Africa

Over 1,000 migrants are thought to have died this year trying to cross the central Mediterranean.

World number one Iga Swiatek caps a dominant season by beating Tunisia's Ons Jabeur at the US Open to win her second major title of 2022.

A selection of the best photos from across Africa and beyond this week.

Queen Elizabeth visited more than 20 African countries during her reign, as the British Empire ended and independence swept the continent.

From reprimanding late-comers to uncovering corruption, the new county governors announce their arrival.

Iga Swiatek bids for a second Grand Slam trophy of the year, while Ons Jabeur seeks her first major in the US Open final on Saturday.

The leaders of countries across the continent express their sadness at the Queen's death.

Katy Rodríguez (R) and her son (in his father’s arms) when they were reunited after leaving the Migrant Assistance Centre in San Salvador following their deportation. Like thousands of other families, mother and son were separated for four months after entering the United States without the proper documents. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

For a while in 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s “family separation” policy looked like it might become the Stalingrad of his war on immigrants. It was clearly a bridge too far politically, given the global outcry it provoked. Even parts of the Republican party couldn’t stomach it. So Trump retreated strategically on family separation, and intentionally left the program so disorganized that reuniting parents and children became a still-incomplete ordeal.

At the same time, though, he launched other forms of bureaucratic blitzkrieg to punish and separate families seeking asylum and other legal statuses and move towards an immigrantenrein United States. His final offensive, Title 42, slammed the door on nearly all forms of immigration at the southwest border under the widely rejected pretense that it would prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Over four years later, the casualties of family separation are still being found and healed. According to the July 31 report of the White House’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, there are still 941 children, about 17 percent of the total separated, who are not yet reunited or in the reunification process. But media attention has faded over time.

Over four years later, the casualties of family separation are still being found and healed. According to the July 31 report of the White House’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, there are still 941 children, about 17 percent of the total separated, who are not yet reunited or in the reunification process. But media attention has faded over time

Now Caitlin Dickerson and The Atlantic magazine have done the wounded and the world a service by digging deep and doggedly to flesh out this ugly history, shining light into the back alleys of the Trumpist immigration project and onto the faces of its victims.

“’We need to take away children’ – The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy” is an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the systematic jailing of immigrant parents and their separation from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. It comes at an auspicious moment to remind us how much the guts of Trump’s immigration initiatives were infected with lawlessness and gratuitous sadism.

She provides powerful evidence that traumatizing kids and preventing their parents from finding them were precision-targeted, intentional thuggishness, rather than careless bureaucracy. And her research demonstrates that if Trump’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, takes power again, it will double-down on its attacks on immigrants’ lives, which it sees as a winning political strategy.

Trump’s nose-thumbing at the Espionage Act and the various laws trashed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, along with his reflexive obstruction of justice in many investigations, finally appear to be the target of serious attention from the Department of Justice and others.

However, his assaults on many thousands of immigrant families, while they struck a dissonant chord for even some of his supporters, were soon drowned out politically by other abuses and scandals. Now Dickerson’s full orchestration amplifies the original themes, counterpointing many of the current motifs of 45’s fugue of criminality. And critically, she gives eloquent voice to many of the families torn apart by the policies, along with the psychologists, lawyers, community groups, and a few bureaucrats with a conscience working to reunite and heal them.

This story of family separation broke in the spring of 2018 after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his “Zero Tolerance” policy, which included jailing asylum-seeking parents and taking away over 5,500 of their children, according to Physicians for Human Rights. But as Dickerson documents, pilot efforts to separate families began early in the Trump administration in 2017, although officials claimed that no such policy existed. (Note: I got a glimpse into a tiny corner of that landscape of pain volunteering to accompany a few parents and kids who had been separated.)

Even some Congressional Republicans and groups such as conservative evangelicals panned the policy as excessively cruel. Many organizations for human and immigrant rights insisted that what Sessions was trying to criminalize was in fact protected by U.S. and international law: migrants have the right to ask for asylum at or in between official ports of entry, or anywhere else in the U.S.

In fact, they have to be on U.S. territory to make their request. Zero Tolerance, which supposedly necessitated separating children because it threw their parents in jail for asking for asylum between ports of entry, was an attempt to sweep away the basic premises of asylum by executive fiat.

The last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg decried family separation as a “crime against humanity”. Physicians for Human Rights issued a report condemning the policy as a form of torture and forced disappearance. And the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called it “government-sanctioned child abuse”.

A report by the Department of Homeland Security’s own Office of the Inspector General criticized the agencies involved for inadequate recordkeeping and data management that made it difficult to reconnect parents and children.

Dickerson makes clear that the shoddy family tracking system was an intentional effort to render reunification more difficult. John Bash, a U.S. attorney in El Paso, Texas, testified in court that he was horrified by the policy’s effects on children. All that was needed, he reportedly said, was a simple spreadsheet to record the information linking parents and children. But none was created.

From recently disclosed internal emails, Dickerson discovered that plans to reunite parents and children were “faulty to the point of negligence” because “inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening.” Bash testified that he and other government attorneys made efforts to close cases against migrant parents within a few days in order to allow their children to be reunited with them rapidly, before they could disappear into the separate branch of the Department of Health and Human Services that took care of unaccompanied children. He said he was later outraged to learn that these efforts were quashed by Trump operatives within Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and the Border Patrol, who were determined to punish families by keeping them separately detained and incommunicado, long-term or permanently, against all legal and ethical standards.

A 2018 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ms. L v. ICE, elicited a ruling that the family separation policy was unconstitutional. The court ordered the government to reunite all separated families, and the Trump administration went through the motions of complying. But as ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt later wrote: “The reason so many families have not been located is because the Trump administration withheld their names and then failed to disclose information that could have helped us find them.” Even after the judgement, Trump’s operatives continued to expand the jailing of immigrants and tearing apart of their families through other means.

Through his four years, Trump relentlessly cranked up the volume on the false narrative that an enormous “invasion” of dark-skinned “illegal aliens” had to be deterred by increasingly brutal, sometimes borderline psychotic, measures. The President reportedly proposed that the border wall should be electrified and that a water-filled trench should be dug the length of it and stocked with alligators or poisonous snakes. He also asked his advisors about the feasibility of shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down when they tried to cross the border. His immigration Rasputin, Stephen Miller, later allegedly floated the idea of reinstating family separation with a vicious twist.

Under “Binary Choice”, immigrant parents with children would be forced to choose: allow their children to be taken away from them, or waive humanitarian protections for juveniles so that the whole family could be imprisoned together indefinitely. A revelatory book by New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, Border Wars, details many similarly unhinged policy debates in the Trump White House.

When the Biden administration took power with promises to humanize the immigration system, it appointed an interagency task force to finally reunite all of the families. But progress has been slow on the difficult cases remaining, largely because of the Trump administration’s poor record-keeping and obstructionism.

The task force reported that as of July 14, almost a year and a half after its establishment, there are still 1,217 children not known to be reunited with their families {although some of these may have found each other but not informed the government). Of these, 276 are “in process for reunification”. But of the rest, 764 have “contact information available but not reunified” and 177 have “no confirmed contact information available and reunification status unknown”. So a total of 941 are not yet in the reunification process. However, the total still not reunited has been reduced by 510 since September 2021.

