Africa

A new film about Somalis in Manchester challenges decades of negative coverage, its directors say.

A rights group has criticised authorities for using soldiers to quell protests over fuel price rises.

Paris St-Germain are fined 100,000 euros (£87,691) by the French football league (LFP) for racially profiling potential young recruits.

Ivory Coast striker Vakoun Issouf Bayo says he wants to "score goals and win trophies" at Celtic after arriving in Scotland.

Solar panels can be seen on three buildings in the Morro de Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro. In the middle is the CEPAC daycare center, with a green terrace and two sets of photovoltaic panels, which reduced its expenses by 80 percent thanks to solar energy. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Jan 22 2019 (IPS)

“We can’t work just to pay the electric bill,” complained José Hilario dos Santos, president of the Residents Association of Morro de Santa Marta, a favela or shantytown embedded in Botafogo, a traditional middle-class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro.

The high cost of electricity in the favela is due to consumption estimates made by Light, the local electricity distributor, based on telemetry, without reading the meters in each home, Santos believes.

“The bill is high even when you’re not home, when you’re traveling,” he lamented.

The steady years-long rise in electricity has turned solar energy into a general desire, especially among the poor in the favelas, who account for nearly a quarter of the 6.6 million inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro proper, because the electric bill absorbs a large proportion of their income.

 

 

At least 15 public institutions in Santa Marta already have solar installations that lower their energy costs, thanks to Insolar, a “social business” company active in the neighborhood since 2015.

Four daycare centres, churches, the Residents Association, a music school and the local samba school now have solar power systems, with the support of Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell.

Now the idea is to extend the initiative to 30 businesses on the “morro” or hill where the Santa Marta favela is located. In addition, Insolar is seeking funding to install pilot systems in 14 other favelas in Rio de Janeiro, to expand solar energy, for which there is growing demand in these areas, said Henrique Drumond, the company’s founder.

“Our goal is to democratise solar energy,” he explained. “We are doing it together with the local residents, involving them in the whole process, training local labour,” he told IPS, which made several tours of Santa Marta and other favelas to talk with residents about the arrival of solar power in their lives and their economies.

For further information read Solar Energy Drives Social Development in Brazil’s Favelas

The post Solar Energy Begins to Light Up Favelas in Rio de Janeiro appeared first on Inter Press Service.

President Omar al-Bashir waves to supporters during a rally in Khartoum on January 9. Sudanese authorities have revoked the credentials of at least six journalists working for international outlets. (Reuters/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah)

By Staff Correspondent
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 22 2019 (CPJ)

Sudanese authorities yesterday revoked the credentials of at least six journalists working for international news outlets, including Qatar-based broadcaster Al-Jazeera, according to news reports. The outlets have been covering demonstrations against President Omar al-Bashir. Bashir is due to travel to Qatar today for his first international trip since the protests began in December, according to reports.

“Sudan’s move against the international media is another desperate attempt to muzzle the press during this period of unrest,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “It is particularly ironic that Al-Jazeera journalists are denied their right to report as Bashir travels to Qatar.”

Sudanese security officials yesterday revoked the credentials of Al-Jazeera correspondents Osama Ahmed and Ahmed Alrehaid and camera operator Badawi Bashir; and Al Arabiya correspondent Saad el-Din Hassan, the journalists’ outletsreported. The same day, authorities revoked the credentials of Turkish Anatolia Agency correspondent Bahram Abdel Moneim and photographer Mahmoud Hajjaj, according to the local press freedom group Sudanese Journalists Network. In a statement, Al-Jazeera denounced Sudan’s “arbitrary decision” and called on authorities to reinstate the accreditation.

The post As anti-Bashir protests continue, Sudan revokes credentials of foreign press appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Middlesbrough are in talks to sign out-of-contract former Chelsea midfielder John Mikel Obi, reports BBC Tees Sport.

