INDIA, CHINA FIGHT POVERTY, POPULATION GROWTH 

Date: Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Source: IPS - Inter Press Service
Author: Thalif Deen

The world's two most populous nations - India and China - are placing a high priority on reproductive health and poverty alleviation as part of their efforts to meet the U.N.'s much-touted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and its 2015 deadline.

Since 1978, China has accelerated development and reduced its population living in "absolute poverty" from 250 million to 15 million, according to a new report submitted by the Chinese government to the annual ministerial meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) through Jul. 31.

"We firmly believe that China will achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) fully and on schedule, thereby making an important contribution to the achievement of the Goals at the global level," the report said.

China also boasts it is "the earliest among developing countries to meet the MDGs of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger".

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

China is one of the few developing nations to publicly declare its commitment to meet all eight MDGs by 2015, while most countries have declared their inability to meet the deadline, a situation made worse by the global financial crisis.

Meanwhile, in a report titled "India: Urban Poverty Report 2009", the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation points out that over 80 million poor people live in cities and towns of India.

India has shared the growth pattern of some of the fastest growing regions in Asia, according to the study. The country has witnessed around 8.0 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in the last couple of years.

But India's urban population is increasing at a faster rate than its total population of 1.16 billion.

Overall, India's population growth has been steadily decreasing and continues to do so, says Professor Gita Sen of the Centre for Public Policy at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Management. She said that National Family Health Surveys point to important reductions in the number of children that women want to have.

"The major weakness of the Indian programme is its continuing dependence on female sterilisation as the overwhelmingly dominant family planning method," Sen told IPS.

There are others, including a variety of temporary methods, that have been made more available over the years but they still constitute a very small share of the total.

This denies to women, including the large numbers of younger married women and couples who may wish to space their children better, the means to do so, she added.

In its report to the ECOSOC meeting, China says the energies of the Chinese people are completely dedicated to a single goal: the eradication of poverty, and the realisation of a strong, prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious modernisation of that foundation.

"The success of the anti-poverty drive has drawn the world's attention: within a relatively short time, China has met the needs of its 1.3 billion people for food and clothing," it said.

China also points out that from 1978 to 2008, its GDP grew at a rate of 9.8 percent per annum, while its global rank rose from number 10 in 1978 to number three.

Dr. Yiyi Lu, a research fellow at the China Policy Institute in Nottingham University, told IPS: "It is this sustained high rate of growth that has lifted millions out of poverty in China."

Asked for the exact reasons for China's economic success, she said: "I don't have an answer, because it is attributable to multiple factors rather than any single factor."

In its report, China admits that to fully achieve the MDGs, it must still deal with imbalances in socioeconomic development and gaps in the equality of health between regions and between urban and rural areas.

Asked if China's success had been facilitated by an authoritarian regime, Dr Lu said: "I don't think there is more political repression now in China than before. I don't think one can say economic development has resulted in more political repression, but it has not resulted in democratisation either."

Has authoritarian rule made economic development possible?

"I don't know, but it certainly hasn't made it impossible. But this doesn't mean authoritarian rule will also deliver economic miracles in other countries," said Dr Lu, who is also an associate fellow of the Asia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain.

She said "you can easily have authoritarian rule without economic development and the reduction of poverty".

Asked if the current financial crisis is having a negative impact on population policies in India, Sen told IPS that in recent years, India has significantly raised the reproductive health focus through the large National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) which prioritises reduction in maternal mortality.

This is done primarily through increased institutional deliveries and financial support to women and village health workers, as well as improved availability of emergency transport, and better infrastructure.

"There is no apparent negative impact on funding because of the financial crisis, at least so far," Sen added.

In fact, the recently announced government budget significantly increases plans for social sector expenditures, she added.

Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), stresses the overriding significance of reproductive health in the current economic environment.

"I do not think that any of the crises we are facing today - whether it is the food crisis, the water crisis, the financial crisis, or the crisis of climate change - can be managed unless greater attention is paid to population issues," she said.

Greetings from Bangkok.  A second article follows this one.

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article in the Wall Street Journal.  See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124787011359360457.html to leave a comment.  The author is the managing director of the Brookings Institution:

"...If developed nations are held responsible for emissions that they historically contributed, oblivious to their impact on climate change, why shouldn't developing nations take responsibility for producing generations of people who will generate emissions into the future? Put another way, it is unclear whether we should use the population figures of 1950, 2000 or 2050 in judging per capita contributions to climate change."

India and Climate Change

Yes, the U.S. emits more per capita. But it's also been more responsible about population growth.

JULY 20, 2009

By WILLIAM ANTHOLIS

As the world community gears up for another round of climate-change talks -- and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives in Delhi on Sunday for meetings with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh -- a central issue will be how to bring developing countries into a climate-change pact.

Developing countries such as India do not want to pledge to reduce their emissions until industrial countries have first demonstrated not just pledges but actual emissions cuts. Industrial countries, for their part, generally recognize that they should act first. But they want some assurance that their reductions won't be meaningless in the face of rapidly rising emissions in China and India.

