Africa

When she was 20 Mary Njambi was trafficked to Saudi Arabia where she thought she would obtain work as a well-paid domestic worker. Instead, she was treated as a slave and was sexually abused. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Oct 3 2019 (IPS)

Six years ago Mary Njambi* received news of a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity far away from her poverty-stricken village situated in the heart of Kiambu County, Central Kenya. She was 20 years old, a single mother and out of work.

“My best friend told me that rich families in Saudia (Saudi Arabia) were in need of house maids. My salary would be 1,000 dollars per month and overtime,” Njambi tells IPS.

Her friend took her to a recruiting agency in downtown Nairobi where all travel arrangements were made at no cost to her.

Three months later, Njambi and 15 other girls made that fateful journey to Saudi Arabia.

“We all separated at the airport and I was taken to my employer’s home. The moment I walked in, a woman started barking orders at me in Arabic even though I did not speak the language,” she says. At this point, Njambi had no way of knowing that she had been trafficked.

Kenya a transit point for trafficking

The 2019 Global Report Trafficking in Persons report released in June by the United States Department of State profiles Kenya as a source, transit point and destination for people subjected to sex trafficking and forced labour.

Released every year, the report classifies countries into four tiers based on their government’s demonstrated commitment to eliminate human trafficking.

• Tier 1 ranking is the highest and indicates that a government meets the minimum standards of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.
• A country such as Kenya, with a Tier 2 rating, has not met these standards but has made significant efforts to do so.
• The Tier 2 Watch List, on which Kenya was placed until 2015, is similar to Tier 2 with the exception that the number of human trafficking victims is significantly high or significantly increasing.
• Tier 3, which is the worst ranking, indicates that a country such as Saudi Arabia has not met minimum standards to eliminate human trafficking, and is not making significant efforts to do so.

“These efforts include criminalising human trafficking and providing care for survivors,” Victor Amugo, a prosecutor at Kilifi Law Courts, Coastal region which is a hub for human trafficking to Somalia, tells IPS.

According to Wilkister Vera, Kakamega’s County Police Commander in Western Kenya, law enforcers are diligently fighting human trafficking.

“We are targeting the entire network of recruiters, places where victims are held before they are moved, transportation and following the paper trail including work permits and passports,” she tells IPS.

“Systems are also in place to take care of victims through the National Referral Mechanism,” she adds.

Young women and girls the most vulnerable

The Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative, a data hub on human trafficking, affirms that like Njambi, children and youth are more vulnerable to human trafficking for primarily sexual exploitation and forced labour.

• One in every six victims trafficked is a child,
• Two-thirds are aged 18 through 29,
• 17 percent are aged between 30 and 47, and
• Less than one percent are over 47 years.

“Poverty and gender inequalities are some of the factors that make women and girls vulnerable to human trafficking,” Zuleikha Hassan, Kwale County Member of Parliament, and founder of Tawfiq Muslim Association, tells IPS. “We have to aggressively educate communities to identify human trafficking situations that come disguised as the job of a lifetime.”

Njambi says that back-breaking house work, working for at least 18 hours a day and sleeping on the floor characterised the first few days of employment. It quickly escalated to physical and sexual violence.

Days spiralled into months without a single day off and with no pay. “One day I went to the rooftop and threatened to jump off if they did not take me back home and it worked,” she narrates.

This was in 2013, at that time, news that hundreds of Kenyan girls were distressed and stranded in the Middle East was spreading across the country.

“The lucky ones made it home bruised and battered. Others came back in coffins. In 2014, the government banned Kenyans from travelling to the Middle East for work,” says Dinah Mbula*, who runs a recruiting agency in downtown Nairobi.

“There was a crackdown by the government targeting recruiting agencies but horror stories did not scare desperate unemployed people from going to the Middle East,” Mbula tells IPS.

Victims of trafficking treated like criminals 

In 2000, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (the Palermo Protocol), marked an important transition into the modern movement against human trafficking.

