Earlier this month, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argued that Africa needs Western countries to cut long term aid that has brought dependency, distorted economies and fuelled bureaucracy and corruption. The comments on the blog posting suggested that many readers agreed. In a response, Savio Carvalho, Uganda country director for aid agency Oxfam GB, says that aid can help the continent escape poverty - if done in the right way:

In early January, I travelled to war-ravaged northern Uganda to a dusty village in Pobura and Kal parish in Kitgum District. We were there to see the completion of a 16km dirt road constructed by the community with support from Oxfam under an EU-funded programme.

The road is bringing benefits in the form of access to markets, education and health care. Some parents say their daughters feel safer walking to school on the road instead of through the bushes. Many families have used the wages earned from construction work to pay for school fees and medical treatment. This is the impact of aid.

Having lived and worked in east Africa, I have witnessed the positive effects of aid. But done badly, it can be very limiting and even has the potential to create more harm. To avoid this, it must be provided within an enabling environment in which it is used as a catalyst for change and not as an end in itself. Governments must show leadership through an accountable system.

For individuals, access to resources – including aid - is like an investment. Aid can build up poor people’s assets, support good governance and enhance skills and capacities to bring about transformation. But it can become a bane when it makes communities dependent, lazy and hopeless. Governments, aid agencies and the United Nations need to ensure the delivery of aid is well planned and coordinated, leading to higher self-reliance among poor communities.

Aid is also beneficial when trade is fair. There are several examples in Africa, like the case of coffee farmers in Uganda, where aid has been used effectively to improve the overall quality of the coffee seeds, thereby giving farmers better prices for their produce. When they have access to markets at home and abroad, they generate income which is ploughed back into increased output, better access to health and education, and overall improvement in the quality of their lives. To make this happen, developed countries need to stop procrastinating and put in place fair trade practices.

Aid works well if governments are accountable – in other words, when they are responsible and encourage active citizenship. On this continent, civil society is still weak and needs to be nourished. But stopping aid will not resolve frustrations about poor governance, which is partly a result of weak public scrutiny. Aid should be used to help fight corruption and promote accountability through active input from ordinary people.

As I have argued here, receiving aid is not just an act of charity. It should be understood as the right of poor communities to a life of dignity. As stated in international conventions, people have a right to good health, food, water and education. We all need to ensure the planet’s resources are equitably distributed. As Mahatma Gandhi said, you must be the change you want to see in the world.

So what do you think? Which argument is most convincing?

The Rohingyas, a Muslim minority fleeing oppression and hardship in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, have been called one of the most persecuted people on earth. But they have seldom hit the headlines -- until recently, that is. More than 500 Rohingyas are feared to have drowned since early December after being towed out to sea by the Thai military and abandoned in rickety boats. The army has admitted cutting them loose, but said they had food and water and denied sabotaging the engines of the boats.

(Photo: Rohingyas in immigration area in soutwestern Thailand, 31 Jan 2009/Sukree Sukplang)

The Rohingyas are becoming a headache for Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia where they have washed up. Indonesian authorities this week rescued 198 Rohingya boat people off the coast of Aceh, after three weeks at sea. Buddhist Thailand and mostly Muslim Indonesia call them economic migrants looking for work at a time when countries in the region, like everywhere else, are in an economic downturn. But human rights groups such as Amnesty International are calling on governments in the region to provide assistance to the Rohingyas and let the UNHCR  have access to them.

Myanmar's generals have a shabby enough record with their Buddhist majority. The brutal suppression of monk-led protests that killed at least 31 people in September 2007 and the continued detention of opposition icon and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi bear witness to that. But their treatment of ethnic minorities, including the Muslim Rohingyas and the Christian Chin people in the mountainous Northwest -- where insurgents have been fighting for autonomy -- have been especially brutal. They are not oppressed because of their faith alone, but their faith and ethnicity make them targets. The military government does not recognise them as one of the country's 130-odd ethnic minorities. They are forbidden from marrying or traveling without permission and have no legal right to own land.

