Monday, July 21, 2008

Deal Seeks to Offer Drug for Malaria at Low Price - NYTimes.com



 
 

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via www.nytimes.com on 7/18/08

Deal Seeks to Offer Drug for Malaria at Low Price

Published: July 18, 2008

The Clinton Foundation announced Thursday that it had brokered an agreement among several drug makers that it hoped would ensure a steady supply of a crucial malaria medicine at reasonable prices for the world's poor.

The charity, created by former President Bill Clinton, is trying to control spikes in the price of artemisinin, a derivative of the sweet wormwood plant that Chinese scientists turned into the latest miracle drug against malaria.

In 2004, when international donors agreed to pay for artemisinin-based drug cocktails, the price of the raw material soared. In a year, it more than quadrupled, to about $500 per pound from about $115 per pound. (At the time, pharmaceutical executives in China blamed farmers for hoarding the supply.)

The Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis, then the only company with an artemisinin-based drug approved by the World Health Organization, absorbed the losses, and makers of generic drugs were scared away from the field.

But by 2006, after farmers rushed to plant more sweet wormwood and pickers gathered it in the wild, the price had plummeted to about $70 a pound. It has remained in that range since.

The complex deal announced Thursday involves two Chinese suppliers of artemisinin, two Indian companies that turn it into active ingredients and two more Indian companies, Cipla and Ipca Laboratories, that produce finished pills.

The Chinese companies have agreed to supply artemisinin at a price of no more than $136 a pound, said Dai Ellis, the foundation's executive vice president for access programs. The drug makers have agreed to buy at that price, but are free to buy elsewhere if they can find it for less than about $125 a pound. In return, they will sell their products at agreed-upon low wholesale prices.

At the moment, with global artemisinin prices well below those levels, the ceiling is "irrelevant," Mr. Ellis said. "Capitalism takes over."

However, he said, donors may soon start subsidizing private-market purchases of such drugs. (In most poor countries, people buy malaria drugs at private pharmacies and shops, while AIDS and tuberculosis drugs are distributed by public hospitals.) Lower prices could create new demand, sending prices of the raw material up again.

It is unclear how much control over the market the arrangement will create. Wormwood is also farmed in Vietnam and Tanzania and grows wild around the world. When prices soared, plans were announced to grow it in South Africa and elsewhere, and to make synthetic versions.

Mr. Ellis said the Clinton Foundation hoped to sign up more suppliers.

It also announced that Cipla and Ipca would produce a new artemisinin-based combination, artesunate plus amodiaquine, for about 30 percent less than its prevailing market price.

Sanofi Aventis, the first company to market a version of this combination approved by the W.H.O., deliberately did not patent it. Novartis's earlier product combines artemisinin with a different drug, lumefantrine.

Daniel Vasella, chairman of Novartis, said he was glad to have more competitors because, even at current artemisinin prices, his company lost 80 cents on each pill it made for public health agencies. With research and distribution expenses, he said, "It has cost us over $100 million."


 
 

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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist - Nicholas D. Kristof - The Luckiest Girl in the World - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com - Sent Using Google Toolbar

Op-Ed Columnist - Nicholas D. Kristof - The Luckiest Girl in the World - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist

The Luckiest Girl

Published: July 3, 2008

This year's college graduates owe their success to many factors, from hectoring parents to cherished remedies for hangovers. But one of the most remarkable of the new graduates, Beatrice Biira, credits something utterly improbable: a goat.

Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

On the Ground

Share Your Comments About This Column

Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.

Go to Columnist Page »

"I am one of the luckiest girls in the world," Beatrice declared at her graduation party after earning her bachelor's degree from Connecticut College. Indeed, and it's appropriate that the goat that changed her life was named Luck.

Beatrice's story helps address two of the most commonly asked questions about foreign assistance: "Does aid work?" and "What can I do?"

The tale begins in the rolling hills of western Uganda, where Beatrice was born and raised. As a girl, she desperately yearned for an education, but it seemed hopeless: Her parents were peasants who couldn't afford to send her to school.

The years passed and Beatrice stayed home to help with the chores. She was on track to become one more illiterate African woman, another of the continent's squandered human resources.

In the meantime, in Niantic, Conn., the children of the Niantic Community Church wanted to donate money for a good cause. They decided to buy goats for African villagers through Heifer International, a venerable aid group based in Arkansas that helps impoverished farming families.

A dairy goat in Heifer's online gift catalog costs $120; a flock of chicks or ducklings costs just $20.

One of the goats bought by the Niantic church went to Beatrice's parents and soon produced twins. When the kid goats were weaned, the children drank the goat's milk for a nutritional boost and sold the surplus milk for extra money.

The cash from the milk accumulated, and Beatrice's parents decided that they could now afford to send their daughter to school. She was much older than the other first graders, but she was so overjoyed that she studied diligently and rose to be the best student in the school.

An American visiting the school was impressed and wrote a children's book, "Beatrice's Goat," about how the gift of a goat had enabled a bright girl to go to school. The book was published in 2000 and became a children's best seller — but there is now room for a more remarkable sequel.

Beatrice was such an outstanding student that she won a scholarship, not only to Uganda's best girls' high school, but also to a prep school in Massachusetts and then to Connecticut College. A group of 20 donors to Heifer International — coordinated by a retired staff member named Rosalee Sinn, who fell in love with Beatrice when she saw her at age 10 — financed the girl's living expenses.

A few years ago, Beatrice spoke at a Heifer event attended by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist. Mr. Sachs was impressed and devised what he jokingly called the "Beatrice Theorem" of development economics: small inputs can lead to large outcomes.

Granted, foreign assistance doesn't always work and is much harder than it looks. "I won't lie to you. Corruption is high in Uganda," Beatrice acknowledges.

A crooked local official might have distributed the goats by demanding that girls sleep with him in exchange. Or Beatrice's goat might have died or been stolen. Or unpasteurized milk might have sickened or killed Beatrice.

In short, millions of things could go wrong. But when there's a good model in place, they often go right. That's why villagers in western Uganda recently held a special Mass and a feast to celebrate the first local person to earn a college degree in America.

Moreover, Africa will soon have a new asset: a well-trained professional to improve governance. Beatrice plans to earn a master's degree at the Clinton School of Public Service in Arkansas and then return to Africa to work for an aid group.

