Africa

By External Source
SEOUL, South Korea, Nov 3 2021 (IPS-Partners)

The Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) has announced the appointment of Ms. Helena McLeod, Cardno International Development Group’s Team Leader of UK Aid’s Cities, Infrastructure and Growth Program (Uganda) and former Director of KPMG International Development Advisory Services (IDAS) Africa, as the incoming Deputy Director-General and Head of Green Growth Planning & Implementation (GGP&I). Ms. McLeod will succeed Ms. Hyoeun Jenny Kim, who was named Ambassador and Deputy Minister for Climate Change in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea on July 31, 2021.

Ms. McLeod will lead the GGP&I division based in the organization’s Seoul headquarters and formally assume her duties, serving a three-year term beginning on January 10, 2022.

Dr. Frank Rijsberman, GGGI’s Director General commented “We are delighted to welcome Ms. Helena McLeod to our vibrant and cohesive organization with a strong commitment to help countries make a transition to a model of economic growth that is environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive. In this role, Ms. McLeod will be responsible for managing our growing network of country offices, currently in 30 countries, where about three quarters of our 400 staff members work, embedded in the offices of our government members and partners.”

“As GGGI is going through a period of rapid growth to scale up its program and deliver more impact to green the recovery from the pandemic while accelerating climate action, this is a critical role for the organization. I am confident that Ms. McLeod’s many years living and working in developing countries, particularly in Africa, in both government and the private sector, have given her abundant experience and contacts that we can’t wait to put to work to support the green transition the world so urgently needs.”

“I am excited to join GGGI at this important point in the organization’s journey. With my experience spanning across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, I am looking forward to leveraging my network of contacts on the ground to enhance and strengthen relationships with government stakeholders and private sector actors to help contribute to making a transformational impact in countries where GGGI has operations – especially at a time when country presence is growing rapidly in size and scale,” said Ms. McLeod.

Ms. McLeod, a British national living in South Africa, brings a wealth of 25 years of experience leading large and dynamic teams and managing innovative climate and development programs – including grant and blended finance funds – worth over GBP 1 billion, which helped to benefit millions of people.

As Head of CIG Uganda, she is responsible for managing a team of 30 multidisciplinary and multi-national experts. She is also leading diverse workstreams, including targeting mobilization of GBP1billion of finance for climate smart flagship infrastructure projects, assisting the Kampala Capital City Authority with the development and implementation of its Five-Year Strategic Plan, assisting COVID Economic Recovery Planning and action, innovative green urban planning and working on solid waste management reform.

Prior to joining Cardno, Ms. McLeod was Director for the Resilience, Renewable Energy and Climate Change Sector at the KPMG IDAS Africa Practice. In this position, she significantly scaled the portfolio to a managed grant portfolio of USD 400 million, across Africa and Asia. With specialty in management of philanthropic, government and private sector grant funds focused on climate outcomes, among her key responsibilities included designing innovative grant and blended finance funds, developing project pipeline for equity and debt finance, rapid mobilization of global programs, funds, and teams, winning and executing new business and setting strategic direction of the practice.

Her technical thematic experience covers off-grid and on-grid clean energy, urban climate resilience, infrastructure project preparation and financing, solid waste management, climate smart agriculture, sustainable transport, energy efficiency, sustainable timber trade and forestry preservation.

She also held numerous senior positions at KPMG IDAS Africa, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, DFID Africa Regional, and DFID Southern Africa. Early in her career, she worked as an economist at DFID South Africa, DFID’s London Office, and the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji.

She holds an MSc degree in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (with distinction) from the University College London and a BSc degree in Economics from the London School of Economics.

About the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI)
GGGI was established as an international intergovernmental organization in 2012 at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Its vision is “a low-carbon, resilient world of strong, inclusive, and sustainable growth” and its mission “to support Members in the transformation of their economies into a green growth economic model”. GGGI does this through technical assistance to: reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement; create green jobs; increase access to sustainable services (such as clean affordable energy, sustainable waste management); improve air quality; sustain natural capital for adequate supply of ecosystem services; and enhance adaptation to climate change.

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Agriculture accounts for over 25 percent of Africa’s GDP while employing over 70 percent of people that live in rural communities. Credit: Miriam Gahtigah/IPS

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, Nov 3 2021 (IPS)

Local, national and world leaders, and committed climate change activists are in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) to share the progress they’ve made since the COP21 in Paris six years ago and to discuss what comes next. One of the issues that must be on the table at COP26 is the worrying impact of climate change on agriculture in Africa.

Agriculture accounts for over 25 percent of Africa’s GDP while employing over 70 percent of people that live in rural communities. When agriculture is impacted, women, who work in the agricultural sector suffer the consequences. The entire agriculture value chain is threatened by climate change. According to a recent World Bank Report, unless urgent actions are taken, climate change could force millions of Africans to migrate to new areas.

At the production level, climate change is impacting agriculture via drought and flooding events. In 2020, flooding in East Africa impacted over six million people. In 2021, flooding has affected 669,000 people in West and Central Africa, over 700,000 people in Sudan and South Sudan and over 100,000 people in Nigeria.

At the foundation of climate-resilient agriculture is the need for smallholder farmers to have access to dependable and year round sources of water to support agriculture. At the moment African agriculture is dependent on rain-fed agriculture and because of climate change rains are no longer dependable

It is also having an impact through invasive and transboundary plant-eating insect pests such as the fall armyworm and the desert locust. Invasive insect pests cost the African continent U.S. $1 billion every year. Impacted the most are vulnerable groups that include African small holder farmers, women and girls, children, disabled and elderly people.

Without a climate-resilient agricultural sector, even the most ambitious climate initiatives will bear minimal returns. It is imperative for countries participating in the COP26 meeting to finance agriculture initiatives.

Looking at many developed countries, it is evident that it is possible to build climate resilient agriculture. This is particularly possible when several interlinked short-term and long-term strategies are put in place. At the foundation of climate-resilient agriculture is the need for smallholder farmers to have access to dependable and year round sources of water to support agriculture. At the moment African agriculture is dependent on rain-fed agriculture and because of climate change rains are no longer dependable.

