Africa

Malaria still kills 400,000 people every year, most of them African children under five years old. RTS,S is the first malaria vaccine shown to reduce malaria and life-threatening severe malaria in young children. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Kesete Admasu
Sep 1 2021 (IPS)

In the midst of the tragedy and turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s gratifying to see work continuing in Africa to find new ways of fighting malaria, a very old disease that has been a formidable foe for thousands of years and still kills 400,000 people every year, most of them African children under five years old.

Scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and their colleagues at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé in Burkina Faso and the University of Bamako in Mali published results
from a phase 3 trial that involved the world’s first and only malaria vaccine.

The new evidence from Mali and Burkina Faso shows that RTS,S—which is also being introduced in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in a landmark pilot introduction —could be an even more valuable tool than originally expected. And those of us involved in the fight against malaria are certainly eager for good news.

RTS,S is the first malaria vaccine shown to reduce malaria and life-threatening severe malaria in young children. Approximately 2.1 million doses of the vaccine have been provided and more than 750,000 children have received their first vaccine dose through the pilot programme where malaria risks occur year-round

Working in areas where malaria surges during the rainy season, the researchers report a dramatic reduction in malaria illness and deaths among young children who received the RTS,S vaccine just before the rains began. They found the vaccine worked as well as the standard prevention practice in these regions, known as seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which involves administering treatment doses of common antimalaria drugs monthly during the rainy season, usually through a door-to-door campaign.

This is an important finding. SMC is a resource-heavy intervention, and in some settings an annual pre-season single dose of a vaccine could be an attractive alternative.

However, the most striking results occurred in the group of some 1700 children who received both interventions—the medications and the vaccine. They experienced a 60% – 70% additional reduction in severe disease and hospitalizations compared to the already impressive stand-alone interventions—the prevention drugs or the RTS,S vaccine—and also more than a 70% reduction in deaths from malaria. Equally important: the combination was found to be safe and well tolerated.

I was one of a group of African Ministers of Health in June 2016 who served on the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and passionately supported the funding for a RTS,S pilot to learn more about its public health potential. These new results are heartening.

RTS,S is the first malaria vaccine shown to reduce malaria and life-threatening severe malaria in young children. Approximately 2.1 million doses of the vaccine have been provided and more than 750,000 children have received their first vaccine dose through the pilot programme where malaria risks occur year-round. Results from the pilot programme indicate strong community demand for the malaria vaccine as well as the capacity of childhood vaccination to deliver it. This new study in Burkina Faso and Mali provides additional evidence of RTS,S safety and effectiveness.

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Africa’s fight against malaria was stalling at what the World Health Organization (WHO) called an “unacceptably high level” of deaths. Regaining momentum in the malaria fight will require new tools, especially with existing preventive interventions threatened by emerging insecticide resistance.

New tools to fight malaria are especially needed in countries like Mali and Burkina Faso, located in a region known as the African Sahel—a semi-arid ribbon of land that spans the continent from Senegal to Sudan. There, the danger of malaria flares dramatically with the arrival of the rainy season. Today, six of the ten African countries singled out by the WHO as requiring “high impact” malaria interventions are in the Sahel, where malaria remains a primary cause of childhood death despite substantial reductions in malaria achieved through a combination of SMC and insecticide treated nets (ITNs).

Through the development of the RTS,S vaccine over the last 30 years, scientists have discovered that the protective efficacy of RTS,S is particularly high in the first months following vaccination. This feature prompted researchers to study whether RTS,S could be provided strategically, just before the peak malaria season, to fight seasonal malaria transmission.

Giving the RTS,S malaria vaccine seasonally was found to be safe and effective—and combining SMC with the vaccine was especially powerful—and could expand the options available for fighting malaria.

In October, global advisory bodies for immunization and malaria will convene to review available RTS,S evidence and consider a potential WHO recommendation for wider use of the vaccine across Africa.

If WHO recommends the vaccine for wider use, African governments should be prepared to seize on the life-saving opportunity. They must be ready to make smart and strategic decisions to deploy this vaccine while continuing to promote the use of other proven malaria interventions to maximise impact.

We have seen in COVID-19 what the global health community can accomplish when it comes together to fight a killer disease. It would be a welcome turn of events to see Africa emerge from the pandemic with a new tool to take on the old foe of malaria with renewed vigour to get progress in malaria control back on track.

Dr Kesete Admasu, CEO of Big Win Philanthropy, former CEO of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, and former Minister of Health of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

The 31-year-old from Hartlepool was making a documentary in Africa for a Muslim television network.

UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem, KOICA President Lee Mikyung and UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (from left) launched a partnership in 2018 that Ms. Lee characterized as “a key foundation and platform for solidarity and collective engagement for gender equality.” The new tripartite agreement-- between UNFPA, the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and UN Women—has combined the strengths of the three partners to improve the lives of women and girls and accelerate the achievement of gender equality, as expressed in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. Credit: UNFPA/Tara Milutis

By Hawon Jung
SEOUL, South Korea, Sep 1 2021 (IPS)

A strong movement of feminism is sweeping South Korea. While women feel empowered to stand their ground, the men are retaliating.

When South Korean archer An San won two gold medals in just two days during the recent Tokyo Olympics, the response the 20-year-old received at home was a mixed. Some men were angered and said her medals should be taken away. Why? Because her short hair was a sign that she was a ‘man-hating’ feminist.

As bizarre and surreal as it may sound, the attack on An is a bleak reminder of the deep-rooted gender stereotypes in the economically advanced, yet deeply sexist South Korea – and the enormous pressure on women and girls to look and act ‘feminine’. It’s also another episode of the escalating culture war between the country’s increasingly outspoken feminists – and antifeminists seeking to silence their voices.

Lowest in the ranks

South Korea is the world’s 10th largest economy, a tech giant that is home to Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker, and a cultural powerhouse whose K-pop stars like BTS enjoy global followings. But despite all the economic and technological advances, the deep-seated patriarchy and gender discrimination remained little changed.

South Korea is ranked at the 102nd in the world in terms of gender parity, according to the World Economic Forum. The gender pay gap in the country is the widest among the advanced economies of the OECD member nations.

It has consistently ranked as the worst place to be a working woman in the Economist magazine’s Glass Ceiling Index. Women account for 19 per cent of parliamentary seats, almost on par with North Korea.

Hawon Jung

Women are under enormous pressure to look perfect at all times and all costs – as shown in the country’s reputation as the world’s capital of plastic surgery. On the busy streets of Seoul, it’s not difficult to find plastic surgery adverts screaming ‘being pretty is everything!’ and rail-thin K-pop starlets presented as role models for teenage girls and young women. The stars’ extreme diet regimens are widely shared on social media and avidly followed by many.

Typical beauty ideals in South Korea for women include pale yet glowing skin, a youthful ‘babyface’, long and luminous hair, wide eyes, a thin nose, and pin-thin body (nearly 17 per cent of South Korean women in their 20s are underweight, compared to less than 5 per cent for their male counterparts, according to a study in 2019).

The pressure begins early: more than 40 per cent of female elementary school students wear makeup, and the number goes up to over 70 per cent for middle schoolers.

Escape the Corset

But women started to fight back. A powerful wave of feminist movement has taken the country by storm in recent years, allowing many women to speak up against sexual discrimination, assault, and objectification like never before.

Since 2018, women have rallied together to bring down many sexual predators, including a popular presidential contender, in one of the most successful cases of #MeToo in Asia.

Tens of thousands took to the streets for months in 2018 to call for tougher crackdown on the so-called ‘spycam porn’ crimes that secretly film women in public space from workplaces to public toilets and share the footage on the internet.

They successfully campaigned to end the abortion ban. The so-called ‘Escape the Corset’ movement was part of that awakening, meant to defy the pressure to follow the rigid beauty ideals.

Women and girls who joined the campaign cut their hair short, destroyed their makeup, refused to wear tight, revealing, or uncomfortable clothes to instead opt for something more comfortable and practical. Since then, short hair has become something of a political statement among many young feminists.

The wave of awakening, however, has also drawn a strong pushback by men who thought – like many around the world – that the women had gone too far, and many labelled feminists as ‘man haters’ who should be punished.

More than 40 per cent of female elementary school students wear makeup, and the number goes up to over 70 per cent for middle schoolers.

The backlash has reached a fever pitch since May when members of many online forums popular among men started to cry ‘misandry’ over a adds that use an image of a pinching finger, a universal gesture to indicate something small.

Online crusade

In a campaign likened by many as a McCarthyian witch-hunt, they claimed whoever created the image must be feminists and out to ridicule the size of their genitals. Despite having no possibility of any political plot, many of the accused companies and government institutions – including the national police agency and the defense ministry – bent down quickly, apologized for hurting the men’s feelings and removed the images from their posters.

These online mobs even enjoyed political backing; Lee Jun-Seok, a young member of the rightwing People’s Power Party, rose to prominence by amplifying the conspiracy theory over the ‘misandrist’ finger gesture, and eventually became the leader of the party in July.

Feeling supported by a powerful politician and emboldened by groveling apologies from companies and the government, the online mobs moved on to their next target—the star Olympian whose appearance didn’t fit into their ideal of traditional femininity.

‘Why did you cut your hair?’ An was asked on her social media, to which she replied, ‘’coz it’s convenient’. The answer was not enough.

A campaign to extract an apology from An for being a feminist began, with some even demanding that the Korea Archery Association take away the gold medals from the ‘man hater’.

But women fought back again. Lawmakers, activists, entertainers, and thousands of ordinary women rallied behind An, many sharing the photos of their short hair on social media as a show of support.

And as the cyber-bullying targeting An raged on, many women across the country watched as An won yet another gold – becoming the first archer in Olympic history to win three golds at a single Game.

Hawon Jung is a journalist and former Seoul correspondent for the AFP news agency. She is the author of ‘Flowers of Fire,’ a book about South Korea’s #MeToo campaign.

