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The Forum > Article Comments > Rio+20 and a Green Economy > Comments

Rio+20 and a Green Economy : Comments

By Shenggen Fan, published 14/6/2012

Ensuring food and nutrition security for the poor.

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*How many handfuls of rice can you get for the dollar value of a condom. How many condoms would you need to ship, in order to establish a culture of safe sex practices that prevent unwanted pregnancies*

Pericles, you are clearly not so well informed about secret
womens business :)

It doesen't work that way. What you have is organisations like
Marie Stopes, who operate family planning clinics in the third
world. Women get to choose between IUDs, norplants, tubal litigation
and all the rest. Condoms are a kind of last desperate resort.
These clinics had great success, but sadly when Mr Bush came to
power, lobbying by Catholics ensured that funding to many of them
was shut off. So in places like Ethiopia, it was back to feeding
any unwanted babies to the jackals.

Given that the Catholic Church operates many hospitals where women
are denied any kind of family planning, the answer is to provide
funding for speciality clinics like Marie Stopes, which do. Given
our 4 billion $ aid budget, a couple of hundred million a year or
less then 5% of aid, could help an awful lot of women have a choice
about the size of their families. Double it at the results would
be even more dramatic.
Posted by Yabby, Wednesday, 20 June 2012 6:51:10 PM
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Cheryl, that article to which you refer me, by Malcolm King, erm.. you… was a shocker!

I duly commented on it at the time.

See :http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13640#236045 and my subsequent posts.

I’ll also note that 23 people commented on it, of which practically all were in strong disagreement with you and broadly in agreement with me.

What does that tell you Malcolm…er, Cheryl?

That maybe you are just a tad out of touch with reality?

You wrote:

<< The people of Australia elect the Government to make those decisions. Why the hell do you think that concerns the polity? >>

What?? This seems like two totally contradictory statement strung together!

Yes the people elect the government to make this sort of decision; things like international aid. So as I said to Pericles; even if the majority of voters don’t want any Australian money to be spent on international aid, the government should still make the right decision and maintain an aid program.

Of COURSE this sort of thing ‘concerns the polity’! It is fundamental stuff that our politicians should be dealing with. I disagree entirely that aid should be confined to donations administered through NGOs.

<< The anti-pop argument is now the equivalent of drunk dialling >>

Like I said to you last time (and time before that and the time before that…):

< Cheryl, the huge problem with your article [and posts] is your amazing anti-people and eco-fascist rhetoric. It destroys your argument [and credibility] right from the outset >
Posted by Ludwig, Wednesday, 20 June 2012 8:31:58 PM
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<< For example, take the native vegetation acts; exactly the kind of “integrating” of agriculture with sustainability approved by the weasel-words of the author. These laws have massively shut down – oops “worked better with” (by stopping) the production of food in Australia. Now many people in the world are going hungry. Okay, so how do the “scientists” reconcile these two things without countenancing policy causing human deaths? >>

Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Tuesday, 19 June 2012 7:47:07 PM.

Ah Jardine, you’ve hit a raw nerve. It may be an aside to the subject of this thread, but I cannot leave your comments unanswered.

What an almighty overstatement [read; WRONG statement] it is to say that these laws have massively shut down food production in Australia!

The sarcastic parts of your comment are in fact the truth:

These laws are aimed at integrating agriculture with a sustainable environment, with ecological values intact. Not at favouring the natural environment over agriculture, but rather; finding the right balance.

They’ve achieved this, to a fair extent. But agriculture has still prevailed. Environmental values, although much better considered than prior to this sort of legislation, have still taken a lower priority.

So what would you have had us do? Maximise food production at all costs to the environment and without any thought for the sustainability of this food production, in order to feed the world’s hungry, now, without considering the longer term?

Alright, you are only quoting this as an example. But it’s a very bad one. Take it from me, as a principle botanist and ecologist who worked in that field for more than a decade.
Posted by Ludwig, Wednesday, 20 June 2012 9:14:32 PM
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Yabby,

There have been some recent articles on the work of Melinda Gates and the Gates Foundation on supplying contraception to women in poor countries.

http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac;jsessionid=AA4BAB34368965D10E689DF7E9DBA662?page=1&sy=afr&kw=director&pb=none&dt=selectRange&dr=1month&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline&rc=150&rm=200&sp=nrm&clsPage=1&docID=SHD1205131V6713656CC

Melinda Gates had been meeting with groups of African women in connection with the foundation's vaccine program, and she asked them what else the Gates Foundation could do for them. Again and again, they wanted access to contraception, especially long-term injectable types. These injectables can have some nasty side effects, but their advantage is that a woman can slip off to have an injection every few months with her husband and in-laws none the wiser.

This created a problem for Mrs. Gates, as she is a Roman Catholic, but she and the foundation decided to get into supplying contraception in a big way. Needless to say, she has copped a lot of criticism from conservative elements in her church, including that she was subverting the Africans' culture and conjugal relationships (by helping women to opt out of compulsory childbearing).
Posted by Divergence, Thursday, 21 June 2012 9:47:34 AM
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<< The reason that I tend to write in such a black-and-white manner, Ludwig, is to provide contrast to the sheer wishy-washy, "wouldn't-it-be-great-if" nature of your suggestions. >>

That doesn’t wash, Pericles, because it just doesn’t fit reality. Things are simply not black and white and are all too often delicate and very difficult balancing acts somewhere in the grey, well removed from either end-point of possible approaches.

<< "Reallocating" surely involves sending condoms, and instructions on how to use them, in the place of food and medicine >>

Yes, to some extent.

<< These are real-life calculations, Ludwig. And real lives, too. >>

Yes, and any planned reallocation of aid would need to be very carefully analysed first.

So do you think it is the right thing for us to use our aid money to just feed the poor and to not make any attempt to implement population stabilisation and sustainability strategies? Surely not.

<< As I see it, you want some government intervention, but only that which is approved by the people, except for some of the time, when they should "show initiative" instead. >>

I think I’ve explained myself adequately. I’m sure you are smart enough to know exactly what I mean and are just filibustering here for the sake of an argument!

<< GDP per capita has increased steadily over the period. Therefore, the more people, the greater the growth in individual wealth. >>

Hold on… GDP is a pretty rotten measure of wealth, when it includes a whole lot of negative stuff and counts it as a positive, such as economic activity spurred by smoking-related illness or by a flood or cyclone, etc, etc.

And there are many things other than GDP that affect our quality of life, such as congestion, environmental health, increasing crime, ever-more restrictions on what we can lawfully do, etc, all of which are connected to population growth.
Posted by Ludwig, Thursday, 21 June 2012 1:45:35 PM
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