Complementing access to water for agriculture are other important tools including access to most recent and improved agricultural technologies and resources. From improved and climate-smart seeds to drought, flooding, insects and plant disease-tolerant crops varieties to recent knowledge of agricultural practices and access to markets and financial help.

Important is the need for African countries to strengthen their early warning systems. These can only be achieved through strengthening African countries abilities to tap on big data and use it as a tool to stay ahead of all the climate linked disasters. Accompanying early warning systems is the need to lay out comprehensive climate adaptation initiatives.

At the center of all actions and strategies is the need to put the people on the ground and African countries at the center of climate action. As a founder to a startup, Oyeska Greens that is working with farmers at the Kenyan Coast I have seen firsthand the value of putting farmers at the forefront.  Putting them at the forefront ensures that the strategies and initiatives that are laid out are relevant and meeting the current challenges that small holder farmers and other vulnerable groups are facing as it relates to climate change. Without including the very people whom we are serving, we risk unsustainable and irrelevant solutions.

Climate change is the most urgent crisis of our times. While talk and meetings such as COP26 are important, in the end it is the initiatives and actual projects being implemented in African countries, particularly in the agricultural sector that will help move the needle and address the escalating climate change crisis.

All countries must work together and take action in the fight against climate change to avert many crises that are projected to happen if we fail to act.  Lives of vulnerable citizens including women, elderly and people with disabilities are at stake. Now is the time to ACT

 

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

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Celia Umenza Velasco at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security. Credit: United Nations

By Celia Umenza Velasco
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 3 2021 (IPS)

On 21 October, I had the honor of addressing the UN Security Council at the annual open debate on Women, Peace and Security. I spoke as a member of Cxhab Wala Kiwe, which means “Great People’s Territory” in the Nasa Yuwe language, also known as ACIN—Association of Indigenous Councils of the North of Cauca—in Colombia.

I am an Indigenous activist dedicated to my people, our territory, the environment and the cause of peace.

I spoke on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, and as a representative of Indigenous women and women in all their diversity—campesinas, Afro-descendant women, LGBTQI+ persons, refugee and migrant women, women with disabilities and women from countries around the world who suffer from war, poverty and discrimination.

As I said in my remarks, I continue to affirm my solidarity with the women and LGBTQI+ people of Afghanistan who continue to risk their lives fighting for their rights and equal place in Afghan society. We stand with you.

Colombia remains one of the world’s most dangerous countries for defenders of human rights and of land and territorial rights. Attacks on human rights defenders, especially women, LGBTQI+, campesino, Afro-descendant and Indigenous leaders have continued, including in response to the recent protests in Colombia against extreme inequality, violence and scant implementation of the Peace Accord.

On average, at least one Indigenous defender is killed every week. In my territory of Cauca, three Indigenous women leaders whom I worked with were killed in 2020. Their brutal murders illustrate how women often pay a terrible price for their leadership.

For an Indigenous person, land means everything to us. We are nourished by it, and it is a part of our identity and our history. Indigenous communities oppose logging, mining, agribusiness and other large-scale extractive and infrastructure projects—many of which are actively supported by the Government of Colombia—because they threaten the environment and deplete our natural resources.

Indigenous defenders in Colombia are viewed as a threat because we challenge powerful economic interests. My people are killed for protecting our waterways and forests, our flowers and fauna, when their courage and dedication should be held up as a model in the non-violent struggle for territorial rights.

Celia Umenza Velasco

Violence against our communities also demonstrates the devastating impact of militarized responses to social crises. Indigenous communities in Colombia have been calling for demilitarization for decades. Much of the war was waged on our land, and much of the violence continues in our territories today.

Although we have peace in name, lack of implementation of the Peace Accord has refueled conflict. At one point in the war, an Indigenous person was killed every 72 hours, most often caught in the crossfire between armed actors.

Today, the state continues to use militarized force through its security apparatus, particularly in rural areas. The only state presence we see in our territories is the military and the police, who often appear to protect the economic interests of powerful sectors, rather than the rights of local populations.

This represents a failure to comply with the provisions of the Peace Accord. Furthermore, during the recent national protests, police used excessive force against peaceful demonstrators across the country, particularly in Cali where a greater percentage of the population is Afro-descendant and where our Indigenous guard was attacked.

State forces have committed sexual and gender-based violence. Peaceful protestors have been subject to torture, illegal detention, disappearances and killings, echoing the violence that has marked over five decades of war. The gravity of this situation led the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to call for the overall demilitarization of the police in Colombia.

The Peace Accord, with 130 provisions on gender equality and women’s rights, was achieved due to the determined struggle of Colombian feminist movements. On paper, the Peace Accord provides the foundation for a democratic country.

However, five years since its adoption, implementation is at a standstill, especially of its gender provisions and the Ethnic Chapter. The Special Forum of Women and the High Level Forum for Ethnic Peoples are both underfunded and lack political support, and members of the Special Forum of Women have been threatened and attacked.

Implementation is most delayed in provisions for Comprehensive Rural Reform, which would give women access to land and enable them to chart a path to inclusive and holistic development for their communities.

This has allowed the expansion of extractive activities that exploit natural resources, violate territorial rights, exacerbate conflict, and increase violence against human rights defenders, especially those who defend their land.

Colombia’s Peace Accord may be unprecedented in its incorporation of international standards of gender equality—but what good are agreements and promises if they are not kept?

Threats faced by women peacebuilders and human rights defenders in one community are a threat to women everywhere. Despite ten resolutions and repeated affirmations of the value of civil society, the issue of women human rights defenders remains a critical gap in the Security Council’s implementation of the women, peace and security agenda.

Colombia is no different—although Security Council members have regularly condemned the targeting of human rights defenders and social leaders, they have not done enough to turn words into action.

Ending attacks against women human rights defenders, not only in Colombia, but in all conflicts on its agenda, and ensuring the full, equal and meaningful participation and leadership of women in all their diversity, is essential for sustainable peace.