Source: International Politics and Society (IPS), published by the Global and European Policy Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

 

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Will the Taliban aspire for a seat in the UN General Assembly?. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 1 2021 (IPS)

When the Taliban captured power back in 1996, one of its first political acts was to hang the ousted Afghan President Mohammed Najibullah in Ariana Square in Kabul.

The newly-installed government played a triple role: judge, jury and hangman, all three rolled into one.

Fast forward to August 15, when the Taliban, in its second coming, assumed power ousting the US-supported government of Ashraf Ghani, a former official of the World Bank, armed with a doctorate in anthropology from one of the most prestigious Ivy League educational institutions: Columbia University.

In a Facebook posting, Ghani said he fled to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeking safe haven because he “was going to be hanged” by the Taliban.

If that did happen, the Taliban would have earned the dubious distinction of being the only government in the world to hang two presidents. But mercifully, it did not.

Ghani, however, denied that he had bolted from the presidential palace lugging several suitcases with millions of dollars pilfered from the country’s treasury.

Meanwhile, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan during 1996-2001, only three countries recognized its legitimacy: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and UAE.

But now 20 years later, the first four countries most likely to provide legitimacy to a Taliban government may include China and Russia (two permanent members of the Security Council), along with Iran and Pakistan, while others could follow.

At a meeting of the 15-member Security Council on August 30, a resolution condemning the “deplorable” terrorist attack on the Kabul airport, was backed by 13 countries, with two abstentions: China and Russia. But since they didn’t exercise their vetoes, the resolution was adopted 13-2.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs an emergency Security Council meeting on the situation in Afghanistan. “The world is watching. We cannot and must not abandon the people of Afghanistan,” he implored. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

Predictably, Taliban has now pledged a new era and a promise to cooperate with the Americans, perhaps as part of a strategy to gain international legitimacy– and eventually a seat in the UN General Assembly, a seat now held by the ousted Ghani government.

Still, its sordid past—including public floggings and executions, enforced disappearances and violations of basic civil liberties—may come back to haunt the Taliban.

Dr. Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), told IPS there is no evidence that Taliban version 2.0 will be any different from the original Taliban, despite their attempts to convince the world that this time around they will be more user-friendly.

For decades, he pointed out, the Taliban have been responsible for war crimes, and when they last ruled Afghanistan, they perpetrated crimes against humanity.

Last time they were in government, Taliban forces systematically persecuted the country’s vulnerable Hazara minority and stripped millions of women and girls of their universal human rights. The Taliban have not changed, he argued.

Beyond the glare of TV cameras and press conferences, Taliban fighters are already carrying out summary executions and evidence has already emerged of a recent massacre of Hazara men, said Dr Adams.

As an armed extremist group, as perpetrators of atrocities and as a state power, the Taliban stand in direct opposition to everything that the United Nations stands for.

“They belong in handcuffs, not sitting in the UN General Assembly hall”, he declared.

James M. Dorsey, Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, told IPS there is no doubt that the Taliban will claim Afghanistan’s UN seat once they form a government.

They cannot do so before that. In terms of the International Criminal Court (ICC), there is equally no doubt that the Taliban have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“The problem is they are in good company: China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, just to name a few”.

“Why the Taliban and not also others?, asked Dorsey, author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

Asked why the US wants to deal with a Taliban government that is not legally recognized by Washington, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the US has been “engaged with the Taliban for some time diplomatically going back years in efforts, to try to advance a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Afghanistan”.

“Going forward, we will judge our engagement with any Taliban-led government in Afghanistan based on one simple proposition: our interests, and does it help us advance them or not?”.

“If engagement with the government can advance the enduring interests we will have in counterterrorism, the enduring interest we’ll have in trying to help the Afghan people who need humanitarian assistance, in the enduring interest we have in seeing that the rights of all Afghans, especially women and girls, are upheld, then we’ll do it,’ said Blinken, leaving the door open for a political relationship with the Taliban government.

He said if a future Taliban government upholds the basic rights of the Afghan people, if it makes good on its commitments to ensure that Afghanistan cannot be used as a launching pad for terrorist attacks “directed against us and our allies and partners, and in the first instance, if it makes good on its commitments to allow people who want to leave Afghanistan to leave, that’s a government we can work with”

“If it doesn’t, we will make sure that we use every appropriate tool at our disposal to isolate that government, and as I said before, Afghanistan will be a pariah,” he declared.

Samir Sanbar, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, who served under five different secretaries-generals, told IPS: “I do not recall (the former) Taliban government seeking recognition or claiming a seat during the 1996 General Assembly session, attended by U.S. President Bill Clinton”.

But he did remember the former Permanent Representative of Afghanistan seeking a U.N. job.

“If the Taliban decides to claim the Afghan seat, the UN’s Credentials Committee will have to review that claim”.

Sanbar said the Taliban delegation would also need U.S. visas to visit New York, which would require the blessings of the Biden administration.

He also pointed that the UAE may not recognize the current Taliban, as it did in 1996, because it is now hosting the ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

Sanbar said it will be interesting to watch what happens at the upcoming 76th session of the General Assembly which opens on September 21.

Thalif Deen, Senior Editor at the UN Bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, is the author of a newly-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That.” Published by Amazon, the book is mostly a satire peppered with scores of anecdotes– both serious and hilarious. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/

 

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Africa's second round of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup kick offs on Wednesday, with Mohamed Salah among some notable absentees.

Members of Africa's Rural Women's Assembly are among the farmer and civil society organizations demanding a shift away from Green Revolution programs in the face of rising hunger. Credit: Rural Women's Assembly

By Timothy A. Wise
BOSTON, Aug 31 2021 (IPS)

As the United Nations gears up for its Food Systems Summit September 23, the urgent need for structural changes in how we grow, harvest, distribute, and consume food has never been more apparent.

According to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization’s (FAO) annual hunger report, released July 12, the world experienced a nearly unprecedented one-year rise in severe hunger from 2019 to 2020. The agency’s annual estimate of “undernourishment” showed an increase of up to 25% over 2019 levels, to between 720 and 811 million people.

Sub-Saharan Africa saw as many as 44 million more people suffer severe undernourishment, leaving 30% of the continent’s residents struggling to feed their families. A stunning 66% of the continent faced “moderate or severe food insecurity” in 2020, according to FAO estimates, up from 51% in 2014. That is an increase of 244 million food-insecure people in just six years.

You wouldn’t know it to listen to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which released its 2020 Annual Report the same day the FAO sounded its alarms. After noting the challenges of COVID-19 and climate change, the report gushes about the “evidence of improved productivity, better crop quality, higher incomes, and more months of food from [farmers’] surplus.”

In stark contrast to the well-researched data from the FAO, AGRA’s “evidence” was a sloppy set of hastily compiled data presented with examples carefully chosen to show progress. (See my analysis of AGRA’s report here.)

AGRA seems to be living in a different world from poor, rural Africans, oblivious to the documented shortcomings of its technology-focused approach to agricultural development. AGRA leaders and donors seem unaware that the number of severely undernourished people in Sub-Saharan Africa has risen nearly 50% since AGRA was founded in 2006.

That is why African farmer, faith, and community organizations are now challenging AGRA’s failing model, calling on donor agencies and foundations to stop funding the 15-year-old initiative.

Business as usual at the Food Systems Summit

The COVID-19 pandemic was of course largely to blame for the steep rise in hunger in 2020, but climate change and conflict also contributed. So did misguided agricultural policies.

It was the sixth straight year of increases in undernourishment, a trend that last year prompted U.N. Secretary General Antonio Gutierres to call for this year’s Food Systems Summit. The world was clearly not on track to achieve the core Sustainable Development Goal of eliminating severe hunger by 2030.

The summit has been mired in controversy from the outset. Gutierres was widely criticized for his partnership with the World Economic Forum, the corporate elites who gather each year in Davos to discuss the poor world’s problems, sidelining the Rome-based U.N. agencies that generally take the lead on such matters. He compounded the legitimacy crisis by naming AGRA President Agnes Kalibata as Special Envoy to lead the summit.

Major civil society networks and organizations boycotted the summit preparations, which were denounced for favoring technological solutions offered by corporations while failing to put the right to food – and COVID and climate change – at the center of the agenda. U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri recently issued a blistering critique.

The business-as-usual approach of the summit, with its Nairobi-based staff organizing virtual “dialogues” and vetting “game-changing solutions” to food systems failures, seemed deaf to the loud alarms from the FAO. The worst hunger remains in rural areas in developing countries.

Africa’s failing Green Revolution

For the last 15 years, the Green Revolution has been the dominant approach in Africa. AGRA has led the charge from its Nairobi headquarters, with $1 billion in funding, overwhelmingly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation but also with support from the Rockefeller Foundation a small number of bilateral donors. African governments have chipped in with waves of subsidies to farmers – as much as $1 billion per year altogether – to purchase what the Green Revolution is selling: commercial seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs.

The Green Revolution’s “theory of change” is as simple as it is flawed: put seeds and fertilizers in the hands of small-scale farmers. They will see their yields double, so too their incomes from the sales of surplus crops. And they will become food secure from the food they grow and can now afford to buy.

The evidence suggests that none of that has come to pass. Adoption rates for the expensive new seeds and fertilizers remain low, even with governments subsidizing farmers’ purchases. Many of those who adopt have not achieved large yield increases, even in favored crops such as maize. Few have seen rising incomes from sales of growing surpluses; some have ended up in debt after a bad harvest. And food insecurity has grown from its already alarming levels.

This is less a theory of change than a proven route to continued hunger.

Fiddling in Nairobi

AGRA is set to unveil what it will no doubt present as a bold new strategy. But AGRA will likely do little more than fiddle with its current strategy, just as it has before. Unchanged is the failing premise that commercial seeds and fertilizers can dramatically reduce hunger and poverty in rural Africa through a productivity revolution.

Emperor Nero famously fiddled while Rome burned. AGRA should stop fiddling in Nairobi while more Africans go hungry. And donors should listen to African civil society leaders and say no when AGRA claims to speak for Africans and asks for millions more dollars for its failing strategy.