Beatrice dreams of working on projects to help women earn and manage money more effectively, partly because she has seen in her own village how cash is always controlled by men. Sometimes they spent it partying with buddies at a bar, rather than educating their children. Changing that culture won't be easy, Beatrice says, but it can be done.

When people ask how they can help in the fight against poverty, there are a thousand good answers, from sponsoring a child to supporting a grass-roots organization through globalgiving.com. (I've listed specific suggestions on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, and on facebook.com/kristof).

The challenges of global poverty are vast and complex, far beyond anyone's power to resolve, and buying a farm animal for a poor family won't solve them. But Beatrice's giddy happiness these days is still a reminder that each of us does have the power to make a difference — to transform a girl's life with something as simple and cheap as a little goat.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Progress Has Been Made in Fight Against AIDS, but Not Enough, U.N. Report Sa...



 
 

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via www.nytimes.com on 6/2/08

Progress Has Been Made in Fight Against AIDS, but Not Enough, U.N. Report Says

Published: June 3, 2008

JOHANNESBURG — The good news on AIDS: Nearly a million people began life-prolonging drug treatment in developing countries last year. The bad news: 2.5 million people were newly infected with H.I.V.

As new infections continue to far outstrip efforts to treat the sick, the United Nations released a progress report on Monday that highlighted both the notable gains in combating the AIDS epidemic and the daunting scale of what remains to be done.

Unaids and the World Health Organization, two United Nations agencies, had initially set a 2005 deadline for getting three million people in developing countries onto treatment regimens, but that goal was not achieved until last year. In 2007 alone, the number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy rose by 54 percent. Still, that is less than a third of those believed to need the treatment.

There was also significant headway in providing antiretroviral treatments to help prevent women from infecting their babies with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, during pregnancy and childbirth. About a third of H.I.V.-positive pregnant women got the treatments last year, compared with 10 percent in 2004, with the greatest gains in West and Central Africa, the report found.

"It demonstrates our efforts have started to bear fruit," Patricia Doughty, a program officer at Unicef, said in a telephone briefing.

But even as health systems geared up to prevent mothers from passing on the disease to their children, the needs of the mothers themselves were neglected. Only 12 percent of H.I.V.-positive pregnant women were assessed for whether they needed treatment themselves. When mothers die of AIDS and their children are orphaned, the opportunities and even survival of the babies who were saved from infection are undermined.

The statistics were laid out in "Towards Universal Access: Scaling Up Priority H.I.V./AIDS Interventions in the Health Sector," a collaboration of Unaids, the World Health Organization and Unicef. It is the annual report that documents the provision of prevention, care and treatment services for H.I.V. and AIDS.

More than a year after clinical trials in Africa found that male circumcision reduced the risk of heterosexual men contracting H.I.V. by about 60 percent, "many high burden countries are exploring how and whether to scale up male circumcision programs," the report said.

Experts estimate that male circumcision, if widely applied in Africa, could avert two million infections and prevent 300,000 deaths over the next decade.

Dr. Kevin M. De Cock, who heads the World Health Organization's H.I.V./AIDS department, said performing circumcisions on a large scale was no simple task for overstretched health care systems in southern African countries, where the approach was most needed. He acknowledged that adoption of the strategy had been "relatively slow."

"There has been progress, but it would be nice to see it faster," he said.


 
 

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The World - Royal Care for Some of India’s Patients, Neglect for Others - NY...

via www.nytimes.com on 6/2/08
The World

Royal Care for Some of India's Patients, Neglect for Others

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

WHAT MONEY BUYS Robin Steeles of Alabama was pampered during his 10 days at the private hospital in Bangalore, where he underwent heart surgery


Published: June 1, 2008

BANGALORE, India — "To get the best care," Robin Steeles said gamely, "you gotta pay for it."

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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

WHAT BEING POOR MEANS A government hospital in Banglaore that treated poisoning victims lacked equipment that might have saved lives.

Mr. Steeles, 60, a car dealer from Daphne, Ala., had flown halfway around the world last month to save his heart, at a price he could pay. He had a mitral valve repaired at a state-of-the-art private hospital here, called Wockhardt, and for 10 days, he was recuperating in a carpeted, wood-paneled room, with a view of a leafy green courtyard.

A dietician helped select his meals. A dermatologist came as soon as he complained of an itch. His Royal Suite had cable TV, a computer, a minirefrigerator, where an attendant that afternoon stashed some ice cream, for when he felt hungry later. Three days after surgery, he was sitting in a chair, smiling, chattering, thrilled to be alive.

On his bed lay the morning's paper. Dominating its front page was the story of other men, many of them day laborers who laid bricks and mixed cement for Bangalore's construction boom, who had fallen gravely ill after drinking illegally brewed liquor. All told, more than 150 died that week, here and in neighboring Tamil Nadu State.

Not for them the care of India's best private hospitals. They had been wheeled in by wives and brothers to the overstretched government-run Bowring Hospital, on the other side of town. Bowring had no intensive care unit, no ventilators, no dialysis machine. Dinner was a stack of white bread, on which a healthy cockroach crawled while a patient, named Yelappa, slept.

Wockhardt has 30 ventilators, including some that are noninvasive, so the patient does not have to have a tube rammed down his throat. At any one time, a half-dozen are in use. An elderly woman had been in its intensive care unit for a week, on dialysis; her family wanted to do whatever possible to keep her alive, no matter the cost.

At Bowring, one of the young doctors, named Harish, said a ventilator and a dialysis machine would have allowed him to keep half of his patients alive. The most severe case, Mohammed Amin, was breathing with the aid of a hand pump that his wife squeezed silently. Dr. Harish sent the relative of one man to get blood tests done at the nearest private hospital; there was no equipment to do the test here. Then the doctor rushed to the triage section in Bowring's lobby, where the newest patient, writhing, resisting, disoriented from the poison in his gut, had to be tied down with bedsheets.

Where you stand on the Indian social ladder shapes to a large degree what kind of health you're in, and what kind of health care you receive. The beds in Bowring were taken up by small skinny men. One of Wockhardt's most popular offerings is a weight loss program, and the majority of walk-ins at its outpatient clinic suffer from diabetes, closely linked to obesity.

This is no anomaly. A government-sponsored National Family Health Survey released last fall says a woman born in the poorest 20 percent of the population is more than twice as likely to be underweight than one in the richest quintile, and 50 percent more likely to be anemic.