India's Mr. Singh has become the spokesperson for "equity" in emissions reductions. Mr. Singh has acknowledged that climate change is a problem and has said that India will do its part. Like all developing country leaders, however, he points to the fact that industrial countries have contributed a century's worth of emissions to the global atmosphere while developing countries have only started to use, in his phrase, their "share of the global atmosphere." He has pledged that India will never exceed the per capita emissions of industrialized nations. He also said that India will only consider signing on to a climate pact when a common global per capita emissions target has been established.

When it comes to saving the planet, there are strong reasons to consider per capita emissions as part of a burden sharing formula. However, we should be cautious about making this the magic bullet that resolves the dispute between industrial and developing countries. Indeed, the Indians themselves should be cautious. It undermines a core part of their argument.

At some level, Mr. Singh is right. India has not contributed historically to the problem. U.S. per capita emissions are probably 12 times those of India's. If the U.S. meets the ambitious goal of cutting emissions 83% by 2050 -- as stipulated in the recent energy bill passed by the House of Representatives -- U.S per capita emissions would drop from 20 tons to three or four tons per person annually.

That per capita standard would still be double India's current level of two tons per person. Because emissions linger in the atmosphere for 50 years, scientists tell us that all countries must cut their emissions over the next four decades to protect the planet. So if the U.S., the EU, and Japan slash emissions, but China, India and other developing countries continue to emit greenhouse gases unabated, by 2050 the overall global emissions might decrease, but not by enough.

But that's not the only reason to be concerned about the per capita standard.

First, a per capita emissions standard does not consider population growth. It only looks at the quantity of greenhouse gases each person emits. That standard accepts, in essence, that unmitigated population growth is fine. This undermines a careful consensus developed over a decade ago, with India's support, at the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development. After a century of inaction, the world community agreed that population growth needed to be managed. Even under that mandate, China and India together may add almost a billion more people to the world's population by 2050.

Second, countries like India are using a double standard when they talk about history. In essence, developing nations are arguing that the U.S., the EU and Japan need to act first on climate change. They need to make up for their history of using fossil fuels, even though these nations did not know at the time that they were threatening the climate.

Yet there is also a population-growth history that can't be ignored. During at least the last half of the 20th century, population growth exploded in developing nations. From 1950 to 2000, world population grew 2.5 billion to six billion -- an increase of about 140%. Over that period, India went from 350 million people to over a billion -- up 182%, outpacing even China's increase. By comparison, the U.S. grew from 157 million to 287 million -- a rate of increase that is well below the world average.

If developed nations are held responsible for emissions that they historically contributed, oblivious to their impact on climate change, why shouldn't developing nations take responsibility for producing generations of people who will generate emissions into the future? Put another way, it is unclear whether we should use the population figures of 1950, 2000 or 2050 in judging per capita contributions to climate change.

Fighting climate change is a complex and dynamic undertaking. As with most metrics, the per capita standard is too simple. It doesn't fully acknowledge the emissions of previous and future generations. When Mrs. Clinton meets with Mr. Singh, she should make it clear that a static per capita metric alone cannot solve the problem of climate change.

From The Hindu.  See http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/08/09/stories/2009080950140400.htm

It’s time to act

PROF. S. C. GULATI

Reinvigorating family planning is critical to the success of population stabilisation efforts

India’s population has grown from 345 million in 1951 to around 1162 million by May 2009 and is still growing by around 16 to 17 million every year. By all accounts, population growth in India has been rapid and such a massive base and excessive growth have important implications for socio-economic development and quality of life. India’s problem of excessive population growth is reflected in widespread hunger, poverty, unemployment, lack of physical and health infrastructure, increasing scarcity of basic resources like food, water and space in several parts of India despite concerted developmental efforts since independence.

Glaring facts

A recent “Global Economic Prospects” report projects that one-fourth of India’s population would be below extreme poverty line, less than $1.25 a day, by 2015. Our official estimates provided by the National Sample Survey in 61st Round based on the Uniform Recall Period methodology yields a poverty ratio of 27.5 per cent for the country as a whole in 2004-05. Despite the declining trend in poverty ratio as per official statistics we still find that around 25 per cent of India’s population (around 29 crore people) still don’t have enough income or resources to afford even two square meals a day. Thus, the massive population base and its rapid growth still continue to be a major challenge to socio-economic progress and sustainable development.

We ought to have a national debate and political consensus and commitment to invigorate family planning efforts, which possibly has been put on the back burner as a population control measure. Possibly, the lack of political commitment to family planning efforts was a result of some excesses during the emergency period i.e. 1975-77; thus the official family planning programme was, dangerously, neglected afterwards. Possibly we have thrown out the baby along with the bath water. Still in India the unmet need for contraception — parents not desirous of having any more children or another child over coming two years, but not using any contraception methods — turned out to be 13 per cent in 2005. Thus, the unmet need for contraception is still substantial.

