Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has caved in to pressure from the governor and is banning oil and gas drilling off the Florida coast.

“I support the governor’s position that Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver,” Zinke said in a statement late Tuesday.

He outright admitted that Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott pressured him to put the state’s waters off limits.

Last week, the Trump administration proposed opening nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, reversing former Obama administration policies.

The White House has said it wants to make the U.S. more energy independent.

But environmental groups and Republican and Democratic governors from coastal states loudly object. They say oil and gas drilling puts marine life, beaches, and lucrative tourism at risk.

The Pentagon has also expressed misgivings about drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, where naval exercises are held.

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf was the largest such disaster in U.S. history, causing billions of dollars in damage to the Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Florida, killing more than 100,000 different marine mammals, birds, and reptiles.
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Nearly seven years into Syria’s civil war, Syrian refugees in neighboring Lebanon are becoming poorer, leaving children at risk of child labor and early marriage, aid organizations said on Tuesday.

A recent survey by the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, U.N.’s World Food Program, and refugee agency, UNHCR showed that Syrian refugees in Lebanon are more vulnerable now than they have been since the beginning of the crisis.

Struggling to survive, more than three quarters of the refugees in Lebanon now live on less than $4 per day, according to the survey which was based on data collected last year.

“The situation for Syrian refugees in Lebanon is actually getting worse – they are getting poorer. They are barely staying afloat,” Scott Craig, UNHCR spokesman in Lebanon, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Around 1.5 million refugees who fled Syria’s violence account for a quarter of Lebanon’s population.

The Lebanese government has long avoided setting up official refugee camps. So, many Syrians live in tented settlements, languishing in poverty and facing restrictions on legal residence or work.

“Child labor and early marriage are direct consequences of poverty,” Tanya Chapuisat, UNICEF spokeswoman in Lebanon said in a statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We fear this (poverty) will lead to more children being married away or becoming breadwinners instead of attending school,” she said.

According to UNICEF, 5 percent of Syrian refugee children between 5-17 are working, and one in five Syrian girls and women aged between 15 and 25 is married.

Mike Bruce, a spokesman for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said without sufficient humanitarian aid and proper work Syrian families would increasingly fall into debt and more could turn to “negative coping mechanisms” like child labor and marriage.

Cold winter temperatures in Lebanon would also hurt refugees, he said.

“Refugees are less and less able to deal with each shock that they face and severe weather could be one of those shocks,” said Bruce.
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Sudan’s pound currency weakened to 30.5 pounds to the U.S. dollar on Tuesday from about 29.5 pounds a day earlier, traders said, continuing its fall amid protests over bread prices and an acute shortage of hard currency.

Street protests broke out across the northeastern African country after bread prices doubled in recent days, following a government announcement late last month that it was eliminating subsidies in its 2018 budget as part of austerity measures.

This month Sudan devalued its pound currency to 18 per U.S. dollar from 6.7 pounds to the dollar previously. Hard currency remains scarce in the formal banking system however, forcing importers to resort to an increasingly expensive black market.

“The dollar is rising on a daily basis and there is a strong appetite to buy at any price given its scarcity on the market,” one black market trader told Reuters.

The government has ruled out a market-determined exchange rate and the black market rate for pounds has been steadily weakening against the dollar since late last month, when the devaluation was announced.

“I expect the dollar price to continue to increase in the coming days because companies and importers are buying dollars in large quantities since the beginning of the year because the banks are not meeting their hard currency needs,” another black market trader said.
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When urban designer Trupti Vaitla asked residents of a Mumbai slum what new features they’d like to see in their dilapidated public space, she was surprised by one popular answer: a patch of grass.

The Lotus Garden is the only open area for about 200,000 people who live in cramped and squalid tenements abutting the city’s biggest landfill. The municipal corporation had done little for its upkeep and it was littered with trash.

Three years ago, Vaitla and her team were tasked with transforming it into a space that people would actually use.

They expected residents to suggest elements like lighting, elaborate landscaping and a gym.

The team didn’t expect such enthusiasm for a simple lawn.

“But they were excited to be involved, and for them, a patch of green was really important – a small oasis in their otherwise drab and congested world,” said Vaitla, chief executive of Mumbai Environmental Social Network (MESN).

Vaitla’s team, backed by funding from United Nations Habitat, which promotes sustainable urban development, spent months cleaning up Lotus Garden. They installed lights and water, planted shrubs and grass, and built an open-air gym.

From the very first day, residents including women and children who had earlier avoided the space, swarmed in, Vaitla said.

The appetite for areas like the Lotus Garden is not surprising. In Mumbai, with its population of 18 million and counting, soaring real estate prices and relentless construction, public spaces are shrinking.

“In a crowded slum, these spaces are particularly relevant, as people have nowhere else to go,” said Pontus Westerberg, digital projects officer at UN Habitat. “These spaces also impact on their health, sanitation, safety, access to emergency services.”

Digital Lego

Encouraged by their success with Lotus Garden, MESN and UN-Habitat collaborated on another space in the nearby Gautam Nagar neighborhood. This time, they decided to use technology to encourage even more community involvement.

The team settled on Minecraft, a video game that allows players to build their own worlds using virtual Lego-like pieces.

