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The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) met in Angola last week for the Regional Conference for Africa. The hot topic was food security in Africa, an issue that never fails to elicit feverish hand-wringing. The fretting was all the worse this time because the conference came just days after the release of a new UN report about climate change’s potentially devastating impact on food security in Africa.

Director-General Jacques Diouf demanded that the global community give his continent’s agricultural situation some urgent attention. “In sub-Saharan Africa, since 2009, over 265 million people are malnourished and 30 percent of the population suffers from hunger,” Diouf’s opening statement said.

Far from claiming that genetically modified seeds and other technological fixes are going to be the continent’s way out of this looming dilemma, however — a favorite argument of many hand-wringers — Diouf stated that the global attention on food security “should be an opportunity to support small producers and strengthen family farming.”

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Although Sunoco, Shell and Chevron report reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2009, part of the declines can be attributed to lower production demand.

Sunoco has reduced its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at its refineries and chemical plants by more than 19 percent since 1990, according to the company’s 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report. Refinery GHG emissions dropped by 15 percent and GHG emissions from chemical plants fell by nearly 12 percent in 2009, compared to 2008. The company attributes the reductions to improved greenhouse gas inventories and calculation factors for electricity.

When normalized on a per barrel of throughput basis, GHG emissions decreased at Sunoco’s refineries by 4.1 percent from 2008, and were 9.6 percent lower than 1990. Chemical plant emissions — per pound of production — increased 25.6 percent when compared with 2008, and increased 9.1 percent over 1990 levels. The company says production levels decreased 29.8 percent versus 2008 and 40.5 percent versus the baseline.

The oil company’s refineries and chemical plants also have reduced air exceedances by more than 20 percent, compared to 2008, through investments in emissions control technology and other plant modifications. Click here for a complete performance summary.

Sunoco reports that energy consumption decreased by 11.4 percent at its refineries and chemical plants in 2009, compared to 2008. However, production decreased in 2009 by 11.7 percent at the refineries and by 29.8 percent at the chemical plants, when compared with 2008.

Similarly, Chevron touts its GHG emission cuts. In 2009, the oil company reduced its emissions by approximately 2.2 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Chevron also reduced GHG emissions from flaring by eight percent in 2009, compared to 2008, and advanced projects that will continue to reduce GHG emissions from flaring in Angola, Kazakhstan and Nigeria, according to the company’s 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report (PDF).

Chevron estimates that combustion of its products resulted in emissions of approximately 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2009, approximately 7 percent more than the 382 million metric tons in 2008.

Chevron has increased its own energy efficiency by 30 percent since 1992.

In 2009, Chevron approved the $37 billion Gorgon natural gas project off the northwest coast of Australia, the largest energy project in the company’s history. To reduce carbon emissions, the project plans to capture and reinject carbon dioxide (CO2) from natural gas production. This project will inject four times more CO2 than any other project, according to the report.

In the area of renewable energy, Chevron Energy Solutions (CES) has several projects in the United States to improve energy efficiency and install renewable power technologies at schools, federal facilities and Chevron facilities.

In 2010, Chevron is adding a solar system to power the pumps and pipelines at its Kern River oil field facility and is planning a 1 megawatt concentrating photovoltaic solar facility at a molybdenum nine in New Mexico.

Shell also reports lower GHG emissions for 2009. The energy company’s direct GHG emissions from facilities it operates were 67 million tonnes on a CO2-equivalent basis in 2009, 11 percent lower than in 2008 and around 35 percent below 1990 levels, according to the company’s Sustainability Report for 2009 (PDF). The company attributes the decline to several factors including improved operational performance, lower demand for its products due to the economic downturn, some shut-in production in Nigeria and the sale of some facilities.

The company’s total GHG emissions in 2009, around 11 percent came from the flaring of gas in its upstream business. Some was operational flaring for safety reasons and during the start-up of facilities, but the company said it is working to reduce operational flaring.

The company expects that natural gas will be more than 50 percent of its energy output by about 2012. This is expected to reduce CO2 emissions since it produces up to 70 percent less CO2 than coal when used to generate the same amount of electricity.

Lower-carbon biofuels also will become a greater part of Shell’s efforts to reduce CO2 from the transport fuels mix. In 2009, Shell made investments in developing advanced fuels and lubricants as well as improving its technologies to reduce emissions. Over the past five years, the company has spent $2 billion on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and alternative energies, including biofuels.

