The LAFF Society

Program Director

Peru Opportunity Fund

Hartford, Connecticut

Dedicated to advancing the well-being of Peru’s poor through sustainable entrepreneurial and agricultural development and affordable housing, Peru Opportunity Fund (POF), a leading initiative of the Hampshire Foundation, now seeks nominations and applications for an experienced and astute Program Director who will work alongside POF’s founders in improving the lives of Peruvians by strengthening rural businesses, enhancing agricultural production, and building affordable housing. This is an exceptional opportunity for a talented philanthropy professional who brings a passion for international development in Latin America and who seeks opportunities to make a genuine impact on the lives of rural Peruvians.

ABOUT PERU OPPORTUNITY FUND: Established in 2001, the Hampshire Foundation provides motivated entrepreneurs with access to financial capital, technical assistance, technology, organization-wide capacity building, and inroads to sustainable market linkages. Peru Opportunity Fund works within the Hampshire Foundation to support projects and programs, often through multi-year commitments, that are designed to strengthen the links between communities, livelihoods, and natural resources and in turn protect Peru’s environment by enhancing rural livelihoods. POF also utilizes challenge and matching funds as well as program related loans to form mutual partnerships and attain optimal outcomes. The Fund seeks to maximize its impact by focusing on projects that support systemic change in the quality of life for rural Peruvian communities and works closely with grantees to help them achieve their objectives. Peru Opportunity Fund has three core initiatives and provides funding and program loans for projects in the following thematic areas: Agriculture and Livestock Management, Access to Housing, and Job Training/Business Development.

RESPONSIBILITIES, CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE NEW PROGRAM DIRECTOR: The new Program Director will join Peru Opportunity Fund during an exciting and dynamic period, serving as the primary contact for all Fund initiatives externally and providing critical analysis of potential partners and grantees to the Fund’s Board. Reporting to the Executive Director, s/he will execute all aspects of the granting process and oversee all monitoring and evaluation consultants and a future program assistant. The Program Director will be responsible for fostering and creating strong partnerships that support the Fund’s initiatives and strengthening and systematizing the Fund’s evaluation process to attain its goals.

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE IDEAL CANDIDATE: The successful candidate will bring solid knowledge of current foundation practices and international grant-making and be an analytical thinker with the keen ability to assess the opportunity and risk presented in international development projects. S/he will be able to shepherd the grant-making process from start to finish and understand how to work alongside a dedicated group of founders in fulfillment of their mission. The successful Program Director will demonstrate an ongoing commitment to expanding his/her knowledge base in the Fund’s project areas and will possess superior oral and written communication skills in both English and Spanish. A Bachelor’s degree and five or more years of professional experience in grant-making are required; Master’s degree preferred.

TO APPLY:

Full details and application instructions may be found at: http://www.NonprofitProfessionals.com/searches/pof-pd.htm. Due to the pace of this search, candidates are strongly encouraged to apply as soon as possible. Applications including a cover letter describing your interest and qualifications, your resume (in Word format), salary history and where you learned of the position should be sent to: pof-pd@nonprofitprofessionals.com. In order to expedite the internal sorting and reviewing process, please type your name (Last, First) as the only contents in the subject line of your e-mail.

The Peru Opportunity Fund is an equal opportunity employer. Women and candidates of color are encouraged to apply.

(With chapters by Joan Kaufman and Bonnie Shepherd.)

Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, edited by Mindy Jane Roseman and Laura Reichenbach, assesses the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at  improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights.  The book, recently released by the University of Pennsylvania Press, includes essays by leading scholars and practitioners that are centered on the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) and its resulting Programme of Action.

Visit www.reproductivehealthandhumanrights.com, for more information.  

More than a decade after the enthusiasm that accompanied ICPD, there is growing concern about its effectiveness in the context of global health and development. Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward grapples with fundamental questions about the relationships among population, fertility decline, reproductive health, human rights, poverty alleviation, and development and assesses the various arguments-demographic, public health, human rights-based, and economic-for and against ICPD today.

Several excerpts are available online at www.reproductivehealthandhumanrights.com, as well as short bios for all of the books contributors.  

