Egypt

Indigenous Women and Women of Color Plan for International Conference on. Population and Development

The women of Tafahna al Ashraf, a Muslim village in the Egyptian delta, cultivate the land. Women are also merchants, artisans, agricultural laborers, teachers, and clerks.

The Hagahai are a recently contacted group of seminomadic hunter-horticulturalists living in the fringe highlands of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Although occasional explorers and miners probably walked through their territory in the Schrader Mountains as early as the 1930s and several attempts were made to census them during the 1970s, the Hagahai effectively remained hidden from mission and government influence until the 1980s.

There is now an incredibly cheap, simple, safe and effective method by which parents themselves, however poor, can protect the lives and growth of their children against one of the most common causes of child malnutrition and child death in the modern world UNICEF, State of the World's Children, 1986.

Of the world's 1.6 billion children under the age of 15, 21 percent live in poverty in developing countries.

Although they may appear as coastal communities on a map, Bedouin groups along the northern edge of the Egyptian Western Desert orient themselves south toward the desert where, until sedentarization, their migrations had taken them. Permanent water sources attract them to the coastal region during the summer season when the desert is parched. So does the need to sow barley in the fall and harvest in early summer. Coastal towns and markers, roads and a water pipeline also exert a pull. But their nostalgia for the inland desert, "up country" is strong.

FOR more than thirty years, the Amuesha Indian community of Miraflores (Oxapampa, Peru) has provided young girls as servants to neighboring haciendas and the homes of the region's lumber barons. During the past ten years, as the demand for servants in the urban areas has grown, more and more Amuesha girls have been taken to Lima to work in middle class homes.

An Egyptian Experience

Information technologies could help solve some of the most pressing problems of developing "Third World" nations by facilitating better education and training through access to knowledge.

During the last decade, the adoption of adequate - in some cases, quite minimal - pollution control laws and occupational health standards in the US has spurred the wholesale exodus of many hazardous industries abroad. Productions processes that are illegal in the US are not wanted here, but the products are.

On April 25, 1982, a profound change occurred in life in the Sinai desert. Under the Camp David accords, Egypt resumed control of the final third of the 26,000 square-mile peninsula from the Israelis, who had taken the area in the Six-Day War in June, 1967. At that time no paved roads penetrated southern Sinai. The Israelis built a major coastal highway from Elat south through Nueba and Dahab till Sharm-el-Sheikh and up the west coast through At-Tur and Abu Rudeis to Suez.

INSECTICIDES

DDT - Banned for crop use in the U.S. since 1972, DDT is still used in many countries. DDT contamination has led to the rejection of beef shipments to the U.S. from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In 1976, 500,000 pounds of beef from El Salvador was rejected for DDT levels of 95 ppm (the acceptable U.S. level is 5 ppm). In Guatemala, the average level of DDT in cows' milk is 90 times that allowed in the U.S. Residents of Guatemala and Nicaragua carry 31 times more DDT in their blood than those of the U.S.