Africa

By Stella Paul
SHWE THAUNG YAN, Myanmar, Jan 7 2019 (IPS)

In 2015, Worldview International Foundation began a mangrove restoration project, planting saplings of the trees on about 121 hectares of land in Myanmar’s Ayyerwady region.

In this video, Aung Aung Myint tells IPS when the mangrove restoration began and elaborates on the main species that have been planted. Originally, Myint says, the condition of the soil was concerning, but has increased over the years.

• Sprouting Mangroves Restore Hopes in Coastal Myanmar

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Credit: Getty Images

By Jagriti Gangopadhyay
NEW DELHI, Jan 7 2019 (IPS)

A Chinese researcher has claimed that he helped make world’s first genetically edited babies but the development may come at a heavy cost. A designer baby is a GM human embryo with appropriate qualities which have been shaped as per the instructions received from the parents.

In the dystopian novel, Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932, the setting is a futuristic world. The novel is set in London where citizens are being nurtured in artificial wombs and engineered through childhood indoctrination programmes into predestined categories based on their intelligence and skills. Though this novel was written decades ago, today, genetically modified (GM) children seem to be the next step towards transforming family structures across the globe. Though no designer baby has been born as yet, in a technology driven world, it is going to soon become a reality.

Already, Genomic Prediction, a company based in New Jersey, USA, plans to offer tests to calculate the risk of complex conditions like heart disease of an unborn child. The cost of human gene sequencing too is dropping—from $1,000 today, it could drop to below $100 over the next few years. In simple terms, a designer baby is a GM human embryo with appropriate qualities which have been shaped as per the instructions received from the parents. The process through which designer babies are produced is known as gene editing.

Next, these cuts are restored through non-homologous end joining or homologous recombination that result in the desired edits. Using molecular scissors, cuts can be made at certain locations of the genome. Specifically, designer babies were conceived so that children would be free from any life-threatening disease. For instance, if either of the parent has a history of a terminally ill disease in their family, the GM baby will be immune to that disease. Through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and pre-genetic testing, the doctor will be able to identify the genes which could carry the potential danger of that disease.

Those genes will be muted before the fertilisation of the egg and the fetus produced will be devoid of any anomaly. Given the noble cause associated with gene editing, it is important to understand the ethical challenges of such a process as well the consequences of such a technology in determining the future of families across the globe.

Politics of the body

In his seminal work Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault had argued that with the advancement of medical sciences, an individual will gradually lose the right over one’s body. This argument is increasingly becoming true with the intrusion of technology in reproductive health. In addition to parents succumbing to technology to satisfy their needs, there are several ethical challenges involved with designer babies.

Given the newness of the technology, it is difficult to predict how the designer baby will grow up to be. It is also too early to calculate the side effects of this kind of technology. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that the unborn child’s consent is not taken before the process of gene editing. This is a huge ethical challenge. Moreover, GM babies are bound to create more inequality in society. This technology is expensive and only a certain section of society will be able to access it. Hence, the designer babies will mostly be born with fair skin and skills which will result in securing lucrative jobs. Thus the technology will be used to perfect the body and the mind of the unborn baby and will result in the growth of homogeneous individuals.

The gender factor

India witnessed the debate around designer babies when the health wing of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) announced that eugenics could be used to enable dark skinned Indian parents to have fair and high IQ children. RSS stressed on Ayurveda which has the abilities to purify the entire population of the country. The health wing of the RSS indicated that if the mother eats right and then it will be possible to have a customised baby.

The emphasis on fair and high IQ babies clearly indicates, the RSS’ vision of the future population of India. In addition to producing fair and high skill set producing children, gene editing will lead to discrimination on the basis of gender as well. In India, this technology will be used in sex selection as well. One of the features of this technology is that it can scan the sperms of the male partner. Given India’s history of preference for the male child, there are fears that the sperm with the male gene will be injected and more male children will be born.

Additionally, genetically engineered babies will also expand the gap between the West and the Third World. Since, this form of technology will be expensive in countries such as the US and countries of Europe, a large number of foreigners will travel to various Third World countries such as India, Bangladesh and Nepal and avail the technology at much cheaper rates. Genetically engineered babies as a form of technology is still in its infancy. However, given the upsurge in egg banking, IVFs and surrogacy, experts feel that this technology will garner popularity.

Past experiences show that due to lack of regulation, Third World countries were exploited by people in rich nations to satisfy their parenting needs. Since discussions around gene editing, gene engineering and designer babies have already started doing the rounds, it is important for international bodies such as the World Health Organization to set guidelines and regulatory measures at the very onset.

• The link to the original article:
• https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/science-and-technology/designer-babies-can-lead-to-growth-of-homogenous-individuals-62257

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Excerpt:

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is a post-doctoral fellow at the Manipal Center for Humanities, Manipal, India

The post Designer Babies can Lead to Growth of Homogenous Individuals appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Source: PATTAYAUNLIMITED.COM

By Mohammed Mamun Rashid
Jan 6 2019 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Employment in fisheries and aquaculture around the globe has grown faster than the world’s population. The sector provides jobs to tens of millions and supports the livelihoods of hundreds of millions.

Bangladesh, the world’s largest deltaic zone, is crisscrossed by big rivers and their tributaries and distributaries. Moreover, as a land with an abundance of torrential monsoon rains, most of the plain lands remain inundated during the monsoon season, thus turning the countryside into a big reservoir of freshwater for almost half the year. These huge, inland, sweet water bodies together with the expanse of saline water in the Bay of Bengal provide the basis for a large and diversified fisheries sector. Fisheries have always played an integral role in the lives of the people of Bangladesh. It is more ancient than the profession of agriculture itself.

The fisheries sector of Bangladesh contributes 3.69 percent to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and fish accounts for 60 percent of national animal protein consumption. The sector also plays an important role in rural employment generation and poverty alleviation. Traditionally, low-caste Hindus have been engaged in the fishing profession. The Jaladas (slaves of the sea) belong to the Hindu fisherfolk community which is made up of caste-bound people. In most cases, they live in segregated paras which are localities within a village. The high-caste Hindu and the Muslim aristocracy and gentry carefully avoid any social mingling with them. Traditional fishing communities, which mainly comprise Hindus, are being put under pressure by incoming Muslims who have taken up fishing as their profession. The newcomers are either self-employed or find employment as labourers. The majority of Muslims opt for fishing due to population pressure, economic constraints in agricultural sector, and adverse effects of climate change.

Many elite rich men entered the fisheries sector in the 1960s. The then aristocratic Bengali word motshojibi had been introduced instead of the word jele. What is noteworthy is that the word jele is not included in fisheries act, rules, ordinance, and policy though motshojibi and mach chashi are included in such documents. According to the National Fisheries Policy 1998, about 1.2 million people were engaged in full-time work in the fisheries sector and 12 million people were engaged in part-time work. It is important to include the word jele in policy documents in order to know their number and their contribution to the national economy. It would also help us to understand their socio-economic conditions and undertake different initiatives for improving the lives and livelihoods of fishing communities. However, there is no updated information on fishermen based on para, source of fishing, religion, socio-economic conditions and position. But we do get the number of fishermen from different studies, surveys and project reports. But these things are not always consistent or continuous. According to the Coastal District Information 2005 under Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan, the majority of traditional fishermen are Hindus in 19 coastal districts.

The majority of Jaladas families are in financial debt and receive short- and long-term loans from relatives, neighbours, and businessmen. Their incomes usually increase during Hilsa fishing season. The scope for savings for this community is limited. Due to their dire situation, they spend mostly on food rather than clothes and other things. It is during the off-season that they face financial crises which occur round the year. The majority of Jaladas don’t own boats but nets. Some don’t own either; they work in others’ boats or hire boats for fishing. Many adolescent boys accompany their fathers during fishing. A few of them receive primary education but fail to continue. Fishermen don’t get loan facilities from financial institutions due to a lack of mortgage-free loan provisions in government banks. The average size of many fishermen families is 5 to 7 which is higher than the national average. The rate of early marriage within this community is higher due to abject poverty and social insecurity. And youth delinquency is also a major problem.

Jaladas don’t own lands. They mainly live on khas (government-owned) land, embankments, and accreted char land in huts. Due to the depletion of fish, piracy, and lack of capital, these people remain stuck in the vicious cycle of poverty. They do not even have pure drinking water as they live in over-populated areas.

Even though they have been in the fisheries sector for generations, they do not have a voice when it comes to policies and laws. Furthermore, they are not well-informed about clauses of the fisheries law although they are punished under this law.

Jaladas believe that it is not easy for them to switch to other professions. This is a socio-psychological barrier. Some even consider themselves to be “sinners” as they earn a living by catching innocent fish. They identify themselves as “slaves of the sea” without hesitation. They also believe they are destined to carry this curse their whole life.

The Jaladas community has distinct socio-economic, political, cultural, technological and informational characteristics. Water, nets, boats, rivers and the sea are central to their lives and livelihood. They are socially neglected, economically insolvent, politically pressured, culturally ill-treated, technologically backward, not up-to-date with information, and geographically isolated and vulnerable. The government of Bangladesh should address these issues pertinent to the Jaladas community in relevant sectoral policies so that these people can live with dignity and their rights protected.

Mohammed Mamun Rashid is Programme Manager, Civic Engagement, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB).
Email: rashidmamuns@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post ‘Slaves of the sea’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The long-forgotten Jaladas community and their need for policy inclusion

The post ‘Slaves of the sea’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A view of houses with solar panels on their rooftops in the Maria Pires Perillo housing complex, two kilometres from the city of Palmeiras de Goiás. With 740 homes, it is the largest solar energy project in social housing complexes in the state of Goiás, in central Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
PALMEIRAS DE GOIÁS, Brazil, Jan 4 2019 (IPS)

“Solar energy makes my happiness complete,” said Divina Cardoso dos Santos, owner of one of 740 houses with photovoltaic panels on the rooftops in a settlement on the outskirts of this central Brazilian city.

