The best and worst of the world's eats

 Sudanese refugee mother has a daily struggle to feed her children in the Birak refugee camp, Chad. Photo by Cynthia Jones/World Food Program via Getty Images.

Fit, healthy Australians. Sleek, cycling Dutch. Icelanders living on dried fish.

Not so much, says a new survey, Good Enough to Eat, released Wednesday by Oxfam, compiled from data gathered by international organizations.

 It’s a global food index that weighs the most important factors of dietary health, including affordability, quantity, diversity and nutritiousness of food, as well as a country’s rate of obesity and diabetes. And it has turned up some surprising results.

Where's the best place to eat?

The Netherlands. And the much-touted French and Swiss come in second.

Canada ranks only 25th of 125 countries, thanks to growing obesity and “unhealthy eating.”

The problem is more than a plethora of poutine. “Even in a wealthy country like Canada there’s a big gap between what people need and what they get,” says Oxfam Canada’s Robert Fox, pointing out that aboriginal communities suffer most, and in Nunavut more than half of children live in food insecurity. Fox calls for a “national food policy” in Canada, and an overseas aid policy  that is focused on women food producers.

But food problems are often complex, the report points out.

While the Dutch have the highest overall rating  – and a well-known fondness for riding bicycles – they score lower on the obesity measure, with 19 per cent of people surveyed classed as fat. (Too many Dutch treats?)

Even worse is Australia, whose svelte beach bunny image is blown away by an obesity rate of 27 per cent. And 9 per cent of Australians also have diabetes.

At the very bottom of the unhealthy eating scale, strangely, are wealthy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which rate an “F” for obesity and diabetes.

Icelanders, not noted for grand cuisine, rate at the top of the food quality and diet diversity scale, in spite of their limited farm land and relatively high food prices.

But sadly, it’s all too easy to predict those at the bottom end of the index.

Impoverished Chad – home to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees – is lowest overall, with food that’s too little and too dear. It also has scant nutritional value, and is kept in unsanitary conditions. One child in three is underweight. 

Meanwhile Angola, also near the bottom of the scale, suffers the highest level of food price volatility, except for inflation-battered Zimbabwe. In Angola, “60 per cent of people’s diet is made up of simple carbohydrates and almost half the population do not have access to clean water” to prepare food safely.

In Burundi, a whopping 67 per cent of people are undernourished, and 35 per cent of children are underweight. A number of other African countries have scores that are little better.

One surprise: the worst score for underweight children is in “Asian tiger” India –  some  44 per cent of kids have lower than normal weight, making them vulnerable to stunting and learning disabilities.

“Inequality, weak distribution, failed markets and poor governance mean that people in many countries go to bed hungry, especially women,” says Oxfam, calling for “urgent reform of the way food is produced and distributed around the world to put an end to this scandal.”

Olivia Ward has covered countries from the former Soviet Union, Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

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"Girls married 60 times before 18" - Egypt's Child Sex Tourism

 

YouTube video from the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood promotes women's political rights in Egypt. The NCCM says women's inequality is reflected in sham marriages for teenage girls that  are a form of child prostitution.

 

As if we needed more discouraging news out of the turmoil in Egypt, a shocking report says that thousands of teenage girls are being sold by their parents to wealthy Arab male tourists under the pretext of marriage in a barely-disguised form of child prostitution.

 “The sham nuptials may last from a couple of hours to years,” says a story entitled "Underage Girls are Egypt's Summer Rentals" by Cam McGrath from the Inter Press Service News Agency. 

“It’s a form of child prostitution in the guise of marriage,” Azza El-Ashmawy, director of the Child Anti-Trafficking Unit at the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood told the IPS.

“Some girls have been married 60 times by the time they turn 18," she said. " Most ‘marriages’ last for just a couple of days or weeks.”

McGrath explains that temporary marriages allow the male buyers to get around Islamic restrictions on pre-marital sex.

He reports that the trade has increased since Egypt’s 2011 revolution ushered in a period of economic collapse along with crumbling law enforcement.

McGrath describes the scene in  El Hawamdia, an impoverished town 20 kilometres outside of Cairo.

Well-dressed Arab men "troll the town’s pot-holed, garbage-strewn streets in their luxury cars and SUVs" as "fixers" run alongside offering them apartments -- and underage girls -- for rent.  

A NCCM survey of 2,000 families in three towns near Cairo  found that "the hefty sums paid by Arab tourists was the main motive for the high rate" of so-called “summer marriages” in these areas.

Three-quarters of the respondents said that they knew girls involved in the trade and that the number of marriages was increasing.

According to the survey, more than 80 percent of the male “spouses” were from Saudi Arabia, 10 percent from the United Arab Emirates, and four percent from Kuwait.

The IPS story says that since sexual relations with minors is illegal in Egypt, brokers forge birth certificates or substitute the identity card of a girl’s older sister.

 It says a "pleasure” marriage can be arranged for as little as 800 Egyptian pounds (about $120 Canadian dollars). 

Sandy Shinouda with the Counter-Trafficking Unit of the  International Organisation of Migration in Cairo told IPS that  most of the young girls come from large families for whom marriage to a wealthier foreigner offers an escape from poverty.

