Patrick McCormick of the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, talked to World Focus about vulnerable children around the world.

You can see more on the suspected child smugglers here, from our partner ITN.

Amna Nawaz of NBC News traveled to Pakistan on a grant from the International Reporting Project. She reports on a charity called The Citizens Foundation, which has built 600 schools and enrolled over 80,000 Pakistani students.

Young girls from Madhya Pradesh’s tribal communities near in the town of Dhar. Photo: Overseas Development Institute

Worldfocus partner World Pulse is a media enterprise covering global issues through the eyes of women. This post is excerpted from their PulseWire project, an international online forum for women. In it, Subhadra Khaperde, an activist and researcher from Indore, India, argues that anti-poverty efforts won’t succeed without addressing the root causes of poverty.

There is an interesting hiatus between the perceptions of tribal women and the NGOs regarding the problem of child malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh state in India.

While Chato, a Sahariya tribal woman, emphatically states that the lack of land, means of livelihood, electricity and medical facilities are the main barriers to keeping her children alive the NGOs are more concerned about the improper functioning and lack of universalisation of supplementary child nutrition services.

Thus while the poor women have hit upon the correct analysis that the lasting solution to the problem of malnutrition is in providing adequate and sustainable livelihood opportunities. The NGOs campaigning for an end to malnutrition on the other hand are more concerned with trying to improve the quality of the superficial bandage services being provided by the State. Plants need water at their roots and not on their leaves.

The crisis of malnutrition is there among all the poor and Madhya Pradesh is the state with the most number of hungry people in India. However, the children owing to their lower immunity are more prone to die than their elders are.

The truth is that devastation of livelihoods in Madhya Pradesh has taken place due to the adoption of wrong agricultural policies over the past 40 years or so.

The introduction of the cultivation of soyabean in the monsoon season has led to the gradual vanishing of such nutritious crops as jowar, bajra, makka, udad, tuar, moong and groundnut.

Simultaneously, in the winter season only wheat is sown and the area under gram has been going down. Thus while earlier the poor small farmers used to get nutritious food from their farms they now have to purchase food from the market at exorbitant prices.

Moreover, while agriculture was a profitable enterprise earlier because of subsidies provided for power and fertilizer now it has become a loss-making proposition due to the withdrawal of subsidies.

The problem has been aggravated over time by the fragmentation of land with the increase in population. This has meant that there are now more landless labourers like Chato who get less work and less remuneration and so are in even greater trouble than small landholders.

- Subhadra Khaperde

Chile’s economic “miracle” has lifted many Chileans from poverty and become a fiscal model for Latin America. Since the 1980s, Chile’s has halved the number of people below the poverty line.

But while the middle class grows, the divide between rich and poor deepens. Moreover, middle-class Chileans are under more stress and working longer hours than before.

Martin Savidge hosts Peter Winn and Victoria Hurtado to discuss the underside of Chile’s prosperity, focusing on the middle class, growing inequality and the younger generation.

On the streets of Santiago, Chile.

GUESTS:

Victoria Hurtado is a lawyer from Universidad de Chile who worked at the finance ministry and now teaches about democracy and governance at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez. She is the founder of Tendencias Politicas and Orbitando, websites that aggregate more than 30,000 Chilean blogs. She has also published two bilingual children books, “The Vegetarian Mosquito” and “The Psychic Penguin,” to enhance values for global citizens. Currently, she collaborates as a writer for “Que Pasa” magazine.

Peter Winn is professor of history and international relations at Tufts University and a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Institute of Latin American Studies. Winn has authored and edited several books on Latin America, including an oral history of Allende’s Chile, Weavers of Revolution, Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, and Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean, a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name.

Credits:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producers: Lisa Biagiotti and Ben Piven
Researchers: Michael Ramirez and Geneva Sands-Sadowitz

A young woman in Minas de Oro. Photo: Flickr user lonqueta

The United States has been actively engaged lately in solving the Honduran presidential crisis. The U.S. State Department officials have helped broker a deal to end the sometimes violent dispute between Mel Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president, and Roberto Micheletti, designated as president when the Honduran military escorted Zelaya out of town in his nightclothes. Let’s hope the crisis is resolved once and for all today.