Coming to India’s total fertility rate of 2.7, as per NFHS-2005, we find the unwanted fertility is around 0.8. Thus, still 40 percent of current fertility or 80 out of 270 children born are unwanted. Simply by accounting the unwanted component we can bring India’s fertility to below replacement level, implying less than two children per couple, which ultimately results into population stabilisation. Obviously, unwanted fertility can primarily be eliminated by meeting the unmet need for family planning. Whereas, reduction in wanted fertility requires investments in human beings, especially in areas of education, child care and public health and thus improvements in quality of life.

Given the wide diversity in population and health transition as well as levels of social and economic development and cultural milieu across the states, strategic options for population stabilisation in India varying from state to state are suggested in India: The State of Population 2007. There is no universal prescription. Regional prescriptions are based on categorization of the constituent states and union territories of India into three categories based on current levels of fertility. The first category comprises five Hindi heartland states and five north-eastern states where fertility levels are well above the replacement level. In these states even the wanted fertility is high – well above the replacement level — and unwanted fertility is also substantial. These states are expected to account for 48 percent of the increase in India’s population between 2001 and 2026.

Collective consensus

The second category states — Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Tripura, Assam, West Bengal, Orissa, Gujarat and Maharashtra — are about the reach the two-child goal. Here the wanted fertility is already below the replacement level, two child norms, but the unwanted component is still substantial resulting into higher than replacement level fertility. In these states concerted efforts are needed to provide affordable quality contraception services with informed choice to account for the unwanted component of fertility.

Finally, in the third category — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Sikkim — the fertility is already below the replacement level. In these states, population will still continue to increase because of the demographic momentum built into the age structure of the populations. This category of states would contribute around 15 percent of increase in the country’s population during 2001-26.

However, to minimise the impact of demographic momentum we need to increase the mean age of child bearing in these states. Mean age of child bearing can increase firstly because of increase in age at marriage or age at first birth and thereafter usage of spacing methods to increase birth interval between first and next birth. Surprisingly, teenage pregnancies and motherhood is still higher in low-fertility states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka compared to even high fertility states like U.P. and M.P. Obviously, physiological immaturity during teenage pregnancies and motherhood results into lot of health problems and also reduces educational and thus employment opportunities for women. Possibly, strict enforcement of the Child Marriage Restraint Act and advocacy of widespread utilization of spacing methods would facilitate minimizing the impact of demographic momentum and also reduce teenage pregnancies and motherhood which have serious social, economic, emotional and health implications.

Reinvigorating family planning is critical to the success of population stabilisation efforts in all the states, in whichever phases of socioeconomic and demographic transition it is. It is, however, important to note that the family planning programme must be adaptive to changing compositional needs of family planning methods in different states in different stages of demographic transition.

The writer is with the Population Research Centre, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi.

Thanks to Marianne Ward for this article.  See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/12/india-water-supply-bhopal.  Two related articles follow.

India prays for rain as water wars break out

The monsoon is late, the wells are running dry and in the teeming city of Bhopal, water supply is now a deadly issue. Gethin Chamberlain reports. The Observer, Sunday 12 July 2009

It was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal's Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water.

In Bhopal, and across much of northern India, a late monsoon and the driest June for 83 years are exacerbating the effects of a widespread drought and setting neighbour against neighbour in a desperate fight for survival.

India's vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low.

Across the country, from Gujarat to Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, the state that claims to be "the rice bowl of India", special prayers have been held for more rain after cumulative monsoon season figures fell 43% below average.

On Friday, India's agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, said the country was facing a drought-like situation that was a "matter for concern", with serious problems developing in states such as Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

In Bhopal, which bills itself as the City of Lakes, patience is already at breaking point. The largest lake, the 1,000-year-old, man-made Upper Lake, had reduced in size from 38 sq km to 5 sq km by the start of last week.

The population of 1.8 million has been rationed to 30 minutes of water supply every other day since October. That became one day in three as the monsoon failed to materialise. In nearby Indore the ration is half an hour's supply every seven days.

The UN has warned for many years that water shortages will become one of the most pressing problems on the planet over the coming decades, with one report estimating that four billion people will be affected by 2050. What is happening in India, which has too many people in places where there is not enough water, is a foretaste of what is to come.

In Bhopal, where 100,000 people rely solely on the water tankers that shuttle across the city, fights break out regularly. In the Pushpa Nagar slum, the arrival of the first tanker for two days prompted a frantic scramble, with men jostling women and children in their determination to get to the precious liquid first.

Young men scrambled on to the back of the tanker, jamming green plastic pipes through the hole on the top, passing them down to their wives or mothers waiting on the ground to siphon the water off into whatever they had managed to find: old cooking oil containers were popular, but even paint pots were pressed into service. A few children crawled beneath the tanker in the hope of catching the spillage.

In the Durga Dham slum, where the tanker stops about 100 metres away from a giant water tower built to provide a supply for a more upmarket area nearby, Chand Miya, the local committee chairman, watched a similar scene. There was not enough water to go around, he said. "In the last six years it has been raining much less. The population has increased, but the water supply is the same."

Every family needed 100 litres a day for drinking, cooking and washing, he said, and people had no idea when the tanker would come again.