“The first blessing was thishouse,” said the 67-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 14. “I paid 600 reais (155 dollars) a month for rent in the city of Palmeiras, and now I pay monthly quotas of just 25 reais (6.50 dollars) for this house, which is mine,” she told IPS.

Her retirement pension, which for the past two years has assured her an income equivalent to the minimum wage (250 dollars) a month, and visits from a daughter who lives in Switzerland are “other blessings,” which preceded the solar panels, which allow her to save almost the entire cost of the electricity bill – about 15 dollars a month.

The Maria PiresPerillo Residential complex, a group of 740 homes that began to house poor families in 2016, is a social housing project of the Housing Agency (AGEHAB) of the state of Goiás, in west-central Brazil.

Located two kilometres from Palmeiras de Goiás, a city of 28,000 people, it is the largest of the four residential complexes that AGEHAB will supply with solar energy. The agency is a pioneer in Brazil in includingsolar power in housing programmes.

“We would like to build all the new housing complexes with solar panels and also install them in the ones built previously,” Cleomar Dutra, president of AGEHAB, told IPS.

The agency subsidises the installation, granting 3,000 reais (780 dollars) to each family, through the”ChequeMaisMoradia”programme for the improvement of homes. The money covers the cost of two solar panels and the necessary equipment, such as inverters, cables and supports.

But this year’s devaluation of the Brazilian currency, the real, drove up the cost of the panels and other equipment, which is almost all imported. Additional resources for the facilities in the Palmeiras complex, which are yet to be completed, had to be sought, said Dutra.

Divina Cardoso dos Santos stands in front of her house in a social housing complex, for which she pays a monthly fee of about 6.5 dollars, on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Palmeiras de Goiás. That’s 24 times less than the rent she used to pay. On the neighbouring rooftop can be seen a solar water heater, which all of the homes in the neighbourhood have. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“Not all of the houses will have solar panels, because some did not sign the financing contract for the ‘Cheque Mais Moradia’,” said Pedro de Oliveira Neto, the 32-year-old technician who runs the facilities at the Maria Perillo Residential Complex, installed by Nexsolar.

Oliveira has been doing this work for the past four months, after taking a specialised course. Before that, he worked in the meat industry and in mining. Now he wants to stay in the field of solar energy, “which has a future, it’s innovation,” he told IPS.

Actually, most of the houses in the complex have solar panels, but few of them generate their own energy. After they are installed, other conditions must be met in order for the local power company, Enel from Italy, to connect each home’s system to the grid.

The process began in March 2017 when solar units were installed in three homes as a test.

Patricia Soares de Oliveira, 31, married with an eight-year-old daughter, was included in that first installation. Her electricity bill fell to one-fifth of the previous one. Now she pays about four dollars a month.

“We have two TV sets, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a computer and fans,” she told IPS to explain how much electricity they use.

“Now we want to reduce the water bill, which costs us 10 to 12 times more than electricity,” she complained.

Her family also no longer has to pay rent because they were granted a home in the complex. Whereas they used to pay 350 reais (90 dollars) a month they now pay just 25 reais (6.50 dollars) per month, the fee for the small portion of the financing that the owners have to pay.

The low cost of the home is due to a subsidy of up to 20,000 reais (5,200 dollars) granted by AGEHAB, through the ‘Cheque Mais Moradia’ programme for construction, to poor families with incomes of up to three minimum wages (about 740 dollars), said Dutra, the head of AGEHAB.

Two workers install solar panels on a house in the Maria Pires Perillo housing complex, an additional benefit for the poor families who are buying their homes at a very low cost. The Goiana Housing Agency of the state government of Goias, in central Brazil, subsidises most of the housing and the solar energy. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The families settled in the complex are only paying the complementary financing from the Federal Economic Fund, a government bank.

“A 44-square-metre house, like the ones in the complex, are built with materials that cost 29,000 reais (7,500 dollars), but the cost can be reduced if the purchase is collective,” estimated Dutra. So the ‘Cheque Mais Moradia’ is insufficient, but almost enough.

If the beneficiary families are in charge of construction, working together collectively, or if the mayor’s office provides the labour, the houses can be built practically without running up a debt, Dutra said.

The housing complexes are aimed at the most needy local families, since AGEHAB does not have the resources to assist everyone, she said.

Palmeiras de Goiás was included in the system because the population grew well above the state average, due to immigration. New meat, dairy and animal feed industries attracted many people looking for work.

Generating electricity from solar panels is a novelty of the last two years in the Goiás housing programme, but solar energy was already used in social housing projects for heating water – there are solar boilers on every rooftop.

It is a cheaper and more accessible technology, quite widespread in Brazil, even in the Northeast region, where people are not used to bathing with hot water, due to the high local temperatures.

Patricia Soares de Oliveira, who was the first to receive solar panels as a test in 2017, stands in front of her house and next to an electric meter that reads “danger of electric shock”. Her power bill in this social housing complex on the outskirts of Palmeiras de Goiás in central Brazil has fallen to one-fifth of what she previously paid. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Photovoltaic electricity generation has immense potential in Brazil. In the Midwest, solar radiation from a 30-square-metre rooftop could produce five times the electricity consumed by a low-income family, estimated Dennys Azevedo, an engineer who is works manager at AGEHAB.

That generation would be enough for 3.5 households consuming the national average, 157 kilowatts/hour per month, he told IPS.

But the rules set by the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), the Brazilian regulatory body, do not allow consumers to sell the energy they generate. The only benefit they receive is that the energy that they generate and consume is deducted from their electric bill.

The houses of the Maria Perillo Residential complex, for example, only have two solar panels, which occupy only about one-fifth of the rooftop. An additional panel would exceed the consumption of local families.

That rule, which does not exist in countries that have greatly expanded solar generation, such as Germany, is difficult to eliminate because of “pressure from distribution companies that would lose market share,” said Azevedo.

In addition, these power companies want to charge a tax for distributed (decentralised) solar generation, basically a tax for the use of the power lines, a cost that is currently subsidised, according to them. But “we’ve all already paid an availability tax” for the power grid, said the engineer.

Another restriction is the importation of equipment not yet manufactured in Brazil. The prices depend on the exchange rate, and any devaluation of the national currency makes everything more expensive, making planning impossible, he argued.

In addition, multiple expensive taxes raise the prices of solar equipment in Brazil, cancelling out part of the cost reduction for all solar energy components, said Azevedo, who explained that efforts are being made to avoid that taxation, “perhaps by buying equipment through the United Nations,” and to obtain funds for new projects.

• Solar Energy in Social Housing, a Discarded Solution in Brazil
• Energy Habits Are Changing in Latin America’s Cities

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GGGIs Principle Investment Officer Tero Raassina presenting on rice husk energy opportunities.

By GGGI
Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (GGGI)

In November 2018, a team of GGGI investment and bio-economy specialists have been travelling around the Ayeyarwady Delta and meeting members from national and regional government, NGOs, farming associations, businesses and communities to scope potential bio-economy commodities and investments that will enable socially inclusive green growth, and support national goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation in coastal areas.

In a series of workshops and site visits, GGGI facilitated discussions on the range of current value chain activities in the region to assess what key stakeholders see as the barriers to developing or scaling up these activities. One such value chain that was consistently identified was the bi-products of rice grain processing.

Participants from regional government, rice mills and NGOs discuss the barriers to expanding rice husk bio-economies.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Myanmar produced over 25 million metric tonnes of rice in 2016, of which the Delta region harvests almost half of. There are hundreds of small to medium sized rice mills in the region. Consultation participants described that during the harvesting and milling process, a considerable volume of less valuable bi-products are produced. These include the rice bran, rice straw which is often burnt, and rice husk which is often dumped directly (illegally) in waterways, causing widespread impacts to river and drinking water quality, and navigational safety.

Alternatively, there are a number of existing rice husk bio-gasification plants that use outdated technologies resulting in heavily polluted waterways. Similarly, there are existing rice husk fuel pellet facilities but participants frequently said these plants emit a foul smell.

Visualisation of rice bi-products

Initial value chain analysis shows these low-value bi-products can be used to make higher value products that can increase the income of rice farmers and millers and provide affordable energy to the wider region. The Delta has a low level of electrification at approximately 10% and suffers from chronic power shortages. This power shortage not only limits business development but also contributes to widespread deforestation of the mangroves for fuel wood. The government’s General Administration Department stated “rice husk to energy should be the first priority. If we can use this waste then everyone will benefit”.

The potential economic, social and environmental benefits of this value chain are timely for the Delta, with high proportions of landless rural households and reportedly the highest rates of mangrove deforestation in Asia. The potential investments in this value chain could significantly contribute to achievement of Myanmar’s Nationally Determined Contribution greenhouse gas mitigation targets and REDD+, climate change adaptation (including the NAPA), the Agricultural Development Strategy, and Myanmar’s Sustainable Development Plan.

Potential outcomes of rice husk energy for climate change.

GGGI visited an existing rice husk bio-gasification plant in the Delta and the operators discussed barriers to its development such as high startup costs and lack of affordable finance with up to 13% loan interest being reported. The financing shortfalls also limits access to modern clean technologies that are causing other environmental impacts.

GGGIs Myanmar Programme Officer Thiha Aung discuss issues at the Kyaiklat rice husk power plant.

This early analysis will feed into further in-depth value chain assessment by GGGI to design tailored financing solutions and social interventions that are pro-poor and lead to socially inclusive improvements.

The post Turning Bio-Waste to a Bio-Economy in the Ayeyarwady Delta appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Left: Traditional three-brick. Centre: Original design of the cookstove. Right: The fuel efficient cookstove.

By GGGI
Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (GGGI)

In November 2018, a team of GGGI social development, and green investment specialists have been talking to representatives from national and regional government, NGOs, cookstove manufacturers and households from rural communities on how to increase the distribution and usage of fuel efficient cookstoves.

Fuel efficient cookstoves, or ‘improved’ cookstoves, have clear benefits over the traditionally used open three-brick method and even the original design of the cookstove. Most notably, the improved design is more fuel efficient and requires less fire wood to be collected, resulting in reduced deforestation and time-saving for households, particularly for women.