For children, the gap is equally stark. The poorest quintile is more than twice as likely to be stunted, a function of chronic malnutrition, and nearly three times less likely to be fully immunized.

It is not as if the poor do not seek treatment, Jishnu Das, an economist who studies health and poverty for the World Bank, points out. They do, and sometimes more often than the rich. It is just that they are more likely, Mr. Das says, to land at the doorstep of a caregiver who is incompetent, ill-trained or indifferent to their needs.

"The poor are not dying and sick because they do not go to seek medical care," he said. "In fact, the poor are going to doctors in droves. There are no good options for the poor. The private hospitals and care they are able to access is of very low quality, and when they try and access government care, they receive no attention whatsoever."

The survey found that two-thirds of Indian households rely on private medical care when sick, a preference that cuts across class. Asked why they don't use public facilities, the most common answer was poor care.

India has a countrywide network of government-funded primary health centers and hospitals, but staffing, medicines and resources vary widely. Some, especially in rural India, are notorious for having staff doctors on paper at best. This is only beginning to change. The government has increased health spending in recent years, and this year began a health insurance program that would allow people in poverty access to a hospital of their choice.

The Planning Commission of India this year found that in government-run health centers, 45 percent of gynecologist posts and 53 percent of pediatric posts went unfilled, and that salaries for government doctors are a fraction of those at new private hospitals like Wockhardt.

Wockhardt struggles to fill its slots, too, but its facilities allow it to aggressively recruit, including from among Indian doctors who have worked abroad for years.

The morning papers did not let Mr. Steeles forget the vast gulf between his predicament and that of the hooch drinkers fighting for life at Bowring. Yet as far apart as they were, their tales followed a somewhat parallel plot. The American health care system could no more care for Mr. Steeles than the Indian system could for Mr. Amin.

Mr. Steeles came here because he is uninsured, and could not afford heart surgery in the United States, he said, without liquidating most of his assets. After five months of research and e-mail messages to doctors worldwide, he chose a heart surgeon here in Bangalore. "I'm over here for a fraction of what I would have paid in the United States," he said. "In my personal situation, I'm just delighted I took the road that I did."

Mr. Steele's Royal Suite, incidentally, is available to anyone, Indian or foreigner, who can pay for it. After his stay here, he would move to a room at a private club for 16 days of further recovery, before flying home. All told, he said it cost him about $20,000, a tenth of what he would have paid at a private American hospital.

Across town, among the hooch drinkers, a few of the worst cases had been transferred to private hospitals that had agreed to take them, at the government's expense.

Mr. Amin was too frail to be transferred. He died at Bowring, leaving behind a wife and two young children.

A $10 Mosquito Net Is Making Charity Cool - NYTimes.com

“I think the concept of something simple, and conceptually powerful and concrete seems to mobilize people, even catalyze action.”

Sent to you by john via Google Reader:

via www.nytimes.com on 6/2/08

A $10 Mosquito Net Is Making Charity Cool

Mike Mergen for The New York Times

Lynda Commale and her daughter, Katherine, 7, raised money for mosquito nets on Sunday at a church in Malvern, Pa.

Published: June 2, 2008

Donating $10 to buy a mosquito net to save an African child from malaria has become a hip way to show you care, especially for teenagers. The movement is like a modern version of the March of Dimes, created in 1938 to defeat polio, or like collecting pennies for Unicef on Halloween.

Unusual allies, like the Methodist and Lutheran Churches, the National Basketball Association and the United Nations Foundation, are stoking the passion for nets that prevent malaria. The annual "American Idol Gives Back" fund-raising television special has donated about $6 million a year for two years. The music channel VH1 made a fund-raising video featuring a pesky man in a mosquito suit.

It is an appeal that clearly resonates with young people.

Addressing a conference of 6,000 Methodist youths in North Carolina last year, Bishop Thomas Bickerton held up his own $10 and told the crowd: "This represents your lunch today at McDonald's or your pizza tonight from Domino's. Or you could save a human life."

The lights were so bright that he could see only what was happening at his feet. "They just showered the stage with $10 bills," Bishop Bickerton said. "In 30 seconds, we had $16,000. I'm just lucky they didn't throw coins."

Part of what has helped the campaign catch on is its sheer simplicity and affordability — $10 buys one net to save a child. Nothing But Nets, the best-known campaign, has raised $20 million from 70,000 individuals, most of it in donations averaging $60.

That is a small fraction of the overall need, which experts estimate at $2.5 billion. But it gives the effort a populist edge, and participation is psychologically rewarding for anyone whose philanthropic pockets are shallower than those of Bill Gates.

"The first time I donated money, after my bar mitzvah, it was for someone who needed a heart transplant," said Daniel Fogel, 18, a founder of his Waltham, Mass., high school's juggling club, which raised $2,353 for nets last year. "But I had the feeling: Am I really helping? But if you can say $10 saves a life, that makes students feel they can help a lot. And every student has $10."

Emily Renzelli of West Virginia University learned about malaria on a trip to South Africa. She raised about $1,000 through bake sales and parties where students were snagged in nets and not released until they recited facts about malaria.

Naomi Levine, an expert on philanthropy at New York University, said young people "more than ever want to do something."

"You won't find them giving money to research," she added. "It's too far off. But a net is something you can hold in your hand. And any time young people get interested in any form of philanthropy, it's a good thing."

Crucial to the drive against malaria, which kills an estimated one million people a year, mostly in Africa, has been the development of an inexpensive, long-lasting insecticidal net. Unlike old nets, which either had no insecticide or had to be dipped twice a year, the new ones keep killing or repelling mosquitoes for three to five years. When more than 60 percent of the inhabitants of a village use them over their beds while they are sleeping, malaria rates usually drop sharply.

Major donors have focused on malaria since the creation in 2001 of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has paid for 106 million nets. President Bush in 2005 started the President's Malaria Initiative, which has bought 6 million so far.

The Gates Foundation has spent almost $1.2 billion on malaria, and although most goes toward research into vaccines and new drugs, part went to match the first $3 million raised by Nothing But Nets.

Although in recent years a welter of malaria campaigns has sprung up worldwide, participation in the United States was anemic until two years ago when Rick Reilly, then the back-page columnist for Sports Illustrated, took his daughter to Venice.

