Poverty

Rice is the staple of food of asia, and Vietnam is the second largest exporter of rice in the world, although it's a country about the size of California.

So the style of rice cultivation being practiced to produce such high yield is increasingly dependent on commercial fertilizers, to the point where now many farmers are only realizing a financial return large enough to buy their next year's supply of fertilizer.

Please follow the following link to view the slideshow:

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081116/ONLINESPECIAL/329487276

The Water Wars portal is highlighted in a special edition of Foreign Exchange devoted entirely to global water issues. Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Pulitzer Center journalist Alex Stonehill and draws on the portal to share video reports and student perspectives. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity also joins the program to discuss the critical issue of sanitation.

Miles away from the bustling streets of Mumbai, a decades-old Maoist insurgency is gaining ground.

See the slideshow at Washington Post.

Sitting, waiting, sweating. When you live on the margins in Sudan, there's nothing much behind you, and nothing much in front to look forward to.

And get over any romantic notions about hardy stoic villagers. The people of the Nubian desert tell us they don't like it. And they gather each day in their homes made of mud to share tea and some grinding certainties.

When pro-independence demonstrations erupted in Kashmir over the summer, Danish Shervani said he hesitated to take part until he saw women and children shouting in the streets.

After a long, hot summer of protests against Indian rule, an uneasy calm descended on the Kashmir valley for the holy month of Ramadan. In a bid to reignite mass protests, separatist leaders had called for another pro-independence march this week on Lal Chowk, the commercial hub of the summer capital. The authorities responded with a two-day, shoot-on-sight curfew. Protests were abandoned. After a crackdown over the past few months that has left at least 45 people dead, mostly killed when troops opened fire on crowds, this was understandable.

Heba Aly reports on a village at the edge of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan. Sudanese people there say they're being marginalized by their government.

Listen to the five-minute piece

"Ram, Ram, oh Ram," Chandan whispered to himself, moments after asking me to pray to my own God. He and Arvind, the other local journalist who accompanied me into the bush, held their heads down and closed their eyes, not wanting to accept the random turn of events, the prospect of a grim and pointless death.

A delegation from the northern Sudanese village of Selem visits the mayor's office to complain of services in their village. July 2008.

It's a flashy headline, but a question that some people are legitimately asking themselves. Could there be a rebellion in the north, as there was in Darfur, to the west?

The answer depends on who you ask.

Northerners certainly complain of marginalization. They say they are worse off than Darfur, in fact.

Ask Abbas Adam Ibrahim whether he is Arab or African, and he does not quite know how to respond. "Both," the Sudanese man says, after slight hesitation.

In Kibera, a massive slum of rusty tin roofs and makeshift homes spreading out from the southwest of the city, the rain is turning the twisting dirt roads and alleyways to thick red mud.

Here in one of largest slums in the world--a flashpoint for violence stemming from Kenya's parliamentary elections in December--the rain is causing open sewers to swell and uncollected garbage to rush in rivers of tattered plastic and human waste through backyards.