Although cookstoves are used in rural communities throughout Myanmar, their usage in the Delta is more problematic due to the rate of deforestation of mangrove forests for firewood. Mangroves are a critical forest type for climate change mitigation as they store up to 4 times the amount of carbon as other forest types. The mangrove forests of the Delta are also critical for disaster risk reduction during severe weather events and are foundation for sustaining coastal fishery-based livelihoods.

Potential outcomes of fuel efficient cookstoves for climate change.

In a series of workshops and site visits around the Delta, GGGI facilitated discussions as to why distribution and usage of fuel efficient cookstoves remains low. Cookstove manufacturers discussed barriers to their production, including costs and difficulties with attaining and transporting raw materials, a lack of access to start-up finances, labour-intensive manufacturing process, and a lack of marketing and promotion of product. Numerous problems were consistently mentioned by buyers, including inconvenient design, unfamiliarity with product benefits, remote communities lack access to distributers, and that fuel efficient cookstove is often more expensive than the original cookstove design.

The time required for drying cookstoves during manufacture is problematic, especially during monsoon season. Taken at a cookstove manufacturer in Kalarkon, near Pathein.

Figure 2 Cookstove manufacturing is time and people intensive, taking up to 15 days to produce the final product. Taken at a cookstove manufacturer in Kalarkon, near Pathein.

GGGI presented initial ideas for providing novel investment solutions to increase distribution and usage of fuel efficient cookstoves across the Delta. These have included linking the proven carbon savings of the fuel efficient cookstove to distributed ledger or ‘blockchain’ technology to access carbon credits from the international carbon market. This technology could connect the carbon emission savings of the cookstove to the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or CORSIA, to a domestic custodian bank, and various partners for manufacturing, certification, distribution and implementation. These credits can then be used to increase job opportunities, provide funding for increased distribution and subsidise the product price.

GGGIs Analyst Diana Quezada presents on financing solutions for improved cookstoves. With Principle Investment Officer Tero Raassina and Myanmar’s Programme Officer Thiha Aung.

The potential economic, social and environmental benefits of this investment solution are important for the Delta, with high rural population density and reportedly the highest rates of mangrove deforestation in Asia. The potential outcomes of this solution are aligned with Myanmar’s polices and strategies for climate change mitigation, adaptation, reforestation and sustainable development. It has potential for notable benefits for women by creating many decent, year-round employment opportunities during manufacture, by reducing the time being spent on firewood collection, and reducing respiratory ailments due to smoke inhalation. This benefit of time savings may also allow increased opportunities for girls to engage in educational activities and for women to focus on developing additional income streams.

Ingvild Solvang, GGGIs Global Leader on Gender and Social Development added “access to improved cookstoves is a global challenge, which if solved has the potential to reduce communities’ reliance on fuel wood. Improved cookstoves have positive impacts on deforestation, but also communities spend much time and resources on fuel collection, which contributes to time-poverty particularly for women and girls. Improved cookstoves have a can improve indoor pollution, which causes health problems for children, vulnerable and elderly family members, and those mainly in charge of cooking, typically women.”

The post Using Blockchain Technology to Distribute Fuel Efficient Cookstoves in Myanmar appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Integrated fish ponds and forestry at a LIFT-funded climate smart agriculture project, Bogale.

By GGGI
Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (GGGI)

In November 2018, GGGI have been exploring potential investments in agriculture, forestry and fishery value chains that not only increase economic and social development, but also reduce deforestation pressures and increase the extent of mangrove forests. GGGI investment, forestry policy and bio-economy specialists have been consulting with communities, NGOs and government in the Ayeyarwady Delta to understand the factors that are critical to achieve fully inclusive, sustainable success, and support national goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation in coastal areas.

The conservation of mangrove forests is a notable policy priority for Myanmar. Mangroves are widely acknowledged to offer life-saving protection to coastal communities against the impact of extreme weather events, storm surges and tropical cyclones. In addition their contribution to climate change adaptation, mangrove forests store up to 400% more carbon than other forest types (particularly in their soils) which makes their conservation important to maintaining the stability of global climate. Unfortunately, Myanmar’s mangrove forests are disappearing at the highest rates of any country in Asia, and therefore have a disproportionate impact on greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The potential economic, social and environmental benefits of finding a solution to ensuring the sustainability of forest management are very timely for the Delta. The potential investments in mangrove conservation, and associated value chains could significantly contribute to achievement of Myanmar’s Nationally Determined Contribution targets, as well as key sectoral polices and strategies for climate change mitigation and REDD+, adaptation and sustainable development.

In a series of workshops and site visits, GGGI facilitated discussions on the range of current forestry and fishery value chain activities in the region to assess what stakeholders see as the barriers to developing or scaling up these activities.

Dr Aaron Russell, Ingvild Solvang, Luis Miguel Aparicio and Programme Officer Thiha Aung met with remote communities and Forest Department on the Delta to discuss community forest restoration activities.

The establishment of community forestry projects are seen as a useful means to stabilize and reforest mangrove forests. Local communities strongly recognize the importance of mangroves to provide households with firewood, house and boat building materials. However, a frequently overlooked benefit from mangroves is that they provide natural habitat for Myanmar’s highly sought-after mud-crabs, prawns, blood cockles, and other fish species. Some of these lucrative delicacies provide income for large numbers of landless rural households in the Delta.

Consistent stories were heard during the mission. Existing laws restrict those wanting to own and manage lands. In some communities up to 70% of the population may be effectively landless. There is a shortage of livelihood opportunities in the Delta, and many are forced to seasonally migrate to cities to find work. Mangroves and other forests are often illegally logged as people have no other household cooking fuel options, or have no other option to make an income. There is a large demand for mangrove fuel wood and charcoal from the Delta that reaches as far as Yangon. The catches of crabs, fish and prawns are falling due to lost mangrove habitat, leading to fishers to selling all they catch, including juveniles and females with eggs. This is leading to a cycle of debt for many landless people of the Delta, and as stated by a spokesperson of the Department of Fisheries “we need to conserve the mangroves to increase fishery value chains; their destruction is the primary reason for recent fishery stock depletion”.

Due to their remote location and unaffordable transport costs, many are unable to travel to the markets to sell their goods. Instead they rely on selling to a buyer who comes to them but are forced to sell at often half the market price. Many landless people want to diversify their incomes but lack access to affordable finance without a land title, or knowledge of market demands.

“Community Forestry could ensure people’s rights to sustainable use of forest resources, improve people’s livelihoods also in fishery value chains. These synergies between social, environmental and economic benefits are good examples of what green growth is about”, says Dr. Aaron Russell, Country Representative for GGGI in Myanmar.

Village community members show us their catch of mud crabs that are ready to be sold to the buyer. Fishers know that selling juvenile or female crabs is not sustainable but they have few income options in remote areas.

Initial value chain analysis shows that with the right financial, technological and institutional interventions, integrated community-based mangrove-fisheries management could be sustainable, would provide more diversity in incomes for the landless, thereby strengthening incentives to maintain and reforest mangroves.

In addition to mudcrab value chains, supplementary value chains that have the potential to contribute to these communities’ incomes are to integrate coconut palm or nipa palms and other shade trees around fish/prawn/crab ponds or integrated with the existing farms in agroforestry arrangements. Coconuts provides food, offers many applications for natural coconut fibres, and have the potential for export of virgin coconut oil. Nipa palm similarly has useful fibres, can be useful for livestock feed and there are indications of export demand for nipa palm buds. In addition, there are numerous natural extracts from mangroves that are used across south-east Asia as dyes and pigments, and even with medicinal properties that are underexplored in Myanmar. While individuals can improve their incomes on individually owned land, the sustainability of mangroves and recovery of many fishery species are more likely to be achieved if the economic needs of the whole community are taken into account.

Potential outcomes of integrated community forestry for climate change.

NGO Local community engagement in participatory workshop to assess potential for community forestry activities.

The mission team concluded that the promotion of community forestry and associated value-chains should form a key component of GGGI’s Coastal Landscape Restoration program. This early analysis will feed into further in-depth integrated value chain assessments by GGGI to design tailored solutions and interventions that are pro-poor and lead to socially inclusive benefits from direct and indirect use of restored and protected mangrove areas.

The post Unlocking Sustainable Community Forestry in the Ayeyarwady Delta appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Farmers planting during a rainy season in Dali, North Darfur, Sudan. Credit: UN Photo / Albert Farran

By Dan Shepard
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 4 2019 (IPS)

Record global greenhouse gas emissions are putting the world on a path toward unacceptable warming, with serious implications for development prospects in Africa. “Limiting warming to 1.5° C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics, but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, cochair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III.

But IPCC, the world’s foremost authority for assessing the science of climate change, says it is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5° C—if, and only if, there are “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities.” For sub-Saharan Africa, which has experienced more frequent and more intense climate extremes over the past decades, the ramifications of the world’s warming by more than 1.5° C would be profound.

Temperature increases in the region are projected to be higher than the global mean temperature increase; regions in Africa within 15 degrees of the equator are projected to experience an increase in hot nights as well as longer and more frequent heat waves.

The odds are long but not impossible, says the IPCC. And the benefits of limiting climate change to 1.5° C are enormous, with the report detailing the difference in the consequences between a 1.5° C increase and a 2° C increase. Every bit of additional warming adds greater risks for Africa in the form of greater droughts, more heat waves and more potential crop failures.

Recognizing the increasing threat of climate change, many countries came together in 2015 to adopt the historic Paris Agreement, committing themselves to limiting climate change to well below 2° C. Some 184 countries have formally joined the agreement, including almost every African nation, with only Angola, Eritrea and South Sudan yet to join. The agreement entered into force in November 2016.

In December 2018, countries met in Katowice, Poland, for the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—known as COP24—to finalise the rules for implementation of the agreement’s work programme. As part of the Paris Agreement, countries made national commitments to take steps to reduce emissions and build resilience. The treaty also called for increased financial support from developed countries to assist the climate action efforts of developing countries.