I urged the Security Council to call on the Colombian Government to:

• Fully implement and resource the Peace Accord, in particular the Ethnic Chapter and gender provisions. This includes ensuring regular consultations with, as well as resources and technical assistance for, the High-Level Forum for Ethnic Peoples and the Special Forum of Women, as well as for campesino, Afro-descendant, Indigenous and women’s organizations to monitor the Peace Accord’s implementation.

• Adhere to free, prior and informed consent processes with campesino, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, including regularly consulting with their authorities and community organizations, with regards to economic development in their territories, and ensure that development processes comply with international human rights principles and law, and with the Peace Accord.

• Address the crisis of violence against human rights defenders, including by ensuring: accountability of perpetrators when such attacks occur, and full resourcing for the development of collective and territorial self-protection measures for Indigenous, campesino and Afro-descendant communities, as well as support for their permanent presence in fora where protection policies are discussed, especially the National Commission for Security Guarantees and the Intersectoral Commission for Guarantees for Women Leaders and Human Rights Defenders.

• Immediately demilitarize the police force by moving the National Police out of the Ministry of Defense, dismantle the Mobile Antiriot Squad of the National Police (ESMAD) and redirect funding to support social investment.

• Ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women leaders in the implementation of the Peace Accord and in negotiations with other armed actors in Colombia.

Peace is more than the absence of war. To Indigenous women, it means an end to discrimination, respect for human rights, justice, economic equality, and transformative change with human life at its center.

As the primary international body responsible for peace and security, I urged the Security Council not to allow this year’s open debate to be yet another occasion where they listen to women civil society, but fail to act on our concerns.

The plight of Afghan women illustrates all too clearly the cost of doing so. Women around the world show daily that they have courage and the conviction to fight for peace. We call on the Security Council, and leaders at all levels, to fight for us all.

 

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A wind farm in Port Victoria on the main island of Mahe in the Seychelles is contributing to the renewable energy transition of the small island state located east of the African continent. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia , Nov 3 2021 (IPS)

Breaking the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and accelerating the global uptake of renewable energy will play a decisive role in diminishing the threat of global warming to the survival of life on earth, according to experts. But turning the vision into reality will demand unwavering political will and, critically, massive investment, which can no longer be shouldered solely by aid and development partners.

It is a challenge that the Commonwealth Secretariat, the inter-governmental organisation representing 54 Commonwealth nations, has taken on. Now it is launching an initiative at the United Nations COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow to propel the ability of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to attract major investors with sound compelling business cases.

The summit will be a key setting to leverage “the toolkit into different partner working platforms, such as the Climate Investment Platform, increase collaboration among partners and drive joint action with SIDS on energy transition ahead of other key milestones in 2022 and beyond, including the Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) Forum in Rwanda and Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in 2022 and COP27 to be held in Africa,” Alache Fisho, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Legal Adviser on Natural Resources in London told IPS.

The SIDS Toolkit, a digital tool for governments, developed by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the international development organisation, SEforALL, is currently being trialled in the Seychelles, an archipelago nation of 99,000 people, located in the Somali Sea east of the African continent.

Converting the country’s energy system to renewables is imperative for future stability and prosperity, as climate change threatens development gains. “The livelihood of the islanders is being threatened here with sea-level rise. What we are seeing is greater coastal erosion, increased temperature rises and coral bleaching. We are also getting an increasing frequency of cyclones in the region,” Tony Imaduwa, CEO of the Seychelles Energy Commission in the capital, Victoria, told IPS.

The Commonwealth Secretary-General, Rt Hon Patricia Scotland QC, made an official visit to the Seychelles in June 2018. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

In Caribbean and Pacific Island nations, as well, air temperatures are becoming hotter, weather patterns more unpredictable, while sea-level rise is eroding finite land, destroying crops and contaminating freshwater resources.

Last year, an overwhelming 80 percent of the global energy supply was still generated by fossil fuels and only 12 percent by renewables. This puts the world on track toward a devastating temperature increase of 2.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, claims the International Energy Agency (IEA).

And the bill for importing oil, which comprises 95 percent of primary energy in the Seychelles, is an enormous fiscal burden on the government and its development goals. “It is a drain on our foreign exchange reserves, our earnings, and there is the whole volatile nature of the price. When the price goes up, you get the costs going up, the cost of food goes up, services go up, the electricity cost goes up, transportation goes up. There is the risk associated with the supply, too,” Imaduwa told IPS.

The Seychelles has a human development ranking of 67 out of 189 countries, the second-highest in the African region, and all citizens have access to electricity. But many other SIDS bear much higher levels of energy poverty. In the Pacific Islands, about 70 percent of households lack access to power.

It is, therefore, no surprise that clean energy, which will be more affordable to islanders, is a national priority. The majority of SIDS are committed to achieving 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.

Renewables, ideal for standalone systems, are a good fit for island nations where populations are often scattered across numerous islands separated by vast areas of the ocean. And weather conditions are a great advantage, especially for wind and solar energy. Despite clean energy only comprising 5 percent of the energy mix in the Seychelles, the momentum has begun. The first wind farm was established near the nation’s capital, Victoria, in 2013, and increasingly homes and businesses are installing rooftop solar panels.

But there are challenges to securing the large capital investment needed for complete conversion. In many cases, the lack of strong institutions, enabling regulatory frameworks and small energy markets limit the appeal of the energy sector in SIDS to the private sector and international financiers.

The Seychelles is developing its clean energy sector and blue economy with the support of the Commonwealth and other partners. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

“The Seychelles is no longer considered a Least Developed Country; it is an emerging economy now. So, there is a slight concern from the government that it will not be able to access concessionary loans anymore from multilateral development banks and also that there will be fewer countries that are providing overseas development assistance to the country,” Dr Kai Kim Chiang, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s National Climate Finance Adviser in the Seychelles, told IPS. “The Seychelles is a small country, so they do have challenges in attracting investors because it is a really small market here, and so then the potential for the return of investment is potentially quite small.”

Yet, about US$4 trillion will have to be injected into clean energy growth by 2030, if the global temperature rise is to be restricted to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, reports the IEA. And 70 percent of this will need to be spent in developing and emerging countries.