Consider me an idealist, but I’m thinking beyond that — about steps that might solve the underlying social issues that plague Honduras.

As the months-long battle between the two presidents in Honduras moves toward a rational resolution, what about the abjectly poor Honduran majority?

Honduras needs financial support, economic relief, and definitely social help - why can’t the U.S. and other nations increase their involvement? Fifty percent of Honduras’ 7.7 million people are below the poverty line, and almost 40 percent are children. There is talk of a national unity government by the end of the year. Will that government be able to change the paradigm without international aid?

Inevitably, the U.S. has a role. It has characteristically abandoned social concerns once it finishes with its little wars and interventions. Don’t we have an ongoing responsibility in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and the rest of the region?

Twenty-five years ago, probably the only positive part of turning Honduras into a U.S. staging base for American adventurism in Central America was that American military field hospitals scheduled regular health clinics in the countryside.

I remember seeing poor people waiting in line weekly medical screening, checkups and even surgeries that otherwise would not have taken place. I’m positive that thousands of Hondurans who rarely otherwise had seen a doctor benefited from American military largesse, even though the ulterior motives were not crystalline. It was part of the “hearts and minds” doctrine.

But development aid and social support are more than a handout. Stability in the Hemisphere is good for everyone.

First things first: Solve the political problem and then deal with underlying issues.

Honduras has taken a step backward during this crisis, according to Human Rights Watch.

“Honduras urgently needs to address the serious damage to human rights since the coup,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas Director at Human Rights Watch. “Honduras needs to roll back repressive legislation and give unequivocal orders to security forces to end their abuses and cooperate with the investigations of the human rights unit of the Attorney General’s office.”

- Peter Eisner

Last year, the Economist magazine slotted Ethiopia as the fourth fastest growing economy in the world, ahead of China. The World Bank report “Doing Business 2010” ranks Ethiopia in the top 10 African nations in terms of the ease of doing business. The Ethiopian government is trying to strengthen local and regional businesses and attract foreign direct investment.

Martin Savidge, Ethiopian businessman Ermyas Amelga and economics professor Phillip LeBel discuss how easy it is to do business in Ethiopia, who’s investing and what this means as Ethiopia moves from an agrarian society to a more urban society. The entrenched poverty hinders the robust investment environment, saddling the country with drought, food shortages and inadequate infrastructure.

Some highlights from the show:

• Ethiopia is not a resource-based economy. The sectors that are thriving in Ethiopia are real estate, construction, services, manufacturing, textiles and commercial agriculture with arable land leasing
• A growing population topping 80 million people make Ethiopia a strong consumer society
• Major investors in Ethiopia: China, India, Turkey and Egypt — the U.S. is not a major investor
• Ethiopia’s poverty-stricken image and government-controlled electronic communications and the Internet are potential hurdles to foreign investment
• Ethiopia’s Diaspora community is driving Ethiopia’s real estate boom

Martin Savidge hosts the following guests:

Ermyas Amelga is an Ethiopian businessman based in Addis Ababa. In 1996, he returned to Ethiopia after academic training and working in investment banking in the U.S. He has founded or acquired 11 companies, overseeing more than 2000 employees in the mining, oil, agriculture and financial services sectors. Ermyas also consults investors on entering the Ethiopian market.

Phillip LeBel is an economist and business professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He specializes in economics of developing countries, with emphasis on Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia. This Spring, he was a Fulbright senior fellow in Addis Ababa teaching natural resources economics. He has consulted for USAID, the World Bank, UNESCO, WHO, FAO and the U.S. State Department on various subjects pertaining to economic policy issues.

For more coverage on Ethiopia, watch Worldfocus’ signature videos on the coffee industry, a remote village and Ethiopia’s history and beauty. Watch the PBS Wide Angle film “The Market Maker” about one woman who has created a commodities exchange and revolutionized agricultural distribution in the country.

Credits:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producers: Lisa Biagiotti and Ben Piven

For more Worldfocus coverage of Ethiopia, visit our extended coverage page: Ethiopia Past and Present.