Exhausted from shopping, he said in a recent interview, he returned alone to their hotel. Idly channel-surfing, he stumbled onto a BBC documentary about malaria in Africa. Imitating a British accent, he said: "Up to 3,000 children die needlessly each day of malaria — and all they need is a net."

"I thought, 'That's a column,' " he said. "Sports is nothing but nets — basketball nets, tennis nets, soccer nets, lacrosse nets, jumping the net, cutting down nets, the New Jersey Nets, girls in fishnets, whatever ... ."

Before asking his readers to donate $10 or $20, he searched for an agency to collect the money and buy the nets. He found the United Nations Foundation, which was started in 1998 by Ted Turner. Although it was already sponsoring another campaign, Malaria No More, it agreed to his request that a new group be started with the name Nothing But Nets. "That's a real title," Mr. Reilly said. "It's so simple that even sports fans can get it."

The foundation put a donation form on its Web site and promised to cover all administrative costs. Within a few days, $1.6 million had flowed in.

Soon after, Major League Soccer and the National Basketball Association became sponsors.

Players like Diego Gutierrez of the Chicago Fire and DeSagana Diop of the New Jersey Nets, who is from Senegal, helped raise money and traveled to Africa to hand out nets.

The United Methodist Church, the Lutheran Church and the Union for Reform Judaism also joined the effort, as did corporate sponsors like Orkin Pest Control and Makita tools.

The two Protestant churches pledged to raise up to $100 million each. They organize youth basketball tournaments and ask for money from their own adherents. For example, Bishop Bickerton said, at the Methodist general conference in April, a basketball signed by all the church's bishops was auctioned off for $430,000.

But most of the contributions have been modest, raised by students.

Yoni D. P. Rechtman, a seventh grader on the undefeated middle-school team at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn, organized a 3-on-3 basketball tournament as part of his "mitzvah project," the tradition of raising money for a good cause before one's bar mitzvah. Unfortunately, he said, it rained that day; but the nine players who showed up anyway had family pledges totaling $1,900.

At Howard University in Washington, Ololade Ajayi helped organize the African Student Association fashion show to raise $2,300. She had a personal interest, she said, because she caught malaria several times growing up in Nigeria and lost a friend to it.

"We had to take our own nets to boarding school," she said. "There were stagnant water pools on the school grounds. If your net got holes in it, you'd be bitten."

But the champion for her age and weight class is undoubtedly Katherine Commale of Hopewell, Pa., who has just turned 7 and has raised $43,000.

Her mother, Lynda Commale, said it started in April 2006 when she was watching television while the family slept and learned from a PBS documentary that a child died of malaria every 30 seconds.

"I couldn't sleep," Ms. Commale said. "The next morning, the kids said, 'Mom, what's wrong with you?' I told them — and Katherine was just 5, and she started counting on her fingers. She got to 30, and she looked horrified. And she said 'Mommy, we have to do something.' "

With her 3-year-old brother, Katherine built a diorama from a pizza box and some Barbie dolls to represent an African family in a hut. Then, with a piece of tulle and a toy bug, she developed a short skit showing how nets protect sleeping children.

"She tucks it in, she says, 'You're safe now,' " Ms. Commale said. "Kids get this in like 90 seconds."

Soon, she and Katherine made a presentation at their church and raised $2,000, and they have continued visiting churches. Katherine and her friends also hand-decorate gift cards (which can be ordered at lyndacommale@yahoo.com.) that say, "A mosquito net has been purchased in your name." They have raised about $8,000 each Christmas, Ms. Commale said.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

'Forget climate change, we should spend on nutrition' - Times Online

If we could incorporate microfinance issues with these basic health issues, vitamin a, zinc, water, etc, the problem of course is that this creates malthusian conundrums, too many children surviving, which strains an already strained food supply, and other scare resources, which puts them at even higher risk of massive famine,etc and onward into the malthusian spiral.

 
 

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via www.timesonline.co.uk on 5/31/08

Forget climate change, we should spend on nutrition'

A nine-year-old boy rests on a bed at the Catarino Rivas hospital in San Pedro Sula, Honduras

(Edgard Garrido/Reuters)

Malnutrition in mothers and their young children will claim 3.5 million lives this year

Mark Henderson, Science Editor, in Copenhagen

TimesOnline readers' verdict I Panel'srankings in full

Chooseyour own priorities on our interactive table

Issues: conflictl globalwarming l diseasel hungerl terrorism

Malnutrition should be the world's major priority for aid and development, apanel of eight leading economists, including five Nobel laureates, declaredyesterday.

The provision of supplements of vitamin A and zinc to children in developingcountries, to prevent avoidable deficiencies that affect hundreds ofmillions of children, is the most cost-effective way of making the world abetter place, the Copenhagen Consensus initiative has found.

Three other strategies for improving diets in poor nations were also namedamong the top six of 30 challenges assessed by the project, which aims toprioritise solutions to the world's many problems according to their costsand benefits.

Efforts to control global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions,however, were rated at the bottom of the league table, as the economistsconsidered the high costs of such action were not justified by the payoffs.Research into new low-carbon technologies, such as solar and nuclear fusionpower, was ranked as more worthwhile, in 14th place.

The previous Copenhagen Consensus, held in 2004, also listed global warming asits lowest priority. The exercise was organised by Bjorn Lomborg, thecontroversial Danish statistician who has long argued that though climatechange is real, current approaches to fighting it offer poor value formoney.

Dr Lomborg said: "This gives us the ultimate overview of how global decisionscan best be made and how we can best spend money to do good in the world.Prioritising is hard. It's much easier to say we want to do everything, butunfortunately we have limited resources. We don't just focus on what'sfashionable, but also on what's rational."

The jury of economists chose to emphasise malnutrition, and micronutrientsupplements in particular, because of the major effects that comparativelymoderate financial investments could have.

Around 140 million children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can causeblindness, immune system problems and death, or zinc deficiency, which canstunt growth. Supplements of these nutrients, however, are both effectiveand extremely cheap – at 20 US cents per person per year for vitamin A and$1 for zinc.

For just $60m a year, it would be possible to provide capsules of bothmicronutrients to 80 per cent of undernourished children in sub-SaharanAfrica and South Asia, with benefits worth more than $1bn. "Each dollar doesmore than $17 worth of good," Dr Lomborg said.