(Photo: Thai policeman with Rohingyas at immigration area in southwest Thailand, 31 Jan 2009/Sukree Sukplang)

Most Rohingyas come from Rakhine State, also known as Arakan State, in northwest Myanmar, abutting the border with Bangladesh.  Their roots go back at least to 1821, when Britain annexed the region as a province of British India and brought in large numbers of Bengali-speaking Muslim labourers. When Burma won independence from Britain in 1948, the Bengali-speaking Muslim population near the border exceeded that of the Buddhists, leading to secessionist tensions. This translated into harassment following the 1962 coup that has led to nearly five decades of military rule by the ethnic Burman majority. Thousands fled to Bangladesh to escape a 1978 military census of the Rohingyas called "Operation Dragon."

Refugees typically leave Rakhaine state for Bangladesh first before taking off in their flimsy fishing boats to find a new life elsewhere in Southeast Asia. On a recent Reuters visit to a Bangladeshi refugee camp, our correspondent Nizam Ahmed heard harrowing tales of being rape, torture and slave labour. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says 200,000 Rohingyas now live a perilous, stateless existence in Bangladesh. As a result, thousands have fled to try to start new lives, chancing their luck in rickety wooden boats they hope will get them to Malaysia, home to 14,300 official Rohingya refugees and maybe half as many again unregistered ones.

(Photo: Rohingya refugees prepare lunch at a naval base in Indonesia's Sabang Island, 30 Jan 2009/Tarmizy Harva)

To Myanmar's generals, the Rohingyas are a suspect lot who support local insurgencies that threaten the unity of the country. To Myanmar's neighbours, they are fresh wave of boat people in Asia's endless migrations impelled by destitution. To human rights and religious groups, they are persecuted minorities. As for the desperate and stateless Rohingyas who sail off in flimsy boats hoping to wash up on a friendly shore, they just need somewhere to call home.

It’s not easy being the secretary-general of the United Nations.

For three weeks, the South Korean U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon has been urging Israel and Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza Strip to stop their fighting.  He has described himself as “deeply alarmed” and said he “deplores” the latest war to erupt in the Middle East. Ban said it has caused an “unbearable” number of casualties – over 1,000 Palestinians and 13 Israelis have died since the war began on Dec. 27.

But his appeals – backed by a legally binding U.N. Security Council resolution urging an immediate ceasefire – have fallen on deaf ears.  The Israeli offensive has intensified and Hamas militants have continued to fire rockets at southern Israel.

That is not the only problem dogging Ban on his week-long tour of the Middle East, which he described as “a mission of peace”.  The U.N. plane assigned to carry Ban, his aides, and a throng of reporters and their gear is too small.

It was clear that the group needed a bigger plane when we left Cairo for the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday.  The luggage hold was so overwhelmed by suitcases and television gear that the flight crew had to cram luggage under nearly every seat in the narrow aircraft, which seats just over 50 passengers.

Journalists and U.N. officials complained about the lack of leg room, but we survived the flight and landed safely in Jordan.

The situation worsened overnight with the arrival of yet another television crew with all their gear (but minus their personal luggage which ended up somewhere else on the Eurasian continent). While we were waiting to board the plane for the brief flight to Israel, U.N. officials warned reporters that there were safety concerns.  There may be too much luggage and too many people for the tiny plane, they said.  Sitting in the VIP lounge at Amman airport, we wondered if the secretary-general’s hopes of bringing his peace mission to the leaders of Israel might be dashed from the start – or at least seriously delayed.

But the fears of those in doubt were misplaced – for this was the little plane that could.

After a brief delay during which the Canadian crew stuffed baggage into every nook and cranny of the little aircraft, Ban’s entourage was marched onto the tarmac and seated on the plane.  We were pleasantly surprised that the resourceful Canadians had managed to restore most of the legroom throughout the plane.

Soon we were in the air, headed for Ben Gurion airport.  Some 45 minutes later we landed in Israel, where we said goodbye to the little plane and Ban Ki-moon told Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defence Minister Ehud Barak once again that it was time to end their offensive in the Gaza Strip.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

Voices get loud and excited over the radio Reuters news crews use in Gaza to call in the latest information. Some people complain there are no “Western reporters” inside. But we all work for Reuters, a global agency that sets the international standard.

After two full weeks of bombardment we are all worried about our families but we work and work the story. We hope it will stop.

“They bombed a car in Beit Lahiyah,” says one colleague working in northern Gaza.