To this end, the SIDS Toolkit empowers governments to draft investment-grade business cases. First, key data about the economic and energy status of the Seychelles, for example, about employment, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), utility electricity cost and carbon emissions, is entered into the digital application. The toolkit then analyses the data to provide a detailed cost-benefit analysis of development and transition scenarios and identifies the state’s key investment strengths. It also pinpoints where reforms are needed to boost investor confidence, such as deficiencies in legal and institutional capacity.

“It will assist in terms of formulating strategies to unlocking investment in the energy sector in the Seychelles, and that is something that is missing for us. We are focussing on a lot of plans and policies and implementation, but sometimes we struggle on how to bring these together and create a platform that allows us to say, OK, we have a plan, yes, we want to invest in this area, but how do we do it,” Imaduwa said.

The SIDS Toolkit is designed with a broad range of potential investors in mind, including multilateral and private sector financial institutions. However, Fisho emphasised that private sector involvement is “very important”, especially as many renewable energy technologies entail large capital expenditure. “Moreover, the renewable energy technologies are fast evolving. The private sector can bring the required finance and expertise in the deployment of modern technologies,” she said.

Despite the detrimental economic impact of the pandemic worldwide over the past two years, Fisho makes a strong case for the priority of spending on the energy transition. “The pandemic has highlighted the need to transition towards clean energy in SIDS to increase energy security and economic resilience. Investment in renewable energy is consistent with supporting recover better and more resilient economic development, thereby creating more sustainable green jobs and decent income opportunities for current and future generations,” she declared.

 

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Francisco Montes shows the cement tank where he collects rainwater in El Impenetrable. Scarce rainfall in the last two years has created serious trouble for the inhabitants of this four-million-hectare ecoregion, who are scattered around the Chaco region of northern Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
GENERAL GÜEMES, Argentina , Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Next to the brick or adobe houses of El Impenetrable, a wild area of forest and grasslands in northern Argentina, loom huge plastic barrels where rainwater collected from the corrugated iron roofs of the houses is stored. However, the barrels are empty, because it has hardly rained for two years, local residents complain.

“Things have been very bad recently. It rained one day in September, but very little,” said Francisco Montes, who has lived for 35 years in a house in a large open area in the middle of a monotonous landscape of trees and bushes, several kilometres from his nearest neighbours.

On the dirt road leading to his house, it is rare to run into a person or a vehicle, but it is easy to come across cows, goats, horses and even pigs, since domestic animals are raised loose in this area, to roam freely in their arduous search for green pastures.

Located in the Argentine portion of the Chaco – the great sparsely forested plain covering more than one million square kilometres, shared with Paraguay and Bolivia – El Impenetrable was so named not only because of the thick brush and the scarcity of roads.

The ecosystem covering some four million hectares also owes its name precisely to the lack of water, which turns most of the vegetation a yellowish hue and is made more dramatic by the combination with temperatures that can be suffocating.

From droughts to floods

Rainfall in the area usually comes in just three months, during the southern hemisphere summer. And rains have been scarce for as long as anyone can remember in this part of the Chaco.

But for two years now the situation has been worse than usual, because the drought has been especially bad, after severe flooding in 2018 and 2019 that wrought havoc among local residents and their livestock, when it rained three times the historical average.

In the absence of piped water, Montes, who lives on his remote property with his wife, is one of the best equipped in the area to deal with the complex scenario, because in his field he not only has a large cement tank with a capacity to store thousands of litres of rainwater, which lately has been of little use. He also has an 11-metre deep well that allows them to extract groundwater.

But this is not enough either. “The water is very brackish. You would have to go at least 20 metres down to get good water,” he told IPS.

Montes, however, at the age of 73, has the resignation of someone who has lived a lifetime knowing that water is a scarce commodity. “Back then we used to take water directly from the river or from a well, when it was available,” he recalled.

He was referring to one of the branches of the Bermejo, one of the biggest rivers in the La Plata basin, which originates in Bolivia and passes about 500 metres from his field. The Bermejito – or “little Bermejo”, as the branch is known locally – is one of the few rivers in El Impenetrable, and the vegetation on its banks is a deep green colour that is not usual in this region.

Goats cross a dirt road in El Impenetrable, an ecosystem of four million hectares, where livestock is raised loose, to roam the area in search of pasture. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

A few kilometres from Montes’ home, near the entrance to the El Impenetrable National Park -a 128,000-hectare protected area created in 2014 – there is a 160 square metre rainwater collector sheet metal roof facility with two tanks that can store up to 40,000 litres.

It was built in 2019 to supply local residents, as part of the “Native Forests and Community” programme.

This Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development programme was supported by a 58.7-million-dollar loan from the World Bank and 2.5 million dollars from the national government and seeks to generate community roots in areas where there are no sources of employment.

Native Forests and Community benefits vulnerable rural communities, both indigenous and non-indigenous, through infrastructure works and training for the sustainable management of natural resources.

One of the programme’s priorities is to promote the use of renewable energies, and it has installed solar panels for electricity generation and solar stoves in areas where the most commonly used fuel is firewood.

According to official figures, the initiative has so far benefited 1,200 families from 60 communities in different provinces of the country, most of them in El Chaco and the rest of northern Argentina.

A community solar panel and rainwater harvesting roof installation near the El Impenetrable National Park in northern Argentina was built in 2019 by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, with support from the World Bank. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Esteban Argañaraz lives only 100 metres from the rainwater collector. Sometimes he goes to fetch water from the community tanks, although he cannot get enough there either, so he resorts to buying drinking water in the nearest town, Miraflores, which is 60 kilometres from his home down a dusty dirt road.

“This year I brought an 8,000-litre water tank. It cost 700 pesos (about seven dollars), but the complicated part was transporting it, which cost 4,000 pesos (40 dollars),” Argañaraz explained to IPS, while showing the well that was dug in front of his house to accumulate water for the animals and irrigation, which is completely dry.

Argañaraz, 60, and his wife have a garden at home to grow vegetables and fruits. But they have had to practically abandon it since 2020, due to the lack of water. Skinny cows and goats are another reflection of the severe drought.

The inhabitants of El Impenetrable rarely manage to sell any animals and almost everyone survives on social assistance. This ecosystem – environmentally degraded by the extractive economy – is part of Argentina’s Northeast region, which has the highest poverty rates in the country, with 45.4 percent of the population living in poverty.