 
 

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test


Opportunity International Webinars


Dear Opportunity Partners,
 
Join us for a two part Webinar Summer Series on June 3rd and 17th!  If you would like to join us, just scroll down and follow the instructions.  No need to rsvp.
 


    



Operations 101 and 201 . . . A two part summer series!

We report a 98% loan repayment rate and share stories about lives transformed . . . but how does this happen? This webinar series will answer your questions about our operations and provide you with a better understanding of what happens behind the scenes at Opportunity – both through our programs and with our funding. Join us and bring your questions!
Tuesday, June 3rd at 12:00 noon central time
Part I - Operations 101: How do we do it?
Learn how Opportunity International grew to serve 1 million loan clients a year: how loans are made, how loans are used and the role of the loan officers who work with our clients to make it all happen.  We will also discuss why banking has become such an important part of our future and how savings is creating opportunities for even more entrepreneurs to benefit from an Opportunity International microloan.  
Tuesday, June 17th at 12:00 noon central time
Part II - Operations 201: Where does the funding come from?
How do we fund our work? During this session you will learn about how we raise the funds necessary to support our work – both through private donations and investment capital. We will also cover corporate fundraising and share how we land those large grants from foundations like the Gates Foundation. Join us prepared to ask how you as governors can help secure this funding.
 
Follow these easy instructions to participate in the Webinar:
 
To test your computer:
At any time prior to the Webinar, you can click the link below to test your connection and make sure your Internet Explorer is set up to participate.  We are using Java.  While most computers already have Java installed, yours may not.  In that case, you will need to install Java.  This will only take a few seconds.  This link will quickly lead you through the installation process.  http://smys5.civi.com/test.html <http://smys5.civi.com/test.html>
To participate:
Step One:
To assure that you will have a successful Web Presentation experience, we recommend that you log on to the power point presentation by clicking on this link http://civi.com/opp1 <http://civi.com/opp1>   about 15 minutes in advance of the presentation. This way you will be sure that your system is compatible with ours before the presentation starts. (For those who like to prepare way in advance, note that you cannot access our page earlier than 11:45 on the day of the presentation.)
 
Step Two:
At 12:00 noon central time call the below phone number. There is no pass code needed. The operator will ask for your first and last name.  This will get you hooked up to the call so that you can hear the presentation and participate in the Q and A session during the call.  Phone Number: 866-548-2699.  You can call in a few minutes early if you like.  [For those dialing from outside the U.S. and Canada, dial 904-596-2360.]
 
If you do not have access to a computer you can always call in and listen to the presentation!

If you need assistance, call our Civicom special tech support person at 877-211-0224 and enter Pass code: 592 821.  (Outside the U.S./Canada, dial: +1-847-597-8069 and enter Pass code: 592 821.) .
 
If you want more detailed instructions, scroll down below my signature.

We look forward to having you on the call with us!
(If you are interested in learning more about or joining our Board of Governors, please let me know.)
 
Sarah Tesch
Manager, Opportunity Partners



Opportunity International
Direct | 630.242.4137
Toll Free | 800.793.9455 x 4137     Fax | 630.645.1458
Email | stesch@opportunity.org <mailto:MyEmail@opportunity.org>     Web | www.opportunity.org <http://www.opportunity.org/>
2122 York Road | Suite 150 | Oak Brook, IL 60523


 
Detailed Webinar Log-in Instructions

1. Simply click on http://civi.com/opp1 Internet Explorer will open, showing you the following:

2. Type in your name and click “next”
3. Your computer will test for Java and you should see something similar to the following:
(If you do not have Java currently installed, it will walk you through installing it.)

4. Click “next”
Your screen should now show the presenter’s screen.
 
If you see the following, it is because you have a “pop-up blocker” (which many of us have due to the Google toolbar):
Simply click where it says “click here to see the host’s screen” and you will then see the presenter’s screen.

 
 
 


------ End of Forwarded Message

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

microfinance meeting

Date: Thursday, May 29th
Time: 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Place: Room 209 on the North end of the CHA building

Willow Creek Medical Trip To Zambia - June/July 2008

This is from the Willow Creek, S. Barrington website under Global Connections. Thought this might be of special interest to John. Maybe John, you even know the MD who's leading the group? ~ Nike

Zambia Medical Team
We have formed a Medical Team to Zambia for June 20 - July 5, 2008. Mike Marschke, MD is leading this team .... Mike currently is a palliative care physician at the University of Chicago and participated in the WCCC medical assessment trip to Zambia in 2007. The team will be serving in Samfya, Zambia alongside our ministry partners . The focus of the trip is to assist in starting up a general medical clinic, the education of medical personnel and volunteers, and also to provide general medical care to the community.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Tony Campolo's Weekly Podcasts

Here is the website for Tony Campolo's weekly podcasts:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/TonyCampoloPodcast

These are also available on ITUNES.

World’s Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut - New York Times



 
 

Sent to you by john via Google Reader:

 
 

via www.nytimes.com on 5/17/08

May 18, 2008
The Food Chain

World's Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut

LOS BAÑOS, Philippines — The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.

The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.

This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world's agricultural system. Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.

The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.

"People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda," said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the rice institute.

Vital research programs have been slashed. At the rice institute, scientists have identified 14 genetic traits that could help rice plants survive the plant hopper, which sucks the juices out of young plants while infecting them with viruses. But the scientists have had no money to breed these traits into the world's most widely used rice varieties.

The institute is the world's main repository of rice seeds as well as genetic and other information about rice, the crop that feeds nearly half the world's people.

But nowadays at the International Rice Research Institute, greenhouses have peeling paint and holes in their screens and walls. Hallways are dotted with empty offices. In the 1980s, the institute employed five entomologists, or insect experts, overseeing a staff of 200. Now it has one entomologist with a staff of eight.

"We've had an exodus here," said Yvette Naredo, an assistant geneticist.

Similar troubles plague other centers in Asia, Africa and Latin America that work on crop productivity in poor countries. Agricultural experts have complained about the flagging efforts for years and warned of the risks.

"Nobody was listening," said Thomas Lumpkin, director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. World leaders are scrambling to respond. On May 1, President Bush asked Congress for an extra $770 million to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. That network includes the rice institute.

Robert Bertram, who oversees the funding for the United States Agency for International Development, said he was still trying to stop the cuts and argued that research to improve crop yields was "like putting money in the pockets of poor people, and I mean billions of poor people."