For more Worldfocus coverage of Ethiopia, visit our extended coverage page: Ethiopia Past and Present.

For more Worldfocus coverage of Ethiopia, visit our extended coverage page: Ethiopia Past and Present.

Most suffer from chronic malnutrition, which means that while they are getting enough calories, the food they eat is severely lacking in vitamins and protein.

As Samuel Loewenberg reports, this poor nutrition affects not only their bodies, but their future.

This production was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

For more:

Click here for the full transcript of the video.

Listen to our radio show on “Guatemala: Behind the famine”
View the Pulitzer Center’s Food Insecurity multimedia project.
Read Samuel Loewenberg’s blog from the field: Chronic malnutrition fatigues Guatemala’s children

The Philippines is a microcosm of the problem, with children driven to the streets by crushing poverty.

Worldfocus correspondent Mark Litke and producer Ara Ayer report from the Philippines, where they encounter one man — a former child of the streets himself named Joe Dean Sola — who has dedicated himself to improving the lives of street kids.

Since the story was shot, street children have suffered even more as the result of the severe flooding in the region.

(View full post to see video)‘

For more on Worldfocus’ coverage of the Philippines, click here.

Daggerin’ dancing at the Passa Passa Dancehall in Kingston, Jamaica. Photos: Gabrielle Weiss

Correspondent Lisa Biagiotti reported the signature story One island, two Jamaicas and a ‘whole heap’ of difference with Micah Fink and Gabrielle Weiss of the Pulitzer Center.

Lisa shares why Worldfocus didn’t broadcast daggerin’ images, addresses the realities of rampant violence and adolescent sex and recounts how some Jamaican artists are singing more uplifting gospel Dancehall music.

At the center of the music ban in Jamaica is daggerin’. Earlier this year, Jamaica’s national broadcasting commission banned sexually-explicit and violent lyrics and images related to daggerin’.

Worldfocus — based in New York City, not Kingston — also decided not to air these images because we thought our audience might be alarmed by the graphic nature of the dance. (Tell us below what you think of the daggerin’ images!) We didn’t mention daggerin’ in our video story because it begged the question…what is daggerin’?

Americans usually refer to this form of dancing as “freaking,” “bumping and grinding” or “dry-humping.” Urban clubs across the U.S. are packed with young people doing the American version of daggerin’.

In Jamaica, opponents of daggerin’ have described the dance as having sex with clothes on and even framed it as an aggressive, violent rape. Essentially, a woman bends over while a man pounds against her to the beat of the music. They liken the dance to a dagger stabbing piece of meat, violently and repeatedly.

The daggerin’ dance and the music that goes along with it slit Jamaican society. The Christian moral guard said children were overexposed to sex at an immature age. The defenders of Dancehall said the music mirrored the life and pressures in Jamaica’s poorest ghettos.

Turf wars and teen pregnancies

But behind the public music clash lurks the reality of rampant violence and adolescent sex in Jamaica.

Last year, 1,600 people were murdered mainly because of turf wars and reprisal killings. But this is still four to five  murders a day for an island the size of Connecticut with a population of 2.8 million. (Most murders are confined to waring communities and the result of turf wars and reprisal killings.)

As for sex, approximately 80 percent of children are born out of wedlock and 35 percent of Jamaican women are pregnant by age 19.

Put down the gun and praise the Lord to the tune of gospel Dancehall

Not all Dancehall music is “murder music,” and not all of it is so sexually charged it could electrocute you. The Dancehall genre can be broken down into three streams: hardcore (explicit), mainstream (radio and TV friendly) and gospel (uplifting and positive).

The Worldfocus signature story One island, two Jamaicas and a whole heap of difference focused on the hardcore Dancehall variety, examining Jamaican society through the lens of the public debate on daggerin’ music. Hardcore Dancehall has gained international airplay, but has also come under attack abroad. Concerts of Jamaican singer Buju Banton are currently being canceled in the U.S. because gay groups are saying his lyrics advocate the killing of homosexuals.