But the situation is complicated in urban areas as well. In fact, the provincial capital Resistencia, with a population of 300,000, has the highest poverty rate in Argentina, at 51.9 percent.

Unpredictability is the rule

“The main characteristic of rainfall in (Argentina’s Chaco province) is its high variability: there are cycles of dry, normal and wet years. The other important aspect is that most of it is concentrated in one part of the year: in the case of El Impenetrable, the rainy season lasts only three months,” water resources engineer Hugo Rohrmann, former president of the Chaco Provincial Water Administration, told IPS.

Jorge Luna, a family farmer raising cows, goats and pigs in El Impenetrable in northern Argentina, stands next to plastic barrels where he collects rainwater and a solar panel that provides electricity. Rainwater harvesting is a very limited solution for families in the El Impenetrable ecoregion due to the lack of rain. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The expert pointed to another important fact: rainfall in El Impenetrable is usually between 600 and 800 millimetres per year, but evaporation, due to heat that can reach 50 degrees C in summer, is much higher – up to 1,100 millimetres.

“That is why neither wetlands nor aquifers with the capacity to supply a population are formed and there is no other choice but to collect rainwater, which is also scarce. The lack of water is becoming more and more evident and makes life more and more difficult for the local population,” Rohrmann added from Resistencia.

Constanza Mozzoni, a biologist from Buenos Aires who has been living in El Impenetrable for two years doing social work, has a categorical answer when asked what life is like for the local population, both indigenous and non-indigenous people: “Everything revolves around how to get water,” she told IPS.

Mozzoni works for the Rewilding Argentina Foundation, an environmental conservation organisation that works in and around the El Impenetrable National Park, and lives in a prefabricated house that also has a rainwater harvesting roof.

The foundation, however, provides all its staff with bottled water that is brought from the town of Miraflores, along the only safe road in El Impenetrable.

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By SWAN
PARIS, Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Claude McKay is having something of a rebirth in France, thanks to independent publishers and to translators such as Jean-Baptiste Naudy.

Naudy is the French translator of McKay’s novel Amiable with Big Teeth (Les Brebis noires de Dieu), one of two translations that have hit bookstores in 2021, generating renewed interest in the work of the Jamaican-born writer (1890-1948). McKay was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a “cultural nomad” who spent time in Europe during the 1920s and 30s, and the author of the famous poem “If We Must Die”.

The first of the two recent translations – Romance in Marseille (Héliotropismes) – was published under its English title last spring, while Naudy’s Les Brebis Noires de Dieu came out at the end of summer during the so called rentrée, the return to routine after the holidays.

A third McKay novel, Home to Harlem (Retour à Harlem, Nada Éditions), has meanwhile been newly translated and is scheduled for publication in early 2022.

This feast of McKay’s work has resulted in profiles of the writer in French newspapers such as Libération, with Naudy’s expert translation receiving particular attention because of the intriguing story behind Amiable with Big Teeth.

The celebrated “forgotten” work – a “colourful, dramatic novel” that “centres on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia,” as Penguin Books describes it – was discovered only in 2009 by then graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier while doing research. His discovery came 40 years after McKay had completed the manuscript.

Cloutier and his advisor Brent Hayes Edwards went on to confirm the authenticity of the work, and it was published by Penguin in 2017. Fully aware of this history, Naudy said it was “mind-blowing” to translate the novel, and he drew upon his own background for the rendering into French.

Born in Paris, Naudy studied Francophone literature at the Sorbonne University and design at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands. He describes himself as a publisher, translator and “text experimentalist”, and he coordinates “Déborder”, a book series published by independent publishing house Nouvelles Éditions Place. Within this series, he has translated African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson (2020) and now the McKay novel.

As a writer, Naudy, under the name of Société Réaliste, has himself published two books, in addition to essays and experimental texts in journals and reviews; and as an artist he has exhibited work in both solo and group shows internationally. One can find examples of his public art pieces around Paris.

 

Jean-Baptiste Naudy in Paris (photo by AM)

 

The following edited interview with Naudy, conducted by email and in person, is part of SWAN’s series about translators of Caribbean literature, done in collaboration with the Caribbean Translation Project.

SWAN: How did the translating of Aimable with Big Teeth come about?

Jean-Baptiste Naudy: In 2019, Sarah Frioux-Salgas and I were invited by Cyrille Zola-Place, director of Nouvelles Éditions Place in Paris, to curate a book series dealing with unclassifiable texts, overreaching genres, intertwining topics. Our common interest for the internationalisation of political and poetical scopes in the 20th century, via the publication of books largely ignored by the classical Western frame of reference, gave birth to this book series, entitled Déborder (To overflow).

The first book to be included was a reprint of Negro Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard in 1934, a massive collection of poetry, fiction and essays about the Black Atlantic, for which she collaborated with paramount artists and scholars of those years, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Padmore and dozens of others.

Since then, we have published five more books in this frame, like the first French translation of Eslanda Robeson’s African Journey, or Sismographie des luttes (Seismography of Struggles), a kind of world history of anticolonial journals, amazingly edited by art historian and writer Zahia Rahmani.

At the beginning of 2020, Sarah told me the story of a newfound book by Claude McKay, Amiable with Big Teeth, edited by Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Christophe Cloutier for Penguin Books in 2017.

Searching the archives of a rather obscure New York publisher, Cloutier had found the complete and ready-to-be-published manuscript of a completely unknown novel by McKay. The very fact that such a story was possible – to find out of the blue a full book by a major writer of the 20th century – was unfathomable to me. Nouvelles Éditions Place immediately agreed to the idea of publishing the book in French.

SWAN: Including your translation, there will be three novels by McKay published in French this year and next. Can you explain this surge of international interest in his work?

JBN: The renewed interest in Claude McKay’s oeuvre is global for sure, but also at times pretty local. The critical deconstruction of the Western ideological frame of thought has called for the exposure of another cultural grounding, a counter-narrative of modernity, other stories and histories encompassing the plurality and complexity of dominated voices, visions, sensibilities, positions on their path to liberation.