Not everyone gets a tanker delivery. The city has 380 registered slums, but there are numerous other shanties where people have to find their own methods. Some, like the Malviyas, tap into the main supply. Others cluster around the ventilation valves for the main pipelines that stick up out of the ground from place to place, trying to catch the small amounts of water leaking out. In the Balveer Nagar slum, 250 families have no supply at all. The women get up in the middle of the night to walk 2km to the nearest pumping station, where someone has removed a couple of bricks from the base to allow a steady flow of water to pour out.

A few communities have received help from non-governmental organisations. In the Arjun Nagar slum, a borewell has been drilled down 115 metres by Water Aid to provide water for 100 families, each paying 40 rupees (50p) a month.

Until the well was drilled, Shaheen Anjum, a mother of four, got up at 2.30am each day to fetch water, wheeling a bike with five or six containers strapped to it to the nearest public pipe in the hope of beating the queues. "Often we would get there and the water would not be running," she said. "It was so tiring: the children were suffering and getting ill because they had to come too. The tankers used to come, but there were so many fights that the driver used to run away."

Water Aid is working in 17 of the city's 380 registered slums, providing water and sanitation. "It's not just Bhopal. This has been a drought year for many districts," said Suresh Chandra Jaiswal, the technical officer. "Now it has reached a critical stage. We just don't know any more how long the water will last."

Fifty years ago, Bhopal had a population of 100,000; today it is 1.8 million and rising. In a good year the city might get more than a metre of rain between July and September, but last year the figure was only 700mm.

Neighbours of the Malviyas cluster around the hole in the street outside the house where Jeevan Malviya lived with his wife, Gyarasi, their son, Raju, 18, and their four other children. It was the evening of 13 May, said Sunita Bai, a female relative: a local man, Dinu, thought that the family had blocked the pipe to stop the water flowing further down the hill.

He and a group of friends slapped Gyarasi, 35; Raju tried to stop him. Someone produced a sword and, a few minutes later, the Malviyas lay dying. "We were too afraid to do anything," said a woman who gave her name as Shanno. "Dinu didn't want them to take any water. He wanted it for himself."

Thanks to Kathleene Parker for this article from the Christian Science Monitor.  See http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0825/p06s09-wosc.html.  Also see the story below about India’s vanishing ground water.

India's farmers struggle without crucial monsoon rains

       Shivrani Sharma, who farms a little over an acre in Bamheta, a village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh says she has not been able to plant any crops this year. “It’s the worst monsoon in a long time”, she says. "We are having a very bad time”.

       Rajiv Singh Yadav, also from Bamheta, says he is counting on his winter wheat crop – which he will sow in November – to make up some of his summer losses. In the meantime, he says he is struggling to feed his herd of 35 buffalo.

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Average rainfall dropped 29 percent from June to mid-August – prime planting season for India's 234 million farmers. It's the worst monsoon season in years –though an increasingly diverse economy will ease the overall impact.

from the August 25, 2009 edition

Bamheta, India - The only thing growing in Jayabati's parched field this summer is a mound of cow-dung bricks that, once dried and hardened, will be used as cooking fuel.

"No rain, no planting," says the weary-looking woman, who goes by one name, as she stands on the tiny plot of land she farms with her husband in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Like most of India's farmers, Jayabati has no access to irrigation systems. She depends entirely on the monsoon rains that fall between June and September to water her staple sorghum crop.

This summer, the rains have stayed away.

India is experiencing its worst monsoon in years. Though a bad monsoon is less damaging to an economy that is diversifies away from agriculture, it is making life tough for India's 234 million farmers.

Driest June in 80 years

Summer showers account for 80 percent of the country's annual rainfall but from June to mid-August – India's most crucial planting period – they were 29 percent lower than average, says India's meteorological department. In Uttar Pradesh, they were down more than 60 percent. The month of June was the most arid in India in more than 80 years.

Rice, the biggest crop sown during the monsoon, has been worst hit, along with sugar cane and oilseeds. Though rainfall has improved in some areas in recent weeks, it has come too late for many crops, which require an even sprinkling of rain throughout the sweltering summer. Some fear that heavy showers now could damage already reduced crops of sugar cane.

"It's too late to plant most crops now," says M.S. Swaminathan, an agriculture scientist who is described as the father of India's green revolution, a movement in the 1970s that brought high-yielding seeds and an increased use of fertilizers and pesticides to India. He describes this year's monsoon as "a calamity."

Fresh rainfall may prove more helpful to winter-sown crops such as wheat and rapeseed, which depend heavily on water from reservoirs. Indeed, the government is encouraging farmers to plant more winter crops to mitigate the effects of an awful monsoon.

Economists look to the skies

The country's economy remains closely tied to its fickle summer rains, even though its technology boom makes more headlines.

Agriculture accounts for 18 percent of the country's total gross domestic product. But more significantly, it employs more than half the 1.1 billion-plus population. And many rural Indians seem certain to curb their spending on goods and services this year.

A bad monsoon can also reduce power production: Hydropower provides a quarter of India's electricity. In 2002, when monsoon rains were down 19 percent, GDP growth slowed from 5.8 percent to 3.8 percent.