Biden appointed Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, to run the task force. “The idea of punishing parents who are trying to save their children’s lives, and punishing children for being brought to safety by their parents by separating them, is fundamentally cruel and un-American,” she told Dickerson in 2018, prior to being appointed. “It really to me is just a horrific ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for a mom.”

Legal efforts to grant permanent legal status to affected families and to make illegal the separation of parents and children for purposes of deterrence are both on hold, ACLU attorney Gelernt told Dickerson. The Biden administration pulled out of negotiations with separated families on payment of restitution for their suffering, according to reporting by Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. Allegedly, the administration withdrew partly out of fear of political damage from mendacious attacks by Republicans claiming that Biden was making immigrants millionaires by negotiating damages. In fact, the government had not yet made an offer, but was trying to settle because it believed that the court would hold it liable.

One positive Biden policy change, allowing unaccompanied children to request asylum when their families still could not, may have led to unintended consequences. As a result, more children were reportedly being sent to the border alone to get them out of perilous Mexican border areas controlled by organized crime. And in reality, many long-running immigration policies, from unjust deportations to long detentions, have also had the effect of tearing apart families.

Overall, Biden’s immigration initiatives have slowly eliminated some of Trump’s worst abuses, but have delayed removing others and in some cases extended them. A few of the most capable immigration advisors, such as Andrea Flores, former director of border management for the National Security Council, have left the Biden administration out of frustration with backsliding and delays on reform, according to a piece by Blitzer. Other high-level administration officials confirmed that “resistance to easing Trump-era restrictions” on immigration came from high up in the White House: “Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser”. All three are “political people”, but none is an “immigration expert”, Blitzer’s sources told him.

Despite the threats to democracy exposed by the January 6 hearings and other investigations, some in the Administration seem to be underestimating the magnitude of the menace posed by Trump and the MAGA movement to a just immigration system.

The heart of Trumpism is a strain of white sado-nationalism. It is an explicitly racist and xenophobic ideology that proposes ethnic cleansing to ultimately end most immigration, legal or not, and kick out most immigrants, more than four out of five of whom are from Latin America, Asia and Africa.

It is motivated in part by the great replacement theory: in a nutshell, Make America White Again. And it is punctuated by brutality against vulnerable immigrant families and efforts to trample the civil and human rights of all people of color. As historian Mae Ngai of Columbia University told me in an interview, “I think there’s too many brown people in this country for their tastes — that’s what it all comes down to.” And Adam Serwer of The Atlantic nailed its essence: “The cruelty is the point.”

Trump has created “something akin to a fascist social and political movement,” as philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale University put it. And it has become the North American vanguard of a nascent fascist international, led by Trump and Vladimir Putin, and featuring luminaries such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Marine Le Pen of France, Matteo Salvini of Italy, and other mainly European leaders.

Fascism needs scapegoats to blame for the mythical fall from greatness, and immigrants are a favorite whipping boy for many of them. Other conservative but not fascist movements have also borrowed or innovated anti-immigrant ideas: for example, Boris Johnson and the British Conservatives’ failed plan to ship rejected asylum seekers to Rwanda, in Central Africa, is a crackpot variant on Trump’s now-defunct Remain in Mexico policy.

If Trump or another MAGA standard-bearer is elected in 2024, they will likely try to resurrect some form of family separation, along with other aggressive policies floated at the end of his term, such as further limits on asylum, an end to birthright citizenship, and more use of active-duty troops at the border. His closest immigration advisors, including Stephen Miller, Stephen K. Bannon and Kris Kobach, continue to publicly advocate for these sorts of scorched-earth measures, and will undoubtedly lobby hard for them in Congress if the GOP wins either house in November.

Regardless of the occupants of the White House or Congress, Trump successfully filled the ranks of Homeland Security and related departments with leadership and rank-and-file staff who shared his ideology. Dickerson fleshes out the rogues gallery with some lesser-known cadre and renders a detailed account of how they took control of the far-flung immigration bureaucracy.

The Washington Post recently editorialized on family separation: “There has been no accounting for the officials who conceived, pushed and carried it out. Nor has the U.S. government offered the traumatized families permanent legal residence in the United States, even as a means of reuniting deported parents with their children. … Congress must ensure future presidents never try this again.”

The Biden administration needs to stop looking over its right shoulder on immigration: negotiation with the MAGAfied GOP on this is futile, but it has managed to alienate many among the immigrant communities and allies essential to the Democratic coalition. It’s way past time to return to the kinds of immigration policies that Biden initially promised, based on global realities on the ground, human rights, and family values.

Ritta Achevih​ was barely able to feed her family, but now the Kenyan farmer has changed her fortunes by adopting Sustainable Land Management (SLM) approaches that improve soil health and productivity by protecting the soil from degradation. Credit. Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
Kigali, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

For more than five years, Ritta Achevih was harvesting one bag of maize or less from her small plot each season. She could hardly provide enough healthy food for her big family.

The culprit for her growing poor maize yields was the exhausted soil on her one-hectare plot she continuously tilled on the edge of biodiversity-rich Kakamega Forest in northwestern Kenya. Farmers have cut down trees to make way for more land near the forest leading to massive land degradation.

But Achevih (65) from Vihiga Country has transformed her farming and harvested eight bags of maize last season. This is thanks to adopting the Sustainable Land Management (SLM) approaches that improve soil health and productivity by protecting the soil from degradation using manure. In addition, SLM promotes intercropping of maize and legumes and growing indigenous leafy vegetables.

“Changing how I managed my land has changed my yields. My livelihood has improved because I have enough and different types of food to eat,” Achevih told IPS on the sidelines of the Alliance for a Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

“I grow maize, beans, and indigenous vegetables which have helped my family to have enough healthy food. The indigenous vegetables have increased my family income because of the high yields,” said Achevih adding that she now enjoys varied meals daily.

“I have more food to choose from now than before. I can have bananas or millet porridge in the morning and ugali (maize dish) with indigenous vegetables for lunch and in the evening enjoy potatoes,” she quipped.

“My farming method is better, but farmers need training and support to produce more food, have more markets and earn better income.”

Achevih contributes to food security for her family and community. She could do better with access to improved technology, know-how, and inputs to boost food and nutrition security on the back of growing threats to agriculture in Africa.

Another farmer, Wellington Salano from Kakamega County, says the government needs to fulfill its commitments to agriculture development in Africa by investing more in the sector to help beat poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.

“African leaders should give a bigger portion of their budgets to agriculture because it is the source of our food and livelihoods, Salano told IPS. “Farming is life and cannot ensure healthy food without the investment to increase the production of farmers at a time we have to deal with climate change and shortage of food.”

Salano (65) grows maize, beans, and indigenous vegetables in Kakamega country in northwest Kenya. He practices sustainable land management and sustainable forest management under a project started by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) together with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO). The project seeks to enhance the sustainable management of the Kakamega Forest, which has been affected by deforestation due to illegal encroachment to harvest firewood, timber, and herbs and the conversion to pasture, leading to extreme biodiversity loss.

How to feed and nourish Africa?