What was interesting for me was to try to understand or feel what the colonial condition was doing to the language itself. How writing or expressing oneself in a foreign language, an imperial language imposed upon a great variety of cultures, was transforming the language in return

To that extent, McKay is an immense writer, whose very life was bound to this intertwining. Like most of the key figures of the Black Atlantic, he has been largely ignored or under-appreciated by the 20th century literary canon. More than ever, he is a lighthouse for those interested in the interwoven problematics of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

But he is as well a singular figure of displacement, a critically productive internationalist, being at first a Jamaican in New York, then a Caribbean from Harlem in Europe, then a Black writer from France in Morocco, and finally back to the United States, a Black Atlantic wanderer.

Which is also the point of his renewed presence in the French contemporary cultural landscape. The very fact that one of the most preeminent actors of the Harlem Renaissance was, first, a Jamaican, and second, writing from France about the Americas and the global Black diaspora is irresistibly intriguing.

Another important factor is the crucial influence that McKay’s writings had on a number of Francophone literary figures of the 1930s, including the founders of the Négritude movement, the Nardal sisters, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, René Ménil, and many others.

In a nutshell, I would argue that McKay captivates nowadays for all those reasons at the same time. He epitomizes the Black international radical current that rose in the 1920s and 1930s, his critical scope is extremely contemporary, and he is representative of a certain blend of political and cultural cosmopolitanism that happened to exist in the French imperial metropole during the interwar years.

It is interesting to notice that the three books being published now in France deal with different periods of his life: Home to Harlem, his 1928 bestseller (translated Retour à Harlem in the new French translation to be published by Nada Éditions) is a luxurious portrait of Harlem in the 1920s, written while he was in France. Romance in Marseille, released last April by Héliotropismes, another previously unpublished novel from the early 1930s, revolves around the central themes of his most famous novel also set in Marseilles, Banjo. And thus, Amiable with Big Teeth, dating from 1941, being his last fiction and only novel ever written in the United States.

SWAN: In addition to your native French, you speak English and Spanish. Where and how did you begin learning other languages?

JBN: Where I grew up, English and Spanish were mandatory at school. So, I grasped some elements there, quite poorly. Then I had to travel. So, I learned most of my English with Ukrainian artists in Lisbon and bits of Spanish with Brazilian anarchists in Athens. How romantic…

SWAN: How did your interest in translation start?

JBN: My first encounter with the need to translate something happened I guess when I went to London for the first time, in 1997. Following a totally random move – because I liked his name – I bought a washed-out copy of Kamau Brathwaite’s Middle Passages. I had never read anything like that. For sure it sounded like street music to me, half a drunkard rant, half an esoteric psalmody, but the polyphony at work in this single text, the sound and visual poetics of patwa mesmerized me.

So, for the last 25 years, I have been trying to translate exactly that, the very sensation I had in front of this palimpsest of languages. A rant that would be a psalmody, at times unintelligible, at times neat as a scalpel slice. How language can be haunted by the spectre of the past while echoing potentially emancipated futures. What Rimbaud called “the long, immense, rational derangement of the senses”, inscribed on a page where words are sounds are signs are ciphers are colours are noises are tastes are notes and nevertheless, never more than words.

SWAN: Can you tell us more about other works that you’ve translated and how you selected these?

JBN: Last year, I translated African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson, and it was a delight. I have an intense admiration for Eslanda Robeson, an amazing transnational feminist networker and anticolonial advocate.

This book was a great success in the USA when it was published in 1945, the first popular book about Africa written by an African American writer. It is a travel diary, at the same time complex and honest, but I particularly liked how Robeson used this genre to create commonality between Africans and Americans.

For the anecdote, Eslanda Robeson and Claude McKay really disliked each other, their writing styles are almost opposite, as well as their social backgrounds and cultural framings; however, I think they were aiming at the same liberation and I love them both!

SWAN: How important is translation for today’s world, especially for publishing underrepresented communities? In the Caribbean, as in other regions, it sometimes feels as if countries are divided by language. How can people in the literary and education spheres help to bridge these linguistic “borders”?

JBN: When I was a student, I had the opportunity to study what we call in my country “Francophone literature”, so literature written by former and present subjects of the French colonial project. Or raised in the postcolonial remains of the French empire.

What was interesting for me was to try to understand or feel what the colonial condition was doing to the language itself. How writing or expressing oneself in a foreign language, an imperial language imposed upon a great variety of cultures, was transforming the language in return.

At its core, Francophone literature has a poetical abundance and a political tumult that always seemed to me in synchronization with the modern condition. Whatever be the scale and the observation point. What people from my neighbourhood in Paris, coming from all corners of the world, were doing via the vernacular popular French slang we were talking every day, the “Francophone” writers were doing the same to literature itself.

Upgrading it to a world-scale. As any other imperial language, French does not belong to French people, fortunately, and that is the main source of its current literary potency as well as the only sound reason to continue to use it.

The political side effects of this linguistic colonial and then postcolonial condition astonished me as well: how this shared imperial language allowed Caribbean peoples, Arabs, Africans, Indochinese, Indians, Guyanese, to relate and elaborate a common ground.

This tremendous poetic force and its radical cosmopolitan perspective bound me to translation, especially when I experimentally realized that the situation was exactly the same with all the other imperial languages, English, Spanish, etc. Suzanne Césaire was maybe one of the first poets to see the Caribbean not so much as separated islands (divided by bodies of water, empires, languages, political status) but as an archipelago, an extremely complex panorama whose unity is undersea and underseen. I consider that my task as a literary translator working on the Atlantic world is to help languages undersee each other. I aim to be a pidginizer.

SWAN: What are your next projects?

JBN: I am working on several translation projects. First of all, an amazingly powerful collection of short stories by South African wonder writer Stacy Hardy. Then, a beautiful and crucial book by Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation, dealing with the key role played by Black women in the decolonization of the French empire.

