Archives for May 2016

Venezuela is on a rapid and precipitous decline. You might even say, as my guest today Francisco Toro wrote in a recent piece in The Atlantic that Venezuela is falling apart. Between food, fuel, medicine and commodity shortages, corruption and rampant crime, this one-time middle income country is struggling mightily. There’s an incipient humanitarian crisis and instability of Valenzuela could effect the entire region.

Fransisco Toro is the proprietor of the blog Caracas Chronicles and co-authored the Atlantic piece, with Moises Naim, a former Venezuelan official and longtime editor of Foreign Policy who was a guest on this very show last year. The piece very succinctly describes the causes and consequences of Venezuela’s collapse and begins with an very telling anecdote about toilet paper.

If you have 20 minutes and want to understand the reasons why Venezuela is on the verge of a collapse and the broader social, economic and international implications of the country’s implosion, have a listen.

The international humanitarian system is stretched beyond capacity. In fact, it’s fair to say it is broken.

The inability of the international community to confront multiple manmade and natural disasters, like the crisis in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, ebola in west Africa and the earthquake in Nepal is a profound contributor to insecurity around the world.There are more people displaced around the world than there has been at any time since World War Two; donors are not committing enough money to provide for the basic needs of people affected by sudden crises, and the international community is not doing a sufficient job of preventing the outbreak of conflict, ending current conflicts, or mitigating the effects of natural disasters.

SOUTH SUDAN, Malakal, 26 February 2016 Credit: OCHA/ Charlotte Cans

These failures and proposed solutions to these ongoing challenges are the subject of the first ever World Humanitarian Summit, which kicks off in Istanbul in mid May. This is a UN backed affair, which includes participation of member states, civil society and the private sector. And one participant is on the line with me today to discuss some of the problems and solutions that this conference hopes to address.

Shannon Scribner is Oxfam America’s Humanitarian Policy Manager, and in this conversation she offers an insightful preview of what to expect from this conference, some of the more controversial debates about the role of humanitarian relief and international development that this conference has already sparked, and how a first-ever world humanitarian summit can help mend a broken humanitarian system.

I caught up with US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just after he left the stage at the Climate Action Conference in DC. This was a two day UN backed conference with representatives from local and national governments, the business sector, civil society, NGOs and philanthropies gathered to discuss strategies to implement the Paris Climate Agreement.

Some quick background: the cornerstone of the Paris Agreement are a set of commitments by each government to take certain actions or meet specific goals, and taken together these pledges can meaningfully alter the current climate change trajectory.  That is, of course, if these commitments and pledges are actually implemented. The point of this conference was to bring together stakeholders from disparate sectors to make the commitments of the Paris Accord a reality.

Enter the US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack. He details the specific actions that USDA is taking to implement the US government’s commitments at Paris. And those are technically interesting, but what I found enlightening in his comments is that it suggests there is a bureaucratic shift underway at USDA to mainstream climate imperatives throughout the department.

This shift at USDA is likely one manifestation of a trend we are seeing throughout the US government in which the imperatives of confronting climate change are being mainstreamed throughout the whole of government. It’s not just the EPA or department of energy or interior. Rather, every branch of government is taking this on in their own differentiated way. And that is, I think, a pretty interesting shift that we are living through.

What do you think? Have a listen!

Paul Niehaus is undertaking a radical experiment. His organization, Give Directly, wants to find out would happen if people living in extreme poverty were offered the guarantee of a basic income for ten to 15 years. They plan on launching an experiment in East Africa in which 6,000 people would be given, with no strings attached, enough money to pay for their basic needs over a long period of time.

At the home of recipient Gabriel Otieno Awoche in Koga village on 22 October 2014. Gabriel built a house and chicken coop with the cash. He also bought woodworking tools for his furniture workshop. Gabriel with his wife Lucy Adhiambo and their daughter Charlotte, 3. They also have another daughter, Mariam, age 1 1/2.

The idea they seek to test is called the Universal Basic Income. There are some communities around the world that offer this in some form, but never before has this idea been tested over an extended period of time in the developing world.

Give Directly announced this new experiment a few weeks  ago and it’s caught the attention of the international development community and those of us in the media who follow these things. Paul explains what they hope to accomplish with this experiment, how it will actually work, and what implications it has for the global effort to combat extreme poverty.