But even at the time that the Paris Agreement was adopted, it was recognized that the commitments on the table would not be enough. Even if the countries did everything they promised, global temperatures would rise by 3° C this century. According to the IPCC, projections show that the western Sahel region will experience the strongest drying, with a significant increase in the maximum length of dry spells. The IPCC expects Central Africa to see a decrease in the length of wet spells and a slight increase in heavy rainfall.

West Africa has been identified as a climate-change hotspot, with climate change likely to lessen crop yields and production, with resultant impacts on food security. Southern Africa will also be affected. The western part of Southern Africa is set to become drier, with increasing drought frequency and number of heat waves toward the end of the 21st century.

A warming world will have implications for precipitation. At 1.5° C, less rain would fall over the Limpopo basin and areas of the Zambezi basin in Zambia, as well as parts of Western Cape in South Africa. But at 2° C, Southern Africa is projected to face a decrease in precipitation of about 20% and increases in the number of consecutive dry days in Namibia, Botswana, northern Zimbabwe and southern Zambia. This will cause reductions in the volume of the Zambezi basin projected at 5% to 10%.

If the global mean temperature reaches 2° C of global warming, it will cause significant changes in the occurrence and intensity of temperature extremes in all sub-Saharan regions. West and Central Africa will see particularly large increases in the number of hot days at both 1.5° C and 2° C. Over Southern Africa, temperatures are expected to rise faster at 2° C, and areas of the southwestern region, especially in South Africa and parts of Namibia and Botswana, are expected to experience the greatest increases in temperature.

Perhaps no region in the world has been affected as much as the Sahel, which is experiencing rapid population growth, estimated at 2.8% per year, in an environment of shrinking natural resources, including land and water resources.

Inga Rhonda King, President of the UN Economic and Social Council, a UN principal organ that coordinates the economic and social work of UN agencies, told a special meeting at the UN that the region is also one of the most environmentally degraded in the world, with temperature increases projected to be 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the world.

Largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, the Sahel is regularly hit by droughts and floods, with enormous consequences to people’s food security. As a result of armed conflict, violence and military operations, some 4.9 million people have been displaced this year, a threefold increase in less than three years, while 24 million people require humanitarian assistance throughout the region.

Climate change is already considered a threat multiplier, exacerbating existing problems, including conflicts. Ibrahim Thiaw, special adviser of the UN Secretary-General for the Sahel, says the Sahel region is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with 300 million people affected.

Drought, desertification and scarcity of resources have led to heightened conflicts between crop farmers and cattle herders, and weak governance has led to social breakdowns, says Mr. Thiaw. The shrinking of Lake Chad is leading to economic marginalization and providing a breeding ground for recruitment by terrorist groups as social values and moral authority evaporate.

*Africa Renewal, which is published by the United Nations, reports on and examines the many different aspects of the UN’s involvement in Africa, especially within the framework of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). It works closely with the many UN agencies and offices dealing with African issues, including the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa.

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Excerpt:

Dan Shepard is a UN public information officer specializing in sustainability issues--including SDGs, biodiversity & climate change.

 
Africa Renewal*

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Young planters stand guard by mangrove forest in Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
SHWE THAUNG YAN, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (IPS)

Htay Aung is having a moment. The 63-year-old retired professor of Marine Science sits at the foot of a Buddha statue atop a hill on Shwe Thaung Yan sub township, in Myanmar’s Ayyerwady region, almost in meditation. Below him, a vast thicket of mangrove glistens in the gold of a setting sun. For Aung, this stretch of mangroves—known as the Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park—is a symbol of joy, hope and all things good.

“We gave three years of hard work in planting these trees. Now they are growing tall. Soon, they will be the biggest assets of our people,” he says, pointing at the forest and the tiny dot of houses that appear in the horizon.

The restored mangrove forest in Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mangroves in Myanmar
This mangrove forest is spread across an area of 2,557 square kilometres (km)—almost the size of Luxembourg.

However, in most places, the density is wafer thin thanks to rampant clearing of the mangroves for space to breed shrimps and for firewood etc. According to a recent study by Pierre Taillerdat, Massimo Lupascu and Daniel Friess, Myanmar loses about 21 square km of its mangrove forest each year.

Shwe Thaung Yan, about 185 km north west of Yangon, once had a severely degraded forest where 75 percent of its mangroves had been destroyed.

Then the story changed.

In 2015, just before the rains came, a motley crowd of a few hundred men, women and youths from the fishing villages, wearing shinny plastic gumboots and carrying sling sacks filled with mangrove saplings, gathered along the muddy swamp in Myagi—one of the three villages under Shwe Thaung Yan.

For several hours a day, they planted the saplings in the muddy soil made fertile and nutrient rich by regular tides.
By October of that year, they had planted over 700,000 trees on three square km of land.

Since then, the plantation drive has taken place each year. By the end of October 2018, the community planted six million trees in three villages of under Shew Thaung Yan, covering 9 square km of land—an area over four times bigger than the city of Monaco.

Leading the planters from the front, besides Aung were Uboni and Aung Aung Myint, experts in mangrove research and costal ecosystems restoration. The three are currently associated with Worldview International Foundation (WIF)—a Norwegian charity co-founded by Arne Fjortoft, a former journalist turned politician and a renowned environmentalist.

“We used the satellite images, studied the images meticulously and created a map that shows the exact patches in the mangrove forest that had gone bare. We shared this information with the villagers. We also marked the areas and divided the planters in several groups and assigned each group a certain area,” Uboni tells IPS.

Before the plantation started, WIF entered into an active partnership with Myanmar’s Ministry of Environmental Conservation and two of the country’s leading educational institutions, Myeik and Pathein universities. The land area for planting mangroves—over 7 square km in all—was provided by Pathein University, which is also involved in studying marine science along the coast of Shwe Thaung Yan.

Worldview International Foundation (WIF) signboard by a mangrove forest in Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mitigating Climate Change
Mangroves make up only 0.7 percent of the world’s forests, but they have the potential to store about 2.5 times as much CO2 as humans produce globally each year. A 2017 study estimated that the total amount of carbon held in the world’s mangroves was around 4.2 billion tonnes. If this whole amount were released as CO2, it would be equivalent to the annual emissions of China and the United States put together.

Another study said that Myanmar’s mangroves — which is 3 percent of global mangrove forests, shows “huge (blue carbon) potential if conservation can prevent further emissions from their loss and encourage future carbon sequestration through restoration.” So, blue carbon mitigation at the national scale “is well aligned with the Paris Agreement and associated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for some nations,” the study says.

Cameron Keith Richards, professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, visited Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park in 2016 to evaluate the mangrove restoration and its blue carbon stock. In his validation report, which helped the project qualify for selling its carbon stocks, Richards summarised the project saying that it was “reasonably assumed to represent an overall 4.3 million tons of C02 within a 20-year lifecycle of the current trees and additional trees to be planted in the project.”

The mangrove project has opened ways for alternative livelihoods and skill-building opportunities for the community. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Community Development
Shew Thaung Yan is primarily a fishing sub township where catching and selling of fish remain the source of sustenance for its nearly 11,000-strong community.

However, the mangrove project has opened ways for alternative livelihoods and skill-building opportunities for the community: during the monsoon when there is little or no fishing in the sea, the community members earn wages by planting mangrove saplings in the forests around them.

Women of the village have also started a clam farming collective–a first for the community. The collective which presently has 55 members, is running from a site that was earlier used as a nursery for growing mangrove saplings. The women visit the mangrove forest where they collect clams and bring it back to the farm where each of them have a 6 to 10 ft enclosure that are regularly flooded by the tidal waves. The clams have been “sowed’ into the slushy farm soil, where they will thrive and grow fat, feeding on the nutrients brought by the tides.

This is a zero-investment livelihood initiative that promises local women a good earning opportunity, explains Shwe Sandar Oo, the coordinator of the farming project. “The land is free, the clams are free and we have already connected them to buyers,” she tells IPS. The buyers, she says, are hoteliers in Chaung Tha, a beach town popular among domestic and foreign tourists. Big, fleshy clams are high in demand among the tourists and usually fetch half a dollar each.

Clam farmer Thein Thein Sein is full of happiness as she looks upon her zero-investment clam farm in Myagi village of Shwe Thaung Yan sub township in Ayyerwady region of Myanmar. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Thein Thein Nwe, one of the clam farmers says that it’s the zero-investment that drew her to the collective. Earlier this year, Nwe’s eldest daughter dropped out of school at grade 10, after she failed to pass her grade 10 tests. With the income she earns from her clam farm, the 42-year-old fisherwoman now hopes to send her daughter to a private coach, so she could retake the tests.

Many in the village of Maygi have received clean cookstoves and solar lamps provided by WIF. The village has a media centre where school-going children of the village are learning various skills including basic computer operations, photography and embroidery. Run by WIF, the centre offers scholarship girl students who are promising but too poor to afford tuition fees.

Way to the Future
As 2019 begins, the planters in Shwe Thaung Yan are gearing up to plant two billion trees–their biggest plantation drive to date. Once finished, restoration drive of Shwe Thaung Yan would be complete and the restored forest would store 300 million tonnes of CO2, Uboni says. “After this, we are going to Yangon Division and also the delta division. So, in the new year, we will go to Bago and Mon state to plant mangrove,” he announces.

Aung, on the other hand, is more focused on the underwater marine life, especially conserving the seagrass and the coral bed both of which are available in the sea around Shwe Thaung Yan.

“The seagrass can stock much more blue carbon than the land trees or mangrove. It is also what feeds Dugong or sea cow—a critically endangered sea mammal. So, with the help of WIF and Pathein University, we now aim is to build a marine sanctuary around Shwe Thaung Yan,” he says.

The idea has received the approval of Daw Si Si Hla Bu, the rector of Pathein University. “I want to see our university making significant contribution to coastal ecosystem restoration,” Hla Bu tells IPS.