A number of the chapters address institutional challenges to ICPD and consider how the changing political, religious, academic, and disciplinary contexts matter. Other chapters engage operational and conceptual issues and whether ICPD has been able to move the reproductive health agenda forward on topics such as maternal mortality, abortion, HIV/AIDS, adolescents, reproductive technologies, and demography. Finally, several chapters examine how ICPD has been sidelined by emerging health and development agendas and what could be done in response. Unlike any book yet published, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward examines the state of the arguments for reproductive health and rights from a multidisciplinary perspective that provides policymakers, scholars, and activists with a better understanding of how reproductive health and rights have developed, their place in the global policy agenda, and   how they might evolve most effectively in the future.

To order this book through the University of Pennsylvania Press , click here.  To order this book through Amazon, click here.

For more information, go to www.reproductivehealthandhumanrights.com.

[This commentary was posted on Sept. 26, 2009, together with many other links and comments, at http://garysick.tumblr.com/ ]

The discovery and announcement of a second Iranian uranium enrichment facility – apparently on a Revolutionary Guards base near the holy city of Qom – has changed everybody’s calculations.

For the Obama administration, it provides them the kind of leverage against Iran that previously seemed to be lacking in the run up to the October 1 start of negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany (the P5+1). The revelation of the new site brings closer than ever before the possibility that Russia, certainly, and perhaps even China, might lend their support (or at least tacitly acquiesce) to a new round of sanctions. That will make the threat of real consequences for Iran’s defiance of the United Nations Security Council much more credible and strengthen the hand of the western negotiators.

Iran, in turn, will arrive at the meeting red-faced but almost certainly not apologetic. Iran will claim that it had no obligation to announce the site until 180 days before introducing nuclear material. They notified the IAEA of that position in 2007 on the grounds that the original agreement was not ratified by the Iranian majles (parliament). Members of the IAEA will dispute this, since changes to the Safeguards Agreement are technical and do not normally require ratification.

The legal technicalities, however, are less important than the politics, and Iran will clearly be on the defensive in a way that has not been true for a long time.

Iran lied about this site. Very probably it was never intended to become public. Building a small enrichment facility in an underground chamber on a Revolutionary Guards base with no notification to any international authority, at a time when Iran was under intense pressure to respond to Security Council requests for more inspections, was clearly intended to avoid scrutiny.

Does that mean that Iran was prepared to proceed covertly with a nuclear weapon? Yes and no. If you start with the conviction, as I do, that Iran was and is determined to develop a nuclear capability that would permit it to “break out” and build a nuclear weapon if and when a decision was taken by Iran’s highest authorities, probably in response to a direct military threat to Iran by another nuclear power, then the creation of this site would serve two logical purposes.

First, it would disperse Iran’s enrichment capabilities, making it much more difficult for an enemy to destroy its nuclear program with a single strike. If the facility was unknown to the enemy, it would provide an immediate fall back capability in the event the enrichment site at Natanz was destroyed or severely damaged. It was very likely a component of Iran’s post-strike Plan B and assumed that any internal opposition to a nuclear weapon would have been removed by the military attack. As such, this facility would very likely be intended to produce a nuclear weapon.

The ambiguities of Iran’s position, which have always been present, would be amplified enormously by the existence of such a facility. The mere existence of such an undeclared site would be a constant worry for the non-proliferation community and a constant temptation to some in Iran to jump-start a weapons program. At a minimum, the availability of a covert enrichment site could shorten considerably the expected time from Iran’s moment of decision until the actual production of a weapon, since it could be launched without the knowledge of the IAEA inspectors.

The second key point, which is no less important, is that the site was apparently discovered by intelligence long before Iran made its announcement. That has to be an alarming and hugely unwelcome fact from Iran’s perspective. At a minimum, it pulls the rug out from under any Plan B, and Iran has to wonder about what western intelligence may know about any other covert activities that may exist or that might be undertaken in the future.

Both of these considerations serve to strengthen the hand of the P5+1 and to weaken Iran’s position.