Shell is also participating in several CCS projects including the Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in Australia, of which it holds a 25 percent interest, and the Mongstad, Norway project, which is expected to capture up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from 2011. Other CCS projects include Shell’s proposed Quest project in Canada and the Barendrecht CCS project in the Netherlands.

Here’s how they stack up in GGH emission reductions.

Ben Lebrave, left, in Lomé, with a member of the group called Milenivo. “They mostly make ‘crunk’ style hip hop,” he tells me in an email.

Imagine getting off the airplane in Accra, Ghana and these are your directions:

“In west airport, ask for the north Dzorwulu (”djuwulu”) traffic light by the Fiesta Royale hotel. At that traffic light, there are women selling food, look for the place with the most people, where there are also taxis. There is a trotro station, tell the women you’re looking for sexy eyes, and tell her you’re looking for Kubolor, she’ll show you the way…”

These are the directions that Ben Lebrave has to guide him. Lebrave is a 30-year old French man currently living in Los Angeles who has just embarked on a month-long trip starting in Accra, Ghana, where he will meet with musicians like Kubolor and set-up partnerships to develop his budding record label, Akwaaba music.

Before he left in mid-April, I met up with Lebrave at a cafe in Venice Beach to talk about his previous three trips to Africa and his plans with this trip: to collect more music and set up recording partnerships with recording studios in Ghana.  Lebrave launched Akwaaba Music in 2008, with one ultimate goal: “to make African music as easily available anywhere as any music.”

Lebrave, who has worked for Moonshine Music and Digital Media Group was inspired to set out on his own to create an African record label when he took a one-week trip to Ghana. He had realized that his job at Digital Media Group was about to be cut and was in search of exotic music, rather than the indie genre he’d been working with.

“The cabby from the airport starts talking to me,” Lebrave recalls. “The cabby tells me, ‘The hotel where you’re going is not so great. Why are you here? You want to hear music?’ Then, he takes me to a place with a crazy base sound system.”

“Being in a place with blasted loud music was so refreshing,” Lebrave remarks, as a contrast to his experience as a DJ in Los Angeles where he had to obey a restrictive rules with regards to curfew and noise.

“It’s poor – a couple plastic tables, fridges, a couple subwoofers (a little soundsystem) - but much more interesting than what I had heard in hip hop or reggaeton, with distinctly Ghanaian chords.”

In 2006, Lebrave appeared in a Big Mac commercial and he used the $35,000 he earned from that commercial to strike out on his own and fund future trips to Senegal, Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin, and Angola.

He says that his relationship with Akwaaba and love of travel gives him a more in-touch approach to bringing African music across the Atlantic.

“There’s a growing interest in Africa but no one goes. Even people in South Africa don’t go and fly to Africa to meet with musicians on their turf,” he says.

Author John Collins reported in 2000 that so-called “world” music amounted to 14 percent of global record sales and that African music is the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. market, increasing about 40 percent per year since 1995 (“The Generational Factor in Ghanaian Music” p.72.).

But Lebrave isn’t sure how the importation of music from Africa to America officially translates into the official fair trade label. He says this concept is called “equitable trade” in French. However, “Fair Trade” is applied to paying people a decent wage, but in his case he is sharing ownership of right to an artist’s music.

When he launched Akwaaba and told people it was a fair trade label, people thought he was using the label as an excuse to compensate for mediocre music.

“They’d come back to me and say, ‘Dude I thought your music was fair trade. It’s actually pretty good.’”

“No standards have been developed for music,” David Funkhouser of TransFair USA wrote in an email to me. ”TransFair USA has ownership rights to the phrase “Fair Trade Certified” and they certify products (coffee, tea, chocolate, flowers, olive oil, etc.) for which standards have been established.”

Lebrave says that in standard music industry contracts, the royalty rates are 10 percent, but with Akwaaba, he pays the artists 50 percent of the profits using Western Union, since most artists don’t have a bank account.

In November 2008, Lebrave put out Akwaaba’s first compilation. The second compilation came out in February 2009, and since then he’s released one compilation per month.

According to an Internet statistics site, the Akwaaba website currently has about 3,000 views per day. Since January of 2010, Lebrave has sold 1,000-3,000 songs per month, mostly on iTunes, and is increasingly selling directly off BandCamp for a dollar per song. “Just A Band” a Kenyan group, accounted for nearly half of those sales. “Another slightly more glorious amount,” he points to, is a recent deal where a TV show will pay $3,500 for a song by Iba Diabate.