As for mainstream Dancehall, lyrics must be sanitized or changed completely for air play. For example, “Rampin’ Shop” became “Dumpling Shop.” The tune and rhythm were the same, but the lyrics were child-proofed.

When I was in Jamaica late last spring, I stopped over at Roots FM, a community-based radio station that pumps positive music and conversation into the inner cities. Every week, Dudley Thompson hosts “What’s the Verdict” — an American Idol styled contest where callers can vote on songs from emerging artists. The gospel Dancehall song “Same Gun” by Xtreme had won the contest. The song traces the cycle of violence committed by one gun that kills a person, is stolen and used again until it it is put down. The young artists of Xtreme, Chris D and Lyrical, dedicated the song to their three slain friends and hope their music encourages more peace and love.

LISTEN to Chris D and Lyrical’s song “Same Gun:”

Joel Harrison, known as Kruddy, is a DJ at 876radio.com and supports the music ban, believing that Dancehall artists are now forced to be more creative and are singing about the recession and fathers abandoning their children. Critics aren’t convinced the ban has had any real effect on artists because the realities in Jamaica’s inner city have not changed.

Keepin’ it safe with Daggerin’ condoms

And for his part, Vybz Kartel, whose sexually-explicit song “Rampin’ Shop” provoked the ban, has come out with a line of Daggerin’ condoms. Now you can dagger away to his sexually-explicit music, and should you feel compelled to take off your clothes, you’re equipped with his Daggerin’ brand of condoms. See the commercial below…and let me know what you think of the daggerin’ debate.

- Lisa Biagiotti

• Watch the signature story about how public responses to the ban reveal the legacy of two Jamaicas dating back to the country’s slave history: One island, two Jamaicans and a ‘whole heap’ of difference.
• Watch Jamaican Dancehall artist Spice sing about the poverty plaguing Jamaica’s ghettos.
• Watch all the Worldfocus In the Shadows video signature series
• For more information on homophobia and HIV in Jamaica, visit The Glass Closet, a multimedia project produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Grace Hamilton, known as Spice, is one of Jamaica’s most prominent Dancehall artists. She and Vybz Kartel came under attack for their duet “Rampin’ Shop.” Not all of Spice’s songs are so sexually graphic. In the video below, Spice talks (and sings) about growing up in Jamaica’s ghettos.

Listen to the song Rampin’ Shop by Vybz Kartel and Spice that caused a culture war in Jamaica:

• Read about the controversy over music and dance related to daggerin’ and the variety of Dancehall music here: No daggerin’ on Jamaican TV and on Worldfocus.
• Watch the signature story about how public responses to the ban reveal the legacy of two Jamaicas dating back to the country’s slave history: One island, two Jamaicans and a ‘whole heap’ of difference.
• Watch all the Worldfocus In the Shadows video signature series
• For more information on homophobia and HIV in Jamaica, visit The Glass Closet, a multimedia project produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

People prefer charcoal because it is cheap, easily accessible, easy to transport and burns longer than wood. It’s also a source of livelihood for poor families across the country.

But the growing demand for charcoal is placing increasing pressure on Mozambique’s forests.

Haru Mutasa of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports on the disastrous toll being taken on the environment.

Haiti is plagued by severe poverty and life expectancy is some 20 years lower than in the U.S.

Imagine a country in which a child is 10 times more likely to die before reaching five years of age than a child in the United States, a country where the overall life expectancy is 57 years old, nearly 20 years less than in your own country — a country where human beings sometimes eat dirt pies for nourishment.

And imagine finally that something can be done to resolve the tragedy facing the majority of the 9 million people who live in a nation not far south of the United States. That country is Haiti.

Haiti comes to the news pages when there is some new spot event, like the sorry case of a boat overloaded with 200 migrants capsized in the Caribbean this week, throwing a number of people to their deaths. But the nightmare of desperation never ends for Haitians, wracked by violence, hunger, fear and deprivation across generations.

Forget for the moment that U.S. policymakers looked the other way during decades of kleptocracy by the Duvalier family in Haiti during the 20th century; or that the Bush administration essentially tricked the elected president of the country, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, out of the country in 2004; and that thereafter, the United States has cared little and thought less about Haitians, whose lives were made even worse last year after the punishing hurricane season.