The risk for the P5+1 negotiators is that they will be so filled with righteous indignation that they will overplay their hand. The purpose of the negotiations, after all, is not simply to posture, to issue impossible demands, and thereby justify moving to sanctions. Iran is plagued by political divisions at home, and this latest revelation undercuts their international arguments. But that is no guarantee that they will simply roll over and comply with whatever is demanded of them.

All of the factors that were well known before this latest discovery remain true. Sanctions have not worked after fifteen years of trying, and sanctions alone are almost certainly not going to get Iran to abandon its basic nuclear program. Sanctions are and always have been more useful as a threat or a trading card than as an effective tool in practice. Iran clearly dislikes the sanctions that are in place now, and they are anxious to avoid more in the future. So there is room for discussion. But there is no evidence whatsoever that if increased sanctions are actually applied Iran will dismantle its enrichment program. Instead, they will escalate. The reality today is the same as before: the end game of sharply increased sanctions is war.

In my view, the objective of these negotiations has also not changed. We want Iran to stop its nuclear growth and agree to much more intrusive inspections. The west should be willing to pay a price for such concessions, perhaps in the form of conditional removal of sanctions, freezing United Nations Security Council action on Iran in the interim, and inviting greater inclusion by Iran in regional affairs as Iran implements concrete steps of confidence-building. That is not easy, but neither is it an unreachable goal.

The negotiators going into the October 1 meetings are starting with a much better hand than most of them anticipated. Will they play their hand as cleverly as they have managed the pre-negotiation period?

HEALTH:
Why Is Viagra Popular and the Condom Controversial?

by Johanna Son* - TerraViva/IPS

BALI, Aug 14 (IPS) - Why is the popular drug Viagra so praised for its virtues, while the condom is vilified by conservative religious groups among others the world over?

Both are ‘external’ technological interventions that relate to sexual activity. They are among the most prominent tools in the area of reproductive health and sexuality.

But it is the gender and sexual ideologies behind them - especially when combined with conservative religious forces and aspects of patriarchal culture - that put them on opposite ends of the spectrum of public acceptance.

The result is a paradox that has huge implications for public health, especially in relation to the HIV and AIDS pandemic that is now entering its third decade and affects 33 million people worldwide.

As Michael Tan, a reproductive health activist and chair of the University of the Philippines anthropology department put it: “Why is Viagra so desired and condoms so repulsive in many cultures?”

Tan stressed, condoms are in the World Health Organisation (WHO) list of essentials - unlike Viagra. In other words, the social and institutional acceptance levels of Viagra and condoms are “totally opposite to the biomedical truth.”

As has been stressed over and over in the hundreds of sessions at the 9th International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) that ended here this week, condoms remain the most effective way today to have safer sex, which is key to curbing the transmission of HIV and AIDS.

Condom usage campaigns have been central to efforts by countries like Thailand to slow the transmission of the virus and to achieve a reduction in the number of new cases.

But in many countries, including in Asia, condoms continue to be a loaded word, a magnet for conservative groups that say they corrupt values and encourage early sexual activity or go against religious teachings that sex should go with procreation.

Condoms and pills are also often linked to their contraceptive roles - which are of course absent in marketing for Viagra, packaged by pharmaceutical firms for improved sexual experiences.

There is also the argument by many men that condoms diminish sexual pleasure. This feeds into the gender and cultural bias that societies often have, that men’s pleasure is most important, Tan added.

“Condoms and pills tend to be resisted and demonised, blamed for promoting promiscuity and are sometimes even said to fuel HIV itself,” Tan explained at a discussion organised by the Institute of Population and Social Research at Mahidol University.

In India, studies show that condom use tends to be linked more to educated men, according to Jayashree Ramakrishna of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India.

While religion may not be such a big factor in this debate in India, Ramakrishna added that the focus on condoms in fighting the epidemic eased a bit after the Indian government revised its HIV prevalence figures some years ago.

Likewise, she says, taboos remain on the open discussion of sex, which makes it harder to deal with reproductive health and HIV and AIDS. “Women say ‘we might have sex, but we don’t talk about it,’” she said. Officials argue that sex education materials should not be too frank. Eight states in India have banned sex education in schools, Ramakrishna added.