Mourners said the six men died while saving colleagues during last week's terror attack in Nairobi.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY & KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 22 2019 (IPS)

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, and substantial opposition from community groups, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are still being promoted to deliver sustainable development.

Public-private hospital partnerships are supposed to ensure that the private sector will offer much needed efficiency in healthcare provision.

Anis Chowdhury

However, any government considering healthcare PPPs should be aware of the Australian experience, especially after what has happened with the Northern Beaches Hospital, a PPP between the New South Wales government and Healthscope.

The A$600m facility was officially opened with much fanfare on 19 November 2018. With a A$2.2 billion 20-year contract, it was billed as the flagship project for the NSW government to hand over to the private sector delivery of a wide range of public services from prisons to technical education to health.

Profits before patients
The chief executive officer resigned two days after the official opening amidst claims of critical shortages of staff, medicines and supplies since it opened to its first patients on 30 October. Anaesthetists at the hospital have threatened to stop performing elective surgery until critical problems are addressed, leading to a crisis atmosphere.

The government and hospital authority describe the staffing and supply shortages as ‘hiccups’ and ‘teething problems’. But these are not trivial, often involving life and death issues. In one particular case, a new mother’s life was put in danger after undergoing a caesarean section at the hospital. Her attending doctors and nurses had to frantically try to source blood and equipment to operate safely. Thankfully, that episode did not end in any tragedies.

The Sydney Morning Herald has reported on complaints that the hospital has been forced to cancel elective surgery perhaps due to lack of staff. The facility suffers from a lack of basic supplies including syringes, intravenous lines, medical swabs, saline bags, needles, wash cloths, rubbing alcohol and maternity pads. It also reported inadequate nursing staff and a large number of locum nurses.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The Australian doctors’ union has warned the head of NSW Health that junior medical officers were required to do ‘unsafe work hours’. For instance, one intern was assigned 60 patients while junior medical officers were expected to work up to six hours of overtime daily, usually unpaid. One doctor reported working 110 hours in a week.

Costing taxpayers more
This latest healthcare PPP is also costing taxpayers more than what the government announced before. For example, before the 2015 state election, the former health minister said that the hospital would cost only A$1 billion. However, the true cost to taxpayers was A$2.14 billion.

This is not the only instance of healthcare PPPs going wrong. In the early 1990s, the NSW government opened the privately-operated Port Macquarie Base Hospital. The authorities announced savings by ignoring additional administrative and legal costs; it ended up costing about A$6 million more than a public hospital of an equivalent size. The Auditor-General’s report concluded, “The government is, in effect, paying for the hospital twice and giving it away”.

Yet, the ‘teething problems’ had not gone away 13 years after it was privatised by the Conservative Government. Before its 20-year contract period ended, the Labour Government felt compelled to buy back the hospital for A$80 million.

Similarly, after years of losses, the South Australian government was forced to buy back a privately run hospital opened by Healthscope in 1995 at a cost of A$17.5 million to the taxpayer. The Victorian government bought back Latrobe Regional Hospital, opened in 1998 under a similar agreement, two years later, after suffering A$8.9 million worth of losses. Years later, the Victorian government announced plans to buy back Mildura Base Hospital, the last remaining privately run hospital in the state.

Private operators not more efficient
Despite these spectacular failures, governments do not seem to learn from past mistakes, instead continuing with more PPPs. Therefore, a dogmatic belief that the market will provide healthcare more efficiently must be behind the push for these partnerships.

The Australian Productivity Commission’s 2009 report found that, on average, the efficiency of public and private hospitals is similar nationwide. Public hospitals in NSW and Victoria were more efficient than their private counterparts by more than 3% and 4% respectively despite operating far more in rural areas (generally much more costly), and their high-cost responsibility to provide accident and emergency services.

More recently, the independent McKell Institute reported similar findings, and noted a disconcerting trend of private operators only picking the most profitable services to run, leaving the public sector with the more costly, less profitable and onerous work. This allows private operators to capture more profits while leaving the government, and taxpayers, with more risks and costs.

