See Editorial by Van Ommeren et al Standards for humanitarian agencies The Sphere Project Those affected by catastrophe and conflicts often lose basic human rights. Recognising this, a group of humanitarian non-governmental organisations and the Red Cross movement launched the Sphere Project in 1997. The aim of this project was to improve the quality of assistance and enhance the accountability of the humanitarian system in disaster response by developing a set of universal minimum standards in core areas and a humanitarian charter. The charter, based on international treaties and conventions, emphasises the right of people affected by disaster to life with dignity. It identifies the protection of this right as a quality measure of humanitarian work and one for which humanitarian actors bear responsibilities. The Sphere Project was launched in response to concern about inconsistencies in aid provided to people affected by disaster, and the frequent lack of accountability of humanitarian agencies to their beneficiaries, their membership, and their donors. The project attempts to identify and define the rights of populations affected by disasters in order to facilitate effective planning and implementation of humanitarian relief.
On May 12th, 1926 Stanley Baldwin announced the end of the General Strike in a radio broadcast to the nation. The announcement was followed by a choir singing Parry's now familiarJerusalemwith its resounding climactic affirmation of ‘England's green and pleasant Land’.1It is hard to resist the speculation that this was Baldwin's choice as much as Reith's, since the Conservative Prime Minister had from the outset of his political career been identified as an ordinary man rooted deeply in the English countryside.2Baldwin's private correspondence demonstrates that his attachment to ‘our eternal hills’ was entirely genuine, but there can be little doubt that this was also an image that he consciously cultivated, and which – via his mastery of the new instruments of mass communication – he was able to convey to a wide and popular audience. To this extent he might be thought of as a Tory populist: as J.C. Squire noted in theObserverreview of Baldwin's 1926 collection of his speeches, entitledOn England(released just before the General Strike), ‘this is the work of a thoroughly representative Englishman: not the common man, but one expressing what the common man feels and cannot say for himself’. These ‘common’ themes and sentiments ranged across a number of issues from Shakespeare to the topical ‘Peace in Industry’, but pride of place in the volume was granted to his definitive statement on national identity, given in May 1924 ‘to celebrate our country and our Patron Saint’ at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St. George, and entitled plainly and unambiguously ‘England’.
When Andrés Molina Enríquez wrote his polemical attack on the Mexican hacienda, published on the eve of the Revolution, he was particularly scathing about the cereal estates of themesa central. According to his arguments, these were the properties most typically ‘feudal’, and thus he characterized them as vast tracts of land, under-used and undercapitalized, serving only to legitimize the seigneurial status of an elite class of rentier landowners. The proprietors were similarly castigated for preferring the low-risk security of irrigated crops, and for their withdrawal from the uncertainties of maize production on thetemporallands. As a result of these policies the routine supply of maize, the food grain of the nation, was, or so he argued, left to the efforts and tenacity of a multitude of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable terrain.
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