Kujua

According to experts, Australia’s  million-square-kilometer Murray-Darling River Basin faces a very bleak future due to ongoing global warming. The nation’s main foodbowl has been besieged by drought for the last decade and reports estimate things are only going to get worse.

“This is a massive environmental disaster on our own doorstep,” said Lesly Fischer a ranch owner who has been forced to sell over 700 cattle because of increasingly saline water supplies for her livestock.

The country’s Department of Climate Change expects more droughts and states the decrease in rainfall, especially in south-eastern Australia, is directly linked to global warming.  As is stands today, only approximately 6 percent of Australia’s land is considered farmable and experts are predicting the country’s agricultural production could fall by 92 per cent by 2100.

The Obama administration committed itself Tuesday to supporting the creation of a United Nations commission of inquiry into alleged human rights abuses and war crimes perpetrated by Burma’s State Peace and Development Council.

The SPDC, led by Senior General Than Shwe, is a military junta that has been running the Southeast Asian nation since 1988. The junta has been accused of numerous serious crimes against humanity including arbitrary executions, political imprisonment and the recruitment of child soldiers.

The U.N. Secretary-General, in fact, has cited the SPDC in four consecutive reports to the Security Council as being in violation of international laws prohibiting the use of child soldiers. According to some estimates by Human Rights Watch, there are now thousands of children under the age of sixteen being forced to serve in its army, the Tatmadaw.

According to the U.S. State Department’s Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act Report 2010 , only approximately 17% of Nigerians have access to pipe-fed water. Additionally, the report highlights the fact that less than 30% of the population has what would be considered adequate sanitation.

“Under the Nigerian constitution, state and local governments are responsible for providing basic services, including water and sanitation services. However, few of the 36 states or 774 local governments appear able to carry out this mandate.”

The Act, which was signed into law by President Bush in 2005, makes access to safe water and sanitation for developing countries a specific policy objective of U.S. foreign assistance programs.

While the U.S. has intensified efforts to improve access to water supply and sanitation in sub-Saharan Africa, spending $2.1 million in Nigeria in 2009, it is clear there is a lot more work to be done to make these things a reality for the vast majority of people living in impoverished countries worldwide.

Gabriel Opio, the Ugandan Minister of Gender, Labor and Social affairs stresses that malnutrition is still affecting upwards of 19% of the Ugandan people because of unchecked population growth in his country.

“Child malnutrition continues to be an important development challenge for our nation. Although the prevalence of stunted children under five years has declined over the past 15 years from 45% to 39%, it is too small to match population growth,” observed Opio.

The Minister estimates that 11% of children are already stunted at birth as a result of the poor dietary intake of their mothers and states that over 50% of deaths of children under five years are related to malnutrition.