Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Nutrition’ Category

The sweetness of the apricots offsets the spiciness of the curry in this dish which I am sure has no connection with India at all.   It is a very quick and easy vegan dish.   I usually serve it with brown rice mixed with fried onions and green peas.  I saw this recipe once about 20 years ago, and I’ve been making it from memory ever since. I have no idea if the way I make it now has any connection with the original recipe. But I thought I should write it down while I can remember it.  (If you don’t want to do the spices you can buy a jar of curry paste.  But they don’t sell those here in Addis Ababa.)

Serves 4.

200g dried apricots
100ml orange juice
400g soaked and cooked (or tinned) chick peas
2 medium onions
2 cloves garlic
3cm ginger
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
1 tsp garam masala

Slice the dried apricots and soak them for an hour in the orange juice.

Dice the onions, and fry them until they go soft. Add the garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, turmeric and cayenne. Fry for 2-3 more minutes.  Add the onion and spice mix to the cooked chick peas.

Pour any surplus juice off the apricots (it is delicious to drink, by the way).  Add the apricots to the chickpeas and onions. Add some water if needed and stir.

Cook on a medium ring for 30 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent the mixture from burning.

As well as rice, consider serving with a fresh raita (yoghurt and diced cucumber).

Guzzling coffee may cut heart disease – health – 16 June 2008 – New Scientist

The researchers found that women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who had more than five cups a day were 44% less likely to die.

A joint project linking the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for Global Development presented recommendations for transforming U.S. foreign assistance this morning.  The recommendation is for a new government department for global development, based on the British model for development policy.

(Full disclosure: I am the author of the chapter of the report which describes the British model which the group recommends.)

The book, Security by Other Means, will be published shortly. The near final version is online here.  This from the website for the project:

In a world transformed by globalization and challenged by terrorism, foreign aid has assumed renewed importance as a foreign policy tool. While the results of more than forty years of development assistance show some successes, foreign aid is currently dispersed between many agencies and branches of government in a manner that inhibits formulation and implementation of a coherent, effective strategy.

The current political climate is receptive to a transition toward greater accountability and effectiveness in development aid. Because this transition is clearly an imperative but has not yet been comprehensively addressed, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have conducted a joint study that both assesses the current structures of foreign assistance and makes recommendations for efficient coordination.

Drawing on expertise from the full range of agencies whose policies affect foreign aid, Security by Other Means examines foreign assistance across four categories reflecting the interests that aid furthers: security, economic, humanitarian, and political.

The International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill will today be voted on for its third reading by the House of Commons.  The bill requires the government to produce an annual report assessing progress toward the 0.7% target, the UN's millennium goals and the effectiveness of aid.

As the second-reading debate showed, there is considerable support for this bill on both sides of the House. 

Update: the Bill passed the House of Commons unanimously. 

Ethan Zuckerman comments on the lack of media interest (either mainstream or online) in the continuing conlicts in Darfur and in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  He also reports the study in the Lancet of the number of deaths in the DRC, which I reported on Friday.

It is shameful that, with the honourable exception of Nicholas Kristof, these unfolding disasters have had almost no media attention.
 

Who wouldn’t want a $100 laptop? Most of the world’s poor, at least for now.

As usual, Russell Southwood at Balancing Act gets it right:

Try going to the informal settlements of most major African cities and explain to potential customers why they might want a cheap PDA or indeed a cheap laptop. Negroponte is giving them away because he knows what an unbearably difficult task it would be to have to actually sell the things to people who might actually want them and have the money to buy them.

Somehow I don’t think Negroponte’s plan is going to work any better than Simputer.

But take a look at Ndiyo.  (The BBC reported it in April.)  That looks to me as if it might be a real success.

More from World Changing and Ethan Zuckerman. 

A fascinating new paper from the National Bureau for Economic research finds that adult mortality alone can account for all of Africa’s growth shortfall over the 1960-2000 period.

This comprehensive analytical and statistical study finds that high adult mortality induces people to invest less, accumulate less human capital, have a large number of children rather than fewer, children who are likely to survive and have be economically productive. This, in turns, lowers economic growth. The effect is economically very substantial. The linkage with fertility is particularly strong: as countries develop, the reduction in mortality precedes, and appears to cause, the fall in fertility (and not the other way round).

In my view, this has important policy implications. We should be careful about blaming Africa’s poor performance on its governments and institutions: this paper finds that the whole of Africa’s poor economic performance can be explained statistically by higher levels of mortality.  Some of this may be an indirect result of poor governance; but the burden of tropical disease is also substantially higher in Africa; and the paper points out that poverty can be self-perpetuating, because countries are too poor to be able to devote resources to fighting diseases and reducing mortality. This suggests that we should focus on fighting disease as a significant investment in reducing poverty and helping to break out of this vicious circle. The proposal  to create market incentives for the development of new vaccines for malaria, AIDS and TB, by promising to buy them if they are developed, would be an excellent start (full disclosure: this is what I work on).

It is also worth noting that this analysis tends to back Jeff Sachs’s claim that there is a poverty trap, as opposed to Bill Easterly’s scepticism which I reported last month.

Source: Death and Development, Peter Lorentzen, John McMillan & Romain Wacziarg NBER Working Paper 11620 (registration required; send me an email if you want me to send you a copy)

Hat tip: Stationery Bandit

The White House is clear that it did not agree to any additional aid for Africa in Gleneagles.

Here is an extract from the transcript of the press briefing, given on Air Force One on the way home, by Faryar Shirzad, the Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics. He’s also the United States G8 Sherpa (that is, the official responsible for representing the President in the run-up to the summit).

Q I believe there was an agreement on Africa aid to go up to $50 billion — was it $50 million or — does the administration support that, because I know in the past the President didn’t want a specific number agreed to.

MR. SHIRZAD: It’s a good question. The question had to do with that there was a $50 billion aid commitment to Africa. What the document reflected was a — what the leaders’ text reflected was that the individual G8 countries, as well as the European Union, had together committed to increase aid by $25 billion in a year to Africa. So there wasn’t a new commitment reflected in the text, but it was an articulation of previous commitments that were already made. …

Q So there’s no promise of new money from the U.S. in that statement.

MR. SHIRZAD: No, I think what that portion of the leaders’ text was supposed to highlight is that while the leaders came to Gleneagles to press the issue of Africa, there’s also a broader development challenge that they reflected in their leaders’ text, and that is the challenge that the OECD has, in their estimation, said they expect development assistance will increase by $50 billion. So it’s not a commitment, but it’s a reflection of an outside estimate that’s been made on that issue.

Meskel Square has an evocative post about Lake Langano in Ethiopia.  When we lived in Ethiopia, we used to visit Langano (in part to get away from the high altitude in Addis Ababa).  We stayed in the cottages in his picture.

He asks for nominations for favourite places in Ethiopia. This is tough, because there are so many to choose from.  I nominated Lalibela, which Grethe and I visited on our cycling trip through Northern Ethiopia.

I have the greatest sympathy for the family of Charlie Bell, the Chief Executive of McDonalds who died on Sunday of cancer of the colon at the age of 43. That is a tragically young age for a man who should have had a great future. It is all the more saddening because it follows the death from a heart attack of his predecessor, Jim Cantalupo, who died aged 60 last April. It may seem distasteful to mention this, but you can’t help wondering if the premature deaths of these two men are related to their product. In American business circles you often hear companies say that they should "eat their own dogfood". I wonder if that is advice that the senior executives of McDonalds would do better to ignore.

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune… to lose both seems like carelessness." The Importance of Being Ernest, Oscar Wilde