Change could come in the form of a new commitment to attacking the cycle of misery. The first signal was the appointment of former President Bill Clinton as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti. His role is intended to raise awareness of the problem and he has already won more than $300 million in pledges for international aid to Haiti. That’s not enough, not by a fraction.

Significant change could come if Dr. Paul Farmer, as expected and hoped, is named the new administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which happens to exist on the flow chart under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Farmer has been in the running for the job for months now, with no announcement.

He is the visionary co-founder of Partners in Health and established a free health clinic in Haiti 20 years ago, treating the dire problems of disease and nutrition among Haiti’s impoverished majority. He has now extended his formula of consciousness-raising and local-based problem solving to Rwanda and Malawi. Partners in Health looks beyond individual health care to sustainable ecology and infrastructure. And the organization is careful to work with local governments, rather than dictating solutions on high.

Farmer’s inspiring mission was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World.

It could be that the administration doesn’t want another high-profile issue on the front burner. Farmer, meanwhile, might not want to be dragged down by government bureaucracy. Whether or not he gets the job, his commitment inspires people to move mountains –- and the need in Haiti and other countries requires new thinking and global commitment to change. We are all diminished by suffering of such a scale that goes along chronically, untreated and ignored.

- Peter Eisner

Photo courtesy of Flickr user glasshalffull91 under a Creative Commons license.

For more Worldfocus coverage of Haiti, visit our extended coverage page: Haiti’s Poor.

President Jacob Zuma warned protesters to respect the law. But across that country, an estimated one million families live in shacks without power and very limited plumbing.

Many blame immigrants for taking jobs that might lead to a better life. For more, watch the Worldfocus signature story “Immigrants in South Africa deal with hostility, xenophobia.”

Yaw Nyarko, a professor of economics and the head of Africa House at New York University, joins Martin Savidge to discuss South African attitudes towards immigrants and the government, as well as economic conditions.

Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera, is largely populated by Nubians. Photo: Flickr user MothersFightingForOthers

Nubians in Kenya are one of the groups that Worldfocus is exploring on our extended coverage project Stateless to Statehood.

Adam Hussein Adam, project coordinator of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, writes how his community’s plight is largely unknown outside of Kenya.

Kenyan Nubians have been defined as stateless people because their identity is questioned. They are without doubt one of the country’s most invisible and under-represented communities – economically, socially, politically and culturally. This is because they have been silent victims of discrimination, exclusion and violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms for as long as they have been in Kenya…

My great-grandfather worked in the service of the British in Somalia around the First World War and later resettled in Meru, a small town on the slopes of Mt. Kenya. His father before him worked for the Turko-Egyptian army in the Sudan. I, like my parents, was born in western Kenya.

Although I am well-educated, I have experienced serious difficulties in interacting with government officials. Between 1992 and 2000, I applied unsuccessfully for a passport five times, losing jobs in the process. One manager once asked me why I did not have a recognisable ethnic identity and that this was why I could not be promoted. Apart from studying to university level, which is an exception rather than the rule, mine may as well be the story of most Nubians. It is a story characterized by the need to survive through challenges that are never explained to you. It is a story characterised by limited interactions with state officials who always remind you it is your privilege to be served by them. It is a story characterised by assuming false identities in order to belong…

Before I encountered these challenges in my own life and found out that many of my Nubian colleagues gave up hope of productive careers because of delayed or denied identity cards, I had accused most of them of being lazy. Today I understand that Kenyan Nubians, whether citizens or not, do not belong.

The Kenyan government uses both ethnicity and territory to establish belonging. Since both Nubian ethnicity and their territory of occupancy are contested by the government, most Nubians live as de facto stateless persons without adequate protection under national and international law, irrespective of the fact that they should be considered Kenyan citizens under the Constitution. In Kenya nothing defines your citizenship more than your ethnicity. Nubians face institutionalised discrimination in issuance of documents. They are subjected to a vetting process of ethnic determination in order to acquire an identity card or passports.