Finally, I will work on the first French translation of The Practice of Diaspora, an essential book by Brent Hayes Edwards, focusing on Paris as a node of the Black Atlantic culture in the interwar years. Its subtitle says it all: Literature, translation and the rise of Black internationalism. This masterwork constructs an analytical frame to relate together René Maran, Alain Locke, Paulette Nardal, Claude McKay, Lamine Senghor, George Padmore, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, C.L.R. James, Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, and so many more. As you can easily imagine, it is a mind-blowing book, and I am extremely proud to work on it. – AM /SWAN

 

Addis Ababa residents are told to register weapons and protect areas as rebels reportedly advance.

Five Eritrean footballers from the women's Under-20 national team have gone missing during the a regional championship in Uganda.

Credit: Laura Berman, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, 2020

By Ruth Richardson
TORONTO, Canada, Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Unless food systems transformation is put at the center of climate action, commitments governments have already made, and could make at COP26, will be jeopardized.

Today’s industrialized food system — which includes the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food and food-related items — makes us ill, doesn’t meet the needs of the global population, and has adverse effects on climate change.

Almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food systems. The industrialized practices — from chemical pesticide use to mono-culture crops — at the heart of the dominant global food system have also destroyed 66% of biodiversity, 61% of commercial fish stocks, and 33% of soils.

Then there’s food wastage which equates to 1.3 billion tonnes a per year and produces enough GHG emissions that, should it be a country, it would be the third-largest source of GHG emissions.

We know that waste and loss occur throughout the food supply-chain and mostly involve the waste of edible food by consumers in medium- and high-income countries and loss during harvest, storage, and transport in lower-income countries.

Both food waste and the resulting GHG emissions raise major equity and ethical considerations.

Of course, those detrimental climate impacts then come back to roost in a variety of ways, affecting weather patterns and the very land or seas that are heavily relied upon for crops, fish, and other food.

Ruth Richardson

The resulting lack of ability to grow or access food then becomes a major driver in malnutrition (in all its forms) within communities, with the impacts felt worst by the most vulnerable in our societies — smallholder farmers, the poor, and women.

The 2021 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World estimates that around a tenth of the global population – up to 811 million people – were undernourished last year. Do we really need any other signals that the industrialized food system is simply no longer fit for purpose?

The globalized food system must be overhauled so that food production can be delivered in a way that works with, rather than destroys, our natural resources and pushes planetary boundaries.

It is precisely action on food that is critical to restoring planetary health, radically reducing carbon emissions, protecting nature and biodiversity, and also delivering on all Sustainable Development Goals, from zero hunger to good health and wellbeing for all.

Despite a diversity of evidence making this need for transformation abundantly clear — from scientific reports and peer-reviewed literature to lived experience, oral histories, and ways of knowing — the action we need is still not where it should be on the political agenda: at the top.

The risk to climate commitments

There is hardly any mention of food systems in the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) plans — the non-binding national plans that highlight countries’ actions to tackle climate change — that we’ve assessed to date.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform global food systems. Out of eight assessments of countries’ NDCs we have done so far, none fully account for emissions associated with food imports, particularly those related to deforestation.

Research shows that, in the average European diet, a sixth of the carbon footprint comes from deforestation emissions. Meat and dairy production already use 30% of the Earth’s land surface, driving unsustainable land-use as land is cleared to produce more and more livestock and the crops that feed them.

Only Germany provides a clear commitment to move away from harmful subsidies and to promote sustainable food consumption, and, just Colombia and Kenya have put forward ambitious measures around agroecology and regenerative agriculture.

These concepts promote sustainable farming approaches that compliment nature’s systems rather than diminish them and respect human rights.

Action to be taken

Unless others follow suit, all climate efforts will be undermined and any commitments negotiated in Glasgow that lack a systemic and global approach to food systems transformation will simply be inadequate given the vast mitigation and adaptation potential that the sector holds.

Governments worldwide must look at food systems through the lens of climate action and find new and restorative ways of feeding communities, without pushing the planet to the limits. Fortunately, approaching climate adaptation and mitigation in the context of food systems broadens the range of opportunities to achieve climate goals and facilitates the consideration of systems level effects and interactions.

A food systems perspective also enables engagement of the full range of stakeholders that should be involved in food systems transformation such as those from other sectors as well as local and Indigenous groups that have knowledge of the issues.

Such a perspective is critical to addressing climate change and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, which are all linked by food as the golden thread.

Tried and tested methods of agroecology and regenerative agriculture already exist for others to roll out and replicate. For example, in India, chemical-free farming has been used by the 600,000 farmers involved in the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming programme to tackle soil degradation — which includes erosion, desertification, and other changes in soil that reduce its capacity to provide ecosystem services — and produce more variety of crops.

Research shows that farming without the addition of synthetic fertilizer or pesticides is leading to incredible reductions in pollution and emissions, and better wages and earnings for farmers.

Meanwhile, while in Africa, in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia, COMACO — the social enterprise promoting agroforestry — is retraining poachers to be farmers, tackling deforestation, reporting significant impacts in carbon offset, and putting an end to wildlife killing.

Alongside these ‘beacons of hope’ governments could also promote nutritious, sustainable, whole-food diets adapted to local ecosystems and socio-cultural contexts, acting on the interconnections between food and climate.

There’s a growing body of research that shows that dietary change can help tackle climate change. For example, increased GHG emissions have been associated with diets higher in animal products.

Yet, historically, this has received less consideration in climate policy than, say, the energy and transport sectors. Policymakers have it in their power to catalyze initiatives that enable and create positive food environments that provide equitable access and dietary guidance.

There are steps governments can immediately take, ready-made policies they can adopt, partnerships they can forge. We have the evidence, we have the science, we have the urgency.

What we need now is to see the political will and climate finance moving alongside bravery and connected action from our leaders so that we can all live better, as well as sustainably, on this one Earth of ours.

Ruth Richardson is Executive Director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food

 

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Dr Ijaz Ali has spent the last 11 years persuading the authorities to use genetically engineered mosquitoes to fight dengue fever. The health department, however, is concerned about unforeseen circumstances that could arise from this method.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
Karachi , Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Tajammal felt a sense of “impending doom” as she fought high fever, nausea, bouts of vomiting and extreme fatigue after being diagnosed with dengue two weeks back.

Living in Lahore’s DHA area, which has reported the most dengue cases “because of the damp green environment”, she may have caught it at home, or when she went on a tree plantation drive organized by her office, she told IPS over the phone from the eastern city in the Punjab province.