How Africa can successfully navigate the crises currently affecting the global food supply chain and ensure that African Governments can mobilize investment and accelerate commitments to deliver a food-secure continent dominated discussions at the annual AGRF Summit.

Viable solutions are needed to boost sustainable crop production on the continent, where one in five people faced hunger in 2020. Worse, Africa remains a net food importer, spending nearly $50 billion on food imports.

“We should stop exporting these jobs when we can produce this food,” AGRA President Agnes Kalibata warned. “The current African food systems are failing to deliver healthy diets to all and are one of the greatest challenges for climate and environmental sustainability.”

Currently, about 57.9 percent of the people in Africa are under-nourished, according to the recent report, State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, which also projects that hunger could increase, making Africa the region with the largest number of undernourished people.

Leadership for food and nutrition

In 2021, African leaders agreed on a common position ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit to ensure that Africa was more resilient to unexpected global shocks. However, the continent is off track to achieving agreed targets under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, the Malabo Declaration, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Leaders noted that the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the global supply chain, and the energy crisis had strained Africa’s food systems.

“We need food systems transformation now,” said Hailemariam Desalegn, the former Prime Minister of Ethiopia and Chair of AGRA and the AGRF Partners Group, remarking that African leaders have committed to supporting food systems transformation, and collective action was needed to accelerate progress and real change.

“No country is healthy unless food and livelihoods are healthy,” noted Dessalegn calling on governments to prioritize and integrate policies that would promote healthy and nutritious diets, decent income for the farmers, and address climate and other challenges to food security.

“Africa’s prosperity depends on translating commitments we have made into implementation,” said Desalegn, underscoring that Africa’s plight requires collective will, voice, and action to transform the agriculture sector radically.

“There is a need to boldly galvanize collective will amongst leaders to emphatically support agricultural transformation.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Sep 9 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Schools, students and teachers continue to be targeted and attacked in countries around the world. Over the past two years, we have seen a substantial increase in the number of attacks on education. Innocent children, adolescents and teachers are being killed, raped and abducted. Schools and universities are bombed, burned down and used for military purposes. Girls and boys are too scared to walk to school and face intimidation and other attacks. These are severe breaches of international humanitarian law and ultimately – and absolutely – inhumane.

Yasmine Sherif

On the International Day to Protect Education from Attack, we must unite to protect schools, schoolchildren and teachers from these grave violations. We must unite to uphold international law and the principals of the Safe Schools Declaration. We must unite to safeguard education by creating comprehensive physical protection measures and implement legal frameworks that address impunity and prevent more attacks from happening, as outlined in UN Security Council Resolution 2601.

With the war in Ukraine, unrelenting forced displacement of millions, and armed conflict and violence in countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and beyond – exacerbated by the compounding pressures from the climate crisis and COVID-19 – these attacks on education and on human rights are derailing efforts to deliver on our promise of education for all and the other Sustainable Development Goals.

There were more than 5,000 reported attacks on education and incidents of military use of schools and universities, according the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack’s “Education Under Attack 2022” report.

As we unite to #ProtectEducationFromAttack and help realize the 222 Million Dreams of 222 million crisis-affected girls and boys who urgently need education support – ECW and our strategic partners are calling on government donors, the private sector, foundations and high-net-worth individuals to step up and make substantial contributions at Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Financing Conference, taking place in Geneva in February 2023.

Hosted by Switzerland and Education Cannot Wait – and co-convened by Germany, Niger, Norway and South Sudan – the Financing Conference provides us a chance to deliver on our promise of education for all, to strengthen the protection of schools, students and teachers, and to create safe and more protected learning environments.

222 million crisis-affected girls and boys deserve nothing less than their inherent human right to learn in safety and with dignity.

Yasmine Sherif is Director of Education Cannot Wait.

By Lily Meyersohn
NEW YORK, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

This week––nearly ten months after the emergence of the Omicron variant––the United States is rolling out Covid-19 booster vaccines that specifically target newer, now-dominant strains of the virus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated that 209 million Americans over the age of 12, or 74 percent of that population, will be eligible for the shots.

Unfortunately, the last year and a half are a stark reminder that it takes much more than even the miracle of “lightning speed” science to ensure widespread vaccination in this country.

In late July, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the share of people living in counties designated by the CDC’s guidelines as medium or high risk had grown significantly due to the spread of the BA.5 variant.

At that time, 87 percent of the entire population lived in a medium or high risk area. KFF estimated that the number of people living in those counties who were not up to date on their Covid-19 vaccinations had also jumped––to 198 million. This jump represented a 65 percent increase since the start of June alone.

Despite that data, many Americans have nonetheless accepted a faulty narrative that assumes that high-risk Americans are already safely vaccinated and boosted. Older Americans, in particular, have widely been considered “all set.”

But Benjy Renton, a researcher on Covid-19 vaccine delivery, notes that although older people were prioritized during the initial rollout, achieving nearly 91 percent coverage, by this summer there were already more than 15 million Americans over the age of 65 who had not received their first booster.

This spring, a nationwide survey by the COVID States Project found that a higher number of older Americans are unvaccinated and un-boosted compared to the widely reported CDC data used by most public health officials––calling the CDC data “clearly significantly flawed.”

Matthew Baum, a professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and an author on the study’s preprint, said that it has been difficult for the federal government to figure out exactly how many shots have been administered to each individual. “States are uneven in reporting data,” said Baum. Poor vaccination record linkage in the US has exacerbated the problem.

On Sept. 1, new research presented at the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting regarding booster doses showed that more than 30 percent of people over the age of 50 have received no booster. Many people in that cohort have not been boosted simply because they believe they are protected from severe outcomes from the virus since they were “fully vaccinated” back in the first round.

Vaccine uptake for the other Covid-19 boosters has been relatively low. That means millions of Americans currently have waning—no, waned—immunity to a virus that quickly learned to evade the protection offered by initial vaccines.

The new bivalent boosters are thus a way for our immune systems to “upgrade” their response to new forms of the virus, explains Rob Swanda, an mRNA biochemist and science communicator known for his popular online educational videos. The boosters allow our cells to “remember what both the ancestral strain” of the virus looks like and “what the Omicron variant looks like.”

Experts are clear on the fact that these updated boosters will be a “key tool for those at high risk of severe disease,” said Renton. Unfortunately, with every successive booster, uptake has decreased—even among the most vulnerable.

Megan Ranney, a practicing emergency physician, researcher, and public health advocate at the School of Public Health at Brown University, hopes that even “25 to 30 percent of the population, especially immunocompromised and older folks,” get these shots. “That could potentially be really impactful.”

Various studies have shown that increased boosting this round could save many thousands of lives. In late July, the Commonwealth Fund released an analysis estimating that an extensive fall booster vaccination campaign could save 160,000 lives and avert $109 billion in medical costs. Their researchers examined the impact of an early fall vaccination campaign––one that should be right around the corner but has yet to appear.

Even if the campaign’s coverage were slightly less widespread—similar in reach to that of the 2020–2021 influenza vaccination campaign—it would nonetheless prevent nearly 102,000 deaths and more than 1 million hospitalizations, and save $63 billion in direct medical costs by the end of next March. Either of these scenarios could prevent deaths from exceeding 1,000 per day.