Arne Fjortoft tells IPS that the funding for the proposed marine sanctuary could be raised from selling off the carbon stock of mangrove forests. For Fjortoft, however, the mangrove restoration, vocational trainings, clam farming and marine life conservation are all part of a big, single picture: “The final goal here is to help bring sustainable development for 12 million people of the country’s coastal communities. And that’s the future we are hoping to see.”

• Restoring Ghana’s Mangroves and Depleted Fish Stock
• Fishing Villages Work for Food Security in El Salvador

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The Sierra Juárez forest in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is vulnerable to the effects of climate change, but at the same time it can help fight the phenomenon. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
IXTLÁN DE JUÁREZ, Mexico, Jan 3 2019 (IPS)

“I dream of a healthy, sustainable, well-managed forest,” says Rogelio Ruiz, a silviculturist from southern Mexico, who insists that “we have to clean it up, take advantage of the wood, and reforest.”

These activities are essential for the ecosystem, especially to adapt to the impacts of climate change, the president of the La Trinidad Communal Lands Commissariat, in the municipality of Ixtlán de Juárez, in the state of Oaxaca, some 840 km south of Mexico City, told IPS.

Forest habitats are precisely one of the best natural mechanisms for mitigating climatic change, but at the same time they face the consequences, such as rising temperatures, variations in rainfall regimes and the spread of pests.

The ecoregion where La Trinidad is located, the Sierra Juárez mountains, is well aware of this. Since 2017 it has been facing an outbreak of the pine sawfly, which eats the needles of the pine tree, the most common species in this area of central Oaxaca. Local organisations estimate that some 10,000 hectares are at risk from this pest.

Ruíz explained that 106 of his community’s 805 hectares have been damaged. La Trinidad has a traditional Mexican system of government for collectively-owned and worked land, which is different from an “eijido” because the land here cannot be sold.

In September, “we applied aerial fumigation” of a biopesticide and now “we will use handpumps,” said the community leader, one of those attending the celebration in Ixtlan this month of the 35 years of struggle against the private forest concessions that were once predominant here. The struggle gave rise to community-managed forests like this one.

La Trinidad, made up of 291 community members and their families, has a permit to annually extract 5,000 cubic metres of wood during an eight-year management plan, in effect since 2014.

These undertakings exemplify the development of Mexican community forestry, considered a global model, for its success in generating social, economic and environmental benefits.

In 2016, Mexico, the second-largest country in Latin America, with 1.96 million square kilometres (196 million hectares), had 20.3 million hectares of temperate forest, 850,000 hectares of mesophilic mountain forest, 50.2 million hectares of scrubland, 7.9 million hectares of grasslands, 11.5 million hectares of rainforest and 1.4 million hectares of other vegetation, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

A truck unloads pine logs at the sawmill of the forest community of Ixtlán de Juárez, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, which, like other local groups in the Sierra Juárez mountains, sustainably manages its community assets, including timber. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The non-governmental Mexican Civil Council for Sustainable Forestry lists 4,886 forest communities and ejidos, of which some 2,100 commercially exploit the forests.

But only seven million hectares, in the hands of some 600 communities, operate with a management and conservation plan, a requirement for obtaining approval for the harvesting programmes promoted by the state-run National Forestry Commission.

Mexico’s timber production totals seven million cubic metres annually, of which Oaxaca in the south contributes just under seven percent.

Forest ecosystems provide water to urban areas, regulate the water cycle, provide food, and capture carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas responsible for global warming, among other ecological services, according to scientific studies.

As a result, in the face of the threats posed by climate change, forests require public policies that generate better economic incentives, offer legal certainty about land tenure, expand markets and increase productivity, say silviculture organisations and experts.

Ixtlan, which means “place of threads or fibers” in the Zapotec language and where 600 hectares have been damaged, has undertaken the fight against pests by experimenting with five species of pine in the community nursery.

“In November and December, we do seed selection. We want faster-growing, pest-resistant species. We are confident that the new species will be more resistant,” explained Sergio Ruiz, forestry advisor for the community enterprise Santo Tomás Ixtlán Forest Union.

The community of Ixtlán, also in the municipality of the same name, owns 19,125 hectares, of which 30 percent is used for forestry.

Its activities also include ecotourism, a gas station, a shop, a furniture factory and a water bottling plant. In 2018, the community nursery provided 360,000 seedlings, 100,000 of which went to reforestation while the other 260,000 were donated to nearby communities. The hope is to create a seed orchard.

A study under preparation by the state-run Technical University of Sierra Juárez analyses climatic factors such as temperature, moisture and soil conditions in Ixtlán.

Workers from the forest community of Ixtlán de Juárez inspect seedlings to be planted in the forest they manage within the municipality of the same name, in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Their plan is to build a seed orchard to generate pine species more resistant to climate change. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

In 2015, Mexico emitted 683 million tons of CO2, making it the second largest polluter in the region after Brazil. Of that total, 20 million tons came from the loss of forest lands.

This Latin American country adopted its own goal of zero deforestation by 2030, a real challenge when average annual logging represents 200,867 hectares lost between 2011 and 2016, according to estimates by the Superior Audit of the Federation, the Mexican government comptroller’s office.

Other sites in the Sierra Juarez mountains are also exposed to climate change, although their height above sea level temporarily protects them from insects. Such is the case in the municipality of San Juan Evangelista, where silviculturists are preparing to adapt their forests to the phenomenon.

“It is important to clean up the forest, because it takes away combustion power and the risk of pests. In addition, managed forests allow more carbon sequestration than unmanaged forests. They can help prevent climate change from accelerating,” Filemón Manzano, technical adviser to the forestry community in that municipality, told IPS.

Analco, which means “on the other side of the river” in Nahuatl, consists of 150 community members, the owners of 1,600 hectares, of which 1,000 are covered by forests and 430 of which are exploited. The community operates a nursery for 3,000 seedlings.

Manzano and academics from the state-run Postgraduate College of Agricultural Sciences are preparing research on CO2 absorption by managed forests, estimated at five tons per year per managed hectare.

Under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, Mexico pledged to reduce, by 2030, up to 14 million tons of annual CO2 emissions from land use, land use change and forestry, by promoting sustainable forest management, increasing productivity in forests and jungles and promoting forest plantations.

But the outlays needed to implement mitigation measures would total 11.789 billion dollars up to that year, at a cost of 53 dollars per ton of CO2. Zero deforestation would require 7.923 billion dollars and sustainable forest management would require 3.861 billion dollars.

In July, the Mexican forestry sector proposed a long-term policy, greater investment, an adequate legal framework, strengthening community forest management, community participation in the design of measures and a link to climate change, as part of the “Forests with people, forests forever” campaign.

Rogelio Ruiz called for more support to better care for the ecosystem and thus reap more benefits.

The study “Toward a Global Baseline of Carbon Storage in Collective Lands”, published in September by the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Washington-based global network of 15 partners, estimated that Mexican community forests trap 2.8 million tons of CO2.

Manzano called for more forest management. “We want to show how managed forests contribute to the conservation of the planet. It’s going to be important to have more resistant species and create a good mix of species,” he said.

• Forest Communities Join Forces to Fight Land Degradation in Mexico
• Indigenous People Demand Shared Benefits from Forest Conservation

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Social Protection and Financing Social Development
Against the backdrop of persisting poverty and widening inequalities, ESCAP supports national and regional efforts by functioning as a knowledge platform for social protection, including through its Social Protection Toolbox (http://socialprotection-toolbox.org). ESCAP advocates for inclusive social protection along the Social Protection Floor and works to strengthen the capacity of policymakers in the Asia-Pacific region to design, implement and finance inclusive social protection as a tool for achieving the 2030 Agenda.

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Jan 3 2019 (IPS)

2019 will be a landmark year for the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Four years will have passed since world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Four years since governments recommitted themselves to eradicating extreme poverty, improving universal health care coverage, education and food security, and achieving a sweeping set of economic, social and environmental objectives. Long enough to assess our direction of travel and then refocus work where progress is falling short.

As the United Nations development arm in the region, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific’s (UN ESCAP) absolute priority is to support our members achieve the SDGs by 2030. We work to give scale to their effort through regional cooperation and the South-South cooperation. So, we see the stock taking in 2019 as an opportunity. One to ensure our region remains on track to achieve sustainable development.

We already know our region’s effort must be intensified. UN ESCAP analysis shows that on our current trajectory only one SDG, universal education, is on track to be met by 2030. Environmental degradation and air pollution are worsening. Our region is feeling the full force of climate change, but our greenhouse gas emissions remain high. Intraregional trade and connectivity remain below their potential. Inequalities, both within and between countries, are widening.

Much good work is underway to overcome these challenges. But there is scope to step up our region’s response in three main areas.

First, the region cannot afford to ignore widening inequality. Had the proceeds of growth been shared more equitably over the past decade, 140 million more people could have been lifted out of poverty. Inequalities of income, opportunity and increased exposure to natural disasters are all on the rise. Our response clearly needs to cut across sectors. But UN ESCAP research shows social protection delivers the highest return on investment. Countries such as Thailand or Vietnam have expanded their social protection programmes and have expertise to share. Let us use South-South cooperation to share it.

Continuing to strengthen our resilience to natural disasters is also key. We know disasters increase inequality. They keep children out of school and adults out of work, increase inequality and entrench poverty. Regional cooperation can help establish multi-hazard early warning systems, improve impact forecasting and damage assessment. UN ESCAP works closely with the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space of Indonesia (LAPAN) towards these objectives. LAPAN had a leading role in developing the recently agreed Asia-Pacific Plan of Action on Space Applications for Sustainable Development. Now, we need to focus on implementation, to harness space applications and digital innovations, to protect people from natural disasters better.