In Punjab, the number has crossed 11,000 and new cases continue to rise. With two and three patients occupying a hospital bed, according to news reports, many are forced to lay on stretchers in corridors.

Tajammal was lucky. Her condition did not reach that critical level. Her fever subsided in three days though nausea and vomiting continued to hound her for a week.

Two weeks later, she feels almost new and is gaining back her strength.

Pakistan has seen a rise in the number of dengue fever cases, genetically engineered mosquito has been mooted as a solution.

But if there is one lesson she has learnt, it is never to underestimate the power of the diminutive flying fly. “I’d avoid going outdoors till it gets cold enough for the mosquito to die,” she said.

It was back in 1994 when dengue was first reported in Pakistan, but it was not until 2005 when the first epidemic occurred in Karachi. Since 2010, Pakistan has been experiencing an epidemic-like situation in three provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Punjab and Sindh.

While Lahore continues to battle the dengue virus, things are not looking too good in the port city of Karachi either.

“We are seeing loads of dengue cases. It seems to have replaced Covid-19,” admitted Dr Naseem Salahuddin, heading the infectious diseases department at Karachi’s The Indus Hospital. Those with mild or moderate dengue are sent home with instructions to show up for a follow-up,” she added.

The spread of dengue from Karachi to Lahore and from Lahore to different parts of the Punjab and then to relatively temperate zones of KP in recent years indicate that Aedes mosquitoes have gone through “adaptation to relatively temperate zones”, explained Dr Erum Khan, professor of microbiology at the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Aga Khan University, in Karachi. She said climate change, along with a runway population, urbanization and increase in travel and transportation, is stoking it further.

“The severity of the disease has increased, but the government’s input is inconsistent and without any long term disease control strategy,” lamented Khan.

While mortality is high among patients who come in late in the course of the infection, Salahuddin said it was important to keep a close eye on the patient while keeping a “balance” between giving just enough fluid but “not overloading” them with it.

At the same time, while hospitals in Karachi can manage treatment, she feared in future, “cases are going to get more and more severe and bigger and bigger numbers and a time may come when hospitals may become overburdened”.

That is why healthcare professionals like her cannot emphasize enough for the city administration to clean up the city of garbage and pools of water from rain or overflowing gutters and broken pipelines.

Otherwise, warned Salahuddin, there is going to be another health disaster for the public. “Cleaning of the city is our only chance,” she pointed out.

“Given that majority of the population do not know about whether they were ever infected before, the situation in Pakistan can worsen in future outbreaks,” warned Dr Ijaz Ali, a virologist at Islamabad’s Comsats University.

Bad governance, the inability to understand the mosquito’s behaviour or habitat, and refusal to allow research or use established scientific methods in other countries were some of the barriers to controlling the Aedes mosquito population in Pakistan, said Ali.

“Sporadic recurrence of dengue each year and emergence of chikungunya and zika point towards the failure of existing strategies, if any, to control the vector population,” he pointed out.

The government, for its part, continues to spray insecticide across the cities and has, over the years, got better at strengthening treatment and diagnostics.

Pupa of the Aedes mosquito developing into an adult. Pakistan has seen a rise in dengue fever caused by the mosquito and the control of the disease continues to be problematic.

But said Ali, the use of insecticides has led to insecticide resistance. He particularly finds the open-air fumigation drives mere “cosmetic” and a “least effective” measure. As for treatment and diagnostics, he said it still did not address tackling the “source” of the dengue infection, the mosquito itself.

He believes a combination of chemical (insecticide spraying), mechanical (mosquito traps placed near and inside hubs of transportation such as airports and bus stations) and biological (with biological a major component) strategies would be best in combating vector-borne diseases in the long run.

For the last 11 years, he has been trying to convince both the provincial and central governments of making “billions of mosquitoes in labs”, which when released in the wild, could reduce the spread of dengue virus, but with little luck.

The released genetically engineered male (only) mosquitoes, when they mate with Aedes females (also the carrier of the virus), would produce offspring that would die while still at larvae or pupae stage, explained Ali, the only Pakistani with a doctorate in genetically modified mosquitoes. In addition, genetic modifications, he said, can also shorten the life span, cause sterility and even death of the transformed Aedes species.

However, those who can decide have dawdled for too long with the result that the virus has gone out of control, he remarked. He has been trying to draw attention but with little success. “They [government officials] tell me if word gets out the government was fighting the virus by letting loose even more mosquitoes, they will have to confront the wrath of the public!”

“Any biological intervention altering environmental ecosystem has to be very carefully weighed for its pros and cons,” said Dr Rana Safdar, director-general, health, Pakistan. “Unforeseen consequences of releasing GM mosquitoes cannot be ruled out outright,” he added warily.

“Field trials of genetically modified mosquitoes have successfully been carried out in various countries including Malaysia, French Polynesia, Brazil, Australia, Vietnam and Singapore,” said Ali adding the methods have not had any “significant impact on human and animal health or the ecosystem”.

But Safdar remains unconvinced. “Not only can genetic engineering alter the mosquito’s targeted characteristic but can go beyond.” This tampering with nature could potentially enhance the risk of other mosquito-borne diseases or become a source of another nuisance.

“Moreover, interaction of new species with pre-existing vectors in an area of intervention may lead to some new environmental challenges,” that the country may not be ready to battle with.

“I can understand the frustration of the researcher,” said Khan, but since Pakistan is a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, it has to keep in mind the “biosafety concerns” on the environment and human health. “There are no clear guidelines so far. Therefore, I believe the government is reluctant,” she said.

While Khan conceded, “replacing GM mosquitoes to reduce disease was a tangible solution”, she remained wary.

“For now, I would recommend more experiments under controlled environment to be carried out to assess the impact on biodiversity before releasing GM mosquitoes in the wild, and because the study is a complex one, it should have a team comprising environmentalists, social scientists and biotechnologist working together as one health concept to get a complete picture,” she said.

But if absolutely nothing is done and the mosquito continues to live on, Ali predicted Pakistan might experience epidemics of yellow fever in the years to come.

 

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