Health rights undermined
Health is a right, and society (and therefore government) has a responsibility to ensure that everyone has access to health services. But with PPPs, the state becomes health service purchaser, instead of provider. Under PPPs, private operators, previously earning patient fees and health insurance payments, can profitably earn public funds meant to finance patient services.

Profit-seeking is ‘distorting’ patient-health service provider relations. As noted by the New England Journal of Medicine, “Our main objection to investor-owned care is not that it wastes taxpayers’ money, nor even that it causes modest decrements in quality. The most serious problem with such care is that it embodies a new value system that severs the communal roots and Samaritan traditions of hospitals, makes doctors and nurses the instruments of investors, and views patients as commodities.’’

Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University & University of New South Wales (Australia), held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was Assistant Director-General for Economic and Social Development, Food and Agriculture Organization, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007.

The post Hospital PPPs Undermine Healthcare appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Former Senegal defender Omar Daf extends his deal as coach of French club Sochaux until June 2021.

Former Senegal and Chelsea striker Demba Ba returns to play in Turkey this time with league leaders Istanbul Basaksehir.

A young boy runs with his tyre past buildings damaged by airstrikes in Saada Old Town. Credit: Giles Clarke/OCHA

By Martin Scott
NORWICH, UK, Jan 22 2019 (IPS)

According to a recent poll of aid agencies by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the most under-reported crisis of 2018 was the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, commented that, ‘the brutality of the conflict is shocking, the national and international neglect outrageous… I have seldom witnessed such a gap between needs and assistance’.

Other ‘forgotten crises’, according to the agencies polled, include the Central African Republic, Lake Chad Basin, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Burundi, Nigeria and, for the first time, Venezuela.

Highlighting such ‘reporting gaps’ is important because international news coverage plays a key role in raising awareness of and drawing attention to humanitarian crises, in order to secure the funding needed to help.

The 2018 U.N. funding appeal for the Democratic Republic of the Congo was less than 50 percent funded. Such under-funding is linked, albeit indirectly, to a lack of public awareness. In the UK, for example, a recent survey, commissioned by Human Appeal, showed that two thirds of adults were not aware of the recent violence in the DRC.

In response, it is not enough to simply urge news organisations to do more. We need to understand the main causes of this acute lack of coverage of humanitarian affairs, in order to know what can be done about it.

Dr Martin Scott

This is the aim of an ongoing academic research project into Humanitarian Journalism and was the focus of a report I published late last year entitled The State of Humanitarian Journalism with Dr Kate Wright at the University of Edinburgh and Dr Mel Bunce from City, University of London.

 

Humanitarian journalism in crisis

The research makes clear that humanitarian journalism is itself in crisis.

Our survey of over 1500 individuals involved in the aid sector, revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the quantity and quality of mainstream news coverage of humanitarian affairs. 73% of respondents agreed that mainstream news media does not produce enough coverage of humanitarian issues. News coverage was also criticised for being selective, sporadic, simplistic and partial.

It is not enough to simply urge news organisations to do more. We need to understand the main causes of this acute lack of coverage of humanitarian affairs, in order to know what can be done about it.
We also examined coverage of over 20,000 news outlets to find out how many were regularly reporting on humanitarian affairs. Only 12 covered the four humanitarian events we analysed. These events included the ongoing crisis in South Sudan, the 2016 Aceh earthquake, the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit and the 2017 UN appeal for humanitarian funding.

The 12 news organisations which did cover all four of these events included Al Jazeera English, the Guardian Global Development site, IRIN News, the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Voice of America.

Our analysis of their coverage showed that they do a better job than most at reporting humanitarian crises. These particular news organisations generally offer sustained and detailed coverage, regularly producing features, analysis pieces and even some campaigning reports.

Furthermore, while journalists are often accused of telling very similar stories about disasters, we find that these particular news outlets actually varied significantly in how they covered such crises.