Lebrave writes from Ghana today of one of his first meetings, with Panji of Pigen Music, “he considers that taking an African artist and modifying his sound to appeal to a specifically western audience is doomed for failure. We couldn’t agree more!”

To keep up with Lebrave’s blog and his latest beats, you can check out: www.akwaabamusic.com. One of my personal favorites is “Sunrise” by Just A Band, with a hushing, sexy and mellow melody set over a clucking of background percussion that carries the song’s current.

by Andrew Williams

For many of us in the so-called developed world, the ability to turn on the tap for clean, fresh water to drink, cook and wash with is taken for granted.  However, for many others, access to a ready supply of disease-free water remains a distant dream.

The stark truth is that over a billion people have little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water, causing 1.8 million people to die every year from diarrheal diseases, and contributing to the deaths of a further 1.3 million from malaria.

World Water Day

In an effort to tackle these serious and ongoing issues, the theme of today’s United Nations International World Water Day is “Clean Water for a Healthy World,”  reflecting the importance of water quality alongside quantity of the resource in water management efforts.

World Water Day is held annually on 22 March to focus attention on the vital importance of freshwater and promote the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

Global water quality is undergoing rapid decline, mainly as a result of population growth and rapid urbanization, as well as industrial activities such as the discharge of pathogens and chemicals into the environment.  This year’s campaign is aimed at raising awareness about sustaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being by encouraging governments, organizations, communities, and individuals around the world to actively engage in proactively addressing water quality.

Nestlé and Project WET

To showcase its efforts to increase awareness about water quality and sustainability, Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) has chosen to mark this year’s World Water Day by highlighting its ongoing commitment to educate children about issues related to managing and protecting water resources.

NWNA is the largest corporate sponsor of Project WET, (Water Education for Teachers), an international scientific and educational program, aiming to educate children on the importance of water and the need to protect it.  The program uses hands-on investigations, demonstrations, science experiments, educational games and stories, to stimulate understanding of water resources.  Materials are used by schoolteachers to facilitate teaching their pupils on the topic and come in the form of “ready-to-go” teaching material.

Since 1997, NWNA support has enabled Project WET to train some 340,000 educators and reach more than three million children and 25 million students, in almost 50 countries, with education focused on important topics including water resource management, hydration and health, and environmental stewardship.

A “Water Neutral” Coca Cola?

Coca Cola and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) used World Water Day to announce an additional joint investment of $12.7 million in their global partnership, the Water and Development Alliance (WADA), to support eight new multi-year programs throughout sub-Saharan Africa in Angola, Burundi, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania.  With the latest funding, Coca Cola said that a total of $28.1 million has been committed since 2005 to 32 WADA projects in 22 countries.

In 2007, Coca Cola pledged to become “water neutral” and return to nature all the water used by its bottling plants.  The pledge coincided with the announcement of a partnership with WWF to conserve and protect freshwater resources around the planet, including a commitment to help conserve seven freshwater river basins, support more efficient water management in the company’s operations, and reduce the company’s carbon footprint.

The company’s efforts focus on three main areas:

• Reducing the water used to produce its beverages;
• Recycling water used in manufacturing processes – returning all water used for global manufacturing processes to the environment at a level that supports aquatic life and agriculture by the end of 2010; and,
• Replenishing water in communities and nature – balancing the water used in its finished beverages.

In practical terms, the company says its partnership with WWF will see a Coca-Cola hydrogeologist working with a WWF scientist to design integrated watershed management tools and metrics to measure their impact.  It will also involve cooperation with a WWF expert on sustainable agriculture to support more efficient irrigation practices throughout its agricultural supply chain.

Conservation efforts will focus on seven of the world’s most important freshwater river basins: China’s Yangtze; southeast Asia’s Mekong; the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo in the US and Mexico; the rivers and streams of the south-eastern United States; the water basins of the Mesoamerican Caribbean Reef; the East Africa basin of Lake Malawi; and Europe’s Danube River.

Pepsi’s Water Challenge

PepsiCo, meanwhile, today announced new global goals to provide access to safe water to three million people in developing countries by 2015 “and to continuously strive for positive water balance in company operations in water-distressed areas.”

Since 2005, PepsiCo says the company and its foundation have committed more than $15 million to organizations working to bring safe water to developing countries, including India, China and Africa.

