Pambazuka - Zambia: Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6112 English DEVELOPMENT Français Português Zambia: Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat Home 2002-02-28, Issue 55 Current Issue http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6112 Author List Tag Cloud Printer friendly version Feedback She is sitting on a warped stool in a roofless market with the ferocious midday sun Back Issues bearing down on her. A sinewy woman with deep-set eyes and sharp features that About jut sphinxlike from under her black head scarf, Rose Shanzi awoke with a start this SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE! Advertising morning, and the primordial question that jarred her from sleep is stalking her again: Will she and her children eat today? Newsfeeds email: Broadcasts Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat Publications Awards By Jon Jeter Washington Post Foreign Service DONATE TO PAMBAZUKA NEWS! Subscribe Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A01 Friends of Pambazuka MARAMBA, Zambia -- She is sitting on a warped stool in a roofless market Action alerts with the ferocious midday sun bearing down on her. A sinewy woman with GET INVOLVED Editors’ corner deep-set eyes Features and sharp features that jut sphinxlike from under her black head scarf, Rose Shanzi awoke with a start this morning, and the primordial question Announcements that jarred her from Dakar World Social Forum 2011 sleep is stalking her again: Comment & analysis Will she and her children eat today? PAMBAZUKA NEWS Tributes to Tajudeen Latest tweets Advocacy & campaigns It is always a compound question. With five children to feed, often Pan-African Postcard there is not enough food to go around; tough choices have to be made. SebPerimony #FF FF @bongosroger Still, all the answers Rose is @Mogadishow @Survie Notes from Zimbabwe searching for today lie in the neat rows of tomatoes arranged by size, @Radio_Africa1 @CongoRT Obituaries ripeness and price on the wooden table standing at eye level before her. @AfrikInfo @pambazuka @Billetsdafrique Bonne Journée à Books & arts "If I sell my tomatoes, we will eat today," she is saying simply. "If I tous ... Letters & Opinions don't, we don't eat." 5 days ago · reply · retweet · favorite African Writers’ Corner To buy enough food to get her family through another day, Rose will need Andreas_Bieler Review of Samir Blogging Africa to earn roughly 75 cents. Amin's book Global History: A View Podcasts & Video from the South (Pambazuka Press, 2011) at bit.ly/R4LwuH Emerging powers in Africa Day in and day out, survival for one-fifth of the world's population turns on what others consider loose change. Much as one woman in a @pambazuka Watch 5 days ago · reply · retweet · favorite remote town in southern Highlights French edition Africa tries to keep hunger at bay for just a little longer, so too are FahamuAfrica Great struggles, great Highlights Portuguese edition 1.3 billion others throughout the developing world who earn, on average, Cartoons less than $1 a day. Join the conversation Zimbabwe update The percentage of the world's population living on less than $1 a day is African Union Monitor smaller than it was 10 years ago. But in absolute terms it has hardly Pambazuka News is produced by a Women & gender budged in more than two decades, actually inching up slightly from its 1990 level, according to pan-African community of some Human rights World Bank statistics, based on household surveys around the globe. 2,600 citizens and organisations - Refugees & forced migration academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society Social movements In this hardscrabble town on Zambia's southern border, nothing comes easily. The 75 cents that Rose needs to make ends meet is about 50 organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, Africa labour news percent more than she and commentators who together produce Emerging powers news ordinarily earns from her vegetable stand in a 12-hour day. insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative Africom Watch Moreover, the competition is stiff. Rose is one of no fewer than 4,000 and influential web forums for social justice in Elections & governance vendors peddling everything from double-A batteries to zebra-skinned Africa. Corruption love seats at Maramba's sprawling market. At least a few dozen women here sell tomatoes just as Development red and ripe as Rose's. LATEST TITLES FROM PAMBAZUKA PRESS Health & HIV/AIDS FROM CITIZEN TO REFUGEE Education And although the tomatoes cost just a few pennies per handful, customers are hard to come by. Jobs have evaporated since duty-free shipments of Uganda Asians come to LGBTI foreign-made clothes Britain 16 Days of Activism Against began pouring into Zambia a decade ago, shutting down virtually all of Mahmood Mamdani Gender Violence the textile factories here and in the nearby city of Livingstone. 