For instance, we found that Thomson Reuters focused on stories about dramatic and timely events, while the specialist humanitarian news outlet IRIN wrote thematic pieces and analysis, targeted at global audiences.

 

The challenges of funding humanitarian news

The main reason why few news organisations, and particularly commercial news outlets, regularly produce original coverage of humanitarian affairs is the very high costs involved.

It is very expensive to fund on-the-ground reporters and the kinds of time-consuming research and travel necessary to explain the complex causes of humanitarian crises.

In fact, we find that almost all international news outlets regularly covering humanitarian affairs rely on support from either states or private foundations. There are issues with both sources of funding.

Foundation funding alone rarely offers journalists long-term financial sustainability. Professor Rodney Benson, in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, at New York University, explains that, ‘most major foundations see themselves as providing… short-term start-up support with the expectation that non-profits will eventually achieve commercial sustainability’.

In addition, there just isn’t enough donor money to go around. Very few foundations are active in this area; often because of their objectives don’t align with those of journalists or because of the difficulty of measuring the impact of their investments.

This is why specialist non-profit news outlets reporting on humanitarian issues struggle to survive.

For example, despite featuring in our list as one of just 12 news outlets regularly covering humanitarian affairs, the news non-profit Humanosphere closed down in 2017 due to a loss of funding.

Other foundation-dependent news organisations in this area that have either closed or dramatically downsized in recent months include News Deeply and the International Reporting Project.

Support from Western governments can also subsidise the high costs of producing regular, original coverage of humanitarian affairs for radio stations like the BBC World Service and Voice of America (VoA).

For instance, we found that humanitarian issues were mentioned in nearly one in five (19%) items on the news bulletins of the BBC World Service.

However, there are important questions to be asked about the ways in which humanitarian news might be affected when governments support journalism as part of their foreign policy objectives – and to achieve ‘soft power’.

We found no evidence that government officials directly interfered in editorial output of either World Service or VoA. However, a key problem, at both organisations, was the way in which journalists’ ability to cover humanitarian issues in particular geographic regions waxed and waned in relation to governments’ strategic and funding priorities.

Such problems were even more acute at international news outlets, based outside the West and funded by state money. Journalists at Al Jazeera English, for example, faced considerable ethical dilemmas about how to cover events in areas where Qatar was involved militarily, or had diplomatic interests. This includes Yemen, Syria, Sudan and South Sudan.

 

Paying for humanitarian reporting

Given the inherent costs and challenges associated with funding humanitarian news, there are no easy answers to the question of how to increase coverage of under-reported crises.

However, there is also some cause for optimism. In the Aid Attitudes Tracker, a largescale survey of audiences in the UK, France, Germany and the US, more people claimed to follow news about “humanitarian disasters” (59%) either “closely” or “fairly closely” than any other type of international news (see Clarke et al 2018).

Perhaps audiences are more interested in humanitarian journalism than many journalists think. Some may even be willing to pay for it.

An audience survey for IRIN recently found that a majority (57%) would consider signing up to some form of paid subscription model.

Encouraging audiences to pay directly for journalism they trust and value may ultimately be the only sustainable solution to the crisis facing humanitarian news.

* https://people.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/martin-scott

 

The State of Humanitarian Journalism report is the latest publication from the ongoing Humanitarian Journalism Research Project by Dr Martin Scott, Dr Kate Wright and Dr Mel Bunce. This AHRC-supported research has involved interviews with nearly 200 journalists and media funders; as well as surveys and extensive newsroom observations. More information about this project can be found here.

The post Why Are so Many Humanitarian Crises Under-reported? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Martin Scott* is a Senior Lecturer in Media and International Development at the University of East Anglia, UK.

The post Why Are so Many Humanitarian Crises Under-reported? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A protester in the Slovak capital, Bratislava holds up a picture of murdered journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jan 22 2019 (IPS)

“I’ve never known a time when it was as bad as it is now,” says Beata Balogova, the Vice-Chair of the International Press Institute (IPI) and Editor in Chief of the Slovak Spectator Sme. “In terms of what’s going on with journalists, we’re in a very unique period,” she adds.