“Three dead arrived in Shifa hospital,” says another in Gaza’s largest hospital.

“Several people were injured when Israeli planes bombed the tunnels,” said a third from southern Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt.

I field these calls in our office where we have put duct tape crosses on every window to limit flying glass if a strike is too close. Still, the largest window in the hall was blown out.

We have a fixed camera on our high-rise building but our cameramen are being cautious not to point their cameras from the windows, in case they are mistaken for weapons. (Such mistakes were given as the reasons why a US tank blasted our Baghdad bureau in 2003, killing and wounding colleagues, and was also the reason given for an Israeli tank killing our colleague here in Gaza, Fadel Shana, nine months ago.)

The camera can show the blue Mediterranean sea a few blocks to the west, or point the other way to where Israeli ground forces are closing in, perhaps little more than a kilometre away. At night it used to show bright lights and traffic.

Now it is empty streets and a few cold electric lights. Nothing much moves after dark these days. And we choose, for safety reasons, not to stay in the bureau overnight. We look after our families and keep in touch with contacts and colleagues by phone, ready to head out and film if necessary.

We all get to the office around 9 a.m - typically about 10 of us, with another dozen colleagues working in other parts of the Gaza Strip. The strikes have usually been going on for a few hours by then. We call that information in to our bureau in Jerusalem where colleagues have been updating our main report around the clock. The updates go on all day long.

I often have no time to write up stories myself. It all moves so fast. I use two land phones, an Israeli mobile phone, and a Palestinian mobile phone that is intermittent.

Inside Gaza, we use text messages to communicate. We have to monitor local television and radio stations because they are often first with developments that we race to check. Those checks are essential, of course. The mixture of confusion and deliberate propaganda that accompanies any war, means that our standards of cross-checking everything and ensuring readers understand the sources of information need to be rigorous.

Every day is a new life written for me and for my family and also for the Reuters team in Gaza. Shelling and air strikes have hardly spared any place in the whole Gaza Strip. The heart of the city of Gaza has been hit several times.

Some areas seem to have been hit simply because a Hamas policeman walked nearby, or some militants were detected at a street corner by the Israeli forces. The high-explosive attack that follows can be devastating, taking out not only targeted people but a house or some passers-by.

The movement of our crews is restricted to hospitals and major strikes at places that are important, or where we think there may have been a high death toll. It is simply too dangerous to do otherwise. We cannot be with Hamas leaders or accompany the fighters to film them since that would be too great a risk.

“Please take care. Do not enter a place right after it is bombed. Wait a bit, it may be hit again.” This is a warning I issue to our crews 30 times a day.

We urge our cameramen and photographers to avoid main roads outside the city, and to look carefully where they drive.

“Try not to pass by a police station even it was already bombed. Do not go by a money exchange shop, or a house of a Hamas leader. Do not pass by a place the Israel army has threatened to bomb. Avoid passing close to a mosque.”

This is also my daily advice to myself — a list I repeat mentally as I drive back and forth.

Inside the office we have breakfast together, lunch too sometimes, and we send meals to people on outside missions. At one stage we did not see our outside crews for almost five days. When they returned to the office there was a big welcome scene. We hugged one another and thanked God we were safe, that all of us were safe.

Four journalists have been killed since the offensive began. One worked for Algerian and Moroccan television, another two for local Gaza broadcasters. The fourth was the special presidential cameraman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

When the main security complex was hit, 200 metres from our office, a piece of shrapnel penetrated the wall of our TV production room and made a hole. Part of the ceiling broke but everybody was safe. Many times we have ducked under the tables when huge blasts from air strikes shook the office. We also hear the whistle of outgoing Gaza rockets fired at Israel from inside the city.

Our families are our main concern.

I live in the south west side of Gaza City, not far from the sea, and the sounds of explosions in the district in the street have never ceased for 14 days of war. We’ve had almost no electricity for 10 days. For safety, my wife, daughter and son squeeze all day into our little hallway, listening to the news on a transistor radio. When one goes to the toilet, they all go together. One goes into the bathroom, the rest wait just outside.

For 14 days we have been sleeping in the same room, which we thought was away from the street and would be safe. But the whole building shook with every explosion and my wife had to leave our bed and hug the kids, sleeping on mattresses. My kids cover their ears a lot of the time when explosions start. My daily lectures about safety –  that we are far from what is happening — seem pretty useless.