In India, PepsiCo says its beverage operations reduced water use in manufacturing by more than 45 percent and conserved more than 3 billion liters of water since 2007, thereby “achieving positive water balance – giving back more water than the company consumed.”

Reduced water consumption practices are spurring new technologies involving other natural resources, PepsiCo says.  In the U.S., the company has begun cleaning new Gatorade bottles with purified air instead of rinsing with water.  In the U.K., PepsiCo Walkers’ business has already reduced water usage at its largest potato chip facility by 42 percent between 2001 and 2007. One trick: capturing the water that is naturally contained in potatoes and using it to make manufacturing facilities more water self-sufficient.

UNSHAKEN

Today’s World Water Day also sees the launch of UNSHAKEN, a charity: water campaign to fund long-term water solutions for areas of greatest need in rural Haiti.  In tandem with local partners, charity: water, a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations, has been funding safe water and sanitation projects in Haiti for two years.

Since the earthquake earlier this year, more than a million people have fled the capital Port-au-Prince to the countryside, where they have minimal or no access to clean, safe water.  charity: water says that whereas a third of the nation previously lacked access to safe water, the impact of the quake has made the situation even more devastating.  As the rural communities continue to swell, so does the risk of deadly waterborne diseases. charity: water is committed to supporting long-term water and sanitation solutions in Haiti.

UNSHAKEN aims to raise awareness of the plight of Haitian’s by telling the stories of eleven areas that have swelled with those displaced since the earthquake and now need long-term water solutions more than ever.  Each region’s story, complete with photos and GPS coordinates, will be published on the campaigns’ website. In the coming months, the charity also plans to raise $1.3 million to supply more than 40,000 people in these areas with clean, safe drinking water.

Prior to today’s official launch, the campaign has enjoyed considerable support from companies, including retailer Urban Outfitters, which is selling a custom Haiti relief T-shirt, designed by eco-brand Apolis Activism, to fund clean water for at least 1,500 people.

Collaborations and Potential Conflict

Even though businesses are launching initiatives like these, they are likely to continue confronting the pressing challenges posed by inadequate water quality.

One key emerging theme in the process is the number of global companies that have chosen to work in collaboration with charities and NGOs to more effectively reach out to local communities.  The strategy lends credibility to initiatives and enables businesses to tap into existing networks of support.  If managed correctly, such collaborative approaches can also serve to enhance the reputation of the participating company, not least via an association with organizations that often possess unimpeachable social and environment credentials.

However, such high profile commitments and pledges do not come without potential downsides for corporate and brand reputation.  Coca Cola, for example, has been the target of campaigning in India, where communities located in the neighborhood of manufacturing sites have complained of water depletion and pollution.  In early March, a non-profit activist organization, India Resource Center, said Coca Cola’s continued operations of a plant in water-stressed Kala Dera in Jaipur, India, “are nothing short of criminal.”

(Update:  Following publication of this article, BBC News reported that Coca Cola has been asked by the Indian state of Kerala to pay $47 million in compensation for alleged environmental damage at a bottling plant that was closed in 2005.   Coca Cola has insisted that the charges are unfounded.)

The opposition shows that, unlike carbon, the concept of “neutralising” water use is not well defined and presents a major challenge for the partnership.  This is because CO² acts globally on the atmosphere.  If a company emits carbon in one area and then offsets it by planting trees in another, perhaps on the other side of the world, the net result to the atmosphere and climate is neutral.  However, since water is very much a local resource, villagers faced with an empty well will take no comfort from the fact that the same amount of water has been pumped into a river on the other side of the world, like, say, the Rio Grande, one of the rivers included under the Coca Cola/ WWF watershed programme.

Whilst businesses should rightly be applauded for any efforts they make to combat the appalling problems caused by inadequate access to clean and safe water, many campaigners would also point to the pressing need for them to be ever more mindful of the impact their activities can have on the natural environment and some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

Andrew Williams (TheGreenExpert@btinternet.com) is a U.K.-based freelance writer.

Photo: Walter J. Pilsak, Waldsassen, Germany, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

According to a recent AngolaPress article, 262 youths in the southern Angola province of Cuene received microloans in 2009 from the “Angola Youth” microcredit program.The program was launched in 2007 by Angola’s Ministry of Youth and Sports. Although the amount disbursed to date has not been released, the program will …