The B.C. government introduced legislation Tuesday setting 10-year targets to substantially reduce poverty in the province, focusing on chil
David Kennedy says his recent retirement came as a lifestyle shock, especially financially.
The 67-year-old Nanaimo, B.C., man said he faced housing difficulties after retirement, and with the high cost of food and fuel, every month is financially challenging.
The B.C. government introduced legislation Tuesday setting 10-year targets to substantially reduce poverty in the province, focusing on children, while also making a first-time commitment to cut seniors' poverty by 50 per cent.
The legislation would change three laws to set higher targets to cut poverty, ease employment requirements for people on income and disability assistance and provide more supports for people, said Sheila Malcolmson, social development and poverty reduction minister.
🌎📉💪 Poverty in Latin America has fallen significantly since 2008! Between 2008 and 2023, poverty fell from 45.8% to 25.4%. Progress in internet access, adult education, and sanitation all contributed to this decrease.
i see a lot of posts about poverty on this site and they always pertain to injustices, stats, laws and like... i always catch myself wondering, are the people posting these just good people wanting change, or have they been through it themselves?
then i wonder where all the personal stories are apart from the mix of statistics... are people who have truly suffered poverty just not on here...???
i want to swap horror stories/heartwarming ones, see other people's experiences that are similar to my own-
i wanna connect on the feeling of hunger, talk about how that first taste of food zaps your tongue after days of not being able to eat...
wanna hear the warm memories amongst the struggle- for example, my mother wrapping me & my baby siblings in thick blankets on our living room floor so all she could see was our eyes peeking out above our tall, cone-shaped nests and treating it as a game, though she was just making sure we survived another night without heat while going through yet another brutal winter atop our barren mountain...
though i wanna connect on all the battle stories of what it was like to grow up/be in poverty, i really wanna see people talk about what strength, happiness and morals can come out of such despair:
you get used to having nothing and are able to get by, when normal people would have a literal mental breakdown over such things
you take joy in the littlest of things, appreciate so many things people take for granted
you gain a concrete kindness, a deep type of empathy for others you see even having a flicker of the struggle you did/are
you end up informing people of the stats and information that the posts i mentioned above include, advocate for the people less fortunate
i moved away into a wealthy Canadian city where you don't easily see poverty/interact with people going through it unless you venture into very specific pockets of the city and i kinda miss interacting with others that are of my kind- i'll never forget someone sheepishly telling me about how a bottle depot works and realizing that im assumed to be part of the people who have never experienced what its like to rely on such a thing to make the rent and get a day's meal...
The expansion of tree plantations and forest regrowth areas is associated with improvements in people’s living standards across 18 African c
AbstractNumerous countries have adopted large-scale tree planting programs as a climate mitigation strategy and to improve local livelihoods. However, it remains poorly documented how the surge in tree plantations has altered local livelihoods. Here, we assess whether tropical tree plantation expansion and forest regrowth across 18 African countries are associated with local people’s living standards. By combining a recent map that distinguishes tree plantations from regrowth from 2000 to 2012 with multidimensional poverty measures from more than 200,000 households, we find a positive association between people's living standards and areas where tree plantations have expanded or, to a lesser extent, forest regrowth has occurred. Because tree plantations make up a large proportion of recent increases in tropical tree cover – and controversy remains about their potential impacts on both biodiversity and local people – our study provides broad empirical support for the idea that tree plantations and forest regrowth can be linked with reduced poverty in the short term.
den Braber, B., Hall, C.M., Rhemtulla, J.M. et al. Tree plantations and forest regrowth are linked to poverty reduction in Africa. Commun Earth Environ 5, 724 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01845-2
Advocates tout agroforestry as a sustainable farming alternative to soy monocultures and cattle ranching. It can restore degraded pastures and provide a stable income for small farmers.
“As the planet grapples with growing hunger and an uptick of climate change-driven droughts, torrential rains and flooding, experts and authorities from the United Kingdom to Uganda, as well as Brazil’s incoming government, increasingly tout regenerative agriculture to tackle the interconnected crises.
Brazil’s agroforestry advocates say it is a sustainable alternative to soy monocultures and cattle ranching that could help restore roughly 30 million hectares (74 million acres, a little larger than the U.S. state of Arizona) of degraded pastures in the Amazon.
Supporters argue that well-planned and managed agroforestry systems can provide a decent and stable income for the Amazon’s small farmers, many of whom are extremely poor, while protecting the environment by increasing biodiversity and carbon stocks.
“It is perhaps one of the only tools we have to carry out regenerative agriculture that is linked not only to climate goals but also to poverty and hunger reduction goals,” Tomaz Lanza, a consultant, expert in agroforestry and doctor of agronomy, told Mongabay by video calls.
Often referred by the Portuguese acronym SAFs, agroforestry systems combine species as varied as açaí, andiroba, copaíba, cupuaçu, cacao and banana, together with crops such as corn and manioc with trees in relatively small patches of land — a practice that is actually centuries old.
“The populations of the Amazon have been practicing the agroforestry system since they developed agriculture, 2,000 years before the European invasion of Brazil,” Judson Valentim, an agronomist and researcher at Embrapa, told Mongabay by phone...
RECA, with more than 30 years of experience, is for many a blueprint of what sustainable agriculture in the Amazon could look like.
Mongabay traveled to RECA two days after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential elections by a narrow margin. The veteran left-winger has promised to put protection of the Amazon at the forefront of his agenda and has signaled lower interest rates on rural credit for sustainable productions and recuperation of degraded areas...
The cooperative was officially founded in 1989. Today, RECA sells high-value goods like jam and pulp across Brazil and even for export, with açaí and cupuaçu products the biggest earners. The cooperative also has a carbon credits program with cosmetic giant Natura, by which the farmers receive economic compensation for protecting the forest and reducing carbon emissions in the company’s supply chain.
Along with the Tomé-Açu Mixed Agricultural Cooperative (CAMTA) in Pará state, experts consider RECA the most successful example of agroforestry in Brazil’s Amazon.
For Valentim, the researcher, a huge part of RECA’s success comes down to its organizational model as a cooperative. He touts the economic benefits of the agroforestry model not only as a way of lifting small farmers out of poverty but offering perspective for the future, halting Amazonian migration and the advance of the deforestation frontier.
“An agroforestry system with açaí and a consortium of cultures including a short-term production crop can place a farming family with 5 hectares of land in the Brazilian middle class,” he said.
Agroforestry systems are more resilient economically because producers are less exposed to price shocks if the value of a product changes, but also environmentally, key at a time of increasingly accelerated droughts and floods.” -via Mongabay, 12/9/22
‘It helps with my stress’: US basic income project shows signs of success
Georgia pilot gives 650 predominantly Black women $850 a month for two years, no strings attached – and it seems to be working
"Researchers say the growing body of evidence from guaranteed-income projects has the potential to spur a reevaluation of how government can more effectively create a social safety net for historically-marginalized populations."