Without such a campaign, the authors estimate that a surge could lead to more than 260,000 additional deaths by the end of March. That is, of course, in addition to the 1.04 million deaths the country has already experienced––a figure that has contributed to the nation’s staggering decline in life expectancy last year and the biggest two-year drop in almost 100 years, reported STAT.

What would an effective outreach campaign actually look like?

This week, Renton insisted on Twitter that we especially need to focus on “better outreach to the uninsured,” given that the uninsured represent the “least-vaccinated demographic group” in the US.

Others advocate for institutions to conduct more effective community outreach; Taison Bell, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia, told me that we need a “multipronged campaign––on the bus, subway, radio––but also a targeted campaign in higher-risk communities” that allows for communication and coordination with local places of worship and community leaders.

I’m convinced. But I cannot say that I am optimistic.

In 2021, as a researcher for the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project––a team that collected data about online vaccine misinformation and disinformation––I heard from passionate, inspiring doctors, public health experts, and health care advocates who fiercely believed that when provided with the right tools––in the forms of access to the vaccine, accurate information, time off work, childcare, and/or supportive community members with whom they could talk through hesitations and concerns––the vast, vast majority of Americans were open to getting vaccinated and then boosted for Covid-19. I trusted those doctors and advocates.

I still do.

But those tools take time, and they all take a lot of money. As Bell and Renton and others have reminded me, Covid funding has continued to dry up from Congress this summer. In the last few months, Americans have witnessed the ending of a slew of supportive pandemic economic policies, from the Expanded Child Tax Credit to the Uninsured Program and paid pandemic sick leave.

And the Biden administration just announced it will discontinue its free at-home rapid test mailing program due to a lack of funding. The program was critical to detection and prevention last winter and spring during the height of the first two Omicron waves. Americans had until Sept. 2 to order their last batch. After that, Congress is saying––as it has for months, like a terrible rallying cry, or maybe a death chant––“you’re on your own now.”

Lily Meyersohn is a researcher at the Institute for Public Accuracy, where she covers pandemic policy and American health care issues. Prior to that, she was an associate researcher and writer for the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project, a coalition of research entities that investigated online Covid-19 vaccine misinformation. The group’s work supported information exchange between the research community, public health officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms. She can be reached for more information at lilymeyersohn@gmail.com or @LMeyersohn.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Tunisia's Ons Jabeur will face world number one Iga Swiatek for the US Open women's singles title after both win their semi-finals on Thursday.

A waiter serves coffee in a glass to a customer outside a coffee shop in Havana's Vedado neighborhood. Drinking coffee on the street and in homes is a custom in Cuba that has become increasingly difficult to maintain, due to scarcity and cost. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

While the Cuban government’s plans to increase production begin to bear fruit, Mireya Barrios confesses that she seeks every possible way to enjoy a cup of coffee every day, in the face of high prices and scarcity.

“If I don’t drink it I don’t feel good, I have a headache all day. For me drinking coffee is almost as important as eating,” said Barrios, who receives from family members quantities of coffee beans “brought from the east, where the best coffee in the country is produced,” which she mixes with chickpeas before roasting, to make it stretch farther.

After drinking her own cup, Barrios sells coffee as a street vendor in the early morning in the old town district of Centro Habana, one of the 15 municipalities that make up Havana.

“That sip of hot coffee is sometimes the entire breakfast of people who go to work and don’t have it at home because they leave in a hurry, or because they don’t have any coffee, which in addition to being scarce has become very expensive,” Barrios said in an interview with IPS.

Coffee is part of the basic food basket on the island. The government sells each month, per person and on a subsidized basis, a 115-gram package mixed with 50 percent chickpeas.

In recent months there have been delays in distribution due to the late arrival of raw materials, including packaging paper, given the financial problems faced by this Caribbean island country in the midst of the deepening structural crisis of its economy, which dates back three decades.

When consulted by IPS, residents in some of Cuba’s 168 municipalities admit that the coffee quota “is barely enough for seven to 10 days, if you’re thrifty.”

People often resort to the black market to acquire additional quantities. There, the same 115-gram package, often taken from stores or government establishments, is sold for the equivalent of half a dollar.

Better quality Cuban and foreign coffee brands are sold almost exclusively in stores in convertible currencies, unaffordable for many families who are paid wages in the devalued Cuban peso.

For example, a kilo of the national brand Cubita costs about 15 dollars in a country with an average monthly salary equivalent to 32 dollars, according to the official rate of 120 pesos to the dollar.

Roberto Martínez shows the nursery where he grows new coffee plants in the town of Palenque, Yateras municipality, in the eastern Cuban province of Guantánamo. A cooperation project with Vietnam created seed banks to renew and improve cuttings and thus boost the quality and yields of local coffee. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Boosting coffee production on the plains

Coffee arrived in Cuba in 1748 and production received a major boost after the Haitian revolution (1791-1804), with the immigration of French-Haitian farmers who settled in mountainous areas of the eastern part of the island where they set up coffee plantations, some of whose ruins were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in the year 2000.

During part of the 19th century, this country was the main exporter of coffee to Europe, exporting 29,500 tons in 1833, for example.

Statistics show that the historical record was reached in the 1961-1962 harvest: 60,300 tons. But after that production declined and currently volumes do not exceed 10,000 tons per year.

With a demand of 24,000 tons per year, this once important exporter actually has to import coffee from other countries, but in quantities that do not meet its needs.

According to Elexis Legrá, director of coffee and cocoa of the Agroforestry Group (GAF), attached to the Ministry of Agriculture, Cuba exports the Arabica variety, the highest quality, produced by coffee growers in mountainous areas.

The prospect is to start exporting small quantities of the Robusta variety, in greatest demand on the international market.

This year, the goal is to export some 2,700 tons, a figure similar to that of 2020, according to industry executives.

Experts say the main factors behind the drop in production are pests, tropical cyclones that frequently hit the island, the effects of climate change, the depopulation of rural and mountainous areas and obsolescent technology.

About 90 percent of national coffee production comes from the mountains in the four easternmost provinces: Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo, where the highest quality varieties are grown, due to tradition and favorable microclimates.

However, since 2014 the Cuban government began identifying soils with adequate conditions for planting coffee in lowland regions, and training courses and technical advice have been provided to new coffee growers.

Sun-dried coffee beans in Palenque, in the municipality of Yateras in the province of Guantanamo. The easternmost of Cuba’s provinces is one of the largest local producers of coffee, where the highest quality varieties are grown, due to tradition and the favorable mountainous microclimates. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“They used to say you couldn’t grow coffee here, and today we have some 2,000 bushes on just half a hectare,” Juan Miguel Fleitas told IPS. In addition to growing root vegetables, fresh produce and fruit and raising livestock, he also grows coffee on his family farm, Victoria 1, in the capital’s Guanabacoa municipality.

The 29-hectare farm, with six workers, belongs to the 26 de Julio Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs).

The UBPCs manage both private properties and state lands granted in usufruct in this socialist nation with a largely centralized economy.

“In the cooperative we have about eight hectares of coffee, dispersed. We are working on the introduction of Vietnamese coffee. It has a good yield, with a larger bean,” the farm’s head of agricultural production, Jorge Luis Gutiérrez, told IPS.