On Thursday the children realised I was just trying to make things easier. An Israeli missile hit a house across the street where we lived and killed a journalist, his wife and his mother-in-law. I was still working and my wife called to tell me and I could hear the children crying in the background. I had to check a colour story bylined in my name by Reuters in Jerusalem. The colleagues there told me to go home and to be with my family, which must be the top priority before anything else.

We have to leave the office before it is too late at night because the streets are empty and scary. Restaurants are closed and bakeries crowded by people in the daytime. One baker helped out with a special delivery, grateful for the work of journalists.

Our Reuters colleagues in Jerusalem are far away but they have some visual contact via our live television monitor, so they can see the smoke, dust and flames caused by Israeli bombing in Gaza. They can get some of the atmosphere. We also have many colleagues on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, just a few kilometres from our office here, watching and filming the bombs landing around us and the rockets being fired at Israel.

It is hard to get accurate statistics from independent parties on how many fighters have died. Hamas spokesmen do not answer that question. Our cameramen rarely cover funerals of gunmen of Hamas, it is too dangerous. The Israeli army says it has killed “hundreds” of fighters. From the tolls we are compiling from the hospitals, hundreds of civilians have also died.

On Friday Jan 9, an air strike hit a TV production and transmission facility about 100 metres from our office. At least one person was hurt and there was considerable damage. It was used by several Arab TV stations and Iran’s Press TV. The Israeli army said the building was not a target but may have sustained “collateral damage” - and they assured us they have the coordinates of the Reuters bureau and that we are not a target. It is worrying nonetheless.

We pray this will stop soon.

UNITED NATIONS - High-level diplomacy usually occurs behind closed doors, but at the United Nations on Thursday, a smoke-filled basement cafe was where Arab ministers at one point haggled over the final text of a ceasefire resolution for Gaza.
 
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa puffed on a chunky cigar in the modest Vienna Cafe, joined at the table by foreign ministers of Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and a few other Arab countries trying to stop Israel’s incursion into Gaza. 
 
At one point late in the afternoon, a British diplomat joined the ministers at the table, showing them proposed amendments to the resolution while the Arab diplomats chewed in public view on a late lunch of sandwiches and muffins and sipped espresso.
 
Mindful of journalists’ eavesdropping on their conversations, the ministers then moved back to their private conference room to talk further and await answers from the British, French and U.S. foreign ministers to changes to the text.

  - Photo credit: Reuters/Mike Segar (Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa (L) greets U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at U.N. headquarters on Jan. 5)

India has asked the United Nations Security Council to blacklist the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Pakistani charity which it says is a front for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed by New Delhi for the attacks on Mumbai. But how far is India prepared to go in engaging the Security Council, given that it has resisted for decades UN invention over Kashmir?

Indian newspapers have suggested that India invoke UN Security Council Resolution 1373, passed after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and requiring member countries to take steps to curb terrorism.  The latest of these calls came from N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of Indian newspaper The Hindu, who said India must respond to the Mumbai attacks "in an intelligent and peaceful way".  

So is India preparing to break a long-standing taboo about United Nations intervention?  It first turned to the United Nations in 1948, after India and Pakistan began their first war over Kashmir. The Security Council mandated a ceasefire and India's then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also promised a plebiscite in the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir (comprising land now held by India, Pakistan and China) to allow the people to decide whether they wanted to join India or Pakistan.

Since then the UN Resolutions have become one of the major bones of contention in the tortuous relationship between India and Pakistan. Until relatively recently, Pakistan insisted that India make good its pledge to hold a plebiscite, while India insisted this had been superseded by the Simla accord following the 1971 war, in which the two countries agreed to resolve all their disputes bilaterally.

Before anyone leaps to judgment on this, I'd recommend reading the exact wording of the UN Security Council Resolutions. Here is the PDF link to the April 1948 resolution, which makes clear that Pakistan must withdraw fighters first from its side of Jammu and Kashmir, followed by a progressive withdrawal of Indian troops, to allow a plebiscite to take place.  It also says that the choice for the people of Jammu and Kashmir was whether to join India or Pakistan; independence -- at least as far as the Resolution goes -- was not an option.

