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Stopping the sperm
The search for the male pill

Techniques for regulating human fertility have concentrated predominately on the female of the species. Perhaps the only defensible reason for this is that in terms of interfering with fertility the male is a vastly more difficult sex to deal with.

Only one egg is ovulated in the female every 28 days or so, but male spermatozoa are produced non-stop. And the time lag form start of production to final release in semen takes some three months.

Against the female’s single egg, the males ceaseless conveyor belt provides between 200 and 400 million sperm in each ejaculation. And only one is needed to fertilise that egg.

Not surprisingly, success with a pull for women came relatively early and nearly 90 million women take the pill today making it easily the most popular contraceptive ever.

The research for a male pill, despite a great deal of talk, been haphazard and tardy. But this is changing. The World Health Organization has now set up a vast research network and late last year, agreements for collaboration were sent out to ten centres, one each in Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Hungary, India, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Thailand and Yugoslavia.

All of these centre will in effect go to China for their inspiration or, to ne more precise, to the pioneering research which Chinese scientists have been conducting for the past 25 years on a substance called ‘gossypol’.

This is largely because gossypol has come tantalisingly close to becoming the elusive male pill. This is an acidic compound found in the seed of the glandular variety of a cotton plant.

Its antifertility action appears to be through damaging the lining of cells and cavities of the testes which are involved in producing and conveying semen. The degree of action and reversibility has been studied in humans only in China and Brazil.

The essence of the Chinese and Brazilian finding was the ‘sperm counts’ went down to below four million per millilitre of ejaculation within three month; and production of sperm was arrested on the ‘maintenance’ schedule in each course. But there are problems.

The first might be reversibility. Will the men return to sexual normality when they come off the treatment? In the Brazilian study the maintenance dose of 20mg every other day, was reduced to 40mg weekly, in two men. They returned to normal spermatogenesis.

But the Chinese studies , of much longer duration, indicate that the longer the substance is under treatment and the lover the sperm count achieved the more difficult it seems for him to return to normal sperm production

Gamini Seneveratni, CSE

Trouble brewing
Government - inspired drunkenness

WHILE the brewing of beer has always been an intrinsic part of the African way of life, the South African Government has prostituted the traditional custom into a multi-million rand industry.

Almost any kind of fruit can be convened into African beer but among the most popular ones are those made with paw-paws brewed with flour and sugar and ubuganu - made in the month of February with the ripening of the marula berries. But the most prized beer is the traditional Zulu beer or iJuba which is made of amabele (a type of wheat). sorghum and malt. This beer takes about three days to ferment and in the rural areas the amount of time and energy spent on its making and consumption gives it a central role in daily life.

But while brewing of beer remains a joyful activity in the rural areas, the story is very different in the industrialised centres. The Government has used the African’s propensity for beer to advantage and has turned it into a multi-million rand industry. All the Pretoria-appointed ‘administration boards’, which control the day-today lives of the African people, own beerhalls from where they sell iJuba to the locals at huge profits. Its sale is in fact the chief source of revenue for the administration boards. The Port Natal Administration Board in Durban, for instance, makes an annual estimated profit of seven million dollars from the sale of iJuba.

To keep the profits high, the authorities constantly dream up new ideas to boost the sales. Recently, for example. they called on employers to allow their African workers to consume two litres of iJuba before starting because the beer would increase productivity.

In spite of protests, the white government continues to invest heavily in beer-halls and has even spent vast sums in building riot-proof beerhalls in the city of Port Elizabeth. It wants to avoid a repetition of June 1976, when demonstrating students went on the rampage and first razed to the ground beerhalls which they regarded as symbols of oppression.

Press Trust of South Africa

India’s giants
Marwari control of industry

ABOUT 200 years ago a small business community living in villages around Shekhawat, in the desert fastness of India’s poorest state, Rajasthan, began to settle in other parts of the country. They took with them their inborn fiscal skills, family ties and communal spirit and they began to prosper in a quite remarkable way.

They never looked back. Today it is believed that half the financial assets of India are in Marwari hands.

The most extraordinary figure of them all was the head of the giant Birla group, Ghanshyam Das Birla. Earlier this year, almost unnoticed outside India, he died on a visit to London at the age of 89. He was one of the greatest industrial tycoons of the twentieth century.

G.D. Birla was the third son of a small cotton trader living in Bombay. Soon after World War One he left for booming Calcutta, the heart of British investment in India. Carrying his suitcase wherever he went, GD the cotton broker became a familiar figure in many a British commercial institution in Calcutta. When ajute mill fell sick, GD borrowed the money and defied the British commercial monopoly.

Despite their attitude to money-making, and much of it is ruthless, the Marwaris remain devoutly religious and puritanical in their social standards. Workaholics all, they have, until recently, been little inclined to participate in any activity outside business.