The beans came from seed banks from the east of the island, as part of the Cuba-Vietnam collaboration project, developed from 2015 to 2020.

In the 1970s, Cuban experts taught Vietnamese farmers and extension workers to plant this variety, in a nation then devastated by the war with the United States (1955-1975).

Vietnam is today the second largest exporter of the bean and shares its know-how with Cuba to achieve Robusta coffee cuttings that guarantee renewed plants with superior characteristics, in order to increase quality and yields.

Cuba’s “program to grow coffee in the lowlands” has set a goal of planting 7,163 hectares of coffee in production areas in several of the country’s 15 provinces.

So far, 1,200 hectares have been planted, another 700 hectares are in preparation, and the aim is to harvest more than 4,000 tons by 2030, according to official estimates.

By that date, Cuba’s “coffee production development program” aims to harvest 30,000 tons of coffee nationwide.

Bags of coffee are stacked on a handcart, to be sold at a state-run establishment in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood. The government provides 115 grams of coffee per month to Cuban families at subsidized prices, but in recent months it has been delivered with delays due to difficulties in obtaining supplies. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Organic coffee

Esperanza González is committed to growing coffee “without chemicals or herbicides, only using agroecological management techniques, earthworm humus, lots of organic matter and free-roaming chickens that help fertilize the soil with their excrement.”

González, who returned to Cuba after living for years in the Canadian province of Manitoba, was granted in 2017 in usufruct the eight-hectare Farm 878 that she renamed Doña Esperanza, located in the town of Santa Amelia, in the municipality of Cotorro, near the capital.

Since 2008, the Cuban government has granted unproductive and/or degraded land in usufruct to recuperate it and bolster food production.

This policy forms part of plans to strengthen food security in a country that is up to 70 percent dependent on food imports, whose rising prices lead to a domestic market with unsatisfied needs and shortages.

González, who through her own efforts imported “the equipment and the technology to be able to completely process our coffee,” told IPS that she hopes that with this year’s harvest they will “have a local quality product packaged under our own brand.”

However, she also highlighted “the exchange with coffee growers in the municipality of Segundo Frente (in the province of Santiago de Cuba), from whom we have received baskets to harvest coffee and give the final preparations to our crop.”

In 2021 “we harvested half a ton of good quality beans. We hope that little by little Doña Esperanza will become a lowlands coffee farm with higher volumes of export-quality and national-consumption production, which is so much needed,” she said.

Several initiatives with international support seek to strengthen the value chains associated with coffee production, restore the soils and ecosystems where coffee is grown, and identify markets for selling coffee grown with sustainable practices.

Prodecafé, an agroforestry cooperative development initiative that will run until 2027, was launched in February. With a budget of over 63 million dollars, it is expected to benefit 300 cooperatives in 27 municipalities in the four eastern provinces where coffee production is concentrated.

This joint project of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Ministry of Agriculture is aimed at strengthening the cocoa and coffee value chains and includes a gender approach by encouraging the inclusion of women in agroforestry activities.

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74% of people in G20 countries want economic systems to change, survey finds. Credit: Paul Virgo / IPS.

By Paul Virgo
ROME, Sep 8 2022 (IPS)

In 1972 the Club of Rome alerted the world to the harm human economic systems were doing to the health of our planet in its seminal, best-selling report, The Limits to Growth. With the devastating impacts of the climate crisis hitting home harder than ever, especially in the Global South, that warning about the dangers of exponential economic growth has been fully vindicated.

The club, an international network of scientists, economic experts and former heads of State and government, is marking the 50th anniversary of that landmark work with a new contribution that builds on ‘Limits’ and the dozens of other reports that it has released over the last half century to consolidate the case for an overhaul of the prevailing economic paradigm.

If humanity snaps out of its collective denial, it can move to a ‘Great Leap’ scenario in which global temperatures are stabilized at below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. To bring this about it is necessary to address the fundamental inequalities that are the root cause of the ecological crisis

‘Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity’, which is coming out late in September, warns that if the world continues with the economic policies of the last 40 years, the rich will get richer while the poor fall farther behind, creating extreme inequalities and growing social tensions within and between countries.

In this ‘Too Little, Too Late Scenario’, political division and lack of trust will make it increasingly difficult to address climate and ecological risks, with regional societal collapse, driven by rising social tensions, food insecurity and environmental degradation, increasingly likely.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this.

If humanity snaps out of its collective denial, it can move to a ‘Great Leap’ scenario in which global temperatures are stabilized at below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

To bring this about it is necessary to address the fundamental inequalities that are the root cause of the ecological crisis by: ending poverty through reform of the international financial system; addressing gross inequality by ensuring that the wealthiest 10% take less than 40% of national incomes; empowering women to achieve full gender equity by 2050; transforming the food system to provide healthy diets for people and planet; and transitioning to clean energy to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

“With bold action now a large population can thrive on a livable planet,” Owen Gaffney, one of the six authors of the new report, told IPS.

“We argue that we need five transformations in parallel at speed with the biggest effort this decade on poverty, inequality, food, energy and gender equity”.

“This is the minimum. This does not lead to some utopia, but this leads to societies that are functional enough to deal with the scale of the crises we know are coming.”

Gaffney, a sustainability analyst at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said that it is necessary to break away from “a system that will create the first trillionaire this decade” and distribute wealth more fairly to create a system that benefits the majority in the long run.

“High wealth inequality has a destabilizing influence in societies,” he said.

“It erodes social cohesion. Compare Sweden to the United States. In the US there has emerged an ‘elite versus the rest’ worldview. This, compounded by race and religious divisions, has contributed to an increasingly dysfunctional society.

“In more economically equal societies there is more trust in governments. We need trust in governments to allow societies to take large, long-term decisions”.

Earth for All, which is the result of a two-year research project, goes on to give 15 policy recommendations with the greatest potential to accelerate these turnarounds.

It also calls for the creation of a novel financial innovation, the Citizen’s Fund, which would distribute the wealth of the global commons to all people as a Universal Basic Dividend, in order to tackle inequality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and provide a safety net for the most vulnerable through economic shocks.

Furthermore, the book tackles the fierce debate between supporters of ‘degrowth’ and advocates of ‘green growth’.

It sides with the latter, saying the ‘Giant Leap’ would not spell the end of economic growth, but the end of the directionless economic growth that is destroying societies and the planet.

“Exponential economic growth comes hand in hand with exponential growth in material consumption, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in the current economic system,” said Gaffney.

“This does not necessarily need to be the case. An energy transformation to clean energy will cause economic growth in the clean energy sector and a contraction of the fossil fuel sector.”

“So, it depends what is growing. If we have growth in circular economies and regenerative economies, this is good.”

“If we continue growing the linear ‘take, make, break, waste’ model then we don’t have a long future on Earth”.

Although the solutions proposed in the book are largely macro-economic ones that can only be implemented by governments, the book is also a statement against climate doomism and a call to action for everyone.

Gaffney points to the impact social movements like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion are having and to a survey done for Earth4All with Ipsos MORI of G20 countries which suggests that 74% of people in G20 countries want economic systems to change.

He hopes that we are reaching a positive “social tipping point” in which these new ideas take hold and embed in the political sphere rapidly.

