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Inside this Issue: Youth Cafeteria Campaign, Latest Update The Way Forward: Open, Unscripted and Interactive NGO Input at the Ministerial Dialogue with Representatives of the Major Groups Is your suitcase heavier upon return? IISD's Climate Knowledge Management Project Cracking the Peanuts or the Coconuts? Macro Impact from the Local Level |
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Friday, May 16, 2008Macro Impact from the Local LevelBy: Jeff Rose , Executive Director of The Full Belly Project, Members of the SIDS Emerging Technologies PartnershipIt is at the local level that action occurs. It is locals who must champion any solution". Just like the discussions taking place here at CSD, the solutions must have the ability to not only be actualized locally, but they must have a macro-scale impact. We know that simple technologies, specifically agricultural based technologies, enabled much of the Western world to leap from an agrarian based economy to an industrial based, and now to an information based economy. As part of the SIDS Emerging Technologies, The Full Belly Project is one organization that offers a macro-scale impact which can be championed and sustained locally. The Full Belly Project is a non-profit that collaborates with MIT D-Lab, Duke University, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, and Cal-tech to develop simple and inexpensive agricultural devices. The Full Belly Project performs the R&D for these technologies and licenses out these technologies to local entrepreneurs in developing countries. The entrepreneurs profit from selling these technologies to local farmers groups. The local farmers profit from having the ability to add value to their crops because they are now able to: thresh, shell, winnow and use their biomass as an alternative fuel. Once a technology is created the users of the technology continue to expand the technologies limitations as well as the technologies impact. Let me offer some real-world examples of the macro/micro scale impact that The Full Belly Project has had. In the Philippines, The Full Belly Project's Universal Nut Sheller is used to shell peanuts. The local farmers reaped the benefit of being able to sell their peanuts to traders for four times the value of un-shelled peanuts. 5,000 jatropha farmers in Mali are now able to cleanly remove the husks from the jatropha plant which enables them to be processed in an oil press. The Malian farmers receive the "jatropha cake" as a locally produced fertilizer/pesticide. These are just two examples of solutions that were created to meet the needs of agrarian based developing economies, which have local and global impacts. One hopes that there will be more of an open dialogue between funding agencies, NGO's and Community based efforts in future CSD's |