/climatechange.html

MORINGA TREE documentary part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWXZ47P_2BY

MORINGA TREE documentary part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoTfyhK5WNQ

Fwd: Recent posts from the SuSanA Forum

From: SuSanA - Forum <forum@susana.org>
Date: 2 March 2014 08:03
Subject: Recent posts from the SuSanA Forum
To: conserveafricanews@gmail.com

Recent posts from the SuSanA Forum

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• Effectiveness of the Microcredits in Sanitation - by: F H Mughal
• Re: CLTS doesn't lead to sustainable safe sanitation & hygiene - Plan International study - by: F H Mughal
• Re: Help us Rename the SuSanA Forum ‘User of the Month’ ! - by: Marijn Zandee
• Re: CLTS doesn't lead to sustainable safe sanitation & hygiene - Plan International study - by: IFEMIDE
• Re: CLTS doesn't lead to sustainable safe sanitation & hygiene - Plan International study - by: muench

Effectiveness of the Microcredits in Sanitation - by: F H Mughal Posted: 01 Mar 2014 10:01 PM PST In the report: “State of the World 2013 – Is Sustainability is Still Possible?” I came across an interesting note by Doug Satre (Box 17-1). Tracing the history briefly on microfinance, Doug says that currently there are an estimated 500 million microsavings accounts around the world. Many providers aimed to make microfinance profitable, allowing it to attract investor capital and thus achieve greater scale. The microfinance industry has exploded to include over 1,000 institutions serving an estimated 85 million clients. While Doug’s discussion is in the context of sustainable agriculture, it is a fact there is significant growth of microfinance institutions. This is also valid for Pakistan. However, microfinance in sanitation sector has not picked up the pace, as yet, in the Sindh province of Pakistan, primarily due to low priority for sanitation. Here is the interesting part of Doug’s write-up. He says that after an initial burst of wild enthusiasm, there is now a growing debate about the effectiveness of these credit mechanisms as tool for ending poverty. This is especially true where the focus on scalability has caused lending institutions to neglect impoverished rural populations. The farmers who can take out loans sometimes borrow for costly agricultural inputs and then become trapped in a vicious cycle of crop failure and debt. Particularly troubling are the reports of up to 200,000 farmer suicides in India, where farmers have borrowed to buy expensive genetically modified organisms, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. Reading this makes me to think twice about microfinance in sanitation field, as those problems mentioned above, could put progress in sanitation in the rural areas in reverse gear. While taking microfinance system to a next higher level, where greed for more money crops in, may cause problems, I would appreciate, if forum members can share their experience of situations where microfinance in sanitation has brought in more problems and, whether the effectiveness of microfinance in sanitation sector is doubtful. F H Mughal

Re: CLTS doesn't lead to sustainable safe sanitation & hygiene - Plan International study - by: F H Mughal Posted: 01 Mar 2014 09:07 PM PST Dear Elisabeth, Yes, you got it right with your Bangladesh and Tanzania example. If CLTS is working properly in Bangladesh, it should continue to be used there. If other sanitation system is working in Tanzania smoothly, that system should continue to be used there. To use your words: one should not be too tempted to export the concept to Tanzania. Simple as that. Regards, F H Mughal

Re: Help us Rename the SuSanA Forum ‘User of the Month’ ! - by: Marijn Zandee Posted: 01 Mar 2014 08:48 PM PST For the Noun I would go for "contributor", and I think Florian's idea of "featured" sounds good as well. So my vote is for: Featured contributor, that somehow also sounds logical when there is an interview with that person. For the rest, I agree with Dorothee, that Elisabeth should be the next "featured contributor" or which title we may choose .