The Agency for International Development is the primary vehicle for the American government to finance development projects abroad. James R. Kunder, its acting deputy administrator, said the agency hoped to reconsider the cutbacks if Congress allows extra money.

Crop by crop and country by country, agricultural research and development are lagging.

The center in Mexico has created drought-tolerant corn for Africa and higher-yielding, disease-resistant wheat for South Asia. But it does not have the money to get the varieties into the hands of poor farmers.

In Africa, where yields have remained stagnant since the 1960s, efforts to bolster them have been hampered by cuts not only in research but also in programs like fertilizer distribution.

Even in the United States, long a world leader in agricultural research, some money has been shifted away from crop-productivity work into issues like nutrition and food safety.

The biggest cutbacks have come in donations to agriculture in poor countries from the governments of wealthy countries and in loans from development institutions that the wealthy governments control, like the World Bank. Such projects include not only research on pests and crops but also programs to help farmers adopt improved methods in their fields.

Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations roughly in half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion. The United States cut its support for agriculture in poor countries to $624 million from $2.3 billion in that period.

"Agriculture has been so productive and done so well, people have kind of lost sight of how fragile it really is," said Jan E. Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University who works with rice. "It's as if we have lost track of the fact that food is linked to agriculture, which is linked to human survival."

Cooperation on Crops

Agricultural research and development work is never done. The demand for food keeps growing. Insects and plant diseases adapt, overcoming efforts to thwart them.

In the 1960s, population growth was far outrunning food production, threatening famine in many poor countries. But then wealthier nations joined forces with the poor countries to improve crop yields. Countries like India and Pakistan embraced new plant varieties, irrigation projects and fertilizer programs in a vast effort that came to be known as the Green Revolution.

Yields soared, and by the 1980s, the threat of starvation had receded in most of the world. With Europe and the United States offering their farmers heavy subsidies that encouraged production, grain became abundant worldwide, and prices fell.

Many poor countries, instead of developing their own agriculture, turned to the world market to buy cheap rice and wheat. In 1986, Agriculture Secretary John Block called the idea of developing countries feeding themselves "an anachronism from a bygone era," saying they should just buy American.

Additional factors prompted wealthy countries to shift their donations away from agriculture. For instance, advocacy groups criticized some of the environmental problems arising from intensive farming, weakening support for the Green Revolution. And urgent new priorities like the AIDS crisis in Africa captured the world's attention.

Advocates for agriculture fought a losing battle to stop the cutbacks — nowhere more than in the World Bank, the huge institution in Washington that makes low-interest loans to poor countries for development projects.

Adjusted for inflation, the World Bank cut its agricultural lending to $2 billion in 2004 from $7.7 billion in 1980.

The Green Revolution had led to creation of a global network of research centers focusing on agriculture and food production, with 14 institutes — including the International Rice Research Institute — scattered across Asia, Africa and Latin America, in addition to a research office in Washington. The centers, known collectively as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, carry much of the burden of improving crop yields in developing countries.

As the world lost its focus on crops, the budgets of some of the centers were cut. At others, the budgets stayed level or even rose, but donors increasingly directed the money toward worthwhile but ancillary projects like environmental research. Spending fell on the laborious plant-breeding programs needed to improve crop productivity.

As these trends played out, the stage was being set for a food emergency.

From 1970 to 1990, the peak Green Revolution years, the food supply grew faster than the world population. But after 1990, food's growth rate fell below population growth, according to a report by Ronald Trostle, a researcher at the Agriculture Department.

Around 2004, the world economy began growing more quickly, about 5 percent a year. So as the food supply was lagging, millions of people were gaining the money to improve their diets.

The world began to use more grain than it was producing, cutting into reserves, and prices started rising. Early this year, as stocks fell to perilous levels, international grain prices doubled or even tripled, threatening as many as 100 million people with malnutrition.

Slow Recovery for Aid

At the World Bank, agricultural financing has begun to recover. Under a new president, Robert B. Zoellick, the bank has decided to double its lending for such programs in Africa. After President Bush's request to Congress, other wealthy countries are joining the United States in increasing their support.

But the case of the brown plant hopper shows there will be no quick fix for the years of neglect.

The insect is not a new problem. In the 1960s, the rice institute, nestled between jungle and the bustling town of Los Baños, pioneered ways to help farmers grow two and even three crops a season, instead of one.

But with rice plants growing more of the year, the hoppers — which live only on rice plants — had longer to multiply, and became a bigger concern.

The institute responded by testing thousands of varieties of wild rice for natural resistance. Researchers found four types of resistance and bred them into commercial varieties by 1980.

But brown plant hoppers adapted swiftly, and the resistant strains started losing their effectiveness in the 1990s. An important insecticide lost its punch, too, as the hopper developed the ability to withstand up to 100 times the dose that used to kill it.

While the insect was adapting, the rice institute was being gutted.

Its money comes come from government donations, foundation grants and assistance from development institutions like the Asian Development Bank, an affiliate of the World Bank. After peaking in the early 1990s, the rice institute's budget has been cut in half after adjusting for inflation, a reflection of the larger cutbacks in global agriculture.

Several dozen important varieties of rice have been lost from the institute's gene bank through poor storage. Promising work on rice varieties that could withstand high temperatures and saltier water — ideal for coping with global warming and the higher sea levels that may follow — had to be abandoned.

A potential solution is at hand for the plant hopper problem. No fewer than 14 new types of genetic resistance have been discovered. But with the budget cuts, the institute has mounted no effort to breed these traits into widely used rice varieties.

Doing so now would take four to seven years, if money could be found. In the meantime, the hoppers have become a growing threat. China, the world's biggest rice producer, announced on May 7 that it was struggling to control the rapid spread of the insects there. A plant hopper outbreak can destroy 20 percent of a harvest; China is trying to hold losses to 5 percent in affected fields.

"We must stay ahead of rapidly evolving pests — and increasingly, a changing climate — to assure global food security," said Mr. Zeigler, the rice institute's director. "Cutting back on agricultural research today is pure folly


 
 

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Microfinance
Poor people, rich returns

May 15th 2008 NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

Is it acceptable to profit from the poor?