Timothy A. Wise is senior advisor at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food.

 

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South Africa's Pieter du Preez is overcome by emotion as he wins Paralympic gold in men's road cycling.

Dominican Farmer and Vendor Ayma Louis has COVID restrictions and the hurrricane season to contend with. Credit: Alison Kentish (IPS)

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Aug 31 2021 (IPS)

Around 2 pm on August 18, 89-year-old farmer Whitnel Louis and his wife Ayma began packing up their unsold produce, hoping to leave the capital of Roseau and get home way ahead of the 6 pm curfew recently put in place to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Their pickup was among dozens that lined the Dame Mary Eugenia Charles Boulevard, known by locals simply as ‘the Bayfront,’ a wide street near the ocean with a cruise ship berth, sea defense wall and a docking port that pre-COVID would receive passenger vessels from neighboring islands.

During the three-week curfew period, farmers were permitted to sell their produce along the Bayfront for a few hours every day.

“The curfew was necessary but it was rough. Look at the sun, the heat we are taking. When it’s raining and windy it’s worse. It’s a challenge. We can’t ship our produce overseas like before. The vendors who buy from us to resell want to give us next to nothing for the produce, forgetting all the hard work that goes into farming,” Louis told IPS.

While the farming couple is dealing with the impacts of measures to curtail the spread of COVID-19, the present hurricane season is anxiety-inducing. The Louis were hard hit by two weather systems in the last six years. In 2015, during Tropical Storm Erika, a river burst its banks and raged through their home, destroying all their belongings. In 2017 category five hurricane Maria destroyed their farm.

“Everything was down. Pears, mangoes, coconuts. I had five sheds and the hurricane ripped them apart. Wood was flying everywhere. Today, I still don’t have a single shed on my farm, because I do not have the money to rebuild,” Louis told IPS.

Ahead of the annual hurricane season, the country’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit referenced the dual challenge facing small island states in the Caribbean.

“Hurricane Season is here amid a COVID-19 pandemic. To be safe during the season, I suggest you all prepare a COVI-CANE supply kit,” he stated in a social media post.

Residents were urged to follow guidelines that included having a traditional hurricane preparedness bag with adequate supplies to last at least three days, along with a COVID-19 kit with gloves, masks, hand sanitizers and rubbing alcohol.

The messaging, tailored for a time when the country might have to deal with two major crises, mirrored the instructions and operations of the Office of Disaster Preparedness.

“Where we were at this time last year to where we are now, we have a lot more information and we have made some advancements, so all notices and public announcements have included current COVID-19 messaging, reminding Dominicans that even as we prepare for hurricanes, remember that COVID-19 is still around and we must take all necessary precautions to protect lives,” Programme Officer at the Office of Disaster Management Mandela Christian told IPS.

The pandemic has spared no sector and the disaster preparedness official said the department is using technology to continue its work.

“A lot of the old preparations were done face to face including meetings and training to prepare for upcoming hurricane seasons. With this pandemic, one of the key management protocols is physical distancing. It changes things, for example, if we get impacted, we would have had to convene the National Emergency Operation Centre and bring people into a central location. This has to be reformed and restructured. As far as possible we have transitioned to virtual sessions,” Christian said.

“There are some limitations for example in rescue operations. You can’t remotely rescue somebody and there will be times to deliver relief supplies to the population. What we have been doing is reviewing protocols, informed by health systems, not just nationally, but also regionally and internationally,” the disaster official told IPS.

Dominica, like countries the world over, has been promoting vaccination as one of the best safeguards against the pandemic and to avoid a mass outbreak of COVID-19 in the event of a natural disaster.

The country has seen a recent surge in positive cases and in August, recorded its first COVID-19 related death.

“I am confident. For myself, for my family and everyone that vaccination works. I am not saying that it is 100 percent effective, or bulletproof, but it works in reducing transmission and the severe disease form of COVID-19. I am appealing to those still waiting and deciding – it’s time to get vaxxed,” National Epidemiologist Dr Shalauddin Ahmed told an August 24 press briefing.

It is a plea that health officials throughout the hemisphere continue to make.

Director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), Dominican Dr Carissa Etienne has expressed concern over the slow vaccine uptake in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Just about 18 percent of people in the hemisphere have been fully vaccinated against COVID 19.

“What we are seeing now is persons totally relaxing on the public health measures and a high level of vaccine hesitancy,” Etienne  told a press briefing. “Even when vaccines are available, persons are not coming forward. We are seeing vaccine hesitancy in healthcare workers.”

“I don’t know the sources of the information that is triggering this level of vaccine hesitancy. I can tell you that they are not scientifically proven, and I want to appeal to you to listen to the sources where you have truthful, scientifically based information and evidence,” she added.

PAHO’s suggested measures for a ‘COVICANE’ season include evacuation and emergency shelter plans that factor in physical distancing and rigorous sanitization – along with mass vaccination campaigns.

Dominica’s curfew has been lifted and farmers like Whitnel Louis can sell their produce for longer hours – as long as they adhere to the strict public health and safety protocols.

But with an average of 80 cases a day over the past week and continued appeals for thousands more people to embrace vaccination, COVID-19 concerns are far from over.

“There is no good sign in sight,” said Mr Louis, as he reflected on his series of losses to natural disasters and the present challenges in a pandemic that has left no sector untouched.

“I’m hoping the Lord spares us this hurricane season.”

 

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By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Aug 31 2021 (IPS)

Do you know if midwife services are available at the Saupia Health Centre in Paunangisu, on the island of Efate in Vanuatu, in the Pacific Islands? I do, and I’ve never been within 1,000 kilometres of the facility — I found the information online within seconds thanks to a data platform called Tupaia.

Developed in 2017 as a system for tracking items on the extremely lengthy supply chains of health materials in the Pacific Islands, today Tupaia is aggregating data about health, education and the environment from a number of unrelated sources, analysing it, and presenting it in an interactive online map.

“You can look at the national level and see how many people have accessed health services within a specified time frame or you can zoom into a province or a district and see more specifically details about where there are maybe gaps to people accessing the health system, or where people are doing really well, and that allows a country to set up different responses”

“If you want to see how many people a country has had in respect to a Covid outbreak, or a dengue outbreak, that sort of information will be displayed in Tupaia,” says Erin Nunan, director of Beyond Essential Services, the company that created the platform.

“You can look at the national level and see how many people have accessed health services within a specified time frame or you can zoom into a province or a district and see more specifically details about where there are maybe gaps to people accessing the health system, or where people are doing really well, and that allows a country to set up different responses,” adds Nunan in a video interview ahead of the Small Islands States (SIDS) Solutions Forum taking place online and in person 30-31 August 2021.

Tupaia is one of the innovations being featured at the event, which aims to kickstart SIDS’ efforts to reach the global development goals by 2030. Organised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in partnership with the UN International Telecommunications Union and co-hosted by the Government of Fiji, the forum gathers representatives of the 38 SIDS worldwide, UN agencies and civil society.

The economies of many SIDS have been battered by COVID-19 restrictions, which have smothered the key tourist trade. Many were also already struggling with monumental challenges like rising sea levels and growing numbers of extreme weather events as a result of climate change. The forum, which ends Tuesday, is meant to “incubate, promote and scale-up home-grown and imported solutions to accelerate the achievement of the agriculture, food and nutrition related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” says the website.

The makers of Tupaia believe that the platform has moved countries closer to the targets for SDG3 (health and well-being), SDG6 (water and sanitation for all) and SDG 17 (strengthen implementation and partnership for sustainable development). Their company, Beyond Essential Systems, has also released Tamanu, a medical records system.

Today, Tupaia operates in six Pacific Island countries, and beyond, collecting data in real time from nearly 800 facilities using a variety of sources including its own app, MediTrak, and creating visualizations that health systems, workers and even patients can use for decision-making. In Fiji, it is helping to track Covid-19 swab samples.

Open source and free, thanks to funding from the Government of Australia and others, Tupaia’s data collection, management, and visualization tools can also be used to collect environmental data to manage resources such as water stations and for disaster response. In Papua New Guinea, the platform is used to track the incidence of malaria.

“It might be a nurse in a clinic, it might be an administrator in a single province, those are the people that we really consider to be the customers of the software, the actual end users,” says Michael Nunan, CEO of Beyond Essential Systems, in another video interview for the SIDS Solutions Forum.

For example, in 2018 an order for cold chain medicines for the island of Kiribati was delayed. As a result, a busy facility ran out of several items, including insulin and Hepatitis B vaccine. But the facility nurse was able to log on to Tupaia and instantly see which nearby facilities had a functioning fridge and stock of the needed medicines. She contacted one of them and was able to organise a quick delivery of stock so there was little interruption to patient care.

Named after a Polynesian navigator who joined the crew of Captain James Cook in 1769, Tupaia takes data that is often siloed in specialised software designed for specific purposes and integrates it in dashboards that are customisable for a variety of user groups.

Tupaia’s data sources, supply chain software for vaccines and other medicines, health information software, and data collection applications, deliver information about health infrastructure including cold-chain, critical medical equipment, staff, and service provision.

“Whatever it is you want to do with data, whether it’s data collection, data aggregation, analysis, visualization, or dissemination, we want you to be able to do that with Tupaia,” says Michael Nunan in the video interview.

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Aug 31 2021 (IPS)

With elections right round the corner in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said that a re-elected Liberal government would spend billions in the coming years to hire family doctors. This report says, Justin Trudeau promised that the Liberals would spend $3 billion over four years starting in 2022 to hire 7500 family doctors and nurses as well as tax and student loan incentives for health professionals who set up shop in rural or remote communities and also pledges an extra $6 billion to wrestle with wait lists.

Dr. Shafi Bhuiyan

A 2019 report states that there were 91,375 physicians in Canada, representing 241 physicians per 100,000 population. According to the Canadian Medical Association, around five million Canadians don’t have a primary care physician, or family health care team.