Still, the Indian economy is becoming less dependent on agriculture. In 1990, the sector contributed 30 percent of GDP. This year, a more diversified economy will be especially helpful in offsetting the effects of a dismal summer: Industrial output in June surged to its highest rate in 16 months, rising nearly 8 percent over last year.

"Agriculture is a much smaller part of the economy now, and India appears to be in a recovery phase," says Surjit Bhalla, an economist.

Still, like many economists, he has shaved a percentage point off growth estimates for the year, to between 6 and 7 percent, due to the impact of poor weather. The government, meanwhile, has said it has enough food stockpiled from two years of bumper harvests to prevent high inflation.

Few alternatives for farmers

For farmers, though, the effects of a poor monsoon are as disastrous as they ever were. Most are smallholders, who fall easily into debt, and a dry summer can mean ruination.

Last week, the government raised the minimum purchase price of rice and said it will increase food subsidies to rural areas and allow farmers to delay paying bank loans. It is also considering pumping more cash into a rural job initiative that guarantees 100 days of employment to every poor rural household.

Last year, the government spent nearly 700 billion rupees ($14.4 billion) on waiving farms loans for impoverished farmers. It has said that this year includes no such plan.

But whatever measures the government takes, Indian farmers are suffering this summer.

Mr. Swaminathan says one of the first signs of "extreme distress" among farmers – an increase in cattle sales – is visible throughout the country.

In Uttar Pradesh, when asked about the weather, farmers talk first about their cattle.

Shivrani Sharma, who farms just over an acre of land with her extended family, says her herd of 10 buffaloes is becoming "diseased," a euphemism for starving.

"We have no food or water to give them," she says, adding that she will soon have to consider selling livestock "before they die."

The farming population has also seen an increase in suicides. Up to 15,000 farmers have committed suicide over the past decade after falling behind in payments to money lenders, according to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

For this article, see http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/08/13/indias-vanishing-groundwater/

India’s vanishing groundwater

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | 08.13.09

Two new studies suggest that India’s aquifers are undergoing rapid depletion due, almost entirely, to water withdrawals for agricultural use. Satellite measurements indicate that the water table is sinking faster than anyone had previously estimated, with potentially dire implications for the 600 million people living regionally — nearly one-tenth of humanity — who rely on it.

One study appears in the journal Nature, the other in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

From the Nature study press release:

Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade – and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame. More than 109 cubic kilometers (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared from the region’s aquifers between 2002 and 2008 – double the capacity of India’s largest surface-water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, and triple that of Lake Mead, the largest manmade reservoir in the U.S.

Surface water percolating down from rain, snow, lakes, and rivers recharges aquifers. Some aquifers contain water that’s thousands to millions of years old. (According to New Scientist, the world’s oldest aquifer lies beneath the Sahara — rain that fell perhaps 1 million years ago.)

How does this bode for India’s agriculture? NASA’s Matt Rodell, lead author on the Nature study, says: “If measures are not soon taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output, severe shortages of potable water, conflict, and suffering.”

During the second half of the 20th century, water withdrawals increased dramatically. Beginning in the 1960s — the Green Revolution — the Indian government instituted policies meant to boost agricultural production. As a result, the amount of irrigated land in India nearly tripled between 1970 and 1999. In northern India, agriculture is responsible for up to 95 percent of groundwater use.

Science News says of the study reported in Geophysical Research Letters:

In the mid-1990s, India’s Central Ground Water Board estimated that farmers pulled more than 172 cubic kilometers of water each year from aquifers in the study region of northeastern India, southern Nepal and western Bangladesh…. That’s more than three times the volume of India’s largest surface reservoir. New data gleaned from gravity-measuring satellites suggest that the annual rate of extraction in that region has jumped more than 60 percent since then.

The Science News article continues:

The pace of groundwater depletion in northern India is greater than anyone expected and mirrors trends seen in many other regions, including China and the western United States, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project, based in Los Lunas, N.M. When groundwater disappears or becomes too difficult to pump, people who now support themselves on the land will become economic refugees, she contends. In many parts of the world, Postel adds, “water problems are becoming very serious, very fast.”

The AFP reports that 80 percent of India is threatened with drought this year. The region is experiencing a weak monsoon season. Monsoons bring rainfall to the area on a fairly predictable schedule. (A rough rule of thumb: When we have El Niño years off the US West Coast, as we’re having this year, the other side of the Pacific tends to have weaker-than-usual monsoons.)

But India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, says that, after two years of good harvest, grain stores were adequate to stave off famine brought on by crop failures.

Bloomberg News gives some context to the issue of water groundwater withdrawals worldwide. Forecasts aren’t cheery:

About a fifth of water used globally comes from under the ground, the Stockholm International Water Institute has said. Withdrawals are predicted to increase 50 percent by 2025 in developing countries, and 18 percent in developed countries, according to the policy group based in the Swedish capital.

But how do we know what’s happening to India’s underground water supply anyway? By definition, you can’t see it, and we have little to no on-the-ground data.

The answer: Gravity. Scientists infer groundwater levels from variations in Earth’s gravitational field measured by satellites.