SINCE CompartamosBanco, a Mexican lender to the poor, went public a year or so ago, a rift has been growing in the booming microfinance industry. To supporters of traditional charitable microfinance—providing loans and other financial services to help lift people out of extreme poverty—the Compartamos initial public offering has come to symbolise an aggressive move by capitalists to profit from the poor. To its backers, on the other hand, the success of Compartamos, despite the recent lacklustre performance of its shares, symbolises how the profit motive can help lift many more people out of poverty than charity alone could ever do.

Critics of Compartamos include Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel peace prize in 2006 for his work in popularising microfinance through the Grameen Bank. He was reportedly “shocked” by the IPO, and has argued that microfinance should be about “protecting [poor people] from the moneylenders, not creating new ones.” Another critic, Chuck Waterfield of Microfin, a provider of software to microfinance institutions, accuses Compartamos of “monopolistic exploitation of the poor”. He alleges that it is charging interest rates of over 100% a year, little different from what illegal loan sharks demand, and that it is deliberately making it difficult for poor borrowers to understand how much they are paying for their loans. He and Mr Yunus are campaigning for the microfinance industry to agree on common standards on disclosing charges to help borrowers.

Compartamos concedes that its rates may seem high—though it reckons they are closer to 70%—but says they are set to allow the bank to grow quickly to meet vast untapped demand in Mexico. Its borrowers have risen in number from 60,000 to around 900,000 in the past eight years. This is hardly an indication of exploited customers. Moreover, it is targeting potential borrowers just outside the mainstream, not the very poorest Mexicans.

A “big win” like the Compartamos IPO was needed to attract lots more capital into the microfinance industry, says Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, the chairman of ACCION International, a charity that has been helping to spread microfinance since the 1970s. He expects interest rates to fall sharply as the rush of capital that followed the IPO expands supply and intensifies competition—just as it has done in Bolivia, which boasts the first for-profit, but not listed, microfinance institution, BancoSol. For-profit microfinance has been growing fast, including in India where SKS, a lender created by Vikram Akula, a former McKinsey partner, is backed by Sequoia, a leading Silicon Valley venture-capital firm.

ACCION was an early investor in Compartamos, and banked $140m in the IPO (and retains a 9% stake). This infuriates critics such as Mr Waterfield, especially as ACCION has received funding from the American taxpayer via USAID, the development agency. ACCION is reinvesting the money in new microfinance schemes, however. Mr Rodríguez Arregui fears the public fight over profits may scare away investors. Perhaps the best way to help the poor is to acknowledge that charitable and commercial microfinance can co-exist.

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11376809

Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love - New York Times



 
 

Sent to you by john via Google Reader:

 
 

via www.nytimes.com on 5/18/08

February 3, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama's race or Hillary Clinton's sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee's religious faith.

Liberals believe deeply in tolerance and over the last century have led the battles against prejudices of all kinds, but we have a blind spot about Christian evangelicals. They constitute one of the few minorities that, on the American coasts or university campuses, it remains fashionable to mock.

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Bleeding-heart liberals could accomplish far more if they reached out to build common cause with bleeding-heart conservatives. And the Democratic presidential candidate (particularly if it's Mr. Obama, to whom evangelicals have been startlingly receptive) has a real chance this year of winning large numbers of evangelical voters.

"Evangelicals are going to vote this year in part on climate change, on Darfur, on poverty," said Jim Wallis, the author of a new book, "The Great Awakening," which argues that the age of the religious right has passed and that issues of social justice are rising to the top of the agenda. Mr. Wallis says that about half of white evangelical votes will be in play this year.

A recent CBS News poll found that the single issue that white evangelicals most believed they should be involved in was fighting poverty. The traditional issue of abortion was a distant second, and genocide was third.

Look, I don't agree with evangelicals on theology or on their typically conservative views on taxes, health care or Iraq. Self-righteous zealots like Pat Robertson have been a plague upon our country, and their initial smugness about AIDS (which Jerry Falwell described as "God's judgment against promiscuity") constituted far grosser immorality than anything that ever happened in a bathhouse. Moralizing blowhards showed more compassion for embryonic stem cells than for the poor or the sick, and as recently as the 1990s, evangelicals were mostly a constituency against foreign aid.

Yet that has turned almost 180 degrees. Today, many evangelicals are powerful internationalists and humanitarians — and liberals haven't awakened to the transformation. The new face of evangelicals is somebody like the Rev. Rick Warren, the California pastor who wrote "The Purpose Driven Life."

Mr. Warren acknowledges that for most of his life he wasn't much concerned with issues of poverty or disease. But on a visit to South Africa in 2003, he came across a tiny church operating from a dilapidated tent — yet sheltering 25 children orphaned by AIDS.

"I realized they were doing more for the poor than my entire megachurch," Mr. Warren said, with cheerful exaggeration. "It was like a knife in the heart." So Mr. Warren mobilized his vast Saddleback Church to fight AIDS, malaria and poverty in 68 countries. Since then, more than 7,500 members of his church have paid their own way to volunteer in poor countries — and once they see the poverty, they immediately want to do more.

"Almost all of my work is in the third world," Mr. Warren said. "I couldn't care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas."

Helene Gayle, the head of CARE, said evangelicals "have made some incredible contributions" in the struggle against global poverty. "We don't give them credit for the changes they've made," she added. Fred Krupp, the president of Environmental Defense, said, "Many evangelical leaders have been key to taking the climate issue across the cultural divide."

It's certainly fair to criticize Catholic leaders and other conservative Christians for their hostility toward condoms, a policy that has gravely undermined the fight against AIDS in Africa. But while robust criticism is fair, scorn is not.

In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians. In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.

Unlike the religious right windbags, she was passionately "pro-life" even for those already born — and brave souls like her are increasingly representative of religious conservatives. We can disagree sharply with their politics, but to mock them underscores our own ignorance and prejudice.


 
 

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Putting His Money Where His Values Are - WSJ.com

via online.wsj.com on 5/19/08

Putting His Money
Where His Values Are

Restless Billionaire
Prefers to Invest
'In the Real World'
By ROBERT FRANK
May 19, 2008; Page C1

Nicolas Berggruen became a billionaire through classic value investing. Now, he is switching to a new strategy. Call it "values investing."

With rice farms in Cambodia, windmill farms in Turkey, an ethanol plant in Oregon and glittering new skyscrapers in poor inner cities around the world, Mr. Berggruen is pumping millions of dollars into projects that he hopes will both expand his fortune and alleviate social ills.

