Your Questions About Green Living

how could you write this paragraph in your own words?

Urban agriculture (UA) has been promoted over the last couple of years by a large number of local and national governments, urban actors and international agencies, such as UN-HABITAT’s Urban Management Programme, FAO, International Development Research Centre (IDRC- Canada), CGIAR-Urban Harvest and the International Network of Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF) as a strategy to promote food security and poverty reduction, sustainable resource use and environmental management, social integration and local participatory governance.

Urban agriculture takes place in a multi-sectoral environment, touches on a large number of urban management areas (eg. land use planning, environmental and waste management, economic development, public health, social and community development), and involves a large diversity of systems and related actors (input provision, vegetable production, aquaculture, livestock production, processing and marketing).

Why is the onus on consumers to be environmentally responsible, rather than producers?

The environment and carbon and climate change have been major issues recently. However, when we start to discuss methods in which to reduce our environmental impact and whatnot, the focus keeps coming back to what we as consumers can do, rather than what producers can do, to minimise things like carbon emissions.

Why is that?

Surely, a consumer can only use what is available to them. They can create demand for a product, but that doesn’t always mean the product will become available. If the only food my local shopping centre sells is either genetically modified or imported, then how can I be environmentally and socially conscious and buy the organic sustainably farmed fair-trade stuff?

So we can – and should – do things on an individual level in the short term (buy energysaver light bulbs, do our recycling properly, take reusable bags to the shops, recycle and compost) but what happens in a few years time if we’ve failed to properly plan and implement the major changes to the way we go about our business?

Okay, some things are still being developed for commercial use – such as solar cells which don’t use silicon – but what about the things we should’ve always been doing, like using organic permaculture practices (in short, you plant certain things together so the plants work together to provide all the natural pesticides and nutrients they need) rather than slowly degrading the soil with pesticides and fertilisers? In the long run it would be cheaper, wouldn’t it?

As a child, I never understood how letting the water run down the drain was ‘wasting’ water. I didn’t know we weren’t recycling the water.

Nature was doing a fairly good job before we butted in; why is it so hard to be sustainable now?

Can anyone read my paper and critique it?

This essay should be about the UN’s current involvement in a world affair. Does it fulfill the topic? It’s for a essay contest.
United Nations: The Chance for Millions

The United Nations (UN), founded in 1945, is a famous international organization that is dedicated to solving the problems that challenge humanity. These problems range on a wide variety of issues. Today, one of the biggest goal on the UN agenda is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.

To achieve this goal, the UN has founded the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Program (WFP), and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Each is working to fulfill the World Food Summit’s aim of eradicating global hunger and poverty: WFP with food aid, FAO through its technical expertise in agriculture, and IFAD via international financial assistance. Increasingly, the three agencies are finding joint solutions to dealing with emergencies and promoting recovery and development. #

Of these agencies, the WFP is the UN’s frontline agency in food aid. The WFP is the world’s largest international food aid organization combating hunger in underdeveloped nations with severe food shortages. The operation aims to saving lives in refugee crises and other emergencies, improve nutrition and quality of life of world’s most vulnerable people at critical times in their lives, and enable development by (a) helping people build assets that benefit them directly; (b) promoting the self-reliance of poor people and communities.# The agency also provides the logistics support necessary to get food aid to the right people at the right time and in the right place by land, air, and sea 24/7. The WFP works to put hunger at the center of the international agenda, promoting policies, strategies and operations that directly benefit the poor and hungry.#

The WFP runs emergency and development projects in 78 countries worldwide. In 2006, they distributed food to 87.8 million of the poorest people in the world, including 58.8 million children. Of those, 24.3 million people are in development programs and 63.4 million are beneficiaries in emergency and protracted relief and recovery operations. Since it was founded in 1962, WFP has fed more than 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people and invested more than $30 billion dollars in development and emergency relief.#

The WFP’s innovative projects not only put food on the tables of the weakest and poorest: jobless mothers, school children, landless farmers and HIV orphans. They also help the hungry to secure food and an income by themselves so they can break out of the poverty trap and build a sustainable future. The WFP school meals encourage hungry children to attend school with their school feeding formula: food attracts hungry children to school. An education broadens their options, helping to lift them out of poverty. With the WFP’s development projects, workers are paid not with money, but with food rations to build vital new infrastructure that will increase the food security of households or communities. The special role of WFP food assistance is to give people the chance to take the first steps out of the hunger trap.#

With the help of the United Nations’ World Food Program, millions of people each year are given hope 365 days a year. They are given a chance to live and re-build their lives to support themselves and their families. Most of all, children are given a chance to change their future.

Private pay shrinks to an all time low, while Govt pay-outs are at all time high, Is this what Obama wanted?

Sounds like centrally run, Govt based economy, doesn’t it?
Look at this quote from the USA Today article…”Economist Veronique de Rugy of the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University says the riots in Greece over cutting benefits to close a huge budget deficit are a warning about unsustainable income programs. ” …Aren’t we headed in the same direction as Greece?

excerpt…
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.
At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-05-24-income-shifts-from-private-sector_N.htm
BOOKISH: If you wnat to question the numbers, I believe you’ll have to interrogate the USA Today, since this is their research.

Secondly, it’s easy t ounderstand, not difficult….private pay, NOW makes up the smaller part of income!! AND Govt pay-outs, the biggest…see, easy. You don’t need to try and confuse things when it’s this straight forward.
NOKILLI: How can you be so lost? Socialism is a result of free markets? You must be having a bad day…this is a result of Govt taking over most of the traditional roles of people and people becoming more nad more lazy, ignorant, and addicted to an easy, (albeit very low) level of income…because life is hard and things aren’t fair

Why can’t projects like this get funding?

Hello! Malawi and Mozambique two of the poorest African nations have identified and agreed to try to obtain assistance and funding to develop the Shire-Zambezi Waterway and the Milange District agricultural development project. This fertile land could not only provide food security for both countries, but could provide training centers to train the local farmers in organic, sustainable farming and using the Waterway to transport the surplus to the delta for export. (awjokela@yahoo.com)