Canada’s overburdened healthcare system is yet to tap into its advantage all the untapped talent and skills available to it, as seen during the significant role Internationally Trained Medical Doctors, ITMDs played in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the vaccination clinics, working as contact tracing managers and mental health advisors.

Canada is losing out by not involving and including ITMDs, says Dr. Shafi Bhuiyan, a health professional and Chair of ITMDs Canada Network (iCAN). “Over 4.5 million Canadians are not able to find their family physician, as a result the wait time to see a doctor has been increasing continuously, which is also resulting in social peace and justice disruption.”

Canada currently has more than 13,000 ITMDs, and the visa process, Bhuiyan says, has “a very thorough and rigorous screening program by the Canadian CIC, where medical experience plays a key role along with other requirements to enter the country, but once they come to Canada, due to multiple reasons, they lose out on securing a residency position”.

Saida Azam

Saida Azam is one such ITMD who moved to Canada almost three years ago with her husband for better career opportunities. Azam, a medical professional with experience working in India and Oman, says, “I have performed a number of surgeries and deliveries, I worked as a family physician for three years, but right now I am waiting to be able to do that here.

“The knowledge that I have in this field is really good, the only difference in relation to the Canadian context, with medicine, is that when I move from one territory or one country to another, things will be different, from the patients to the region and other such things. That doesn’t mean that I have less knowledge or the local doctors here have more. What would help people like me is, if there were a training program in place for Internationally Trained Medical Doctors to integrate us better into the Canadian healthcare system.

“Canada is home now, I wouldn’t say I am completely disappointed, but I hope that I will be able to share my expertise and pursue my career, ” says Azam.

One of the key challenges for ITMDs remains cost associated with licensing examinations, the CaRMS application process is often a barrier for newcomers. According to this report, 47 % of foreign-educated health professionals are either unemployed or employed in non-health related positions that require only a high school diploma.

The on-going Pandemic has been a time of crisis all over the world, and with shortage and with the under-utilization of health-care workers in Canada, the country is only creating a strain on its health care system by not including and leveraging on its ITMDs.

The 2020 OECD Policy Responses of Coronavirus (COVID19) report says, “by encouraging the creation of new jobs in the health sector globally, the report suggested a unique opportunity both to respond to the growing global demand for health workers and to address the projected shortages. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many OECD countries have recognised migrant health workers as key assets and introduced policies to help their arrival and the recognition of their qualifications.”

In 2020, Canada, where annual immigration amounts to around 300,000 new immigrants, announced its 2021-2023 Immigration Levels Plan, saying it would target the highest level of immigration in its history by welcoming 401,000 immigrants in 2021, 411,000 immigrants in 2022, 421,000 immigrants in 2023.

“The only time Canada welcomed over 400,000 immigrants in a year was in 1913, when it admitted 401,000 newcomers. It has never come close to this figure again,” this report states.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) says developing countries host more than one-third of international migrants in the world and most immigrants are migrant workers and are employed either formally or more often informally in their countries of destination.

This report by the ILO states the importance of immigrants and how “immigration plays a key role in the destination countries development and public policies can play an important role in enhancing its contribution to the development of destination countries. Excluding immigration from development strategies can represent missed opportunities for host countries.”

“The Canadian government is missing out by not including a pool of talent it has to its access, if these hurdles can be removed, and instead replaced by a more simpler and transparent process towards obtaining approved medical licence, it would be a win-win situation for all,” says Bhuiyan.

If Canada is able to overcome these systemic barriers and inequity towards its ITMDs, with a pool of talented immigrants, it has the potential that will not only impact the countries economic prosperity, immigrants alter the country’s income distribution and influence investment priorities and as taxpayers contribute to the public budget and benefit from public services.

The author is a journalist and filmmaker based out of New Delhi. She hosts a weekly online show called The Sania Farooqui Show where Muslim women from around the world are invited to share their views. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Credit: Frank Dejongh / UNICEF

By Annalena Oppel
HELSINKI, Aug 31 2021 (IPS)

How can we ensure a resilient and inclusive recovery from COVID-19? How can we hold on to the target of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, with the pandemic still ongoing?

I recently had the opportunity to participate as a lead discussant at the UN DESA expert group meeting with many distinguished speakers sharing their insights on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030 despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of sessions discussed future pathways for social protection. Discussants evaluated a set of policies that are gaining significant interest as a tool for recovery but also in building more resilient, adaptive, and inclusive social protection systems going forward.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increased number of social protection measures to help people cope with economic challenges. A total of 4,648 policy measures that addressed the economic and health challenges of the pandemic were identified worldwide.

Most of them fall into the field of social assistance (for example cash or in-kind transfers), with 955 policies receiving fiscal support from a government (UNESCWA, 2021).

However, many of these programmes are temporary, and it is not yet evident whether they will remain an integral part of social protection in the long run.

Annalena Oppel

Many of the challenges that have gained greater visibility during the pandemic have existed long before the pandemic started. As evidenced by the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community and policy makers were still in the pursuit of ending poverty and hunger, and establishing good health and well-being.

Yet as many as 115 million people might be pushed into extreme poverty by the end of 2021 — a major setback in the progress already made. Hence, challenges that continued to exist before can worsen if they remain unaddressed.

Social protection can constitute a tool to address multiple challenges, including poverty, food insecurity or inequalities.

A major concern or point of debate is fiscal space or fiscal prioritization. In other words, to what extent can countries afford and sustain social protection programmes.

This is an ongoing debate, with parties providing various funding solutions, but the most sustainable is often considered to be that of domestic revenues. An initiative in 2015 showed that countries do not need to invest an unreasonable amount in order to implement Social Protection Floors – a framework that captures basic provisions in the area of income and health. In 103 countries, the required resources would amount to less than 5 percent of GDP.

There are then only 12 countries which would require international assistance to implement Social Protection Floors as required resources exceed 10 percent of GDP.

Already in 2012 – the same year that ILO proposed the Social Protection Floor (Recommendation 202), two UN experts proposed a Global Fund for Social Protection (GFSP) for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to ensure financial feasibility and enable countries to put ambitious social protection schemes into place.

In light of COVID-19, there is a growing momentum to revisit this proposal (for example, see here and here).

Another important aspect that was discussed during the expert forum is the availability of data. Data enables evidence-based policy making or to assess the design and feasibility of social policies.

Regarding fiscal capacity, the Government Revenue Dataset (with a newly released version in August 2021) can provide a valuable source on domestic revenues. It covers tax and revenue collection in 196 countries since the 1980s and can provide some insights into how previous crises may have affected fiscal space.

Band-aids or pathways to sustainable development?

Overall, the GFSP and current discussions provide examples of opportunities to propel social protection forward in order to address poverty and inequality.

Ongoing debates, political will, fiscal space, and prioritization will show whether we are on a pathway towards more adaptive, inclusive, and sustained social protection systems, or whether the current expansion of programmes remain short-lived initiatives.

As we move forward, research can support this process by providing timely insights and advice on the effectiveness of current programmes in addressing persistent challenges, e.g., poverty, hunger, and inequality.

At UNU-WIDER, the GRD project, as part of the Domestic Revenue Mobilization programme, is working on different aspects of revenue collection, which can support developing countries to make social protection a lasting solution towards sustainable development.

It is also important to gain a better understanding of the current political climate to see whether public support is aligned with a global mission of building back better, within which social protection can play a crucial role.

*The UN University- World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) provides economic analysis and policy advice with the aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development for all. The institute began operations over 30 years ago in Helsinki, Finland, as the first research centre of the United Nations University.

The writer is a Research Associate at UNU-WIDER* working on the World Income Inequality Database and the Government Revenue Dataset. She obtained her PhD from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or the United Nations University, nor the programme/project donors.

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 31 2021 (IPS)

The pandemic is pushing back the world’s poorest countries with the least means to finance economic recovery and contagion containment efforts. Without international solidarity, economic gaps will grow again as COVID-19 threatens humanity for years to come.

Least developed
While bringing some concessions, the ‘least developed countries’ (LDCs) designation – introduced five decades ago – has not generated changes needed to accelerate sustainable development for all.

Anis Chowdhury

The United Nations (UN) General Assembly created the LDCs category for its Second Development Decade (1971-80). Its resolution sought support for its 25 poorest Member States, with Sikkim out after India’s 1975 annexation.

With many others joining, the LDCs list rose to 49 in 2001. Half a century later, with only seven having ‘graduated’ – after meeting income, ‘human assets’ and economic & environmental vulnerability criteria – the 44 remaining LDCs have 14% of the world’s people.

With more than two-thirds in Sub-Saharan Africa, LDCs have over half the world’s extreme poor, surviving on under US$1.9 daily. LDCs are 27% more vulnerable than other developing countries, where 12% are extreme poor.

LDC criteria differ from World Bank low-income country benchmarks for concessional loan eligibility. Some LDCs – especially the resource-rich – are middle-income countries (MICs) disqualified from graduation by other criteria.

Most LDCs have become greatly aid reliant. Despite grandiloquent pronouncements, only 6 of 29 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ‘development partners’ have kept promises to give at least 0.15% of their national incomes as aid to LDCs.

Chasing mirages?
The UN has organised conferences every decade since to review progress and action programmes for LDC governments and development partners. The first – in Paris – was in 1981, while the fifth will be in Doha in January 2022.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The 2011 Istanbul conference ambitiously sought to graduate at least half the LDCs by 2020. But only three – Samoa (2014), Equatorial Guinea (2017) and Vanuatu (2020) – have done so. Worse, most ex-LDCs have had difficulties sustaining development after graduating.

During the 1980s and 1990s, many developing countries implemented macroeconomic stabilisation and structural adjustment policies from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

These imposed liberalisation, privatisation and austerity across the board, including many LDCs. Unsurprisingly, ‘lost decades’ followed for most of Africa and Latin America.