"The family considers her as a commodity,” she told the IPS. “The girls know their families have exploited them…they can understand that their parents sold them.” 

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Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and invetsigative reporter for the Star and be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher.

 

 

 

Al Qaeda's Conference Call

So why did Canada close its diplomatic mission in Bangladesh Sunday, or the U.S. Air Force evacuate Americans from Sanaa, Yemen at dawn Tuesday, or why did the U.S. State Department issue a worldwide travel alert for the month of August?

Apparently, according to the Daily Beast, Al Qaeda had a conference call.

That's what three unnamed U.S. officials told Eli Lake and Josh Rogin. "This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one intelligence officers said in the story posted online Wednesday, referring to the coalition of villains featured in the Saturday morning cartoon Super Friends.

Those on the call included, "representatives or leaders from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more obscure al Qaeda affiliates such as the Uzbekistan branch. Also on the call were representatives of aspiring al Qaeda affiliates such as al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula," the story stated.

This assertion is remarkable for a number of reasons.

First, the upper echelon of Al Qaeda is skilled at avoiding detection and the idea that up to 20 leaders of the group would participate on what was described as a "conference call" seems fantastic.

Second, the list of so-called "Super Friends" is also curious. While there are known ties between Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Al Qaeda's branches in Yemen or Iraq, including members from Uzbekistan or Sinai or Nigeria on what was purportedly a high-level strategy session seems reckless for a group that is anything but reckless.

Third, one of the officials told the Daily Beast: "All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down to get a sense of who was on the phone call." But the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria did not close this week? And why are the embassies in Kigali, Rwanda, and Antananarivo, Madagascar still shut while the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan re-opened?

Even before the story of the conference call was posted, McClatchy journalist Hannah Allam had gathered an amusing assortment of comments from Washington's counterterrorism analysts, who remain baffled by the extreme security measures.

Top prize goes to former State Department adviser Will McCants, who recently joined the Brookings Saban Center. "It's crazy pants," he said. "You can quote me."

Meanwhile, news seems to be breaking by the hour in Yemen, where Yemenis are also perplexed by the fuss, analyst Abdul Ghani al-Iryani told me in an interview Tuesday. "It’s puzzling to me," he said. "The heightened threat is to be expected because the drones were very busy in the past few days and have killed quite a few of the top leadership of the AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) but we have not seen anything like this. I don’t know why they felt they had to go to these extremes. The Yemenis are not paying attention to it at all. For us it’s just weird Americans do weird things, basically."

Although the alerts started Friday, one Western intelligence official told me the risk is expected to rise following the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which ends tonight.

Much more of this story to come.

 

(For a backgrounder on AQAP, here's one I wrote for TNR a couple years ago - as a primer it's still relevant: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/al-qaeda-the-arab-peninsula-primer#. For on-the-ground reporting in Sanaa, follow on Twitter: Iona Craig, Khaled al-Hammadi, Nasser Arrabyee , Adam Baron and Casey Coombs. Great analysis always from Gregory Johnsen.)

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/06/198681/broad-us-terror-alert-mystifies.html#.UgJDMJFE3Fr#storylink=cpy

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

The Arab uprisings? We're feeling good about it, survey says

Arabs are feeling good about their revolutions, they believe in democracy and would like to keep religion separate from politics.

Those are the surprising results of a new public opinion survey of 20,350 Arab citizens conducted in countries that have seen change and upheaval which, transmitted half a world away to us, seem overwhelmingly negative. The uncertainty in Egypt, carnage in Syria and militias dominating Libya, to name a few.

But in 14 countries including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Libya, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, people are much more optimistic, according to the report by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, a think tank in Qatar.

A resounding 61 per cent of respondents described the Arab Spring as “positive” or “positive to some extent.”

When asked if the revolutions have been successful in achieving goals of securing human rights, laying the foundations for democracy and public liberties, 20 per cent said it has already achieved its aims. (Which admittedly may be a little too optimistic.) Another 26 per cent said these changes will be achieved in the next 1 to 3 years.

Syrians were not included in this survey - their responses would certainly skew the results - but 66 per cent of their brethren in the region were in favour of regime change in Syria. 

There has been a lot of concern about the rising tide of political Islam in places such as Egypt and Tunisia. However, 82 per cent of respondents said a democratic political system, not Sharia-based system, is appropriate for their home countries. When asked whether they supported the statement "It would be better if religion were separated from politics" 46 per cent agreed. 

Which goes to show there is a vast gap between what ordinary people in the Arab world want and expect, what their rulers say, and what we in the English-speaking democracies believe them to want. 

Some fine print: Respondents were selected through a randomized, sampling process and interviewed face to face from July 2012 to March 2013. Margins of error ranged between two per cent and three per cent. 

READ MORE: The Toronto Star's Middle East coverage

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

PHOTO: Camel competition in Kuwait City

 

Kuwaiti men stand near camels during a competition in al-Salmi district, a desert area 120 kilometres west of Kuwait City, on Feb. 7, as part of the ongoing Popular Heritage Festival. The one-month event is held annually to commemorate popular activities in Kuwaiti heritage, featuring camel races, falcons contests, fishing competitions and other events. (AFP Photo/Getty Images/Yasser Al-Zayyat)