Kenya is signatory to the Palermo Protocol, which led to the domestication of the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2010, which came into effect in 2012.

“Section 1 of the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act criminalises sex and labour trafficking,” says Amugo.

Although the Trafficking in Persons report affirms that there are now more prosecutions and convictions of traffickers in Kenya, Amugo says that the numbers could rise if all prosecutions were made under the anti-trafficking laws rather than the more lenient immigration or labour violations laws.

Those convicted under anti-trafficking laws serve 15 years to life imprisonment, a fine of not less than 50,000 dollars, or both.

“Victims of human trafficking are treated like criminals. That is why recruiters continue doing their job because they know chances that a victim will report to the police are next to zero,” Mbula expounds.

Kenya bans and then lifts ban on citizens working the Middle East

Also, this East African nation has lifted the ban on its citizens travelling to the Gulf for work.

The Kenyan government signed bi-lateral agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates and lifted the ban in 2017.

The government insisted on re-vetting recruitment agencies after lifting the ban. But Mbula says that more than 1,000 agencies were vetted and only 100 were cleared but because of corruption “we are still in business with or without a license.”

From early 2019, Kenya allowed Saudi Arabia to recruit domestic workers again.  

According to the Ministry of Labour, at least 130,000 Kenyans work as domestic workers in the Arabian Gulf.

Njambi confirms that it is easier to just disappear in the village than speak out because “people tell you to be grateful you came back alive. There is no support of any kind or counselling.”

She now runs a grocery store at her local shopping centre. 

She says that victims are often compared to others who went to the Middle East and succeeded: “People say your experience was just bad luck and advise you to try other countries like Lebanon. My story is repeating itself everyday because people are desperate.”

*Names changed to protect identity of source

—————————————–The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

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The post Human Trafficking – It Came Disguised as the Opportunity of a Lifetime appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Riana Group.

The post Human Trafficking – It Came Disguised as the Opportunity of a Lifetime appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Kenyans forcibly evicted from their land by British colonisers in the 1930s are demanding reparations.

By Barbara Crossette
NEW YORK, Oct 3 2019 (IPS)

For the first time since a new development agenda was adopted in 2015 to make the world a better place for everyone, government leaders assembled at the United Nations in late September to take stock of progress. The verdict of this summit was not good.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the centerpiece of Agenda 2030, were on life support in the eyes of many experts in and around the high-level UN sessions. Some goals were in danger of reversing earlier gains.

A new strategy, however, devised by a team of international development experts, was presented for governments to consider to turn around the bad news about the faltering goals.

“Our goal to end extreme poverty by 2030 is being jeopardized as we struggle to respond to entrenched deprivation, violent conflicts and vulnerabilities to natural disasters,” Secretary-General António Guterres wrote when the latest data on the SDGs were released in July 2019.

The numbers provided background to the meeting of world leaders in New York during the opening of the 74th General Assembly.

“Global hunger is on the rise, and at least half of the world’s population lacks essential health services,” Guterres wrote. “More than half of the world’s children do not meet standards in reading and mathematics; only 28 per cent of persons with severe disabilities received cash benefits; and women in all parts of the world continue to face structural disadvantages and discrimination.

“It is abundantly clear that a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals.”

Guterres reiterated his message of urgency when he opened the high-level review of the SDGs on Sept. 24. Speaking the next day, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed was more optimistic about what she saw as “the boundless potential of humanity to create a better future for all.” Mohammed, however, who had shepherded the goals into their final form in 2015, acknowledged that progress was off track.

The data report in July revealed that despite some gains, many millions of people among the world’s 7.7 billion people were living in shocking conditions. That included the 785 million people without basic drinking water services and three billion people still lacking clean cooking fuels, contributing to poor health.

Fewer than half of the people in the world had access to safe sanitation, and 673 million were forced to defecate in the open, according to the latest statistics from 2017.