'On the face of it, life in the Racism & xenophobia camp presented a sharp and "No one has money anymore," Rose is saying as she sizes up a woman who favourable contrast to the Environment handled her vegetables but left without buying anything. "The town has open terror of living in Land & land rights no buying power. Selling anything is like squeezing blood from a stone." Uganda. But it was the Food Justice Kensington camp, and not Media & freedom of expression The littlest of her children, 3-year-old Betty, finished off the Amin's Uganda, which was my first experience of what it would be like to Social welfare family's last dollop of porridge this morning. No one else in the household has eaten in nearly a day, live in a totalitarian society.' Mahmood 1 of 6 9/26/2012 4:22 PM Pambazuka - Zambia: Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6112 News from the diaspora leaving Rose unsure if the knot in her stomach is hunger, or anxiety, or Mamdani Conflict & emergencies both. Buy now Internet & technology She has not made as much as a cent today, and she's been sitting here AFRICAN AWAKENING eNewsletters & mailing lists for more than two hours now. There have been luckless days when she's The Emerging Revolutions gone home with nothing, Fundraising & useful resources The tumultuous uprisings in and it is that possibility that preoccupies her now. Eyes shut, hands Tunisia, Egypt and Libya Courses, seminars, & clenched tightly together in her lap, Rose bows her head in prayer. have seized the attention of workshops Resurfacing, she is smiling media but what about the Publications weakly, rejuvenated momentarily by faith, inspired by fear. rest of Africa? With incisive World Social Forum 2007 contributions from across "If you are a mother," she is saying, her gaze fixed on the middle the continent, "African Jobs distance, "you don't know what suffering is until you have watched your babies go hungry. I have Awakening" presents the Global call to action against 2011 uprisings in their poverty suffered many times." African context. Remembering Rwanda Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the former Soviet Union, Buy now World Cup 2010 surviving on less than $1 daily is like living in a time warp, a DEMYSTIFYING AID WikiLeaks and Africa universe of hand-to-mouth existences wholly untouched by technology's advance, the Berlin Wall's collapse, Yash Tandon the torrents of cash flowing from one increasingly borderless country to This pamphlet from another in this new Pambazuka Press shows that epoch of surging global trade. 'development aid' is not what it purports to be - the And nowhere has time stood as still as it has here: sub-Saharan Africa. effects of actions of well-meaning allies in the New Trade Policies North who support aid to Africa for reasons of ethics Following decades of colonial misrule and early experiments in or solidarity are, socialism, nearly 40 African governments have adopted laissez-faire trade policies, submitting to the unfortunately, the opposite of their good so-called structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and intentions. International Monetary Fund -- which reduce spending on public services Buy now and increase privatization -- TO COOK A CONTINENT in hopes of attracting foreign investment and loans. Destructive Extraction and Yet while sub-Saharan Africa's 640 million people represent about 10 the Climate Crisis in Africa percent of the world's population, the region accounts for only 2 Nnimmo Bassey percent of all international trade, Exploiting Africa's resources less than it did during the last days of colonialism 50 years ago. has delivered huge profits to the North and huge damage Zambia, a landlocked, butterfly-shaped nation of 10 million people, is to Africa's environment and as poor as Africa gets. Eight of every 10 Zambians live on less than $1 economies. Overcoming the a day. Ruled by British crises of environment and mining concerns for more than a quarter-century, then colonized by the climate change means also British in 1924, Zambia won independence 40 years later. addressing corporate profiteering and resource extraction. For the 27 years that followed, President Kenneth Kaunda pursued Buy now economic policies that joined government and the economy at the hip. Daunting trade barriers, EARTH GRAB massive state subsidies and onerous business regulations protected and Geopiracy, the New steered a fragile economy heavily reliant on a single commodity: copper. Biomassters and Capturing Inefficient and unproductive, propped up by foreign loans and dragged Climate Genes down by plunging copper prices, Kaunda's "humanist" system slid Diana Bronson, Hope Shand, inexorably into collapse. Fed Jim Thomas, Kathy Jo up with constant shortages of food and fuel and with Kaunda's Wetter authoritarian leadership, Zambians forced their independence hero to As greedy eyes focus on the allow elections, then voted him out global South's resources this in 1991 in favor of a trade union leader promising reform, Frederick book 'pulls back the curtain on disturbing Chiluba.