Midas curse
Botswana, the first graduate in 1994, is now an upper MIC. Its diamond boom enabled 13.5% average annual growth during 1968-90. Unsurprisingly, Botswana’s ‘good governance’, institutions and ‘prudent’ macroeconomic policies were hailed as parts of this “African success story”.

However, the accolades do not sit well. Mineral-rich Botswana remains vulnerable. Right after graduation, average growth fell sharply to 4.7% during 1995-2005, and has never exceeded 4.5% since 2008.

Manufacturing’s share of GDP fell to 5.2% in 2019, after rising from 5.6% in 2000 to 6.4% in 2010. Nearly 60% of its people have less than the Bank’s MIC poverty line of US$5.50 daily.

Botswana remains highly unequal. During 1986-2002, life expectancy fell 11 years, mainly due to HIV/AIDS. When the government embraced austerity, its already weak health system suffered a disastrous brain drain.

Policy independence crucial
Although they have not yet graduated, several LDCs have successfully begun diversifying their economies. Their policy initiatives offer important lessons for others.

Neither Bangladesh and Ethiopia would qualify as a ‘good governance’ model by criteria once so beloved by the Bank and OECD. Instead, they have successfully intervened to address critical development bottlenecks.

Once considered a ‘basket case’, Bangladesh is now a lower MIC. Diversifying deliberately, rather than pursuing Washington’s policies, it has become quite resilient, averaging 6% growth for over a decade, despite the 2008-09 global financial crisis and current pandemic.

Bangladesh saw the potential for exporting manpower to earn valuable foreign exchange and work experience. In 1976, it agreed to provide labour for Saudi Arabia’s oil-financed boom.

Similarly, as newly industrialised economies no longer qualified for privileged Multi-Fibre Arrangement market access, Dhaka worked with Seoul from 1978 to take over South Korean garment exports.

Bangladesh is also the only LDC to have taken advantage of the 1982 World Health Organization’s essential drugs policy. Its National Drug Policy blocks imports and sales of non-essential drugs. Thus, its now vibrant generic pharmaceutical industry has emerged.

Allow pragmatism
During 2004-19, Ethiopia’s growth averaged over 9%. Poverty declined from 46% in 1995 to 24% in 2016 as industry’s share of output rose from 9.4% in 2010 to 24.8% in 2019.

Avoiding ‘Washington Consensus’ policies, Ethiopian industrial policy drove structural change. Manufacturing grew by 10% yearly during 2005-10, and by 18% during 2015-17.

With improved governance, state-owned enterprises still dominate banks, utilities, airlines, chemical, sugar and other strategic industries. Ethiopia opened banks to domestic investors, keeping foreign ones out. Meanwhile, privatisation has been limited and gradual.

Instead of full exchange rate liberalisation, it adopted a ‘managed float’ system. While market prices were liberalised, critical prices – e.g., for petroleum products and fertilisers – have remained regulated.

Neither Bangladesh nor Ethiopia have embraced central bank independence or formal ‘inflation targeting frameworks’, once demanded by the IMF and others, ostensibly for macroeconomic stability and growth.

Both countries retain reformed specialised development banks to direct credit to policy priorities, while Bangladesh’s central bank has “remained proactive in its mandated developmental role”.

Policy is destiny
In development and structural transformation, ‘path dependency’ implies policy is destiny. LDCs’ current predicaments are largely due to policies from decades ago, pushed by international organisations and development partners.

Reform agendas now should avoid ambitious comprehensive efforts which will overwhelm LDCs with modest resources and capabilities. Also, there is no ‘magic bullet’ or ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy package for all LDCs.

Policies should be appropriate to country circumstances, considering their limited options and difficult trade-offs. They must be politically, economically and institutionally feasible, pragmatic, and target overcoming critical constraints.

OECD development partners must instead meet their commitments and support national development strategies. They must resist presuming to know what is best for LDCs, e.g., requiring them to ape Washington and OECD fads.

 

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The highly polluting fuel has contaminated the atmosphere, water and crops for nearly a century.

Modupe Osunkoya enrolled on her third post-graduate degree because she says there are no jobs at home.

A view of Explora's biodiesel plant on the outskirts of the city of Rosario, where most of the companies that process soybean oil in Argentina are concentrated. In recent years, biofuels have generated investments of more than three billion dollars in the country, in addition to more than one billion dollars a year in exports, before the collapse in demand caused by the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Courtesy of Explora

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

Argentina, historically an agricultural powerhouse, has become a major producer of biofuels in recent years. However, this South American country is now moving backwards in the use of this oil substitute in transportation, a decision in which economics weighed heavily and environmental concerns have been ignored.

On Jul. 15, with the support of the government of centre-left President Alberto Fernández, Congress passed a new Biofuels Regulatory Framework, which will be in force until 2030.

The new law published on Aug. 4 reduced from 10 to five percent the minimum mandatory blend of soybean oil biodiesel in diesel fuel, and gave the executive branch the option of lowering it to three percent if deemed necessary to cut fuel prices for consumers."To mitigate we need all the available tools. And in this case, perhaps the worst thing is the setback in an area in which the country has gained a great deal of know-how and capacity, making it one of the largest users of renewable energy in transportation worldwide." -- Luciano Caratori

With respect to gasoline, the law maintained the current 12 percent bioethanol – based on corn and sugar cane – blend, but gives the government the option of lowering it to nine percent.

“The mandatory blends of petroleum-derived fuels with biofuels came into effect in 2010 and since then have generated the largest reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Argentine history, at least until 2019,” energy consultant Luciano Caratori, a researcher at the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation, which focuses on environmental issues, and former undersecretary of energy planning, told IPS.

The expert mentioned 2019 because it was the first year that non-conventional renewable energies – basically wind and solar – represented a significant share of electricity generation in this Southern Cone country of 44.4 million people.

Today, according to official figures, they account for 9.7 percent of the electricity mix, in a country where 87 percent of the primary energy supply is based on fossil fuels: 54 percent natural gas, 31 percent oil, and the rest, coal.

Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is a net exporter of oil, but due to its limited refining capacity it is also a net importer of gasoline and diesel.

Caratori said the reduction in biofuel use is inconsistent with the climate change mitigation commitments Argentina submitted in December 2020, in the update of its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.

This country has committed to cutting GHG emissions by more than 20 percent by 2030 from the 2007 peak, and to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

One of the ways to reach these goals, according to the NDC, is to reduce emissions from transportation – a sector that accounted for 33 percent of total energy demand in 2019 – through the use of biofuels and hydrogen and electrification.

The Argentine Senate special public session in which the law reducing the mandatory percentage of biofuels in the blend with petroleum derivatives was approved. Most of the legislators voted remotely, due to COVID pandemic restrictions. CREDIT: Argentine Senate

“There don’t seem to be too many opportunities in Argentina to offset the emissions savings lost from reducing biofuel use, and 2030 is just around the corner,” said Caratori.

“To mitigate we need all the available tools,” he stressed. “And in this case, perhaps the worst thing is the setback in an area in which the country has gained a great deal of know-how and capacity, making it one of the largest users of renewable energy in transportation worldwide.”

In the Senate, the ruling party’s Rubén Uñac, chair of the energy commission, acknowledged that the biofuels industry made possible the creation of “new companies and thousands of jobs” over the last decade, through “more than three billion dollars in investments.” But he said the system was in need of “in-depth reform.”

In the opposition, the chair of the Senate commission on the environment and sustainable development, Senator Gladys González, denounced “fierce lobbying by the oil companies” and argued that the government “says one thing and does another,” because it expresses in public a deep commitment to the fight against climate change that does not translate into action.

A study published in July by Caratori and Jorge Hilbert, an expert with the government’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), points out that the current installed biodiesel and bioethanol production capacity could cover between 4.5 and 8.0 percent of Argentina’s international commitment to GHG emissions reduction.

“The decarbonisation opportunity offered by biofuels is considered to be very significant with minimal investment,” the paper underscores.

Pros and cons, depending on who is looking at it

In any case, the real environmental impact of biofuels is disputed. María Marta Di Paola, director of research at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), raised several reservations.

View of a soybean field in the province of Santa Fe, in western Argentina. Biodiesel is made from soybean oil in more than 50 plants near the city of Rosario, located in the south of the province. CREDIT: Confederaciones Rurales de Argentina

“We are concerned that they fuel the expansion of the agricultural frontier, compete with the use of crops for food and rely on agricultural production that is highly dependent on fossil fuels,” she told IPS.

“Consequently, although biofuels are presented as an alternative for the energy transition, it is very difficult to quantify their real contribution to the fight against climate change,” said the expert from FARN, one of the country’s most respected environmental institutions.

“In any case, the decision made by the government and Congress had to do with other issues, which clearly demonstrates that the priority given in Argentina to environmental debates is very low,” Di Paola asserted.

At any rate, the industry dismisses the misgivings that are raised.

“Less than five percent of Argentina’s arable land is involved in biofuel production,” Claudio Molina, executive director of the Argentine Biofuels and Hydrogen Association, which has been promoting biofuel production for 15 years, told IPS. “Only three percent of the total corn harvest is used to make bioethanol.”

In Argentina, biodiesel, produced by national and international private capital, received its first big boost through exports, which between 2012 and 2019 generated more than one billion dollars a year, according to official data.

However, the drop in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp decline in 2020, when exports dropped to 468 million dollars.

The main market is the European Union, since the United States slapped high tariffs on Argentina’s biodiesel in 2017 to protect its soybean producers.

The pandemic’s impact on demand and a rise in the price of biodiesel put pressure on the government and left it with two alternatives that it wants to avoid: authorise an increase in consumer fuel prices or reduce the profit margin of the oil companies, especially the state-owned YPF.

This is included in the text of the new law, which states that the government reserves the right to further reduce the percentage of biofuels in the fuel blends when an increase in the prices of biodiesel or bioethanol inputs “could distort the price of fossil fuels at the pump.”

Axel Boerr is vice-president of Explora, a company with the capacity to produce 120,000 tons of biodiesel per year at its plant on the outskirts of the city of Rosario, an area he describes as “Argentina’s Kuwait”, due to the number of factories that generate energy from oil from the soybean fields that abound in the area.