Second, the region must fulfil its longstanding ambition to increase intraregional trade. Recent trade tensions highlight Asia and the Pacific’s vulnerability to protectionism from major export markets. UN ESCAP analysis shows how regional value chains are being disrupted. 2.7 million jobs could be lost due to trade tensions, with unskilled workers, particularly women, suffering most. Increasing intraregional trade and connectivity should be part of our response. By implementing the framework agreement on the facilitation of cross-border paperless trade in Asia and the Pacific, adopted by UN ESCAP members to support the exchange of electronic trade data and documents, smoother commercial exchanges are within reach. Particularly if transport and energy connectivity are also increased. ASEAN’s achievement in strengthening power grids across borders is a leading example of successful political commitment and technical cooperation. We need this at the regional level.

Third, Asia and the Pacific should move decisively to reduce its ever-growing environmental footprint that is undermining development and peoples’ health. We should start with air pollution. As rapid urbanization continues, the region accounts for the bulk of cities with unhealthy air pollution levels. It leads to over 2 million premature deaths a year. Now is the time to agree a common response. One which limits hazardous health effects, accelerates the region’s transition to cleaner energy, promotes sustainable transport and strengthens our fight against climate change. A framework for science-based policy cooperation could make a real difference, including by raising ambitions when it comes to fighting climate change. The countries of North East Asia have already agreed a Clean Air Partnership. We should consider building on this approach at a regional level.

2019 is the region’s moment to build a more coherent regional response to these major challenges. To take decisive steps to combat air pollution and climate change, boost intraregional trade, improve social protection and resilience to natural disasters. We owe it to future generations to seize this opportunity, to come together and to quicken our pace to achieve sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific.

The post Getting Sustainable Development Back on Track in Asia & the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

The post Getting Sustainable Development Back on Track in Asia & the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Gilberto Gómez stands next to the cow he bought with the support of his migrant children in the United States,which eases the impact of the loss of his subsistence crops, in the village of La Colmena, Candelaria de la Frontera municipality in western El Salvador. This area forms part of the Central American Dry Corridor, where increasing climate vulnerability is driving migration of the rural population. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
CANDELARIA DE LA FRONTERA, El Salvador, Jan 2 2019 (IPS)

As he milks his cow, Salvadoran Gilberto Gomez laments that poor harvests, due to excessive rain or drought, practically forced his three children to leave the country and undertake the risky journey, as undocumented migrants, to the United States.

Gómez, 67, lives in La Colmena, in the municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera, in the western Salvadoran department of Santa Ana.

The small hamlet is located in the so-called Dry Corridor of Central America, a vast area that crosses much of the isthmus, but whose extreme weather especially affects crops in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

“They became disillusioned, seeing that almost every year we lost a good part of our crops, and they decided they had to leave, because they didn’t see how they could build a future here,” Gómez told IPS, as he untied the cow’s hind legs after milking.

He said that his eldest son, Santos Giovanni, for example, also grew corn and beans on a plot of land the same size as his own, “but sometimes he didn’t get anything, either because it rained a lot, or because of drought.”

The year his children left, in 2015, Santos Giovanni lost two-thirds of the crop to an unusually extreme drought.

“It’s impossible to go on like this,” lamented Gómez, who says that of the 15 families in La Colmena, many have shrunk due to migration because of problems similar to those of his son.

The Dry Corridor, particularly in these three nations, has experienced the most severe droughts of the last 10 years, leaving more than 3.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned as early as 2016.

Now Gómez’s daughter, Ana Elsa, 28, and his two sons, Santos Giovanni, 31, and Luis Armando, 17, all live in Los Angeles, California.

“Sometimes they call us, and tell us they’re okay, that they have jobs,” he said.

The case of the Gómez family illustrates the phenomenon of migration and its link with climate change and its impact on harvests, and thus on food insecurity among Central American peasant families.

La Colmena, which lacks piped water and electricity, benefited a few years ago from a project to harvest rainwater, which villagers filter to drink, as well as reservoirs to water livestock.

However, their crops are still vulnerable to the onslaught of heavy rains and increasingly unpredictable and intense droughts.

Domitila Reyes pulls corn cobs from a plantation in Ciudad Romero, a rural settlement in the municipality of Jiquilisco, in eastern El Salvador. The production of basic grains such as corn and beans has been affected by climate change in large areas of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In addition to the violence and poverty, climate change is the third cause of the exodus of Central Americans, especially from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, according to the new Atlas of Migration in Northern Central America.

The report, released Dec. 12 by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and FAO, underscores that the majority of migrants from these three countries come from rural areas.

Between 2000 and 2012, the report says, there was an increase of nearly 59 percent in the number of people migrating from these three countries, which make up the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America. In Guatemala, 77 percent of the people living in rural areas are poor, and in Honduras the proportion is 82 percent.

In recent months, waves of citizens from Honduras and El Salvador have embarked on the long journey on foot to the United States, with the idea that it would be safer if they travelled in large groups.

Travelling as an undocumented migrant to the United States carries a series of risks: they can fall prey to criminal gangs, especially when crossing Mexico, or dieon the long treks through the desert.

Another report published by FAO in December, Mesoamerica in Transit, states that of the nearly 30 million international migrants from Latin America, some four million come from the Northern Triangle and another 11 million from Mexico.

The study adds that among the main factors driving migration in El Salvador are poverty in the departments of Ahuachapán, Cabañas, San Vicente and Sonsonate; environmental vulnerability in Chalatenango, Cuscatlán, La Libertad and San Salvador; and soaring violence in La Paz, Morazán and San Salvador.

And according to the report, Honduran migration is strongly linked to the lack of opportunities, and to high levels of poverty and violence in the northwest of the country and to environmental vulnerability in the center-south.

With respect to Guatemala, the report indicates that although in this country migration patterns are not so strongly linked to specific characteristics of different territories, migration is higher in municipalities where the percentage of the population without secondary education is larger.

In Mexico, migration is linked to poverty in the south and violence in the west, northwest and northeast, while environmental vulnerability problems seem to be cross-cutting.

“The report shows a compelling and comprehensive view of the phenomenon: the decision to migrate is the individual’s, but it is conditioned by their surroundings,” Luiz Carlos Beduschi, FAO Rural Development Officer, told IPS from Santiago, Chile, the U.N. organisation’s regional headquarters.

He added that understanding what is happening in the field is fundamental to understanding migratory dynamics as a whole.

The study, published Dec. 18, makes a “multicausal analysis; the decision to stay or migrate is conditioned by a set of factors, including climate, especially in the Dry Corridor of Central America,” Beduschi said.

For the FAO expert, it is necessary to promote policies that offer rural producers “better opportunities for them and their families in their places of origin.”

It is a question, he said, “of guaranteeing that they have the necessary conditions to freely decide whether to stay at home or to migrate elsewhere,” and keeping rural areas from expelling the local population as a result of poverty, violence, climate change and lack of opportunities.

In the case of El Salvador, while there is government awareness of the impacts of climate change on crops and the risk it poses to food security, little has been done to promote public policies to confront the phenomenon, activist Luis González told IPS.

“There are national plans and strategies to confront climate change, to address the water issue, among other questions, but the problem is implementation: it looks nice on paper, but little is done, and much of this is due to lack of resources,” added González, a member of the Roundtable for Food Sovereignty, a conglomerate of social organisations fighting for this objective.

Meanwhile, in La Colmena, Gómez has given his wife, Teodora, the fresh milk they will use to make cheese.

They are happy that they have the cow, bought with the money their daughter sent from Los Angeles, and they are hopeful that the weather won’t spoil the coming harvest.

“With this cheese we earn enough for a small meal,” he said.

• Climate Change Drives Up Rural Poverty in Latin America
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Smallholder farmers at Mamani 6 km from Kikwit, the capital of Kwilu province. Many across the country are learning new farming techniques through practical application. Credit: Badylon Kawanda Bakiman/IPS

By Badylon Kawanda Bakiman
KIKWIT, DR Congo, Jan 2 2019 (IPS)

It was almost four years ago in 2015 that members of Farmer’s Frame of Idiofa (FFI), a farmers group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), produced a mere eight tonnes of sweet potatoes on two hectares of land. But the main reason for the low yield had not necessarily been a climate-related one, but an educational one.
“Thanks to the knowledge about agricultural techniques learnt from Farmer Field School, FFI has produced 30 tonnes of sweet potato in 2017 from a field of two hectares,” says Albert Kukotisa, chairman of FFI, from Kikwit, Kwilu province in southwest DRC.

FFI’s group of farmers are just some of those across the country who are learning new farming techniques thanks to the Farmer Field School (FFS) – an initiative by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

The field schools are not necessarily a new concept. According to a survey they were first introduced in 1989 in Indonesia where schools were developed to hope farmers deal with pesticide-induced problems.

And while they are also not new to the DRC, they are proving an effective way to educate and assist farmers.

Lazard Milambo, an FAO expert says that the new element to the FFS is that farmers are introduced to “new ideas with guided exercises without imposition and stimulating discussions by farmers.” He says the involvement of farmers themselves in the training process is also new.

With the FFS, however, farmers are not just told about new techniques and research, they are able to implement it also. Each week, a group of 20 to 25 farmers meet in local field and under the guidance of a trained facilitator they implement new farming techniques. Facilitators have various backgrounds and can include extension workers, employees from NGOs or previously-trained farmers.

“In groups of five they observe and compare two plots over the course of an entire cropping season. One plot follows local conventional methods while the other is used to experiment with what could be considered best practices. The plot of land belongs to a member of the group,” Patience Kutanga, an expert, agricultural engineer and one of the trained facilitators, explains.

Didier Kulenfuka, an agriculture expert adds that “small farmers experiment with and observe key elements of the agro-ecosystem by measuring plant development, taking samples of insects, weeds and diseased plants, and constructing simple cage experiments or comparing characteristics of different soils. At the end of the weekly meeting they present their findings in a plenary session, followed by discussion and planning for the coming weeks.”

According to a World Bank report, “DRC farmers are particularly poor and isolated, therefore vulnerable to climate impacts and other external shocks…”
In a country with 80 million hectares of arable land, “there are more than 50 millions of farmers in the country with land. Most of them are smallholders,” Milambo says.