Balogova explains during a break from editing the paper at its headquarters in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, how growing animosity towards journalists in Slovakia and other parts of Europe, is being increasingly violently expressed.

“It’s more intense now, there are verbal attacks, threats and the internet discussions on stories are much more aggressive [than before],” she tells IPS.

She says she is just finishing filing legal action against an anonymous person after she received online threats, including calls for a massacre at her newspaper—specifically a repeat of the 2015 one at French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo where two brothers opened fire in the newsroom and killed 12.

It is just under a year since the murder of Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak, who had been investigating links between the Slovak government and the Italian mafia, and Balogova says journalists are having to take all threats more seriously.

“What’s changed over the course of the last year is that in the past a lot of journalists didn’t pay much attention to anonymous threats or aggressions, but as they are seeing now, this kind of hate is being expressed in physical attacks on journalists,” she says.

The murder of Kuciak and his fiancee last February made headlines around the world and led to the resignation of the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. It also raised questions about press freedom and the safety of journalists in the country and focused international attention on apparent serious shortfalls in press freedom in other countries in the region.

This month a new special investigative journalism centre has been set up in Slovakia in memory of Kuciak—the Jan Kuciak Investigative Centre—and is the first such centre in Slovakia.

But while its founders believe it can become an important investigative journalism hub facilitating cross-border investigations into global organised crime, it opens at a time when Slovakia continues to struggle with eroding press freedom, as well as growing and very serious concerns about not just declining press freedom in Eastern Europe, but a complete lack of it in some places, even in European Union (EU) member states.

Romania has taken over the EU presidency this month at the same time it has been criticised for serious shortcomings in press freedom. In Hungary, critics say Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz have virtually liquidated all opposition media, and the Polish ruling party is, according to critics, systematically doing the same.

There remain concerns about the Czech media being controlled by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and his business associates, as well as the President’s openly hostile attitude to reporters. There have also been massive protests in the last few weeks in Serbia against President Aleksander Vucic and his ruling Serbian Progressive Party, in part over a lack of press freedom.

Meanwhile, just last week a court in Montenegro sentenced investigative journalist Jovo Martinovic to 18 months in prison on charges of drug trafficking and criminal associations. He maintains his contacts with criminals were part of his investigative work and that the case against him was politically motivated and press freedom advocates said his sentence had been handed down as a warning to other journalists in the region.

“The ruling will have a chilling effect on other journalists in the region – they will think that if they infiltrate the mafia and work with them, they need to fear not just the mafia but the government of their own country too,” Pauline Ades-Mevel of media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told IPS.

Media watchdogs like RSF as well as international organisations such as the European Commission, have highlighted declining press freedom across the region in recent years.

Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Serbia have all fallen significantly in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom rankings in the last few years amid concerns over authoritarian governments’ use of legislation, taxes, takeovers, forced closures and, some believe, even security service surveillance, to try and silence critical news outlets.

Meanwhile, public denigration of individual journalists and media by politicians have helped fuel what some describe as a “hostile environment” for journalists and encouraged verbal and physical attacks on them.

“The rhetoric from certain politicians has certainly played its part in the [increased] number of attacks on journalists,” Slovak journalist and founder of the Jan Kuciak Investigative Centre, Arpad Soltesz, told IPS.

One of the latest cases of violence against a journalist was an attempt to break into the apartment of investigative reporter Milan Jovanovic on Dec. 30—just weeks after his home in Belgrade, Serbia, had been burnt down after someone threw a Molotov cocktail into it. His requests for police protection after the first attack had not been answered.

The response of Vucic—who dismissed the attack as ‘just a burglary’—and the court ruling in Montenegro is typical, said Ades-Mevel, of governments only paying lip-service to international bodies over media freedom commitments. Both countries are pursuing accession negotiations with the EU.