In an interview with IPS, Boerr said biofuels were a way to add value to agricultural production and help Latin American countries become more than just exporters of primary products.

“In addition, this will aggravate our external dependence, because Argentina is an importer of gasoline and diesel and will have to buy more and more, since it has no more oil refining capacity,” he predicted.

The political negotiations ensured that the current six percent blend would remain in place for sugarcane bioethanol. This secured votes in Congress from legislators from the northwest provinces, which are sugarcane producers.

A possible reduction from six to three percent was left open in the case of corn bioethanol.

“We don’t believe in the argument that we have to take care of consumer fuel prices, because what determines them is oil, not biofuels,” Patrick Adam, executive director of the Corn Bioethanol Chamber, told IPS.

“Today we are working at 70 percent of our capacity and with these changes, which represent a step backwards in terms of the climate, we would drop to 40 percent. We were ready to grow and this law caught us off guard,” he concluded.

By Farhana Haque Rahman
TORONTO, Canada, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

Whether desperately trying to get a place on the last evacuation flights out of Kabul or trekking to the borders with neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, tens of thousands of Afghans are fleeing their country once more.

Events are unfolding at speed. The Taliban are establishing a central government in the capital to fill the void of the collapsed western-backed administration, but they do not control all the country as the protracted civil war enters a new stage. The UN refugee agency UNHCR says that in its “worst case scenario” it is preparing for around 500,000 new refugees in the region by the end of this year. As with many past estimates that could prove optimistic.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Even before the Taliban’s rapid advances in August, conflict this year had displaced an estimated 390,000 people within Afghanistan, and some 14 million were seriously short of food, with prolonged drought across much of the country.

Since the Soviet invasion of late 1979, Afghanistan has seen millions of refugees exiting its borders in waves, creating diasporas near and far. In periods of relative calm many have returned.

But this latest exodus faces a far more hostile world. The tide of international opinion, often driven by rejectionist nationalism, has been turning against refugees in general. Only just recently some western countries were deporting Afghan refugees. Newly erected barriers – whether fences or walls – are becoming the international norm. Refugee quotas have been slashed.

Turkey, already sheltering some 3.7 million registered refugees, has warned Europe it will not become its “refugee warehouse” again after the deal negotiated in 2016 to accept Syrian refugees in exchange for aid. Pakistan and Iran, already host to an estimated total of some five million registered and unregistered Afghan refugees, do not want any more. Britain, with all its historic connections, is opening its doors to only 20,000 Afghans over the next five years. President Joe Biden has authorised $500 million in refugee spending but it is unclear how many refugees might find a home in the US itself. Ottawa pledged to resettle 20,000 Afghan refugees threatened by the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. “Offering refuge to the world’s most vulnerable speaks to who we are as Canadians, particularly in times of crisis,” said Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino.

Worldwide refugee numbers keep rising and are at their highest since the Second Wolrd War. UNHCR’s Refugee Population Statistics Database shows that by late June there were 82.4 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, of whom an estimated 35 million are children under the age of 18. Nearly 70 percent of the total are from five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar.

Yet it is the images and personal stories that carry so much more impact than the bare statistics. For Syria possibly the most devastating, and also far reaching in political terms, was the picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach, drowned trying to reach Europe with his family. Those pictures of Afghans packed into a US military transport plane have defined the chaos in Kabul, soon followed by the carnage of a suicide bombing.

But stories that do convey hope also make it seem possible to the public and donors that something can be done to help, even with relatively small amounts of money.

Naturally everyone displaced by conflict has his or her own story, although it must be recognized that some would rather not tell theirs for reasons to be respected. I have my own to share, briefly.

I first became aware of Afghanistan when, as a young child in the ‘60s in what was then East Pakistan I read in Bangla, Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Kabuliwalah”. The tale of the kind, compassionate man who periodically left his family behind to sell goods he carried in a large sack and make loans to Bengalis made a deep impression, as did his sense of humour and his attachment to a little girl Mini, clearly a cherished substitute for his own children back in Kabul. He was at first a rather frightening figure, giving her treats from his sack, but he slowly gained her and her father’s confidence and respect.

My next contact with Afghanistan was more direct, fraught with danger. While a student in an all-girls British run college in Lahore, Pakistan, my country of birth Bangladesh became independent. I fled what was then West Pakistan, avoiding camps and a protracted repatriation, to reach the newly independent country, taking a hazardous route by ‘tanga’ horse drawn carriages, trucks and buses across inhospitable terrain and mountain through Quetta and the border crossing of Chaman into Afghanistan. Along the way, in no man’s land, armed smugglers extorted more money from our group of about 40, some of them families with children, and one night we had to trek over mountains, exhausted to the point of hallucination. Fearing death but quite ignorant of the danger of rape, dressed in a white ‘burqa’ throughout the perilous journey, monitoring with piercing eyes the movement of those who were temporarily my guardian angels, I made it to the Indian embassy in Kabul after spending days in a dilapidated farmhouse in Kandahar, and, with Indian ID papers, we were flown to New Delhi then on to Kolkata by train, eventually making it to Dhaka after 23 harrowing days. I was fortunate to make it; the new country was still reeling from a war that cost millions of lives. Nearly 50 years later that is so often not the case.

“The resilience of the Afghan people has been pushed to the limit by prolonged conflict, high levels of displacement, the impact of COVID-19, recurrent natural disasters, including drought, and deepening poverty,” UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch told a briefing in Geneva on July 13.

As the Afghan conflict intensified earlier this year, more refugees set out on long and hazardous journeys through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey towards Europe, often paying gangs of exploitative smugglers and people traffickers. Turkey, where authorities estimate there are already some 300,000 registered and unregistered Afghan refugees, is strengthening its border network of walls and fences. Greece, which sees itself as Europe’s ‘front line’ is doing the same.

Reece Jones, a professor of political geography, has researched how in recent decades countries have become inter-connected through complex networks of transport and communication, but the purpose of borders has shifted to become the place where the movement of people is controlled.

“Border security and the construction of walls have increased dramatically in the supposedly borderless world of globalisation,” he says.

As walls and fences go up, so do the dramatic increases in migrant deaths. More than 2000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe over the past year, according to the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration.

Countries announcing new border barriers in recent years include Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the “beautiful wall” of former president Donald Trump on the US-Mexico border. Lithuania is the latest, with its parliament voting in August to erect a metal fence topped with razor wire to keep out migrants, many recently from Iraq, crossing into its territory from Belarus.

Prof. Jones says the borders of the EU are “by far the most deadly” with roughly two-thirds of all migration related deaths occurring there or on the way to the EU. The high death rate, he says, is a combination of an extremely dangerous border in the Mediterranean sea coupled with increased enforcement that drives people to use smugglers and take more risks, as tragically seen in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese found suffocated to death in a refrigerated trailer near a UK port in 2019.

Walls did not work in the past and only divert but do not prevent migrant flows, but they are powerfully effective symbols used by politicians to demonstrate they are addressing perceived economic, cultural and security threats from migrants.

The EU, says Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance: exile and refuge at the borders of Europe, has perhaps the world’s most complex system to deter unwanted migrants, spending billions of dollars on surveillance systems and patrols on land and sea.

In reality the EU tries to prevent even genuine asylum seekers from reaching its territory, as by cutting aid deals with Turkey. The Syrian refugee crisis of 2015, when one million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe, triggered bitter disputes over collective burden sharing that remain unresolved.

While the last US and other foreign troops fly out of Kabul this week, ending a two-decade military campaign, UN agencies are remaining. The World Food Programme says it is “committed to stay and deliver as long as conditions will allow” and needs $200 million to get through to the end of the year. In the first six months of this year, WFP delivered food and nutrition assistance to 5.5 million people, including those newly displaced by fighting.

UNHCR is maintaining staff in Afghanistan and says that at present it is able to access all provinces and continues to work with 18 local non-government partners. “We call on donors to remain steadfast in their support for humanitarian operations in Afghanistan and are also appealing for support,” the agency said, noting that UNHCR’s Supplementary Appeal for the Afghanistan Situation is “drastically underfunded at 43 per cent”.

Borders around the world are being sealed to migrants and refugees, but the international community cannot walk away from Afghanistan and close its eyes.

Farhana Haque Rahman is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. A journalist and communications expert, she is Executive Director, IPS Noram and Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service.

 

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Cattle farming in Jamica. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

Even as COVID-19 walloped Jamaica’s economy last year, the government overhauled its energy emissions milestones to create what many described as a post-pandemic recovery package, based on stronger carbon targets for the farming and forestry sectors.

According to the plan, the country would reduce emissions from both sectors by almost a third over the next decade, by optimising water and energy use and diversifying food production.

Released at a time when most countries around the globe struggled to manage their economies during the pandemic using measures that were expected to set back their sustainability goals, experts hailed the plan as a game changer for a country in a steep economic decline resulting from COVID-19.

With tens of thousands of jobs lost, the government turned to the island’s fast-expanding business process outsourcing (BPO) sector as a much-needed source of jobs, providing a level of diversification from the agrarian society of old. Initially focused on call centres, the sector has expanded to include to more specialised areas including accounting, human resources management, digital marketing, animation and software development.

Climate change expert Carlos Fuller said the new measures “will create new economic opportunities and generate employment for Jamaicans.”

Changes in land use, for development and increased agricultural activities, and reducing deforestation will cut emissions up to 28.5 per cent by 2030, according to the plan, which satisfies both local and international targets. Agriculture currently contributes about six per cent to Jamaica’s total emissions, while land use change and forestry account for 7.8 per cent.

Jamaica is one of the Caribbean’s small island developing states (SIDS). On Monday and Tuesday, representatives of the 38 SIDS worldwide, UN agencies and civil society will gather in person and online to discuss how they can kickstart their economies post-COVID-19 in order to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

The SIDS Solution Forum is organised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in partnership with the UN International Telecommunications Union and co-hosted by the Government of Fiji.