Marwari industrial groups, staunch proponents of the joint family system, nevertheless tend to divide up the companies they own among the various members of the families, making each one responsible for his unit or units. The individual can always rest assured of family advice and financial assistance when needed for investment. But each man must learn to develop on his own and stand on his own feet. The family and community are there only as a cushion. That’s the Marwari way.

S. Muthiah, Gemini

Water decade dries up
UN campaign failing

Are the United Nations, the international aid agencies and the national governments trying to quietly shelve the ‘World Water and Sanitation Decade, 1981-90’ after only two years?

In 1980 the then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim said the official goal of ‘Clean water and adequate sanitation for all by 1990’ was ‘eminently achievable’. He promised: ‘The United Nations system will provide the overall framework, the technical support, the momentum and the promotional activities necessary for the programme’ s success’.

Yet, less than three years later, senior World Health Organization (WHO) officials were saying ‘we knew all the time’ that achievement of the Decade’s goal ‘was not possible’.

By the end of 1982 only 26 countries had set firm targets for 1990. Lack of money is the key obstacle. In 1980 the World Bank estimated that a global annual investment of $60 billion would be needed throughout the 1980s to provide every rural home with a latrine and a standpipe or hardpump, and every urban home with a tap and sewerage connection. A cheaper option was to aim at only 80 per cent coverage using cheaper technologies, cutting the investment by half to $30 billion.

As global spending on water and sanitation projects in 1978 had only been seven billion dollars, the second option was considered more realistic. So the 100 per cent aim of the Decade was virtually abandoned even before it had begun.

Since then the Decade has not attracted much more money for new projects. In 1981 only $10 billion went into new projects, which, allowing for inflation, meant that about the same number of additional water and sanitation services were provided as in 1978.

The developing countries invested eight billion dollars of that $10 billion. Given their suffering economies, they are unlikely to increase that amount. At the same time, international aid has been lower than expected. Even the UN Development Pro~ gramme (UNDP). coordinator of Decade activities, has reduced its funds for water and sanitation projects from $14 million in 1980 - before the Decade began to $6.5 million in 1982.

In many countries the institutions which are supposed to be implementing the Decade’s work are weak and lack trained staff WHO, which says that technological problems are a major difficulty, has not itself done very much about this lack of training. It has not devoted any more money for training, and it has not recruited a single additional water engineer since the Decade began.

If more resources are not forthcoming, the Decade’s aim of providing safe drinking water and adequate sanitation for all by 1990, and WHO’s more ambitious goal of ‘Health for All’ by the year 2000 will become little more than cruel jokes.

John Madely Earthscan

Transplanting tips
Radio links poor farmers

How do you put a struggling pig into a crate all by yourself’? What’s a good way of protecting your chili plants from ground frost? When’s the right day to start irrigating your half acre of crops?*

There’s nothing very new about exchanging household hints and tips to farmers. It’s been done down the centuries as men met in the market-place and women gathered round the well. Children learnt from their parents, almost without noticing it.

But good. simple ideas still take time to travel and there are new ones being thought up in different parts of the world all the time. It was that thought that led a Canadian farmer and radio producer, George Atkins to start a service that would speed the process of telling your neighbour: ‘Have you heard of this idea?’

In four years the Developing Countries Farm Radio Network (DCFRN), operating out of Ontario, has had phenomenal success. Its radio tapes, with supporting material, go to more than 500 farm broadcasters in some 100 developing countries. The total audience may be as many as 100 million farmers. Nowadays Atkins himself tours developing countries. He talks to agricultural extension officers, missionaries, farm broadcasters and people at international research centres. He treks round farms and backyards.

In searching for good ideas he works by some strict rules. They have to have been tested and proved in a developing country. They have to cost little or no money. And they must not involve the use of chemicals or new species. (He doesn’t believe poor farmers can risk any such leap).

Atkins is something of a disciplinarian. He requires that every broadcaster who receives a package fills in a questionnaire each time, saying what was useful. Many of them send back new ideas and stories of how they use the tapes.

A woman in Ecuador who understands Spanish (but is illiterate) memorises the facts on the tapes and gives a free translation into the Quechua language for an audience of 100,000 Indians. In Nepal a young actress dramatises the tapes, acting the part of an old village woman quizzing the extension officer.

Illustrations are sent with the tapes; and an art teacher in the Sudan has turned these into posters, to display in villages. In India a friend he met at that Zambian workshop long ago. Pradip Dey, turns the farming hints into song jingles and plays them over All India Radio. It is all done on a budget of $150,000 a year. His three sponsors - Massey-Ferguson, the farm implement firm, the University of Guelph and the Canadian International Development Agency say they get value for money.

*The answers to the riddles in this article’s first paragraph are: you put a bucket of straw over the pig’s head; you train the chili plant up a bamboo stick to a platform, at least in Nepal; and you dig a small hole in the middle of your half-acre, mix the soil with sand and watch the plants here until they start withering from drought a few days before the rest.