Re: CLTS doesn't lead to sustainable safe sanitation & hygiene - Plan International study - by: IFEMIDE Posted: 01 Mar 2014 08:45 PM PST This is quite interesting a discussion. Before I comment on the topic itself. I would like to make comment on Mutual comment on human right issue. I have gone through your references but I don't know how those assumptions affect human right. He sees subsidy has human right and since CLTS is discouraging hardware subsidy it is against human right. I called it assumptions because because they are paper work. Can you please look at other areas where CLTS addresses human right and weigh the two before making recommendations. Let me remind u of some. Human right recognises that individual have access to basic sanitation at critical times, has your subsidy able to provide this? Clts does! Communal latrine provided in most times have been abandoned due to lack of ownership and resonsibilty, key to latrines has been seized by viage head due to lack of cooperation, many rural people have d taboo of defecating on stranger's faeces so they dont use communal effort? The promotion of dignity and self respect is the hallmark of CLTS. It gives access to sanitation 24/7 being it raining or glooming (night). See you are an office man, you are very good in table work I am not disputing that, and that is why you propand theories but I am a field man, I work directly at community level and I can tell you that most of your theories does not work. CLTS is real and it is really changing behavious. Presently I am not talking of isolated cases, in the mean time, I am working on WSSSRP using LGA Wide Approach in two local government in Nigeria and the something is going on 11states in the federation. Time will not permit me to itemise how CLTS contribute to human right but I will share this experience with you. The issues of human right has been abused by corrupt politicians and thus they have brainwashed the community people that 'you people are poor, it is your right to be rich and have access to everything a rich man has access to, thus any intervention coming to your community is to enrich you claim your right. This has made the community people to relax and kept waiting for government to even buy shoe for them. This is a global issue in developing country. Immediately we enter a community for triggering exercise, the youths that gathering to collect their share. Recently some group of youths rose against us that what is the meaning of this map you are drawing, "we were told that government has given you money to share with us, build latrine and construct water and now you are drawing map, oh you want to steal how money we will not agree". At the end, they came up that we never knew what you came for was for our benefit we thought it is business as usual and they promise to take immediate action, youths even volunteer to assist the elderly. These are reality on field, CLTS has also settled communal conflict in one of our communities. Are you saying we should trash this approach that is positively changing people's life? I will use another page for my comment.

Re: CLTS doesn't lead to sustainable safe sanitation & hygiene - Plan International study - by: muench Posted: 01 Mar 2014 12:31 PM PST Dear Mughal, Thanks for providing those links. I don't quite understand your point though. Are you saying that if CTLS works in one country (let's say Bangladesh), one should not be too tempted to export the concept to another country (let's say Tanzania) because it is bound to not work so well there? Or what exactly where you trying to say? I would appreciate if you could elaborate a bit more on your point. Thanks, Elisabeth

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Prostates, Prunus and policy: A remarkable tree, a contested study, and tough choices ahead

Source: CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) - Sat, 1 Mar 2014 06:26 AM

Author: Bruno Vander Velde

Farmers inspect a planted Prunus africana tree in Cameroon. The potential for sustainable harvests of the tree’s bark is under debate. Photo courtesy Terry Sunderland/CIFOR.

 

Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The source of a popular medicine for treating prostate disorders has been caught in a muddle that extends from the hills of central Africa to the halls of Brussels.
At the center of this tale: tree bark.
Prunus africana — more widely known as African cherry — is a remarkable tree. Related to the common rose, this large tropical tree is also called African stinkwood, on account of its pungent bark. It is found only in high-conservation value montane forests in Africa and Madagascar.
Extracts from its bark are used as an herbal remedy for benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH), an enlargement of the prostate gland that affects many middle-aged men around the world. There now are at least 40 brand-name products using P. africana bark extract; in 1997, the over-the-counter retail value of the trade in P. africana herbal preparations was estimated to be US$220 million a year and may be even higher today. In the past 40 years, P. africana bark harvest has shifted from subsistence use to large-scale commercial use for this growing international trade.
Growing concerns about the sustainability of bark harvest led to P. africana being listed in Appendix-II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1995. Twelve years later, the European Union banned the importation of wild harvested bark from Cameroon, due to the overwhelming evidence that it was highly unsustainable. However, based on pressure from the private sector and from the Cameroon government, the ban was lifted in 2011, and quotas have been established for the major producing regions.
The rationale for the lifting of the ban was based primarily on “Management Plan for Prunus,” a report published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and commissioned by the Cameroonian government, with participation from several research organizations including the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). But senior scientists within CIFOR, as well as staff at a major donor organization, have since expressed concern that this plan did not take into account the complex ecology of the species, and that it overestimated the potential for bark supplies from cultivated sources.
Weak governance and vested interests in the profits from Prunus bark suggest that there is some way to go to ensure that the wild harvesting of the species can be considered sustainable, according to scientists with knowledge of the report. There also are concerns about commercial bark harvest due to the biology of this typically long-lived tree species. For example, where no exploitation takes place, the annual mortality of P. africana trees larger than 10cm in diameter at breast height (dbh, a typical measure of tree size) is very low (around 1 percent per year). Due to commercial bark harvest, death rates of P. africana trees larger than 10cm dbh in commercially harvested wild populations can be 50 to 100 times higher than the natural mortality rate in montane forests in Cameroon.
This case holds lessons about policy development, forest governance and trade, one researcher says.
“The challenge is to get the balance right between commercial demand for the bark, local people’s livelihoods and the resource itself,” said Terry Sunderland, a Principal Scientist at CIFOR. “And this is where there remains a major gap between policy and practice.”
Can wild harvest continue?
P. africana is threatened not just by unsustainable exploitation, but overall habitat loss due to forest clearing. In the central highlands of Ethiopia, for example, forest cover has been reduced from 35 percent to 40 percent cover at the turn of 19th century to less than 2.8 percent now. Forest loss in the Prunus africana-producing countries of Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon and Madagascar has also been high.
Is wild harvest the right path for the future? If experience from other commercially harvested medicinal bark holds any lessons for Prunus africana, it is doubtful. Unlike P. africana, most bark-producing tree species in international trade have made the transition from wild harvest to production from cultivated sources in plantations or agroforestry systems. Cameroonian farmers have been planting trees, but mortality rates are high and the majority of the planted stock is not sufficiently mature for commercial exploitation, Sunderland said.
Despite these factors, some international organizations still see the sustainable harvest of Prunus africana as a model that can be applied elsewhere. If this is to occur, it is essential that widely expressed concerns about inventory and management recommendations are placed on a firm evidential basis, CIFOR’s Sunderland said, to avoid a situation where disputed studies condone continued exploitation within globally significant forest conservation areas.
Research efforts are now under way to determine the way forward for the exploitation of Prunus africana, taking into account the biology of the species, harvesting quotas, governance and benefit-sharing arrangements and international law and policy.
The next stage, Sunderland says, is to determine what is actually happening on the ground with the current phase of bark harvesting and to try to gauge the impacts on both the species and the livelihoods of those involved. This information then will be fed directly into the policy processes that affect the controls on the harvesting of the species, not only in Cameroon but throughout its range.
This scenario, one expert says, illustrates how forestry can contribute to human well-being regardless of geographic location and beyond conventional forest concerns. “It is a good example of why we should acknowledge forestry across the sustainable development agenda, rather than confining it to isolated forest goals or targets,” said CIFOR Director General Peter Holmgren. In the case of Prunus africana, the trees provide considerable health values. “We don’t want to jeopardize these benefits from forests,” Holmgren said. “In this case, a comparatively rare product can generate profound health impacts, depending on how the forests are managed.”
“Situations like this show the need for a more holistic management approach that crosses borders and stakeholder groups — and which is bound together by policies based on the best available evidence.”
For more information about this topic, contact Terry Sunderland at t.sunderland@cgiar.org.

 http://www.trust.org/item/20140301062632-xna4g/