Other current investments in Jamaica have made climate data collection, modelling and analysis priorities. Projects like the Climate Data and Information Management Project should help to improve the collection and analysis of climate data while strengthening early warning systems. The Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project is expected to enhance physical resilience to disasters.

Co-heads of the Climate Studies Group at the University of the West Indies, Dr Michael Taylor and Dr Tannecia Stephenson, recently deciphered the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in terms of what it could mean for the region.

“The intensity and frequency of heat extremes in the Caribbean are increasing and will continue to do so. It will impact energy use, demands for water, agricultural production among other things,” Dr Taylor said.

Jamaica’s emissions and development goals are tied together in the country’s Vision 2030 Development plan, an ambitious guide for this highly indebted nation’s development. Launched in 2014, the document aims to make “Jamaica the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business.”

There have been tweaks, updates and a Road Map, but Vision 2030 remains grounded in four interrelated national goals: Jamaicans are empowered to achieve their fullest potential, society is secure, cohesive and just, the economy is prosperous, and the country has a healthy, natural environment.

In pursuit of the Vision 2030 aims the results have been mixed, said Wayne Henry, Director General of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), the agency tasked with tracking the implementation of the SDGs.

In his September 2020 overview of SDG implementation, Henry noted that Jamaica has recorded positives in the social sector, accountability and governance. For example, there is continued focus on gender equality and the empowerment of women. According to the International Labour Organization, 59.3 percent of managers in the country are women.

But Jamaica has struggled, Henry said, in the areas of security and safety, environmental sustainability and the rate of non-communicable diseases. The murder rate has hovered between 47 and 47.7 per 100,000 in recent years, diabetes and hypertension rates have climbed alarmingly in the 15-and-over age-group, and overall environmental performance has fallen.

Even as the systems for SDG implementation are woven into the national development strategies, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of economies like Jamaica’s. According to Henry, the pandemic shows “how quickly a development path can be challenged.”

COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill and in its wake upended the lives and livelihoods of thousands in the Caribbean, shuttering entire sectors that depend on tourism and according to the PIOJ, contracting the Jamaican economy by 10 percent.

With tens of thousands of jobs lost, the government turned to the island’s fast-expanding business process outsourcing (BPO) sector as a much-needed source of jobs, providing a level of diversification from the agrarian society of old. Initially focused on call centres, the sector has expanded to include to more specialised areas including accounting, human resources management, digital marketing, animation and software development.

But the sector’s employers are prone to COVID-19 outbreaks, and its dependence on the existing fossil fuel-based energy sector is a negative factor for a country keen on cutting emissions.

Still, Jamaica may well have captured the essence of the SDGs by balancing the temporary growth from the BPO sector with its commitment to reduce energy costs and diversify the fuel mix. It plans, for example, to increase the share of electricity generation from renewables from 9 percent in 2016 to 30 percent by 2030. And in 2019, the government commissioned a 36-megawatt wind farm, which is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 66,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year, equal to taking roughly 13,000 cars off the road.

Vaccine access negotiations are at critical juncture. While many countries support the intellectual property rights waiver, including the European parliament the European Union does not. Credit: PAHO/Karen González

By Lyndal Rowlands
Melbourne, Australia , Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

A committee that has spent almost a year negotiating the terms of a temporary intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 medicines will reconvene in September after pausing for the European Summer.

As new variants spread rapidly around the world, the deadlock in the World Trade Organization Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Committee has potentially further delayed access to vaccines and other medicines for billions of people in low- and middle-income countries.

The waiver, initially proposed by India and South Africa in October 2020 has attracted sponsorship and support from several other countries. After widespread campaigning, the United States added its support in May. Yet, while the European parliament also backs the proposal, the European Union does not, in part due to continued opposition from Germany, which is home to a substantial pharmaceutical industry.

The decreasing number of countries holding out from supporting the waiver continued to stall negotiations right up until they paused at the end of July. This is even though the waiver is only being put forward as a temporary measure until the pandemic is under control.

Leena Menghaney, the head of Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign in South Asia told IPS that the countries that proposed the waiver are asking for the right to produce their own medicines and vaccines.

“Many middle-income countries have the technical capacity to also produce Covid-19 medicines and vaccines,” said Menghaney, adding that opponents to the waiver are using arguments that ignore the technical capacity that many countries already have to produce generic medicines.

“It smacks of colonial baggage to say that you’re not ready for this,” says Menghaney. “What countries want is the right to produce these medicines and vaccines.”

This is not the first time that the strict TRIPS rules for medicines have come under the microscope.

The current intellectual property system has also added to the inequality in access to Tuberculosis medicines, contributing to the emergence of new multi-drug resistant variants that threaten to even further prolong one of the world’s most unequal epidemics.

“The intellectual property system doesn’t really distribute the outcomes of science very well. It’s not a system where people are equally able to access the outcomes of research”, said Menghaney. “Governments have been funding research, but the outcomes of research are not equitably distributed,” she added.

“Many times this research actually has its genesis in public labs, the riskiest part of research for HIV, Hepatitis C and now Covid-19 has happened in public labs.”

The strict barriers to intellectual property imposed by TRIPS have also been challenged before by South Africa when millions of people were dying because they could not afford expensive new treatments. Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS, is one of many supporters of the TRIPS waiver alongside World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom.

“We cannot repeat the painful lessons from the early years of the AIDS response, when people in wealthier countries got back to health, while millions of people in developing countries were left behind,” Byanyima has said in support of the waiver.

To date, developing countries have found that their efforts to purchase vaccines have been plagued with difficulties, unfair prices and secretive deals. Anis Chowdhury former Director of Macroeconomic Policy and Development Division of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific told IPS that even sharing of the Astra Zeneca vaccine has not proven easy even though the researchers who developed the vaccine at Oxford University promised that they would not make a profit from the vaccine while the pandemic continued.

“The issue is all these agreements are very non-transparent. And in this case, the parent company dictates almost all the conditions including who could be the distributor of this drug or vaccine, what price you charge, and to which customer,” Chowdhury told IPS.

Both South Africa and India have found themselves tied up in complicated deals meaning they have little say over who they sell vaccines they make to or where they can buy their own supplies from. So far, European countries have been able to secure lower prices for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine than many low- and middle-income countries.

While vaccine waiver negotiations have languished, global efforts to address vaccine inequality have rested on the COVAX facility, convened by the WHO. Yet, Chowdhury, who is also Professor of Economics at Western Sydney University, told IPS that “from the start, COVAX was designed to fail.”

As Chowdhury told IPS, COVAX was put forward as an alternative by rich countries “because the pharmaceutical industries refused to join” C-TAP a WHO proposal to increase knowledge sharing of Covid-19 technologies between countries on the same day it was launched back in May.

Yet, although Dr Adhanom says that 11 billion doses are needed to end the pandemic, COVAX has only managed to put together a small proportion of its modest goal of two billion doses of vaccines, and even this small pool of vaccines is yet to reach countries that need it most since rich countries – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK – have been buying up vaccines from COVAX as well. And COVAX is unlikely to attract enough donations, as even the World Health Organization continues to struggle to attract funding in the midst of the pandemic.

As Chowdhury points out “powerful countries” have been cutting the UN’s budget “right and left for so many years.”

 

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By Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

Some years ago, on a piece on the Afghan crisis I had written that Mullah Omar’s face bore no resemblance to that of the impossibly beautiful, albeit mythical, Helen of Troy. Yet it too had caused the launch of a thousand ships (airships to be more precise), just as Helen’s had done in Homer’s epic tale, the Iliad. Like Troy in that ancient narrative, Afghanistan of the present times was swarmed with invaders who could also be seen as the counterparts of those Greeks- the Americans and their NATO allies. This war lasted for double the time of the Trojan episode, twenty years instead of ten. At its end it led to a reverse situation, victory of the Trojans, in this case, of the Taliban. Though the Greeks destroyed Troy by the ruse of a gift of the Wooden Horse, eventually a Trojan warrior, Aeneid, sailed to southern Mediterranean and laid the foundation of the Rome and its empire. The Greek epoch ultimately yielded to the Roman age, and the annals of geopolitics of that time took a completely new turn. Will the impact of the Afghan war be the same? Shall we see a power transformation in a new paradigm from what we have at the present time? Will American predominance make way for a risen China, now or in the future?

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

There are no easy answers to the questions. It may be an unscientific notion that history repeats itself. However, it is a scientific and logical proposition that similar causes tend to produce similar results. The victory of the Taliban was owed to a number of factors .Among the principal ones were a fierce popular resistance to occupation, not necessarily unique to the Afghan ambience, the corruption and incompetence of an imposed government from outside, seen by many as akin to the Vichy or to the Manchukuo, the lack of any tangible development of the quality of life of the common man , and ,yes, also woman, and the spirit , commitment and ideological dedication of the Taliban fighters. The huge sums of money expended by the US and others, trillions of dollars, kept the developed economies going with minimal impact of the raising of living standards among the Afghan masses. The everyday violence had become unbearable. There was a stated governmental support to women’s empowerment, but very little to show for it in much of rural Afghanistan. The Taliban win has ended the war, and now the Afghans are longing for relief.

The world owes it to them. Yet, though the international community seem reluctant to bring the pains of the Afghans to a closure. The media in many countries is replete with stories that there is a burgeoning pushback to the victors, as if that would alter the results of the war. There are predictions of horrifying threats of Taliban reprisals, against collaborators, none of which has come to pass yet. Indeed, the truth is that violence has largely ceased in the country for the first time in two decades. The cities and the villages have become far safer for the men, women, boys, and girls than many in that young nation have known in their lifetime. True, there are thousands scrambling to get out at the Kabul airport. But far more are lured by the dreams, though not necessary by the prospects, of a better life in America and the West than the genuine fear of losing it in Taliban hands. Far from massacring the departing Afghans, the Taliban are seeking to queue them up in separate lines for departure for the US and the UK, in an effort to restore a modicum of order in the chaos. Indeed, incredibly it may appear given feelings of mutual hostility, the Taliban are cooperating with the erstwhile occupation troops at the airport.