“These are examples of how politicians can pretend to the EU that there are improvements to the rule of law and press freedom, but that the reality is different,” she said.

But while the situation looks grim in many countries, their relations with Brussels could provide a way of effecting change and improving the environment for journalists and media.

“It is important that the governments in Serbia and Montenegro understand they are under scrutiny. Pressure needs to come from outside for governments to clear up from the inside,” said Ades-Mevel.

She added that if action were taken against existing EU members over dwindling press freedom, it would send a strong signal to those hoping to join the bloc.

Earlier this month, the European Parliament (MEPs), agreed to back proposed measures to cut funding for member states where the rule of law, including press freedom, was seen to be undermined. They will come into force if backed by EU member states.

But governments, such as those in Poland and Hungary, have brushed off concerns over media freedom in the past, pointing out examples of critical news outlets as evidence of healthy media plurality.

“Orban has often used the argument that ‘look, there is media plurality, there are over 300 media outlets that can be described as opposition’. But these are normally small and don’t have a national reach,” says Balogova.

“What [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban and his oligarch friends have actually done is ….. changed the public service media into an extended branch of the cabinet office. There is coordinated news production, there are weekly meetings where bosses of the pro-Orban media meet and set the news agenda. It is the worst nightmare version of what the communists tried, and failed, to do, and now Orban has done it to perfection,” she adds.

Jelena Kleut, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Novi Sad, in Serbia, told IPS: “We may be already past the point of no return here. So much has been done to weaken press freedom in Serbia, not just the attacks on journalists but the ruling party gaining control of the media, so I’m not sure if even EU pressure could really change anything.”

Other journalists believe that third-sector organisations hold the key to creating a less hostile environment for journalists to work in.

Pavla Holcova, a prominent Czech investigative journalist, told IPS: “Politicians have been involved in creating a hostile environment for journalists [but] we, as journalists, can’t do very much to stop them [verbally attacking journalists]. We need civil society to stand up and do that for us, to try and get politicians to change.”

However, few people are expecting the environment for journalists to change anytime soon in the region, and some are fearing the worst.

“It was just pure luck that Milan Jovanovic was not in his house at the time it was set on fire. I hope no journalist gets killed but with the frequency of attacks we are seeing now it is something that could happen,” said Kleut.

Related Articles

• Getting Away with Murder in Slovakia
• Media Watchdogs Fear a Chill in Slovakia

The post Never Been a Worse Time to be a Journalist appeared first on Inter Press Service.

South Africa's Leandra Smeda signs for Swedish club Vittsjo GIK after impressing at the 2018 Women's Africa Cup of Nations finals in Ghana.

Barcelona B and Senegal defender Moussa Wague apologises for sending off and says racist insults led to the red card.

Drone visual of the area in Upper East Region, Ghana prior to restoration taken in 2015. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), inaction on land degradation in Africa costs 286 billion dollars annually as 280 million tons of cereal crops are lost each year. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah /IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 22 2019 (IPS)

One month on since the Global Compact for Migration was approved, civil society has highlighted the need to turn words into action, supporting those who have been displaced or forced to migrate as a result of environmental degradation.

In December, over 160 countries adopted the landmark Global Compact for Migration (GCM) which recognised environmental degradation and climate change as drivers of migration. It is the first time a major migration policy has specifically addressed such issues.

While there have been some hiccups along the way, including the withdrawals by the United States and most recently Brazil, the next steps are even more uncertain.

“Now we have the recognition in the GCM, now we need to move from text to action,” Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) Senior Advisor on Disaster Displacement and Climate Change Nina Birkeland said to IPS.

“Because people are moving, we can’t pretend that it is not happening,” she added.

According to the Global Humanitarian Forum, approximately 135 million people may be displaced by 2045 as a result of land degradation and desertification.

A study by the University of Oxford estimates that up to 200 million may be displaced due to climate change by 2050.