Remarkably, one of the authors of the report is Norwegian climate expert Jorgen Randers, who was also among the co-authors of The Limits to Growth.

“We are standing on a cliff edge,” Randers said. “In the next 50 years, the current economic system will drive up social tensions and drive down wellbeing.”

“We can already see how inequality is destabilising people and the planet.”

“Unless there is truly extraordinary action to redistribute wealth, things will get significantly worse. We are already sowing the seeds for regional collapse.”

“Societies are creating vicious cycles where rising social tensions, which are exacerbated by climate breakdown, will continue to lead to a decline in trust.”

“This risks an explosive combination of extreme political destabilisation and economic stagnation at a time when we must do everything we can to avoid climate catastrophes.”

Zambia's Barbra Banda has scored eight goals in three games at the Cosafa Cup on her return to international football.

A medical officer preparing to give a COVID-19 vaccine in Somalia in May 2021. Credit: Mokhtar Mohamed/AMISOM

By Juliet Morrison
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 8 2022 (IPS)

With the outbreak of Monkeypox in non-endemic countries leading to a scramble for vaccines, global health advocates are again calling for equity to be prioritized in the international response.

Equity was a top concern during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency health response. The World Health Organization (WHO) helped spearhead several initiatives in an attempt to reduce disparities between nations, notably COVAX, the vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator.

Yet, despite these efforts, figures from Our World in Data show that only one in seven people are fully vaccinated in low-income countries. In contrast, almost three in four people have been fully vaccinated for a year in high-income countries.

Fatima Hassan, human rights lawyer and founder of South African-based civil society group Health Justice Initiative, sees the current disparity in Monkeypox vaccine access as the latest example of the Global South, and Africa especially, being disadvantaged in the global health space.

“We still as Africa don’t have any supplies of monkeypox vaccines, even though as a continent, we’ve been dealing with this disease for a number of years. So on one level, now that it’s become a Global North problem, the vaccines have been found for them, but not for us.”

Monkeypox can be combated with smallpox vaccines, which are 85 percent effective against the virus. Since the disease was eradicated in 1980, the WHO has had 31 million doses set aside for a rapid response in case smallpox should re-emerge. The organization is currently assessing the potency of this stockpile and whether it can be deployed against Monkeypox.

However, these doses have never been distributed in Africa, where Monkeypox has circulated since the 1970s. The continent is also facing a much higher death rate. When the WHO declared a global health emergency, the only deaths recorded were from West and Central Africa, where 4.7 percent of people who contracted the disease had died.

In the case of COVID-19, many saw the international rules that allow pharmaceutical companies to protect their intellectual property (IP) as simply reinforcing existing disparities between countries.

Several wealthy countries signed contracts with pharmaceutical companies, helping finance private sector research and development, in exchange for prioritized access to vaccine supply. When companies eventually developed successful vaccines, the technology they used was restricted from being shared with the global community. Nations that lacked both the technology and the resources to purchase on the open market resources had to rely on vaccine donations from rich countries that came several months later.

Over 100 organizations and networks joined a coalition called The People’s Vaccine to call for the suspension of intellectual property rules and mandatory pooling of COVID-19-related data and technologies. Those supporting the alliance’s call include the current leaders of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and former Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

For Hassan, intellectual property regulations were especially problematic given the participation of Africans in trial phases for Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines.

“We did all those trials; we’ve contributed to the knowledge generation and to the scientific knowledge that allowed [pharmaceutical companies] to get emergency use authorization. But we were not guaranteed supplies or access or preferential access. So the deeper inequity in this entire setup was also that the Global South was asked to participate in the research and the trials, but there was no regulated way of ensuring […] genuine benefit sharing agreements.”

For countries worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of increased self-sufficiency in coping with global health emergencies.

“I think that was the lesson of COVID. For the global South, it was like, oh, okay, we need to actually figure this out by ourselves,” Hassan said.

Several initiatives have been created to fulfill this goal, including a new mRNA vaccine technology hub in South Africa.

The hub was launched by the WHO and COVAX in Afrigen, Cape Town, on June 21, 2022. It aims to bolster low and middle-income countries’ capacity to produce COVID mRNA vaccines by training scientists in developing mRNA vaccines and pooling all knowledge acquired by partners. The site in Afrigen will be run by a consortium that includes Biovac, Afrigen Biologics, and Vaccines, a network of universities, and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

When the hub launched, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa commended the initiative and its implications for Africa’s role globally.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the full extent of the vaccine gap between developed and developing economies and how that gap can severely undermine global health security. This landmark initiative is a major advance in the international effort to build vaccine development and manufacturing capacity that will put Africa on a path to self-determination.”

African scientists are heading the technology transfer hub. It has already produced the first batches of an mRNA vaccine with technology that will be transferred to 15 countries.

Reflecting on Africa’s response to COVID-19, Public Health Professor Flavia Senkubuge told IPS that she’s proud of how well the continent dealt with the caseload, especially as many predicted COVID-19 would “literally obliterate” the region.

The WHO has cited Africa as “one of the least affected regions of the world” throughout the pandemic. The number of total deaths from the continent, 256 555, makes up 3 percent of the world’s total, 6.49 million. In contrast, deaths from the Americas and Europe accounted for 46 and 29 percent, respectively.

Senkubuge told IPS that predictions that Africa would be completely overwhelmed overlooked the expertise Africa has garnered in combating public health crises, notably HIV and AIDS.

“If you look at South Africa, for people like me who trained and practiced as physicians during the HIV and AIDS period, we are used to those large numbers of very sick patients. Additionally, in South Africa, you must remember that we are a country that has a quadruple burden of disease, therefore which means we have a high volume of patients coming into our health establishments. We are therefore used to working differently, having an optimum triage system, and working in under-resourced and high-pressure environments.”

Being underestimated also extends to the work of African scientists. Both Hassan and Senkubuge told IPS that the work of Africans is often neglected and overlooked in global settings.

Yet, the pandemic has also highlighted their contributions to global health, Senkubuge said. She pointed to South Africa’s discovery and swift response to the emergence of the Omicron variant. She believes this has led to a shift in how African scientists are considering their work on the global stage.

“As African [scientists], […] I think we have kind of shifted the paradigm to say we are here, we are not going anywhere. We’re not going to try and convince anyone regarding the excellence of our work, we’ll just do our work, continue to share it with our communities, publish in the top journals and be part of the global discourse on our own terms. You’re welcome to retake, amend, recheck, but actually, we stand resolute in our unapologetic knowledge that the work we do here in Africa is excellent and contributes significantly to global health.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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CHINA - Constructing an irrigation network in Qinghai Province. Workers were paid part of their wages in food supplied by the World Food Programme. Credit WFP/Sarah Errington

By Trevor Page
LETHBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 8 2022 (IPS)

As our planet continues to heat up, extreme weather has affected many of us. From the west coast of North America across Europe, the Middle East and Asia to Pakistan and New Zealand, wildfires and flash floods have destroyed homes and property and disrupted the daily lives of millions.

Supply chains, already badly affected by COVID, have been further complicated by drying rivers and waterways. In the more developed countries, insurance covers much of the short-term losses.