Richard Kerr of Science Now explains how it works:

As the lead spacecraft passes over a patch of anomalously strong gravity, it accelerates ahead of the trailing spacecraft. Once past the anomaly, the lead satellite slows back down. Then the trailing spacecraft accelerates and again closes on the leader. By making repeated passes over the same spot, GRACE [the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission] measures changes in Earth’s gravity, which are mainly due to water moving on and under the surface. Most famously, GRACE has recorded the shrinking of ice sheets; it has also detected shifting ocean currents, the desiccation of droughts, and the draining of large lakes. Outside of wasting ice sheets, the world’s largest broad-scale decline in gravity during GRACE’s first 6 years came across a 2.7-million-square-kilometer, east-west swath centered on New Delhi.

Of the gravity-measuring method, Jay Famiglietti, associate professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author on the Nature study, tells Bloomberg:

“This is the first time that we have been able to go into the region with essentially no data on the ground and be able to come up with a pretty reasonable number for the rate of groundwater depletion.”

Thanks to Virginia Carter for this New York Times article.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/world/asia/26iht-phils.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=philippines+contraception&st=cse.  Also see below an article from ABS-CBN News and two additional articles.

Bill to Increase Access to Contraception Is Dividing Filipinos

By CARLOS H. CONDE

Published: October 25, 2009

MANILA — Gina Judilla already had three children the first time she tried to terminate a pregnancy. “I jumped down the stairs, hoping that would cause a miscarriage,” she said. The fetus survived and is now an 8-year-old boy.

Skip to next paragraphThree years later, pregnant again, she drank an herbal concoction that was supposed to induce abortion. That, too, failed.

Three years ago, in another unsuccessful attempt to end a pregnancy, she took Cytotec, a drug to treat gastric ulcers that is widely known in the Philippines as an “abortion pill.”

What drove Ms. Judilla, a 37-year-old manicurist, to such extreme measures is a story of personal tribulation familiar to many Filipino women. She and her unemployed husband are very poor — barely able to buy vitamins for their youngest child, let alone send more than two of their older children to school.

“When I had my third child, I swore to myself that I will never get pregnant again because I know we could not afford to have another one,” Ms. Judilla said in a recent interview at her home in Pasig City, on the eastern outskirts of Manila.

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines. Birth control and related health services have long been available to those who can afford to pay for them through the private medical system, but 70 percent of the population is too poor and depends on heavily subsidized care. In 1991, prime responsibility for delivering public health services shifted from the central government to the local authorities, who have broad discretion over which services are dispensed.

Many communities responded by making birth control unavailable.

More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change that. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services, including condoms, birth control pills, tubal ligations and vasectomies. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school.

Supporters of the bill cite urgent public health needs. A 2006 government survey, which interviewed 46,000 women, found that between 2000 and 2006, only half of Filipino women of reproductive age used birth control of any kind. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization based in the United States that researches reproductive health policy, 54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended.

Most of those unintended pregnancies — 92 percent — resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed. Those unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that year, despite a ban on the procedure. Most of the abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions. Many women resort to crude methods like those Ms. Judilla tried.

The bill’s main proponent in Congress, Representative Edcel C. Lagman, also says there is a need for a check on population growth in the interest of national welfare. The Philippine population is estimated at 98 million and is growing at more than 2 percent annually, one of the highest rates in Asia. “Unbridled population growth stunts socioeconomic development and aggravates poverty,” Mr. Lagman wrote in an op-ed column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer recently.

But attempts to make reproductive services more broadly available have met resistance, leading to the defeat of several bills in Congress over the past decade.

The main opposition in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country has come from the church and affiliated lay organizations, which say the proposed law would legalize abortion. In churches across the country, signs have been posted that read: “Yes to Life! No to RH Bill!”

One organization, the Catholic Alumni United for Life, said in a position paper that the legislation would promote abortion by financing abortion-inducing drugs, and therefore “violates explicit Catholic teaching.”

The Rev. Melvin Castro of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, an arm of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said the Catholic Church and the laity would fight the bill, if passed into law, up to the Supreme Court.

“The Constitution is very clear that the state should protect life from conception up to its natural end,” Father Castro said.“Regardless of their religion, Filipinos are God-fearing and family-loving. This bill will change that culture.”

Still, proponents of the bill are optimistic, noting that this is the first time such legislation has won the support of the House committee on health. Previous proposals never even made it into committee. They also cite public opinion surveys that show support for the bill and hope it can be passed before the current Congress adjourns in June.

It seems certain that debate over the legislation will heat up with the approach of national elections in May.

Already, the church has issued statements calling on Senator Benigno Aquino III, expected to be the opposition’s presidential candidate, to oppose the bill. Mr. Aquino, the son of Corazon Aquino, the late president, who was extremely close to the church, has said he will not do this.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is barred from running for another term, has been sending mixed signals about her position. In previous statements, however, she has said she will let her Catholic faith guide her.

“My faith has a very, very strong influence on me,” she said last year.