And according to the same World Bank report the government is, however, committed to a green revolution, pledging to reduce rural poverty by 2020 through agricultural production systems. The government allocated 8 percent of its 2016 budget to agriculture.

But Kikwit, the capital and largest city of Kwilu province, and home to some 186,000 people, has only one university with an agronomic faculty.

Farmers and smallholders instead rely on the advice and knowledge of agricultural extension officers. And now, as Milambo points out, about two million smallholder farmers are working across the country with some 20,000 FFSs.

Françoise Kangala, a 47-year-old farmer of Kongo Central (formerly Bas-Congo) province explains that he learned a lot from the course, including how to identify the best field for planting his crop and how to choose top seeds. His increased knowledge showed in the increased harvest.

“So, my family has harvested 20 tonnes of maniocs [Cassava], Obama variety for a field of one hectare. In 2014 it wasn’t the case. The same land produced only 7 tonnes. Observations about results between old practices and the new is among the innovations of the approach.’’

For John Masamba, a smallholder farmer from Goma, North Kivu province, east of DRC, it’s necessary to popularise this system around the DRC “because it’s a school without walls.” He said he appreciated learning through practice.

“Together, farmers swap experiences. With the knowledge from FFS and using resilient seeds, I have produced [in 2018] 19 tonnes of maize from one a field of one hectare, compared to 7 tonnes in 2016,’’ he says.

Going forward this increased production by smallholder farmers will be crucial to the country’s food security. Smallholding farming contributes — around 60 percent — to the country’s food security, according to Milambo.

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By GGGI
BUDAPEST, Jan 2 2019 (GGGI)

The Hungarian Government approved on December 21, 2018 (Government Decision 1770/2018. [XII. 21.]) the establishment of the Western Balkans Green Center (WBGC), a new instrument to support the implementation of the Paris Agreement. Designed with the support of GGGI under a cooperation project supported by the Ministry for Innovation and Technology of Hungary, the WBGF will support climate actions in six countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Republic of Northern Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

The Government Decision calls for the set-up of a state-owned company, including financial provisions for the next three years. Responding to the needs of the countries, the WBGF will be complementary to existing instruments and will target areas that are under-financed such as climate adaptation. As early as 2019, the WBGC will support project preparation and capacity building in the region through grant financing in water management, forestry, sustainable energy for buildings and sustainable city sectors.

“The Hungarian Government in collaboration with the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) intends to support the green transition of the Western Balkan region through a dedicated fund. With the establishment of the Western Balkan Green Center, Hungary is showing its commitment to the Paris Agreement. The project will result in concrete actions to support climate mitigation and adaptation in a neighboring region”. (Dr. Peter Kaderják, Secretary of State for Energy Affairs and Climate Policy).

The proposal is the result of extensive consultation at regional level, studies and analysis. Furthermore, the proposal was developed under the strategic guidance of an Advisory Committee composed of representatives of ministries, policy experts and other stakeholders.

“I am delighted that GGGI supported the design of an instrument that will help the region meet its objectives under the Paris Agreement. I see a critical role for this Hungarian initiative in supporting green infrastructure investments. GGGI estimates that every USD 100,000 in project preparation funds during the Fund’s first phase may mobilize USD 10 million in infrastructure investments”. (Ban-Ki-Moon, President and Chair of GGGI)

The WBGC is the first step of a broader, more ambitious endeavor, to create a regional multi-donor fund in 2021 supporting project implementation, using blended finance and targeted financial instruments for beneficiaries in Western Balkans. The Government proposal also calls for the set-up of an international committee and further engagement with the Visegrad and other Central European countries for the establishment of the regional multi-donor fund in 2021.
 

*This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244/1999 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.

The post Hungarian Government to Launch a Climate Finance Instrument to Support Climate Action in the Western Balkans in 2019 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: IMF

By Chris Wellisz
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 2 2019 (IPS)

It happened again and again in a career punctuated by upheavals: the peso crisis of 1994, the Asian crisis of 1997, and finally, the big one—the global financial crisis of 2008.

Each time he started a new government job, Timothy Geithner hoped to find a letter from his predecessor, explaining what to do and whom to call if things fell apart. The desk drawer was always empty.

“Financial crises are probably the most devastating economic events that can happen to a country,” says Geithner, who fought the last conflagration as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and later US Treasury secretary. “I’d like our successors to have a better base of knowledge.”

So every summer, Geithner takes time off from his job as president of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, to help teach a two-week crisis management workshop for regulators from around the world.

It’s one part of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, which also offers a master’s degree and is undertaking an ambitious project to create, on a very large scale, what Geithner never found in that desk drawer—a manual for crisis managers.

“A lot of times we’ve made the same mistakes in fighting financial crises over time simply because there was no body of knowledge that people had jointly studied and debated,” says Andrew Metrick, a professor of finance at Yale who founded and runs the program. “It’s almost like you show up at the emergency room and the doctor says, ‘It looks like a broken arm. I think I’ve seen someone once do something for a broken arm.’”

Metrick was one of those emergency room financial doctors. Six months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, he got a call from the Obama administration.

They desperately needed a financial economist. So Metrick moved to Washington to work for the Council of Economic Advisers. There, as chief staff economist, he helped develop programs to revive housing and financial markets.

When it came time to propose legislation, he discovered that academic research wasn’t very useful.

“There was no real great connection between academic knowledge, economic intuition, and what we actually could put in the law because there just wasn’t a good body of research there,” Metrick says. “I was determined that when I came back to the academy I would try to be part of something that would help to fill that gap.”

That was the genesis of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, which got off the ground in 2014 with donations from organizations including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Geithner joined soon after, teaching, raising money, and chairing the advisory board, which includes former central bankers such as the Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke, Mexico’s Agustín Carstens, and Malaysia’s Zeti Akhtar Aziz.

Geithner brought a practical focus to what became known as the New Bagehot Crisis-Response Project, named for Walter Bagehot, a 19th century British economist and author of Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, a bible of sorts for the guardians of financial stability.

The project’s 14 researchers compile case studies of responses to the global financial crisis and the euro crisis that followed it. Eventually, they plan to study manias and panics going back to the South Sea Bubble in the 18th century.

While the global crisis spawned countless books, articles, and memoirs, the Bagehot project seeks to analyze it in a systematic way—and determine what kinds of government actions worked, what kinds didn’t, and why. The architects of crisis-fighting programs in various countries are consultants on the project.

“Our focus is really on the technical details of the interventions,” Metrick says.

Their plan is to create an online tool that crisis managers can turn to in real time, in case they need to recapitalize a bank, say, or set up an emergency liquidity facility. They will also learn what to avoid, like Ireland’s decision to guarantee the liabilities of its banks, which transformed a bank run into a far more serious sovereign debt crisis.

“Because the classic panic happens pretty rarely in the same country, even though it happens around the world with pretty appalling frequency, there’s not actually that much institutional memory, and there certainly wasn’t at the Treasury or the Fed, about how you deal with a systemic financial crisis,” Geithner says in an interview.

The summer symposium—Geithner called it a “war college”—was a two-week workshop for central bankers and regulators. The central banks of China, Europe, Japan, and the United States all sent participants, along with agencies like the Bank for International Settlements and the European Stability Mechanism.

Another piece of the Yale program is the two-day Financial Crisis Forum, where veterans including former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson offer their insights on subjects from capital injections to frozen money markets.

“For the current generation of officials, especially the younger ones who attend the conference, learning from history is vital,” says Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England from 2009 to 2013. “Going forward, current officials also need to learn from the crises that, believe it or not, were averted or successfully contained.”

Finally, there is Yale’s one-year master’s degree in systemic risk, which offers early career professionals a chance to hone their skills and develop new ones. A recent graduate is Özgü Özen Çavuşoğlu, who returned to her job in the financial stability division of Turkey’s central bank and is now researching an early-warning system for the country’s economy.

Just as important, she says, was the opportunity to forge bonds with colleagues from across the globe.

“We are living in an interconnected world,” Özen Çavuşoğlu says. “That’s why the network of people with the same understanding will play an important role in having a stable global economy.”

The link to the original article: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2018/12/tim-geithner-yale-program-financial-stability-wellisz.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

The post Veterans of the Global Financial Crisis Pass their Wisdom on to the Next Generation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Chris Wellisz is on the staff of Finance & Development at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

The post Veterans of the Global Financial Crisis Pass their Wisdom on to the Next Generation appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A Soviet inspector examines a BGM-109G Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile prior to its destruction pursuant to INF Treaty, October 18, 1988, at Davis-Monthan US Air Force Base in Arizona. Credit: US Department of Defense

By Andrew Lichterman and John Burroughs
NEW YORK, Jan 2 2019 (IPS)

A hard-earned lesson of the Cold War is that arms control reduces the risk of nuclear war by limiting dangerous deployments and, even more important, by creating channels of communication and understanding. But President Donald Trump and his National Security Advisor John Bolton appear to have forgotten, or never learned, that lesson.

In late October, Trump announced an intent to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo subsequently stated that the US will suspend implementation of the treaty in early February. While US signals have been mixed, initiation of withdrawal at that point or soon thereafter appears likely.

Agreed to in 1987 by the United States and the Soviet Union, the INF Treaty prohibits the two countries from deploying both nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges between 310 and 3420 miles.

The main reason cited for withdrawal is that Russia has tested and deployed ground-launched cruise missiles the treaty prohibits. Russia denies that the missiles violate the treaty and has made its own accusations, foremost that US ballistic missile defense launchers installed in Eastern Europe could be used to house treaty-prohibited cruise missiles.

On December 21, the United States opposed a Russia-sponsored UN General Assembly resolution calling for preservation of the treaty and for the two countries to consult on compliance with its obligations. The Russian representative said that US withdrawal “is the start of a full-fledged arms race.”

The US representative conveyed that the only way to save the treaty is for Russia to stop violating it. On behalf of the European Union, which opposed the resolution as a diversion, an Austrian diplomat said that erosion of the treaty will have critical consequences for Europe and beyond, dialogue between the US and Russia remains essential, and Russia should demonstrate compliance.