But it’s in the developing world where the effects of climate change cause the most acute form of human suffering: starvation. Somalia, in the Horn of Africa is once again in the grip of a devastating drought. Livestock have perished and children are beginning to die.

Parts South Sudan’s farmland have now been under water for the 4th consecutive year because of abnormal floods. Hapless farmers, marooned on islands of higher ground, are living off handouts from the international donor community. No insurance to cover their losses; they’re lucky just to hang on to their lives.

And if we needed a shriller wake-up call about the unfolding global food crisis, Russia’s war on Ukraine has certainly provided that: Much of grain and fertilizer that the world relies on was held hostage by the combatant’s mines and warships in the Black Sea.

Paralyzed by the outdated make-up and role of the Security Council, the political side of the UN System was once again unable to prevent war from breaking out.

Wars and armed conflict rage on in Syria, Libya, Myanmar, Afghanistan, South Sudan, the DRC and, of course, in Ukraine itself. But thanks to UN and Turkish mediation, grain and fertilizer shipments from Ukrainian and Russian ports have resumed under the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

The Joint Coordination Centre (JCC), set up in Istanbul at the end of July, is ensuring that trade and aid in these most basic of commodities can flow out of Black Sea ports again. Amir Abdulla, the World Food Programme’s former Deputy Executive Director is the UN’s coordinator for the Black Sea Grain Initiative and heads up the UN Delegation to the JCC.

Abdulla told me earlier this week that operations are scaling up and grain exports from Ukraine went over 1 million tons in less than a month and to 2 million tons in just the last week. An average of 9 ships a day heading to or from Ukraine are being inspected jointly by UN, Turkish, Russian and Ukrainian inspectors. “While the conflict in Ukraine continues, it has been possible with the help of Turkey and the agreement of Russia and Ukraine, for the UN to get this initiative underway so that the much-needed flow of food and fertilizer moves out of Black Sea ports to the rest of the world”, he said.

“More grain needs to move through to make space in silos for the new harvest. This is critical for the world’s grain supply for next year. Equally important is the urgent export of fertilizer, including ammonia, so that farmers across the world can continue food production at an affordable cost”, he added.

But what about the wider food crisis that is developing and will be with us in the years to come?

The World Food Programme (WFP) warns that 345 million people are already affected by acute food insecurity in 82 countries. And with the global population set to hit at least 10 billion by 2050, the effect of climate change on agriculture will compound the growing problem. There is a desperate need for the developing world to grow more food.

Up to now, WFP has helped ward off mass starvation among the world’s most vulnerable. But to prevent this happening in the years ahead, there’s never been a greater need for it to address the “development” part of its dual mandate by getting back in the business of helping governments and communities grow more food.

In the early-60s when WFP started out, and for it’s first 20 years of operation, around 70% of its budget was spent on development projects, many of them designed to grow more food.

Work on India’s Indira Gandhi Canal, which takes water from the Himalaya mountains to irrigate 2 million hectares of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, started in 1964 with WFP assistance. Workers building the canal were able to buy WFP food at specially set up shops on the banks of the canal network at low, fixed rates.

After WFP assistance ended the World Bank and the EU helped complete the irrigation network. For the last 50 years, millions of tons of additional food grain has been produced every year as a result of this project. Wheat is now reaped annually in the far-flung desert district of Jaisalmer.

As WFP’s Representative in India, Bishow Parajuli says with pride, “This project has changed the lives of millions of ordinary people”, giving real meaning to WFP’s development slogan: changing lives.

In China’s far-western province of Qinghai, it’s much the same story. Here, back in the 80s, WFP helped the local government’s Water Conversancy Bureau construct an irrigation network that today irrigates what was 8,000 hectares of low-yielding land in Haidong Prefecture.

CHINA – Completed irrigation canal in Qinghai Province, a WFP- assisted project. Credit: WFP/Trevor Page

As with India’s Indira Gandhi Canal, the network was built manually, by hand. WFP food was supplied to pay part of the worker’s wages. With assured irrigation, wheat yields doubled within 5 years. Today, this same area of Qinghai is the province’s main wheat producing area with mechanical combines harvesting the crop instead of reaping it by hand.

CHINA – With irrigation, wheat yields doubled in 5 years at this WFP-assisted project in Qinghai Province. Credit: WFP/Paul Mitchell

Why is WFP no longer helping developing countries build major irrigation networks designed to grow more food? Because its focus changed in the early 90s to emergencies or saving lives as WFP calls it today.

That was when WFP took over the responsibility from the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR to feed the world’s 25 million refugees on its books as well as the 50-odd million who sort refuge elsewhere in their own country as internally displaced people, or IDPs.

But the pressure of climate change and population growth is causing the pendulum to swing again. At WFP’s last Executive Board (EB) meeting in June, WFP’s Changing Lives Transformation Fund (CLTF) was introduced.

While there was general agreement that WFP’s dual mandate – emergencies and development – must be respected and that humanitarian aid alone is not enough, cash-strapped main donor EB members insisted that saving lives must always take priority over changing lives.

Not surprisingly, most EB members from the developing world wanted WFP to help more with changing lives through stepped-up development assistance. After much debate, which went to closed night sessions, the compromise was a $55 million fund over 5 years, or upto $1.2 million for around 10-15 countries as seed money for projects aimed at supporting national food security.

While this is a start, the amounts earmarked seem like half-hearted steps for the organization that the world set up to help governments prevent mass hunger and starvation. Volli Carucci, Director of WFP’s Resilience and Food Systems Service disagrees, pointing to the many reliance measure that WFP is supporting in the drought-stricken Sahel. “ But more long-term support from donors is needed”, he said. Many countries in Africa need to be growing drought-resistant sorghum and millet rather than maize he told me. Maize is the staple for much of the continent.

Acknowledging “the present and future danger” of the global food crisis, Carucci emphasised that greater awareness of WFP’s current resilience initiatives and its development successes of the past is needed.

BANGLADESH – Unskilled labour re-excavating a silted-up irrigation canal. WFP food was used as part-payment of wages to workers rehabilitating irrigation and drainage canals and embankments in this flood-prone country. Credit: WFP/Trevor Page

Bangladesh, China, Egypt and India have all benefited from WFP assistance in building major irrigation networks. Every year since, millions of tons of food grain has been produced that helps feed their people.

EGYPT – Irrigation canal under construction. Credit: WFP

Ethiopia reversed some of its major soil erosion problems by planting millions of trees to protect agricultural land. Always short of cash to pay labour costs, these governments used WFP assistance to help pay the workers on these projects with food.

ETHIOPIA – Watering seedlings for a WFP-assisted forestry project. Credit: WFP/Franco Mattioli

South/South Cooperation provides a channel to transfer the organizational management and technical expertise of these countries to less developed countries with agricultural potential. Projects like these would also provide employment for the growing hordes of unskilled labour looking for work.

As WFP nears its 60th anniversary it has a full agenda of programming and internal management issues to address. Hopefully, helping the governments and community organizations in developing countries grow more food will figure more prominently than in past decades.

Irrigating and developing more farmland could also help with the integration IDPs into new communities to make them productive citizens instead of living off handouts year after year. It could also help stem the flow of migration to the more-developed countries.