For those who comment regularly on this blog, I'm aware this is a two-paragraph simplification and am happy to follow up in the comments section. But for the purposes of the present day, what are people saying?

“If you are scared to refer to it (the UN Security Council) because somebody else will raise Kashmir, then you have got into a defensive state of mind and have lost the battle even before you have started,” The Hindu quotes N. Ram as saying.

In her excellent (French-language) blog, le Figaro correspondent Marie-France Calle notes that while internationalising the Kashmir issue is taboo for India, the country is no longer what it was after the December 2001 attacks on the Indian parliament brought it close to war with Pakistan.  The country has matured and India has acquired an international status that it did not have in 2001, she writes. "And because India has matured, there is talk of Delhi going to the United Nations Security Council to put pressure on Pakistan, rather than acting unilaterally."

The problem for India, however, is that it is reluctant to see any development which reduces its relationship with Pakistan to the Kashmir problem. It argues that Kashmir is a pawn used to pin down Indian troops to prevent Pakistan from having to defend its long border against its much bigger neighbour.

And in that context, it is worth reading the comments made by Pakistan's United Nations envoy (given to me by Lou Charbonneau, my Reuters colleague at the United Nations). The envoy condemned the Mumbai attacks, quoting an op-ed for the New York Times written by Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari. The envoy also said:

 "In Kashmir, Pakistan is exercising restraint in international forums, and this is how we would have liked to see the aftermath of the Mumbai incident as well. We are all aware that the Kashmir situation is the root cause of problems between India and Pakistan. Would it not be a good time to do away with the root cause by pledging to resolve not just with words but with deeds and action as we have done today in Pakistan and get this problem away from us all. How should we proceed?"

So can India, and will India, go to the United Nations, and run the risk of seeing the Kashmir problem internationalised? The Hindu says that "India’s diplomatic and political capabilities would be tested in the coming weeks", a comment that could be equally applied to Pakistan's diplomats.

(And as an aside to regular followers of this blog. I'm deliberately not addressing the question of how China would respond to any appeal to the Security Council, as this seems to belong in a different post. But what do you make of this op-ed in the People's Daily about what it sees as a growing strategic partnership between India and Russia?)

(Photo:fishermen in Kashmir/Fayaz Kabli)

The price of oil may have dropped by more than half in recent weeks but the Saudi petrodollar appears to have lost none of its allure, judging by the procession of very important visitors to the New York Palace Hotel this week and to the U.N. General Assembly. With President George W. Bush in the lead, they have all come to present their compliments to King Abdullah, the Saudi ruler, who has turned the Manhattan hotel and the world body into an extension of his court, complete, it would seem, with a Majlis to receive petitioners.

Naturally, all the VIPs visiting him are eager to congratulate his majesty on his interfaith initiative, a gathering of religious and political leaders which took place  this week under the auspices of the United Nations. The meeting has attracted extravagant praise from, among others, Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister,  and Shimon Peres,  the veteran Israeli president.

It is a fact that the king’s initiative is unprecedented and bold, taking place despite the displeasure of many influential religious clerics at home. It is also a fact that he is the first Saudi leader to have travelled to the Vatican, opening dialogue between the two largest religions.

But some commentators have pointed out the oddity that the king, who at home shares power with clerics of the puritanical Wahhabi Islam — which forbids any expression of other religious belief inside the kingdom, even of less austere forms of Muslim belief — should be so keen on interfaith dialogue abroad. Even Mr Blair admits coyly, in a newspaper article to coincide with the conference, that the king is also “the leader of a nation that critics say has been slow to modernise, with fraught consequences for the rest of the world”.

Critics also point out that the 15 Saudi hijackers who were among the 19 young Arab men who carried out the Sept 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in the United States were partly influenced by the Wahhabi ideology.

But amid the financial turmoil sweeping international markets, the galaxy of world leaders chose to set aside their misgivings about Saudi Arabia’s domestic policies and freedom record. In their sight, they had one goal:

They are hoping Saudis will stump up cash to help the International Monetary Fund bail out emerging and developed countries in crisis.

Diplomats at the United Nations uncomfortably (and privately) acknowledge that Saudi Arabia’s wealth and its growing importance as a major contributor to the U.N. aid programmes — it recently gave $500 million to the World Food Programme — were behind the high turnout at the forum and lack of criticism of Saudi domestic policies.