But this is not simply a phenomenon that will happen in the future—it is already a reality for some.

As migrant caravans from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador continue to make their way towards the U.S., many have pointed to climate change and years of crop failure as the main drivers.

Lesser known is the role of deforestation and land degradation in prompting such movements.

Between 1990 and 2005, almost 20 percent of Guatemala’s rainforests were cut down for palm oil plantations and cattle ranches. This has since lead to soil degradation and eroded land in a country where one-third of the population is employed by the agricultural industry.

Across Africa, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of employment but land degradation is leaving families and young people without food or income security and thus forcing them to search for greener pastures.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), inaction on land degradation in Africa costs 286 billion dollars annually as 280 million tons of cereal crops are lost each year.

“If land is degrading and the productive capacity of the land is degrading and there are no income opportunities anymore, there is no reason for people, young people in particular, to stay in the village,” World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Sustainable Land Management Specialist Chris Reij told IPS.

“The general lesson is: fight land degradation, improve living conditions and more young people will stay rather than leave,” he added.

According to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), restoring just 12 percent of degraded agricultural land could boost smallholders’ incomes by 35-40 billion dollars per year.

Reij pointed to the case of Burkina Faso which saw promising results after villages invested in sustainable land management practices.

According to a study by Reij and his team, Burkina Faso’s Ranawa village saw a decline in land productivity, prompting almost a quarter of its population to leave between 1975 and 1985.

Once the village began improving soil and water conservation techniques, there was no recorded outmigration and some families even returned due to restored productivity. 

Comparing villages that implemented sustainable land management and those that did not, the study found that rural poverty decreased as much as 50 percent in the former while poverty increased in the latter.

‘‘In 1980 only two families had cattle, now all families have cattle. Almost no one had a roof of corrugated iron…just look around you and you’ll notice that almost every family has such roofs…the land where we stand used to be barren, but now it has become productive again,” one farmer from Ranawa told Reij’s team.

In 2016, UNCCD implemented a similar project known as the 3S initiative which aims to restore 10 million hectares of land in areas most impacted by land degradation in Africa. It also hopes to provide 2 million green jobs to the 11 million young Africans who enter the job market each year.

Though it is not the silver bullet and migration will of course still continue to some capacity, investing in land restoration and providing economic opportunities is certainly a part of the solution.

While many countries focus on border security as part of their migration policy, Birkeland urged governments to look at reduction and prevention of displacement.

“We need to look at where this is actually happening and why it is happening. Before you even start to talk about border control, you need to look at how you can try to reduce displacement,” she said.

This includes investments into projects in developing countries, especially with climate change or environmental degradation-induced displacement in mind, and increased protections for those who are forced or choose to leave. 

While it is an enormous challenge, Reij highlighted the need for donors and governments to focus action on improving livelihoods and economic well-being as well as supporting land restoration.

“If you look at the most extreme scenario, unless the economic perspectives of young people can be improved in the next decade, what choice do they have? They can migrate to cities and maybe continue subsequently to Europe, or they can join Boko Haram and similar groups,” he told IPS.

“I think donors and governments have an interest in supporting the scaling of existing restoration success so that millions of smallholders will be able to improve their lives and livelihoods, and that will help reduce migration….we know what to do, we know how to do it. We now need to do it,” Reij concluded.

Related Articles

• Eat Plants, Save the Planet
• Poverty-Stricken Communities in Ghana are Restoring Once-Barren Land
• Land Degradation: A Triple Threat in Africa

The post Bringing Greener Pastures Back Home appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Corporate lawyer Bola Tinubu says everyone has a responsibility to help fight child abuse.

Emmerson Mnangagwa returns home instead of attending the Davos economic summit in Switzerland.

The Italian ambassador is summoned after Deputy PM Luigi di Maio accuses France of exploiting Africa.

George Weah, at one time named the world's best footballer, is marking a year in power in Liberia.