Kenya today does not have official figures of Nubians and does not include them in census reports. There is no official recognition of the community; the Kenyan government had classified the community as ‘other Kenyans’ or just ‘others’ and has only recently started a process of recording Nubians as a named clan of other Kenyans.

Above all, Nubians live in temporary structures throughout Kenya and often on contested lands. Most Nubians’ settlements do not have title deeds and are only occupied on a Temporary Occupational Licence (TOL), leaving the present generation of Nubians as mere squatters.

Stateless individuals and communities like the Nubians are assumed to be hopeless and helpless victims, dependent upon the goodwill of others. Under the assumption that citizenship is the only vehicle for having a civic and political voice and that therefore stateless people lack any political identity, stateless people become less than fully human and are reduced to mere targets of humanitarian assistance. All energies are thus focused on how to acquire citizenship for stateless people as fast and as easily as possible.

What are the Nubians’ issues?

Obstacles to citizenship are also faced by other minority groups in Kenya such as Kenyan Somalis and Coastal Arabs although the Nubians have experienced some progress. The real progress in Nubian experience is in their adaptation and mastery of living in Kenya without belonging…

In 2003 the then Chairperson of the Kenyan Nubians’ Council, the late Yunis Ali, encouraged a procession of Nubians marching to Kenya’s High Court thus:

“My people! For a century, we have sought a compassionate hearing from all authorities in Kenya but we got none. Today, we march to the Kenyan High Court for justice – if not to get it, then as testimony that we stood up for our rights.”

In the end, the challenge of standing up to statelessness – or any human rights abuse – is that as a victim you see it through the emotional lenses of feelings and experience; others will then judge you as subjective. When you stand apart and subject the issue to objective criteria, legal definitions limit one’s expression; most of the legal terms are not expressive enough for local realities. For Kenyan Nubians the lack of a link to the state, lack of integration and lack of social acceptance have been part of our existence. We are neither Sudanese nor accepted as Kenyans.

As a statelessness advocate, I believe that legal links are important for anyone belonging in contemporary society; however, without addressing the social acceptability of any community of a people, groups like the Nubians will continue to live from one crisis to another.

The original article was published in Forced Migration Review, 2009. No. 32.

In Brazil, as in the United States, the issue of race raises passions. Photo: United Nations

Questions of race and poverty raise difficult problems and passions in Brazil, a colossal country of 200 million people where the answers are never any more simple than they are in the United States.

A report released today by the Brazilian government and UNICEF studied the violent deaths of adolescents throughout the country, with some chilling findings. Statistical projections show that 33,000 young people in Brazil will have died as a result of violence between 2006 and 2012, and black children are more than twice as likely to be killed than those classified as white.

The fundamental question, of course, is to determine the source of all violence — and the joint report cites drug-dealing, poverty and the availability of guns. But the question about racial differences is sensitive for Brazilians. Their tendency has often been to defensively compare their country to the United States, and conclude that Brazil is fare more egalitarian, and far more racially blended.

The problem, many Brazilians say, involves class and not race, in which poor whites and poor blacks suffer equally for economic reasons, not for reasons of skin color. The argument doesn’t convince.

It is hard in Brazil to say who exactly is African-Brazilian, and which Brazilians identify themselves as having African heritage: there must be a dozen terms for different skin hues used in common discourse. “We all have African roots,” a Brazilian diplomat once told me at the Brazilian foreign ministry in Brasilia. He appeared to be Caucasian, and his last name was the name of a Portuguese count. The only people I saw there in the Palace of Itamaraty who appeared to be black were serving coffee or waiting to drive ministers to their next meeting.

Last year, there was another report about related issues from the United Nations, quoted by a Brazilian news agency, that “infant mortality among white children…is considerably lower than that registered among black children.” The same report said that while 98 percent of Brazilian young people are able to go to school, “of 660,000 students out of school, 450,000 are of African descent.”

That U.N. report said Brazil has made great strides in combating racism, and that more needs to be done.

Much can be said the same for the United States, which now has a president of African descent.