For the past five years, UN Habitat has used Minecraft in its Block by Block programme, which aims to encourage some of the poorest communities in the developing world to participate in upgrading their common spaces.

The program is a partnership between UN Habitat, Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, and Microsoft, which owns Mojang.

“It can be a challenge to mobilize people in slums – especially the youth – who are resigned to their environment and don’t feel a sense of ownership,” said Westerberg by telephone from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The traditional approach, using maps and drawings, often draws little interest from residents, he said.

“But with an interactive design tool like this – I call it digital Lego – they are so engaged, and that makes the process more democratic,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The Block by Block program was launched in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. It has since been used in about 50 locations in more than 20 countries including Indonesia, Nigeria and Mexico.

Once UN-Habitat selects a site, a Minecraft model of the site is built using photographs, videos, maps and Google Street View, if it is available. UN-Habitat then holds a workshop.

Residents are put into groups of mixed ages and genders, and given a laptop with the Minecraft model. They learn the game in a matter of minutes or hours, Westerberg said, and everyone pitches in on the redesign.

The designs are then discussed with local officials, one design is chosen, and the project is handed over to a local architect to execute.

No Swimming Pool

When Vaitla brought Minecraft to a workshop in Gautam Nagar, participants used it to create plans including better lighting, seating, trees and play areas for children.

The slum’s 6,000 residents live in close quarters, among open drains and common spaces strewn with garbage. They were looking for realistic solutions to improve their lives.

“The designs they came up with were all sensible,” Vaitla recalled. “No one said, ‘We want a swimming pool.'”

Other organizations are also putting digital tools like Google Earth and smartphones to work for disadvantaged residents of India’s urban areas.

Shelter Associates, a charity that focuses on slum upgrades, is working with residents to create maps of slums that need amenities like sewage lines, or are at risk of eviction because they are on disputed land.

This is particularly relevant as the government’s Smart Cities plan risks hastening slum evictions.

In the western state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located, Shelter Associates has mapped about 500 settlements of more than 200,000 homes, said Executive Director Pratima Joshi.

“There are so many low-cost technologies that are easy to use, and we train slum residents to use them as a first step towards mobilizing the communities,” she said.

As for Lotus Garden, residents continue to take pride in the space they redesigned, said Vaitla.

“The lawn is a bit scraggly, but still being maintained, as are other amenities,” she said. “If you involve the community, they will participate, and they will take better care of these spaces.”
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Sitting on a rickety bench at his home in Kipipiri, in central Kenya, Samuel Macharia pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and proudly points to the signature at the bottom.

“This paper means I get paid on time for my potatoes, even when the weather is bad,” he said.

The precious document is a farming contract Macharia signed in March with the East African Potato Consortium. It says he will sell at least two tons of potatoes to food processors each harvesting season for the next two years.

“Thanks to this contract I can earn up to 22,000 Kenyan shillings ($213) per season,” he said.

Recurring drought and sudden cold spells have affected the quality of potatoes and other staples across Kenya.

Peris Mukami, a farmer from Timau village, in Meru County, said her potato yields had declined by over 10 percent in the past two years because “it is either too cold or too hot.”

“The cold damages potato vines with frostbite while heat makes them wilt,” she explained.

To try to fight back, Kenyan potato farmers such as Macharia are increasingly turning to production contracts with food processors — a system known as contract farming — through the East African Potato Consortium.

By working with the consortium, they get access to seeds that better stand up to harsher conditions, as well as better fertilizers.

They also get a guaranteed price for their crop, as long as they produce good-quality potatoes on time, said Wachira Kaguongo, head of the National Potato Council.

Fair Deals

The consortium, which was set up in 2016 by the National Potato Council, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the Grow Africa partnership, aims to increase private investment in agriculture by linking potato farmers with food processors across the country, Kaguongo said.

Each production agreement is reviewed and approved by the National Potato Council, which ensures it is fair to both parties, said Willy Bett, cabinet secretary of the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries.

“Businessmen will always want to get farmers to sign something that may not be favorable to them,” Bett told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We’re trying to prevent that by ensuring that farming activity is done on a contract basis in Kenya.”

Contract farming has allowed farmers to sell produce to food giants such as the fast-food chain KFC, formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Macharia’s potatoes now fetch 22 shillings ($0.20) per kilo, more than double what he used to get when selling them at the Kipipiri open air market.

“I am paid in cash at my farm,” he said. “And I do not have to travel to the market when I don’t want to.”

So far 5,000 farmers have signed up to the system, with a total of 23,000 expected to have made the switch by 2020, said Kaguongo.

Supply Shortage?

Felix Matheri, a researcher at the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology, said that while contract farming provides farmers with a steady income, it risks depriving poor families of their food supply.

“Contracts bind farmers to supplying an agreed amount of potatoes, meaning that when the harvest is low farmers are forced to sell all their produce to meet their obligations,” he explained.

“But potatoes are rich in starch and a critical source of nutrients — farmers should save some for home consumption,” he said.

Others have concerns about contract farming as well. Louise Wangari, a roadside seller of potatoes in Nyandarua County, said she is worried it might affect the supply she gets from farmers.

“The quantity of potatoes I was getting from farmers was already decreasing due to extreme weather,” she said.

“If they start signing contracts with other buyers, then I may be out of business soon, as I can’t afford to pay them as much as the food processors.”
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