“Achieving universal access to even basic sanitation services by 2030 will require a doubling of the current annual rate of progress,” the secretary-general has noted.

Separately, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, Urmila Bhoola, reported that more than 40 million people are enslaved worldwide, a quarter of them children, and that the numbers are expected to rise.

More than 60 percent of those in forced labor work in the private sector, with women and girls disproportionately affected. Almost all of them — 98 percent — have experienced sexual violence, said Bhoola, who reports on contemporary forms of slavery.

Against this dismal panorama, a new report emerged with talking points for the gathering of government officials on the SDGs during the UN General Assembly session this month. The report challenged current assumptions and thinking on the planning and implementing of development projects.

Titled “The Future Is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development,” the report does not attempt to rewrite the 17 development goals or their mind-numbing 169 targets.

Instead, the authors, a team of 15 experts in social and natural sciences assembled in 2016 from developing and industrial countries, concluded that goals could be interconnected or clustered to promote synergistic exchanges for greater effectiveness and should not be isolated in 17 silos.

Leading the group as co-chairs were Peter Messerli, director of the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Endah Murniningtyas, a former deputy planning minister of Indonesia. The UN’s Department of Social and Economic Affairs published their report. (For a global projection of how far off the targets are, see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/gsdr2019 Table 1-1.)

The scientists recommended six areas that could be collaboratively transformative: issues of human well-being and abilities; sustainable and just economies; sustainable food systems and healthy nutrition; energy decarbonization; urban and peri-urban development; and the global environmental commons. They named four “levers” that could be used to spur action: governance, economy and finance, individual and collective action and science and technology.

The underlying importance of science, including the professional collection of credible data, is a theme that runs throughout the report. Governance is also given prominence in both identifying and implementing the goals.

In “The Future Is Now” report, the scientists appeared to conclude that new thinking was needed.

“Every country and region should design and rapidly implement integrated pathways to sustainable development that correspond to their specific needs and priorities, and contribute also to the necessary global transformation,” the authors said.

Using one issue, childhood nutrition, the authors described how their report’s “entry points” can be linked: “For instance, changes in food habits towards more healthy diets may result from individual and collective action, which is informed by scientific knowledge that can directly influence choices made by families, while supporting governance initiatives such as mandatory food labelling and schools limiting students access to sugary drinks.”

The emphasis on collaboration and interaction within and among countries suggests that the current lack of such links reflects not only failures of governance but also the impetus and structure of the SDGs.

David Malone is the rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo and a former president of Canada’s International Development Research Center. He was asked by PassBlue why the SDGs have faltered while the Millennium Development Goals that preceded them were more successful.

“The Millennium Development Goals arose from a desire of the developing continents to refocus the UN on development issues after the decade of the 1990s had focused the UN very much on peace and security,” according to Malone, who has been Canada’s ambassador to India, Nepal and Bhutan as well as deputy chief of Canada’s UN mission.

“They offered the considerable benefit of being simple and clear, few in number (8) with few accompanying targets and indicators,” he said in an email response. “They were not developed by member states, but rather in the office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan several months after the Millennium Summit”.

“That they were mostly attained owes a great deal to the manageable nature of the package, so to speak. But it probably owes more to a very significant growth spurt in both Asia and Africa and to a strong focus on social development in Latin America between the years 2000 and 2015.”

“The members states of the UN very much wished to develop the successor platform, the SDGs, themselves,” he added. “The result was a fairly political approach including compromises that were essentially additive — each country’s or region’s pet priority being somehow accommodated — with little attention to the ability of many governments to implement complex schemes developed internationally”.

The SDGs involve 17 goals, 169 targets and over 200 indicators by which those targets can be measured.

“After their adoption, it became clear within two years that many governments, particularly those with limited administrative capacity, while celebrating the goals, were not actually using them in planning or budgeting national priorities. The UN Secretariat has signaled several times now that on current global economic growth trends, many of the SDGs are unlikely to be attained. Politics nationally, regionally and globally are hardly cooperating either. And SDG success is very much hostage to both sets of factors.”