Brazil and the United States both have far to go. One need think no further than the outrageous case this week in Cambridge, Mass., where one of the nation’s most important scholars and teachers, Henry Louis Gates, was arrested on suspicion for breaking into his own house. He is an African-American who happens to live in a well-to-do neighborhood, where few people are black.

- Peter Eisner

Somalia, Zimbabwe and Sudan topped the list of failed states this year — rankings based on human rights, governance, economic activity and other indicators.

Also among the top 10 are Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Poverty is endemic in many failed or failing states; in others, the government has lost legitimacy and control. As economic pressures increase with the global financial crisis, and environmental pressures contribute to water and food shortages, even more countries are at risk of failure.

But these dire conditions have implications far beyond individual borders, as failed states — with their high rates of poverty and violence — may serve as breeding grounds for terrorists with global ambitions.

Displaced persons in Yemen, which may be on the verge of becoming a failed state. Photo: IRIN

Worldfocus.org’s weekly radio show explores what it means for a state to fail, from the impact on daily life to widespread geopolitical ripple effects.

Thank you for your questions. Worldfocus anchor Martin Savidge hosts a panel of guests:

Pauline Baker is the president of The Fund for Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing war and alleviating the conditions that cause conflict. She has also served as an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and is a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Christopher Boucek is a research associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he focuses on regional security challenges. Before joining the Carnegie Endowment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and lecturer in Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School. Boucek has written widely on the Middle East, Central Asia, and terrorism.

Georgette Gagnon is the director of the Africa Division at Human Rights Watch and led a research mission to Darfur in 2004. She previously investigated human rights violations in Rwanda and directed the Human Rights Department at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Naxalites are an assortment of violent Maoist rebel groups who stage internecine attacks on Indian government targets to bring attention to region’s blight. With about 20,000 fighters, the Naxal-Maoist Insurgency rages in 40 percent of India’s territory. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Naxalites India’s biggest threat to national security, and they continue to attract support from a wide array of castes and tribal groups.

India’s Naxal-affected districts (red signifies most influence) Map: Wikipedia user Planemad

While conducting malnutrition research in the heavily tribal state of Jharkhand — one of India’s most impoverished states — one woman told me this story:

My one-year-old son fell sick one day. The nearest health center is 20 miles away. Going there would mean losing a day’s wage. The whole family would have to go without food that day. I had other children to feed, it was not possible. My son slowly got too weak to play, to stand up and one day he died.

Villagers with stories like this strengthen the Naxal insurgency in the region. Data shows that India’s child malnutrition rate is 47 percent (as compared to 30 percent in sub-Saharan Africa). India also ranks 66th among the 88 countries in the 2008 Global Hunger Index.

Schoolchildren in heavily tribal Jharkhand on Republic Day. Photo: Flickr user premasagar

In 1967, the Naxalites started their revolutionary movement in a small West Bengal village called Naxalbari. With huge support from highly-marginalized tribal communities, the Naxalite-controlled “Red Corridor” starts in Andhra Pradesh and runs through eastern Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar.

Labeling this highly complex issue a matter of law and order, the West Bengal state government sent in police and paramilitary forces and recently banned the Maoist party after recent violence in Lalgarh, West Bengal. And by pigeonholing the Naxalites as “terrorists,” the government has further isolated Naxalite supporters.

But government forces have been accused of gross human rights violations. For each alleged government abuse, the Naxalites have responded with double the level of violence. Large-scale killings increase during elections when Naxalites take passenger trains hostage and launch attacks on police. The Naxalite ideology has led both sides onto a path of increasing bloodshed in a “brutal low-level war.”

Naxalism is a complex social issue with roots in the tremendous deprivation of millions of rural Indians. Negating the politics of development could help turn Naxalism into a true mass movement. Time will tell whether this will create a much larger civil war or be crushed by the state.

More likely than not, Bastar in Chattisgarh, Palamau in Jharkhand and the thousands of other forgotten Indian hinterlands will continue to bleed.

In the Naxal belt and beyond, millions of Indians — just like the woman who lost her son — will continue to starve.

- Anasuya Ray