Another bout of bloody clashes between Congolese Tutsi rebels and government forces, accompanied by vicious looting has sent the hapless civilians of eastern Congo’s North Kivu province once again running for their lives. Tens of thousands of people have fled the fighting, bringing to nearly 1 million the number of people displaced by fighting in North Kivu alone since Congo’s first ever democratic elections two years ago.

The fighting on the border between Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda has triggered the usual round of recriminations between the two countries’ governments. Foreign envoys are jetting back and forth between Kinshasa and Kigali. The United Nations and European Union are both considering sending in extra troops to help the U.N. peacekeeping force, already the world’s biggest at 17,000-strong.

But nobody seems really sure how to stop the violence, end the misery and secure lasting peace for the people of North Kivu.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband are due to meet Congolese President Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa today (Saturday) and travel to the eastern city of Goma, threatened by an offensive by Tutsi rebels this week.

What can be done to end eastern Congo’s vicious circle of violence? Who, if anyone, holds the key to regional peace in Africa’s Great Lakes? And should the United Nations, or the European Union, send more troops to stop the fighting and help stem the humanitarian disaster?

As Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier has delivered many speeches,  but none that anyone can particularly remember. Germany’s top diplomat has impeccable credentials yet has rarely come close to stirring anyone with his balanced, cautious, usually dry and sometimes rather dull addresses. No one would ever think of ticking the box “rousing speaker” next to his name.

That all changed on Saturday — when Steinmeier gave the speech of his life to a congress of his centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). The 500 delegates interrupted the white-haired lawyer’s riveting 88-minute address with applause 114 times. They then elected Steinmeier, who had never won election for any public office, as their candidate for the 2009 election with 95 percent of the vote.

By brilliantly latching on to the dominant issue of the moment — the global financial crisis – Steinmeier told the SPD delegates who have suffered post-war record lows in opinion polls this year and are worrying about their own job security in next year’s elections that it is the SPD more than any other party that is ideally positioned to benefit from the banking crisis. The SPD has long pushed for more state controls, he reminded them, and always stood up to protect the proverbial “little guy”.

“Let’s close our flanks, let’s not settle for second place but rather let’s fight for the victory next year,” Steinmeier told the delegates, who gave him a five-minute standing ovation for the fiery address.

It was also more than the usual vague piddle-paddle that German leaders often offer up. Steinmeier, until now seen more aligned to the conservative wing of the SPD, gave the party’s left plenty to cheer about. He spoke out clearly against extending nuclear power, unambiguously endorsed Gesine Schwan as the party’s candidate for the office of president even though SPD conservatives would prefer her withdrawal, and promised new government spending to boost the economy.

“People are looking to us to lead them through the crisis and we can do it. We’ve buried our differences. We believe in ourselves again and that’s making us strong. At critical moments we’ve been the ones that provided the answers.” Before Saturday the SPD had been a party in disarray. They had struggled to make their mark with voters. Trailing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats by about 10 points in opinion polls, the party has been deeply frustrated, fed up with Merkel getting much of the credit for the achievements of their grand coalition.

“I was extremely impressed with his speech,” said former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who sat cheering Steinemeier in the front row with another ex SPD chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. An accolyte of Schroeder’s, Steinmeier served as his chief of staff. Before Saturday, he was seen as a steady pair of hands, holding an office (foreign minister) that almost automatically makes him one of the country’s most popular leaders. Before Saturday he was respected, admired perhaps.

He has now added a new attribute to his résumé: “rousing speaker”.

UNITED NATIONS - Small farmers feed nearly 2 billion people globally and the rise in commodity prices has put a crimp in their ability to do business as well as feed themselves.

The global credit crunch has taken its toll on banks and investors and caused a redesign of the U.S. financial system. With the easy debt financing on Wall Street gone and donor countries fighting for their own economic health, financing the development of small farmers might seem to be in jeopardy. But the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development says it has funding in place through 2009 and is hopeful for its next round of money raising.

The following interview is with IFAD vice president Kanayo Nwanze, who spoke to Reuters on the sidelines of a U.N. High Level Meeting on Africa’s development needs.