Involving cooperating partners such as UNDP, FAO, World Bank, NGOs and other multilaterals like the EU will be crucial right from the planning stage.

Of course, saving lives will always be the priority of the day. But unless governments act now to ensure that future generations have enough food to eat, parts of the planet run the risk of becoming overwhelmed by the hungry poor.

WFP can and must do more to help countries along the path towards food security, as its mandate dictates. Only then will the world move significantly towards achieving its Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger.

Trevor Page is a former Country and HQ Director of the World Food Programme. He has also served with FAO, UNHCR and what is now the United Nations Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Delegates from the Zambia All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (ZAPPD) met in Lusaka to develop a strategic plan to tackle population and development issues. Credit: APDA

By Cecilia Russell
Johannesburg, Sep 8 2022 (IPS)

Parliamentarians play a decisive role in addressing population issues, as was demonstrated when the majority voted against a private member motion to end the teaching of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in Zambia in 2020.

However, a Zambia All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (ZAPPD) workshop held in Lusaka also heard that many challenges need addressing. The Zambia All Party Parliamentary Group on Population and Development (ZAPPD) was founded in 1997 to provide capacity on population and development and to strengthen parliamentarians’ commitments. It is one of the first National Committees on population and development, established in the East and Southern African region.

The seminar, supported by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), was attended by several expert researchers who unpacked the outlook for the developing nation.

Lester Phiri from the Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia (PPAZ) noted that much work was needed for the country to achieve its Vision 2030 goal of becoming a prosperous middle-income country.

Delegates at a ZAPPD workshop heard that significantly high poverty levels, particularly in Zambian rural areas where 76.6 percent of people are considered poor, should be addressed. The workshop delegates contributed to a strategic plan to address population issues. Credit: APDA

Phiri noted that while the economy had grown, with more mothers surviving childbirth and children being healthier and more educated – this did not “automatically lead to overall national development and improved quality of life.”

To achieve Vision 2030, the significantly high poverty levels, particularly in the rural areas where 76.6 percent of people are considered poor, should be addressed.

Unemployment was high, Phiri said, and there was limited access to empowerment programs.

Another issue was the high fertility rates and maternal mortality rate of 252 for every 100 000 births.

Research indicated that at least one-fifth of married women had an unmet need for family planning.

Zambia’s development would benefit from an explained the benefit of a healthy and educated population by addressing family planning.

“Couples with smaller families are better able to provide for their children, save money, and escape poverty,” Phiri said. “In fact, studies show that shifting the age structure of the population can lead to a 47 percent increase in per capita income.”

Of concern was that gender-based violence was high, with nearly half (47 percent) of ever-married women reporting having experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence.

Answering why, if the economy was growing, there was still widespread poverty, Phiri noted that Zamia had one of the fastest-growing populations in the world. By 2030 the population, estimated at 19 million, will have swelled to 24 million and 41 million by 2050.

This meant that at a “community and household level, there are a large number of dependents, which impacts the working population’s ability to save money and escape poverty”.

Phiri advised parliamentarians to work toward improved child survival and reducing fertility by promoting voluntary family planning.

Another issue needing fixing was the high school dropout rate. The benefits to society would be significant if the country increased secondary school completion rates among youth, especially girls. Other programmes should include investment in comprehensive sexuality education and create an enabling policy environment for pre- and post-secondary, and tertiary education economic activity to counter unemployment and promote entrepreneurship.

“If we invest in the health and education of the population, especially women and girls, we may see a different Zambia in the years to come,” Phiri told the workshop.

Ifoma Mulewa, a sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) researcher at the National Assembly of Zambia, said these objectives could be achieved through energetic and committed parliamentarians.

She said MPs should take the initiative to bring motions on population matters; they should participate in population debates in the House and parliamentary committees and through oversight visits.

They could also undertake public hearings to get wider community and stakeholders’ views on population matters.

She called on them to keep the pressure on the Executive to adhere to international protocols on population and growth.

Phiri agreed and said there was inadequate commitment towards population and development in the allocation, disbursement, and utilization of national budgets. It was also crucial to balance legislation – for example, on child marriage, where the statutory versus customary laws were not harmonized.

He said Zambia had a legislative framework to ensure Zambia remains on the path to achieving its Vision 2030 goal, including the Population Policy Implementation Plan (2019-2030), the 8th National Development Plan (2022-2026), the Family Planning Costed Implementation Plan (2021-2026) and a National Strategy on Ending Child Marriage.

It also had polity for youth, including Education Act 2011, the Comprehensive Sexuality Education Framework, and National Youth Policy (2015).

The Gender Equity and Equality Act (2015) ends discrimination against women.

However, MPs should engage more with the community on population and development issues.

The workshop, attended by about 35 participants and 22 parliamentarians, made crucial inputs to a strategic plan on population by ZAPPD. The new members of ZAPPD, under the leadership of Hon Princess Kasune, MP, are aiming to address the Committee’s contribution to implementing ICPD25 commitments.

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An Afghan girl in the Nawabad District of Kabul, Afghanistan. Credit: UNICEF/Mohammad Haya Burhan

By John Sifton
NEW YORK, Sep 8 2022 (IPS)

This week, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, released his first report. It is a catalog of abuses under Taliban rule since August 2021 and their devastating impact on Afghans.

The report also highlights the devastating humanitarian impact of the country’s economic crisis, caused in part by actions by foreign governments, noting that “all parties bear degrees of responsibility for failures to deliver economic and social rights.”

The report describes “staggering regression in women and girls’ enjoyment of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.” It notes that “in no other country have women and girls so rapidly disappeared from all spheres of public life,” echoing a recent statement by UN experts describing “wide-spread, systematic and all-encompassing” attacks on the rights of women and girls.

The report also details Taliban abuses against officials from the former government, journalists, and religious minorities, among other rights concerns.

As someone who worked in Afghanistan before the first Taliban government fell in 2001, I have witnessed Taliban oppression firsthand. The report’s details are distressingly familiar.

Under the Taliban, the rule of law has no meaning. It isn’t even clear what “the law” is. Since last year, when the Taliban revoked the country’s constitution and stated that all laws needed to comply with Sharia, or Islamic law, it hasn’t been clear which laws and regulations are in force or how crimes are to be handled.

Instead, there are only “evolving and arbitrarily interpreted rules and decrees,” according to the UN report, and legal cases “are handled idiosyncratically across jurisdictions and venues,” while basic crimes are “often dealt with by security forces without involving prosecutors or judges.”

In short, “the law” is whatever a Taliban official might say it is. A situation more threatening to human rights is hard to imagine.

The Taliban authorities should take the report’s recommendations seriously. Most urgently, they should rescind abusive policies that violate the rights of women and girls, protect religious minorities, and engage with the special rapporteur and other UN offices to develop reforms.

The UN Human Rights Council is due to discuss the findings of the report later this month. States should take this opportunity to renew the mandate of the special rapporteur and to establish a new body that will investigate abuses and advance accountability.

Afghans are entitled to better than what the Taliban have given them: A life with few freedoms, no real justice, and where half the population is shut out of education and work.

John Sifton is the Asia Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch. He has previously served as a researcher and as Acting Deputy Washington Director. He focuses on South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and terrorism and counter-terrorism issues worldwide.

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