This fact could mark the beginning of a silver lining in an otherwise dark horizon. If there is a will, there will eventually be a way. Doubtless, the Taliban must change, as some of their leaders seem to opine in public. It seems that some of them are persuaded that there must be a Taliban.02, different from the previous version. It cannot be impossible to bring interpretations of Islamic laws in consonance with those in many other Muslim-majority nations. Treatment of women is something that the world will closely watch. Some within the Taliban may not care, but many others will, and the latter must be encouraged by the global community. BRAC, a non-governmental organization from Bangladesh which was doing commendable work on girls’ education (a great success story in the predominantly Muslim Bangladesh), should be allowed to resume its activities. Afghanistan had a major contribution to the efflorescence of Islamic intellectual culture in the past. That spirit is most certainly imbued in the Afghan ethos and can and should be regenerated.

Mr. Joe Biden is a decent, elder American politician of the old school who thought, with a good reason that America should end the occupation and quit. When put on the carpet, as he has been so often by his critics in recent days for his decision, his legitimate query has been “If not now, then when?” None of the critics seems to be providing him that answer. In all fairness, he cannot be held accountable for the failure of his generals. He is withdrawing because his generals have lost the war, and the winners now want him out. It is as simple as that. Historically, when foreign occupiers have left, those who had served them during the period of occupation have felt insecure. In Western Europe after the German surrender during World War 11, for instance. That thirst for revenge does not seem to prevail at this point in time in post-Taliban victory Afghanistan. Surprisingly in a society where that could have been expected, as Afghans traditionally tend to conform to the three tribal values of honour, hospitality and revenge.

It would be a grave error of judgment to confuse the Taliban fighter with Florence Nightingale. He is made of sterner stuff. He did not get to where he is today by mollycoddling his opponent. But at the same time there is a palpable yearning in him for acceptability. That should be taken advantage of. Should the US want to be a positive force for the post-Afghan war world, it can help by trying to mainstream the Taliban-led Afghanistan into the global system. It will not be easy, as many Afghans including Taliban are unhappy with them and angry. But political realism is a great shaper of civic behavior, and there is not much reason to believe than the Taliban are any different. Those who wield some influence on them- for example, Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey should aid the process. Stability in Afghanistan will help them all. Sanctions that some, including a few members of the G 7, are pressurizing Mr. Biden to impose on the Afghans or freeze Afghan accounts will not advance this process. In fact, it will bring on more hostile and extremist reactions because of which many of the advocates of sanctions will suffer. Exacerbation of the miseries of the Afghans will do the world no good.

Afghanistan is a country that has been impoverished. But it is not poor. Its resources are abundant. It possesses enormous mineral wealth: Lithium, cobalt, nickel, neodymium, rare earths, and the like. These are said to be worth more than a trillion dollars. Extraction of some of these will need greater investment and technological knowhow. This will create opportunities for American and Chinese companies to cooperate. That is the turn of event in historical evolution that will redound to everyone’s benefit.

The US will need to watch out for friends that can inflict more harm than foes. Lord Ricketts, a UK politician, has said that Mr. Biden’s retreat was a “wake-up call to allies who had hopes of a return of the US to internationalism”. But surely a return to “internationalism” does not mean a return to military occupation. The Suez was a good lesson to British Conservatives in that respect. The errors of the British government of Sir Anthony Eden at the time, which the US had then pointed out, had led to an unhappy rift for a while between London and Washington.

Currently the US Vice President, Ms. Kamala Harris is in Singapore, visiting Southeast Asia. She may have already perceived the sense of the region that Asian countries largely are wary of taking sides in big power conflicts. Most are reluctant to be “one or the other’s stalking horse to advance negative agendas”. If this message is not picked up adequately, Asians may view American advances towards them just as the Trojan priest Laocoon saw the Wooden Horse left behind at the gates of Troy in the narrative with which this essay began. He had famously warned: “I fear the Greeks, even though they come bearing gifts”!

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

 

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Afghans are a proud people with a rich cultural heritage. They have known generations of war and hardship. They deserve our full support. The following days will be pivotal. The world is watching. We cannot and must not abandon the people of Afghanistan-- UN Secretary-General António Guterres in remarks to the Security Council on Afghanistan, 16 August '21. Credit: IOM/Mohammed Muse

By Ben Phillips and Jonathan Glennie
ROME, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

As the Western occupation of Afghanistan has come to an end, TV news is broadcasting harrowing scenes of death and destruction, citizens in fear, allies abandoned, and dreams dashed.

While the cynicism of key leaders has been exposed – exemplified by Afghan President Ghani sneaking out, reportedly with bags of cash – the end of the war is also a moment of reckoning for war’s idealists, those who believed in invasion and occupation as a route to development.

Those who believed that the war would bring a new dawn have made clear that they want to hold to account those who presided over its failure, and they want to ensure that such failure not be repeated again. They also want to know what it is that they can do to advance development and human rights.

It is right to hold leaders to account.

But the most important lesson from the occupation of Afghanistan is not principally that it was finished, or conducted, in the wrong way. The tough truth that war’s idealists need to face is this: those responsible for failure of the war are not those who ended it but those who initiated and maintained it, and the way to ensure that the next occupation of a country does not similarly fail is not to start it.

At the conclusion of twenty years of occupation and at a cost of one to two trillion dollars, Afghanistan has been left the poorest country per capita in Asia; the number of Afghans in poverty has doubled; half of the population is dependent on humanitarian assistance; half lack access to drinkable water; poppy cultivation has trebled and opium production is at its height.

Beyond the capital, Kabul, the reach of the formal structures of the created state was weak. The state that the Soviets built lasted three years; the state that the West constructed was so lacking in legitimacy and institutional depth that it collapsed within days.

Theories of “just war” have long recognised that to determine whether a war is just, one must necessarily consider not only what high intentions are declared, but also the likelihood of success.

The facts here are inconvenient: in Libya, it brought about the return of slave markets; in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it facilitated the rise of ISIS; it did not dislodge Assad from Syria, and in Afghanistan a twenty-year occupation ended up replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.

There is a desperate attempt to rewrite history and pretend that one man, Joe Biden, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Whatever tactical mistakes and miscalculations the US has made in the last phase of this war, the fact is that it was lost long ago.

He just told the truth. Two successive US administrations of different parties admitted frankly that the US had lost. And at the point when the US drew down, the entire “Western” operation followed.

This is because whilst the US has been shown to be unable to win a war of occupation to remake a state, every other Western power has been shown to be unable even to attempt to do so.

The US spends about 780 billion dollars a year on its military; the UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada and Italy together spend about 340 billion dollars per year. If the US cannot do this, no one can.

The West could have ended the Occupation much more honourably – for example by providing safe passage for all those who had become exposed by working with them – and can still make a difference by fully funding the massively underfunded international humanitarian aid operation. But the fact is the war could not be won.

Confronted by these realities, war’s idealists ask back, “well, are we just supposed to sit back and do nothing?” No. While occupation is not the tool, there is indeed a fundamental moral obligation, and an enlightened self-interest, to work to tackle poverty and advance human rights worldwide.

The most effective tools to advance those include supporting grassroots civil society organisations, integrating human rights and development into diplomacy, the provision of aid, addressing international bottle-necks to progress (from trade rules to debt and more), and working across nations to advance global public goods (like enabling the mass production of vaccines and other medicines, and limiting climate change).

Are those easy and fast? No, they are hard, but they work. To take one example, it used to be only a minority of kids in developing countries who finished primary school. As a result of grassroots advocacy, national leadership, joined up international engagement, debt cancellation, the deployment of domestic resources and assistance from aid, most children in developing countries now complete primary school.

But most do not yet complete secondary school. Ensuring that almost all children across the world finish secondary school is eminently achievable, in less than a decade, for much less than the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

To advance the full realisation of human rights worldwide, supporting civil society organisations (CSOs) and strengthening international institutions may seem like “weak” approaches compared to just replacing governments one doesn’t like with new governments in one’s own image, but the former approach has proven successful – slowly, and imperfectly – in improving the “soil” in which rights flourish, while the latter approach has been shown to enable nothing to be able to grow on its own.

Occupation forces of foreign soldiers with unaccountable power have not proven an effective starting point for building up good governance and human rights. In contrast, we have witnessed strong civic organising, and international solidarity, secure a return to Constitutional rule in Zambia; we have seen the decriminalisation of LGBT relationships in Angola.

We have also seen Sudan accept the authority of the International Criminal Court (something the US has not yet done); in Lebanon and Jordan, law reform has removed the ability of a rapist to avoid punishment by marrying his victim; in Sri Lanka, civil society organisations have secured court holds on the imposition of the death penalty; in the Maldives, women have joined the Supreme Court for the first time.

In Afghanistan, in contrast, the operating environment of occupation led many human rights organisations to be seen to be associated with it, unfairly, undercutting their ability to enable sustained progressive change – and placing many leaders at great risk – now the end has come.

And the end will always come.

Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires. But we must judge outcomes, not mission statements. In addressing the myriad injustices of the world, invading countries to remake them is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong.

There are people who hope to invade Iran, or Venezuela, or pick-a-country-with-a-problem, but next time, they insist, they’ll do it “better”. They must stop. They must be stopped.

Of course, what drives war is not only – or even principally – idealism. What US President Eisenhower (a Republican, and a great General) called the “Military-Industrial Complex” has only grown.

And the contractors, of course, keep winning, even as the occupations so demonstrably fail. But the maintenance of war depends on the idealists. War’s idealists must now accept defeat, and embrace better ways to change the world.

It’s no surprise that advocates for war as a strategy for development get so misty-eyed; a clear-eyed reading of the facts shows that occupation is not the answer.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality; Jonathan Glennie is the author of The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment.

 

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