"Historically, I've made my money in financials," says Mr. Berggruen, 46 years old, whose net worth is estimated at more than $3 billion. "Now, I'm investing in the real world. I'm investing in the ground, in things that will last for generations and improve people's lives."

[Photo]
Hiroko Masuike/WpN for The Wall Street Journal
Investor Nicolas Berggruen hopes to put his billions to good use, and to turn a profit. 'I'm investing in the ground, in things that will last for generations and improve people's lives.'

Mr. Berggruen's big bet on social investing isn't unique. Richard Branson, the Google founders, Ted Turner and a vast new generation of eco-investors have all espoused world-friendly investing.

The quest is more personal for Mr. Berggruen (pronounced: BerGREWin). After amassing billions and buying all the usual trophies of success -- a Florida mansion on a private island, a luxury condo in New York -- Mr. Berggruen is paring down his material life. He has sold his properties and now lives in hotels. He is about to sell his only car. Because he doesn't have children and is unmarried, he is planning to leave his fortune to a personal foundation and an art museum.

"Living in a grand environment to show myself and others that I have wealth has zero appeal," he says in an interview, standing in a hotel room in New York's Upper East Side. "Whatever I own is temporary, since we're only here for a short period of time. It's what we do and produce, it's our actions, that will last forever. That's real value."

The obsession with legacy is increasingly common among today's super-rich -- even for relatively young billionaires like Mr. Berggruen. "For some of these people, they're growing concerned about how they're going to be remembered," says Russ Alan Prince, president of Prince & Associates, a wealth-research firm that conducted a recent study on legacy. "For others, they've always wanted to do something and they realize that if they don't do it now, they're never going to do it."

For Mr. Berggruen, the transformation follows a life full of eccentricities and unconventional success. The son of Heinz Berggruen, the famed Germany-born art collector who befriended Pablo Picasso, Nicolas Berggruen grew up in France and Switzerland hoping to become a writer. He studied Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists and rebelled against his privileged upbringing.

When he was 17 years old, he moved to New York City to attend New York University. He also started investing with a few thousand dollars of his own money. After graduating -- in two years -- he started investing in stocks, bonds and early forms of private equity.

Soon, he was buying entire businesses. Berggruen Holdings, his wholly owned investing vehicle, has net assets of more than $3 billion, according to Mr. Berggruen, business associates and corporate documents.

One of his biggest victories was FGX, the eyewear company formerly known as Foster Grant, which he acquired when it was declining in value. After making acquisitions, expanding the product lines and shoring up management, he took it public for a big profit.

He also created Media Capital, one of Portugal's largest media companies, after acquiring newspapers, television, radio, magazine and Internet assets. He has since sold the company.

"He's a disciplined buyer," says Martin Franklin, the chief executive of Jarden Corp., the consumer-products giant, and a partner with Mr. Berggruen in several businesses. "Nicolas is one of those guys who turns lemons into lemonade."

Mr. Berggruen was also behind two of the world's largest special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. These so-called blank-check companies raise money through initial public offerings to make acquisitions. A U.S. SPAC he helped launch in December, called Liberty Acquisition Holdings Corp. raised more than $1 billion. A European SPAC he launched in February, called Liberty International Acquisition Co. raised $878 million. Mr. Berggruen is still shopping for companies to buy with both funds.

He has experienced his share of setbacks. One of his earlier SPACs, Freedom Acquisition Holdings, merged with the British hedge-fund GLG Partners Inc. in 2007 to take the fund public. The stock surged initially, but plunged more than 30% in recent weeks after one of GLG's top traders abruptly resigned. Mr. Berggruen, who owns about 6% of the company, says he is disappointed in the loss but confident the stock will bounce back. In 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading Friday GLG's stock was down 11 cents to $7.78.

Despite his wealth, the boyish-looking Mr. Berggruen remains a mystery. He has avoided the press and has never appeared on the Forbes list of wealthiest individuals, although he would likely qualify. When a Dutch magazine tried to publish a profile of him several years ago, Mr. Berggruen bought up all the copies and destroyed them.

His personal habits are legendary among friends and colleagues. He works 12-to-14-hour days. He rarely visits his offices around the world, preferring to work in hotel rooms and restaurants. When he is in New York, he does most of his work on his BlackBerry while speed-walking around Central Park.

For Mr. Berggruen, chocolate is a primary food group. He eats two meals a day, one of which usually consists of chocolate cake. When David Bonderman, founder of TPG, the private-equity firm, went trekking with Mr. Berggruen in the Himalayas, Mr. Bonderman rode a horse. Mr. Berggruen bounded up the mountain fueled on chocolate bars.

He is restless to an extreme, logging 250 hours on his Gulfstream IV last year (his biggest indulgence) and visiting more than 80 cities around the world.

Mr. Berggruen's shift to socially responsible investing was gradual. When oil prices started soaring a few years ago, he looked into alternative energy sources. He acquired the Cascade Grain ethanol plan in Port Westward, Ore., the largest ethanol plant on the West Coast.

In researching ethanol, Mr. Berggruen realized that the world's food production -- which was increasingly being used for fuel -- wasn't keeping pace with demand. He formed a team of top agricultural experts and started researching ways of boosting farming productivity.

He bought up hundreds of thousands of acres in Australia, where he plans to grow grains. He is in talks to buy land in various other areas of the world, and he is negotiating with several governments to lease land for farming cassava, corn, rice, olives and other crops.

After his food ventures, Mr. Berggruen realized how many similar social problems could be solved -- or at least targeted -- through investing.

"Government wasn't solving these problems," he said. "So the market has to step in."

One area was real estate. An avowed urbanist, Mr. Berggruen started investing in projects aimed at reviving decaying inner cities. He is working with partners to buy up large parcels in downtown Newark, N.J., to build a mixed-use development with offices, homes and retail. He is launching similar developments in India, Turkey and Israel, working with top architects such as Richard Meier, David Chipperfield and Kazuyo Sejima.

Mr. Berggruen is also making plans for his foundation, which will target a wide array of social problems. One of the few things he is still acquiring for his personal life is art, which he says will withstand the test of time and eventually be given back to the public through a museum.

"The art I buy now goes to storage," he says. "I don't have a home to hang it in."

Write to Robert Frank at robert.frank@wsj.com


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