Other politicians, particularly those on the local level, have chosen to side with the church. In 2000, Jose Lito Atienza, who was mayor of Manila at the time, issued an executive order ending government-financed birth control in the capital. Condoms and other contraceptives were removed from government clinics and hospitals. Patients who asked for them were turned away.

Mr. Atienza, who is now the environment secretary, defends his order as “the right thing to do.”

“Contrary to what many are saying, that policy was meant to protect women, to protect their wombs from those who want to take away life,” he said.

From ABS-CBN News, the largest network in the Philippines.  See http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/views-and-analysis/07/06/09/rh-bill-ending-manila-citys-war-women  Also see a third article that follows.

The RH bill: Ending Manila City's war on women

By Payal Shah and Jaime Todd-Gher | 07/07/2009 12:38 AM

Mothers attend to their babies inside a ward of a government hospital in Manila July 23, 2008. An estimated 50 to 60 deliveries occur daily at a government hospital in Manila, forcing staff to discharge new mothers as early as 12 to 24 hours after birth. In the face of a burgeoning population growth rate, women's rights groups and members of the Philippine Congress are currently pushing for reproductive health and birth control legislation, but strong opposition remains in the form of the influential and staunchly traditional Catholic Church. REUTERS/Cheryl Ravelo (PHILIPPINES)

From RH Reality Check.  See http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/07/30/denied-contraception-filipino-women-face-poverty-and-despair

Denied Contraception, Filipino Women Face Despair

By Melissa Upreti, Center for Reproductive Rights

July 30, 2009 - 7:00am

Lourdes Osil is a poor woman from Manila City, Philippines, in her thirties. She has seven children, a few more than she had wanted. Make no mistake, she loves her children and husband dearly, but her helplessness and inability to provide them with the most basic things that any parent would want to provide her children—and would feel responsible to provide—has made her a very sad and tormented woman.  

Ms. Osil is one of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of women who over the last decade have been systematically denied their most basic human rights in Manila due to a religious and political agenda. Over nine years ago, the former mayor of the city, Jose “Lito” Atienza issued an executive order which effectively bans the use of contraception. Yes, that means condoms, birth control pills, and even sterilization are virtually prohibited in the city. The purported goal of the policy was to ensure the “moral rejuvenation” of society and Mayor Atienza claimed the ban to be “pro-life.” Yet, the reality is the ban has devastated, and continues to devastate, the lives of women and their families, particularly poor families who rely on health facilities run by the local government. Folks who are already struggling are driven further into extreme poverty due to unintended pregnancies. And women are forced into pregnancy even when it endangers their health.

Thursday, President Obama and other high-level American officials will meet with Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The President and his administration should use this opportunity to reclaim the United States’ longtime role as a champion of equality and human rights and call on President Arroyo to repeal this destructive policy and end the injustice that women in Manila City continue to suffer.

Sadly, the President of the Philippines has stood by while women have suffered and she has done nothing to aid them. In fact she has condoned the policy by proclaiming her full support for natural methods of family planning to the exclusion of all other methods for one reason only—political survival. Many in the Philippines are of the view that the only reason she has managed to survive a string of political scandals is her pandering to the Catholic Church, which has advocated against family planning and therefore, undermined women’s rights.

Before Ms. Arroyo ends her term as President next year, she has one last opportunity to set things straight.  As President, she can ensure the passage of a proposed reproductive health bill currently pending in Congress by changing her position on women’s reproductive rights and expressing her support for the bill, or at least by promising not to veto it. Although not perfect, this bill could indeed transform women’s lives in Manila City, and in the Philippines as a whole, by ensuring access to a broad range of reproductive health services and reducing the risk of pregnancy-related diseases and death which in the Philippines is one of the highest in the region.

Thanks to David Poindexter for this article from the New York Times.  See http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E3DD123AF934A1575BC0A96F9C8B63

Little Space As Filipinos Overwhelm The Schools

By SETH MYDANS

Published: August 27, 2009

PHOTO: Pupils are taught in a makeshift classroom near a garbage dump in Quezon City, Philippines. (PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS LIWANAG FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE)

When Irene Mendevil, a high school English teacher, shouts at her students, she said, she gets a sore throat. So she has begun to use an amplifier.

''I had the experience of losing my voice completely,'' she said of her constant shouting. ''No sounds came out of my mouth. I had to write on paper to tell my students what to do.''

Ms. Mendevil, 33, shouts because her class is so big that just getting the students to listen is a challenge. There are 100 of them, more or less the same number as in the other classes here in Justice Cecilia Muñoz-Palma High School.

And the school itself is not unusual in a country whose population of 92 million is exploding so quickly, and whose education budget is so small that it cannot find space to teach its children.

More children are also coming into the public schools as the economy tightens and families cannot afford the haven of private schools, with their smaller classes.

This school year opened with a nationwide enrollment of 21 million students from elementary through high school, almost exactly one million more than in the previous year.

Although the government began a classroom-building program three years ago, the schools are still 27,124 classrooms short of the need, according to Juan Miguel Luz, a former under secretary of education who works with the National Institute for Policy Studies, which advocates for better education policies.