A representative of China, which supported the resolution, said the treaty is important for global stability, and cast doubt on prospects for making it multilateral. The General Assembly rejected the resolution by a vote of 46 against to 43 in favor, with 78 abstentions.

The INF Treaty allows either party to withdraw on six-month’s notice “if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests.” The treaty also includes a bilateral mechanism for resolving disputes over compliance. The Trump administration has firmly asserted that Russia has violated the treaty, and NATO states have backed that assertion.

But the administration has not made the case that the missiles in question pose a threat that significantly affects the military balance between Russia and the very large and capable forces of the United States and its NATO allies, much less constitute an “extraordinary” development jeopardizing US “supreme interests.”

On December 14, a Russian official stated that Russia is open to mutual inspections regarding claimed violations.

President Trump has also indicated that withdrawal is premised in part on a buildup of intermediate-range missiles by China, which is not a party to the treaty. Here too no case has been made that these missiles, which are based in China’s national territory, are best answered in kind by US deployment of intermediate-range missiles.

Nor has it been demonstrated that peace and stability in that region or the world will be enhanced by repudiating the treaty rather than seeking more comprehensive arms control measures aimed at braking an emerging multipolar arms race. Further, in either Europe or Asia, US ground-based intermediate-range missiles would have to be deployed in other countries.

This likely would spark opposition from their populations—a factor that three decades ago contributed to the negotiation of the INF Treaty itself.

In sum, the INF Treaty should not be abandoned lightly. It remains a key element of the arms control framework limiting nuclear weapons and arms racing. Often forward deployed and intermingled with other forces, the missiles the treaty prohibits are among the weapons most likely to lead to miscalculation or misadventure in a crisis.

And the danger of crisis miscalculation, of a disastrous misunderstanding of an adversary’s mindset, is real. At the time the INF Treaty was being negotiated, some US strategists viewed their nuclear-armed missiles in Europe as useful for convincing “demonstration” shots to show a commitment to defend Europe with nuclear weapons with less risk of escalation to a catastrophic nuclear war.

A 1987 Washington Post article summarized NATO thinking: “A final advantage of the INF weapons is that NATO planners believe that they could use a single Pershing II or cruise missile, rather than another nuclear weapon, with somewhat less risk of triggering an all-out nuclear war.”

But we now know that Soviet military leaders, strongly influenced by the World War II national trauma of a homeland devastated and millions dead, saw things quite differently. In an article published in Survival only last year, Alexei Arbatov, a Russian arms negotiator and parliamentarian, notes that in 1983 Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, head of the Soviet General Staff, made clear that the Soviet Union would not allow itself to be taken by surprise, as it had been in 1941. Ogarkov stated, “We will start the offensive if we are obliged to do it, and as soon as we discover the first evidence of the beginning of nuclear attack by NATO.” And in so doing, he said, “We will deliver dozens and, if need be, a hundred nuclear strikes to break through NATO’s deep defense echelon.”

Arbatov recounted this little-known history to support a subtle but critical point about arms control. Even when prospects for arms control progress seem dim, constant efforts to negotiate create channels of communication that are invaluable in a crisis. They also build institutions devoted to understanding not only the capabilities of an adversary but also their intentions, their fundamental interests and their deepest fears.

But a long hiatus in serious arms control efforts and a climate of deepening hostility have eroded the diplomatic and military-to-military contacts between Russia and the United States. And in the triumphalism of the long post-Cold War period, U.S. arms control institutions such as the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency were downgraded or allowed to atrophy.

With tensions growing among nuclear-armed countries in potential flashpoints from Ukraine to the South China Sea, it is long past time to rebuild the capacity of the US government to negotiate intelligently with its nuclear-armed adversaries.

The best course would be to use the dispute over the INF Treaty as a moment to renew, rather than discard, the negotiating frameworks and institutions that played a significant role in avoiding catastrophe during the Cold War.

However, Trump and Bolton have expressed general hostility to any international obligation that might limit US use of force or military capabilities. Both see negotiations as a zero-sum game to be won or lost. Neither seems capable of imagining international agreements that benefit all parties and make the world a safer place.

So Congress must act, to preserve enough of a fragile status quo to leave space for future diplomacy. As former senator Russell Feingold has explained, there is a legitimate question as to whether it is constitutional for a president to withdraw from a Senate-ratified treaty over Congressional opposition.

However, such core foreign policy controversies seldom are finally resolved by the courts. Congress in any case has the practical power to prevent the administration from taking action contrary to the INF Treaty. Most important, it can refuse to fund weapons testing, production, or deployment that would violate the treaty.

Senator Jeff Merkley and six colleagues already have introduced the Prevention of Arms Race Act of 2018 (S.3667). It characterizes withdrawal from the INF Treaty without consultation with Congress as “a serious breach of Congress’s proper constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government,” and erects barriers to spending on missiles that would violate the treaty.

Despite intense antagonism during the Cold War, the US and Russia were able to negotiate agreements like the INF Treaty to address the riskiest elements of their nuclear confrontation. The time to start building a climate for negotiations is now. Waiting for a crisis may be too late.

The post Renew Nuclear Arms Control, Don’t Destroy It appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Andrew Lichterman is Senior Research Analyst for Western States Legal Foundation, based in Oakland, California. John Burroughs is Executive Director of Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, based in New York City.

The post Renew Nuclear Arms Control, Don’t Destroy It appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Interviewing a marabout in a village north of Markala, Mali. Credit: Mamadou Demblele

By Jan Lundius
Stockholm/Rome, Jan 2 2019 (IPS)

We all adhere to generalizations. For example, while reading and speaking about Muslims and Christians, sweeping opinions might easily become prejudices, particularily if we do not know any individual behind the labels. When I some years ago was working for a Malian NGO, I met a marabout and a Christian who proved that devotees to different religions might find mutual support in their individual beliefs.

Marabouts serve as imams, preaching in and taking care of mosques, they are generally teachers as well. Assisted by my friend Seydou, who translated his Mandé into English, I spoke with a respected marabout. After a while I found that Seydou only provided brief summaries of what the old man said. I asked him if he really translated everything. Seydou confessed that he found that the marabout “talked a lot of nonsense”. When asked what he found specifically disconcerting Seydou answered that the marabout had stated that people were living on the moon. Since I had asked him about his opinion about fundamentalists’ views of the Qur’an I wanted Seydou to repeat my question to the marabout, while trying to translate what he said, word by word. The marabout apparently answered:

– These young hotheads interpret the Holy Qur´an as if they are living on the dark side of the moon. Residing in the moon’s cold shadow they cannot conceive the sun’s light, nor feel it´s warmth. It´s not enough to read God´s words. In my life God is my sun and joy. Words are not enough for understanding the world. Time is a strict master. It taught me to discern what is right or wrong. The Holy Qur’an is truly the word of God, through it His Messenger, may peace be upon him, transmits God´s word to all people, in all places, all the time. By providing us with the words of God the Messenger, may peace be upon him, wanted us to change for the better, not for the worse. God gave humans free will and wants us to choose what is right. God is righteous. He does not want us to choose what hurt others. Fundamentalists do not believe in any free will. They do not know what love is. They do not want people to think. They want to stop us from making free choices. Accordingly, they place themselves above God. Only God is all-knowing and all-powerful. I believe God speaks to all people through The Holy Qur´an, but through my experiences and in my dreams He talks to me.

After our meeting with the marabout, Seydou made contact with a Christian man. We met him in the village school where he was president of the school association. I had been told that he was the only Malian Christian in the district and asked why he, in a country where almost everyone was a Muslim, had become a Christian. He explained that his father had been a Muslim, but also member of a Chiwara society, a traditional initiation organisation that through traditional teachings and rituals taught Bamana youngsters social values. While studying in Markala he had out of curiosity been reading the Bible. Feeling lonely and bewildered he eventually distanced himself from the way of life in his agrarian village. Soon he identified himself with Jesus, assuming that God´s son had told people that a person must be a conscious disciple, able to choose what to believe in and not blindly follow what others tell you to think and do.

He converted to Christianity, returned to his village and began working as a teacher. However, the villagers despised him and tried to dismiss him from teaching. For a man who was not white, rich, powerful and disrespectful, it would have been impossible to leave the faith of his ancestors. The teacher must be an idiot and on top of that outright dangerous.

When I asked him for how long he had endured being the only Christian in the village, the teacher answered that he had “followed Christ” for twenty years, considering it to be his duty to transmit his faith to others, even if villagers spat behind his back. It was the marabout I had been talking to earlier who changed the Christian´s life. One evening the marabout met with him, confessing:

– I realize you are a holy man. Someone as lonely and strong as you must have a robust faith. You have struggled for your beliefs, while I was born into my position. If you would
doubt God, you don´t have to worry about losing people’s respect, they don´t revere you anyway. In contrast, if I would expose doubts and weaknesses I may lose everything I have. People don´t believe in you, but they believe in me. When I suffer hard times, I have no one to turn to. However, I trust you. You know God, just as I assume I know God. I do not know if you need me, but I need you. I know that if I brought my doubts and worries to you, you would understand me. Likewise, when you are in trouble, you may come to me.

The two men became friends. During the Friday prayers, following their fateful meeting, the marabout sent for the Christian. In front of his congregation he declared: “This is my friend. He´s a holy man. If you respect me, you respect him”. Since that time the Christian had become an integrated part of his society. I asked him:

– Are you now respected by everyone?

He smiled:

– Perhaps respected, but not entirely accepted.

Mali is a country with a vibrant, varied and ancient culture, though its fragile democracy has been threatened by coups and jihadist insurgencies. In 2013, upon the Government´s request, France intervened militarily, reconquering Islamist strongholds and in 2015 a United Nations´ monitored ceasefire was established between the Government and Tuareg separatists, though parts of the country remain tense while al-Qaeda-linked militants sporadically carry out attacks.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

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