In mainly Roman Catholic Philippines, the Church and religious groups argue that condom use breaks religious and moral values because it prevents pregnancies when sex is for having children within marriage - and that the its health benefits cloak the fact that it promotes free sex.

This controversy is the reason why proposed laws on reproductive health in the Philippines - where the population growth rate is a high 2.1 percent in a country of 92.2 million people - ignite a firestorm of campaigns by pro- church groups saying such are “anti-life.”

In the conservative Catholic context and in Philippine society, Tan explains, the importance attributed to extending the family line is key to male gender roles. Thus, “being ‘baog’ - the Tagalog word for both impotence and infertility - is to many a fate worse than death” because it is linked to male sexual prowess.

But this same focus on the need to reproduce also generates the view that men are the ones ‘responsible’ for it, and women are mere receptacles in this process. Tan explained, “Males are seen as the source of life and are therefore privileged when it comes to pleasure, and women are seen as a source of pleasure or of men’s babies.”

In sharp contrast to the controversies around the condom, Viagra - a drug that was meant to cure erectile dysfunction but is also used to enhance sexual performance - is widely accepted. It has not drawn attention from conservative quarters that say they are worried about promiscuity or free sex, reproductive health activists say.

The most number of spam email messages these days are even about Viagra- type medication, Tan says, pointing out how widely known and popular this has become.

The obsession with male reproduction and pleasure in many societies leads to undercutting the usage of “life-saving devices” such as the condom, Tan said. “Shrill voices have been head about condoms, but they have been too silent on Viagra,” he argued.

Drug approval institutions in countries like the United States and Japan have also been quick in approving Viagra, which is manufactured by Pfizer, but slow in approving other reproductive health-related items.

For instance, Tan said, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took six months to approve Viagra in 1998, but four years to give its approval for the abortion pill. In Japan, authorities approved Viagra for public use in a few months, but it had taken 35 years to approve the use of the oral contraceptive for women.

Some published reports allege that Viagra, or sildenafil citrate, was first being clinically tested to treat angina, but that it was finally marketed for erectile dysfunction after trials showed this as the stronger result.

Looking into the Viagra versus condom paradox goes far beyond just these two particular products in order to show that “technology is much more than just a tool,” explained Rosalia Sciortino, a professor at Thailand’s Mahidol University and gender and reproductive health expert who chaired the session on this topic at ICAAP.

These two well-known tools offer a lens that show how gender values influence expressions of sexuality and how these can in turn have key impacts on public health risks like HIV and AIDS, Sciortino stressed.

*TerraViva at ICAAP 09 (http://www.ipsterraviva.asia)

(FIN/2009)

From The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION & RESOLUTION VOL. 27 NO. 8 SEPTEMBER 2009
To End and Prevent Wars Between States: Negotiate, Don’t Litigate
BY LINDA STAMATO AND SANFORD M. JAFFE
When conflicts reach across state borders, negotiations are far preferable to litigation as a way to produce solutions that work. For land-use disputes, and the critical issues of access to and management of water resources— where regional cooperation can make a constructive difference—negotiations are essential. Court-imposed “solutions” rarely work because, with these issues, a public consensus is critical. Absent consensus, an  arbitrary, win/lose decision, which seems coercive, is difficult to implement….[read whole newsletter]

Michael Maiello, 09.16.09, 06:00 PM EDT

Forbes Magazine dated October 05, 2009

Two experts have a Marshall Plan for the continent

(With chapters by Joan Kaufman and Bonnie Shepherd.)

Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, edited by Mindy Jane Roseman and Laura Reichenbach, assesses the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights. The book, recently released by the University of Pennsylvania Press, includes essays by leading scholars and practitioners that are centered on the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) and its resulting Programme of Action.

Visit www.reproductivehealthandhumanrights.com, for more information.

More than a decade after the enthusiasm that accompanied ICPD, there is growing concern about its effectiveness in the context of global health and development. Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward grapples with fundamental questions about the relationships among population, fertility decline, reproductive health, human rights, poverty alleviation, and development and assesses the various arguments-demographic, public health, human rights-based, and economic-for and against ICPD today.