To squeeze in all the students, many classrooms have been divided in two by partitions. Stairwells and corridors have been converted into miniature classrooms. In 2006, double sessions were introduced to relieve some of the pressure.

Toilets are a problem of their own, with 62 percent of schools suffering shortages, Bashir D. Rasuman, undersecretary for public works, said recently. Here in Manila, the capital, Education Department figures show an average of one toilet for every 143 high school students and one for every 114 elementary school students.

At Muñoz-Palma High School, some lavatories have been converted into claustrophobic faculty lounges, while the lounges have been put to use as classrooms.

''I have 106 students in my class and 90 seats,'' said Rico Encinares, 34, a chemistry teacher. ''Everybody has seats if some of them are absent. But if they all come, there are not enough seats. They have to share seats.''

Only about 10 percent of his students -- the truly motivated ones -- get a quality education, he said. Individual attention is almost impossible.

''I don't know the names of all my students, even at the end of the school year,'' he said. ''You only remember the ones who are very noisy or very good. But the silent ones who just sit there listening, you can't recall their names.''

He said he planned to buy an amplifier to reach the students in the back rows as soon as he had the money.

According to the World Bank, the Philippines spends $138 per student per year. By comparison, Thailand spends $853 per student, Singapore spends $1,800 and Japan spends $5,000.

The Philippine government spends 2.2 percent of its budget on education, according to official figures, well short of the 6 percent that educators say is optimal -- and this is despite a constitutional mandate to make education a priority.

At the start of the decade, educators talked of a radical overhaul of the system, but the main change since then has been increasingly dire overcrowding, Mr. Luz, of the policy study institute, wrote in a recent paper.

''Sadly, today, we have the same overcrowded structure, the same processes and the same low education standards, but with millions more children to attend to,'' he said.

In her state of the nation speech last month, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo called education a priority and said the government was building new classrooms.

Education Secretary Jesli A. Lapus said in a report that the department planned to build 1,908 new classrooms and renovate 2,513 others. He said 6,322 toilets would be installed, though only 194 were to be completed this year. Not long ago, Mr. Lapus also announced that schools would be collecting scrap material to build and repair furniture.

In the Education Department, employees devoted time to working out the alliteration of a new program called Operation 10 R -- recycle, repair, refurbish, rehabilitate, restore, remodel, repaint, renew, redistribute and reuse.

At Muñoz-Palma High School, students scavenge for plastic bottles to recycle, hauling them in huge sacks to help pay for school equipment.

At the Payatas Elementary School nearby, a teacher, Edmon Miguel Jr., 24, is spending his own money to try to improve conditions.

''We are just waiting for our salary, the other teacher and me,'' said Mr. Miguel, who earns 9,000 pesos, or $187, a month. ''We will make it a beautiful classroom. We will make it a classroom conducive to learning.''

His classroom is a narrow passageway with a tin roof and no windows where 62 children between the ages of 8 and 12 sit crammed together at tiny desks. The room floods during monsoon season.

''When it rains, my shoes get wet, but I continue to teach the children,'' Mr. Miguel said. ''Sometimes their notebooks fall in the water.''

This is a poor community, he said, and he sometimes buys notebooks and paper for the students. ''So each time we have a test,'' he said, ''I buy them a piece of paper.''

From the New York Times April 28, 2009 edition.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/world/europe/28bees.html

April 28, 2009

Group Sounds Alarm on European Bee Industry

By REUTERS

BRUSSELS (Reuters) — Europe’s beekeeping industry could be wiped out in less than a decade as bees fall victim to disease, insecticides and intensive farming, the international beekeeping body Apimondia said on Monday.

“With this level of mortality, European beekeepers can only survive another 8 to 10 years,” Gilles Ratia, the president of Apimondia, told Reuters.

“We have had big problems in southwest France for many years,” he said, but the problem had extended to Italy and Germany.

Last year, about 30 percent of Europe’s 13.6 million hives died, according to Apimondia figures. Losses reached 50 percent in Slovenia and as high as 80 percent in southwest Germany.

About 35 percent of European food crops rely on bees to pollinate them, Mr. Ratia said, and the deaths pose a big threat for farmers.

“It is a complete crisis,” said Francesco Panella, who tends about 1,000 hives in the Piedmont region of Italy. “Last year, I lost about half my production. I can’t survive more than two or three more years like this.”

Mystery has surrounded the recent decline in the bee population. Most keepers blame modern farming methods and the pesticides used on crops like sunflower and rapeseed.

French honey output has suffered in intensive sunflower-farming areas, said Henri Clement, president of the French beekeeping union, but has remained steady in mountains and chestnut forests.

Apimondia’s scientific coordinator, Gerard Arnold, cites two main factors responsible for weakening bee colonies: insecticides and the parasitic mite Varroa. Once weakened, Mr. Arnold said, the hives were then wiped out by other diseases.

The European Union voted this year to phase out the most toxic pesticides after years of wrangling, but beekeepers still say that they are ignored by politicians. “If cattle were producing 30 percent less milk each year, it would not be acceptable,” said Josef Stich, who keeps 200 hives near Vienna.