Several excerpts are available online at www.reproductivehealthandhumanrights.com, as well as short bios for all of the books contributors.

A number of the chapters address institutional challenges to ICPD and consider how the changing political, religious, academic, and disciplinary contexts matter. Other chapters engage operational and conceptual issues and whether ICPD has been able to move the reproductive health agenda forward on topics such as maternal mortality, abortion, HIV/AIDS, adolescents, reproductive technologies, and demography. Finally, several chapters examine how ICPD has been sidelined by emerging health and development agendas and what could be done in response. Unlike any book yet published, Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward examines the state of the arguments for reproductive health and rights from a multidisciplinary perspective that provides policymakers, scholars, and activists with a better understanding of how reproductive health and rights have developed, their place in the global policy agenda, and how they might evolve most effectively in the future.

To order this book through the University of Pennsylvania Press, click here. To order this book through Amazon, click here.

For more information, go to www.reproductivehealthandhumanrights.com.

From the RNA Underworld September 14, 2009
by Arthur Hunt

Norman Borlaug passed away yesterday. Dr. Borlaug was the key contributor to the so-called Green Revolution, that brought great food security to countries such as Mexico, Pakistan, and India. He was a clever and innovative plant breeder and a great champion for the use of high-yielding crop varieties in agriculture.

He was also an outspoken proponent of biotechnology. As he stated in this short interview:

“I have devoted my life to the global challenge of providing adequate food production for a growing world population. Forty years ago, a Green Revolution was started using improved seed and fertilizer, helping dramatically increase the harvest while sparing forest and natural areas from the plow. It took both the scientific advances and the changes in economic policies by leaders to allow for the adoption of the Green Revolution technologies by millions of hungry farmers.

Over the past decade, we have been witnessing the success of plant biotechnology. This technology is helping farmers throughout the world produce higher yield, while reducing pesticide use and soil erosion. The benefits and safety of biotechnology has been proven over the past decade in countries with more than half of the world’s population. What we need is courage by the leaders of those countries where farmers still have no choice but to use older and less effective methods. The Green Revolution and now plant biotechnology are helping meet the growing demand for food production, while preserving our environment for future generations.”

From his foreword to “The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution” by Henry Miller and Greg Conko (Praeger Publishers, 2004):

“As a plant pathologist and breeder, I have seen how the skeptics and critics of the new biotechnology wish to postpone the release of improved crop varieties in the hope that another year’s, or another decade’s, worth of testing will offer more data, more familiarity, more comfort. But more than a half-century in the agricultural sciences has convinced me that we should use the best that is at hand, while recognizing its imperfections and limitations. Far more often than not, this philosophy has worked, in spite of constant pessimism and scare-mongering by critics.

I am reminded of our using the technology at hand to defeat the specter of famine in India and Pakistan in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most “experts” thought that mass starvation was inevitable, and environmentalists like Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions would die in Africa and Asia within just a few years “in spite of any crash programs embarked upon.” The funders of our work were cautioned against wasting resources on a problem that was insoluble.

Nevertheless, in 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government formed the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT) and sent my team to South Asia to teach local farmers how to cultivate high-yield wheat varieties. As a result, Pakistan became self sufficient in wheat production by 1968 and India a few years later.

As we created what became known as the “Green Revolution,” we confronted bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions. We surmounted these difficult obstacles because something new had to be done. Who knows how many would have starved if we had delayed commercializing the new high-yielding cereal varieties and improved crop management practices until we could perform tests to rule out every hypothetical problem, and test for vulnerability to every conceivable type of disease and pest? How much land for nature and wildlife habitat, and topsoil would have been lost if the more traditional, lowyield practices had not been supplanted?

At the time, Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, “Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Hill was right. His prediction anticipated the gene-splicing era that would arrive decades later. As Henry Miller and Gregory Conko describe in this volume, the naysayers and bureaucrats have now come into their own. If our new varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available.”

Dr. Borlaug had been suggested at times to be the greatest living American. Given the scope of his accomplishments, it’s hard to argue with this.