A significant difference between the SDGs and the MDGs is that the former should apply to every nation, not only developing countries, and that all governments are expected to declare their aspirations, plan their appropriate policies and track their national progress.

That has not happened in numerous places. One of the most glaring examples is the United States. A State Department website on the topic qualifies it by an advisory that it “is a work in progress” and mostly devoid of US-specific information or commitment.

Among other advanced economies, the Europeans have done much better, with a number of related websites, beginning with an overview of regional policies.

On Sept 24 at the UN, a panel of European Union and developing-country partners in the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States announced a new commitment to the 2030 Agenda, backed by about $32 million, from the Europeans.

Canada, with numerous websites introduced by a comprehensive policy statement, is also active, as is Japan. It has multiple online sites, including one following the work of its national task forces carrying out the sustainable goals.

The post Salvaging the SDGs: New Thinking to Spur Action Takes Shape appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Barbara Crossette is the senior consulting editor and writer for PassBlue and the United Nations correspondent for The Nation. She is also a board member of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The post Salvaging the SDGs: New Thinking to Spur Action Takes Shape appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Nigeria's president visits continental rival South Africa weeks after condemning attacks on foreigners there.

Chelsea striker Tammy Abraham says he has not decided on his international future after helping the Blues to their first Champions League win of the season.

At least 14 people are reported killed at an illegal gold mine in the eastern town of Kampene.

Newly-appointed Guinea manager Didier Six names former captain Florentin Pogba in his first squad.

Moroccan centre-back Medhi Benatia thanks his country's fans as he announces his retirement from international football.

The five young players came to Uganda to play in the regional Cecafa Under 20 Challenge Cup.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

In a 1974 article, Woody Allen poked fun at biblical stories presenting ludicrous paraphrases of The Book of Job, Abraham´s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac, as well as The Book of Proverbs. One of Allen´s invented proverbs was: “The wicked at heart probably know something”, thus implementing that the “pure of heart”, i.e. credulous people, know nothing. 1 Giuliano da Empoli, a well-known Italian politician, culture personality and founder of the influential think tank Volta makes use of this Woody Allen quote to introduce his book Gli ingegneri del caos,2 The Engineers of Chaos. da Empoli describes that everywhere in Europe and elsewhere the rise of populism takes the form of a frenzied spectacle, overthrowing established rules and political decency by converting them into their opposite. In the eyes of their supporters, unscrupulous and power-hungry demagogues are currently transforming what previously was considered as political incorrectness and abuse into a desirable quality of fearless truth-seekers. To their followers, the inexperience of populists becomes proof of their unattachment to corrupt, elitist circles, while their incompetence is considered to be a sign of authenticity. The tensions such populist politicians create at national and international levels are by disenfranchised citizens assumed to be manifestations of their independence, their ability to think “out of the box” and a capacity to express the inner feelings of an otherwise silent majority.

da Empoli assumes that populism, like Communism once was, now has become a spectre not only haunting Europe but the entire world. However, da Empoli does not consider current populism to be just an expression of spontaneous dissatisfaction. He points to the fact that much of the emotions stirred up in support of populist parties have been devised by behavioral sciences and smart marketing, something he calls “quantum politics”. Techniques that originally were developed to sell goods and services are to a much greater extent than before now being used in politics. In what da Empoli denominates as the Selfie-era unscrupulous politicians are exploiting people’s need to manifest their personality in social media, allowing experts to apply sophisticated technologies to record and manipulate people’s thoughts and behavior. It is such experts da Empoli labels as “engineers of chaos”, spin doctors, ideologues, scientists and data experts without whose assistance populist leaders never would have come to power.

da Empoli introduces his readers to stories about a small, web-marketing company that created a powerful Italian political party, to web technicians who ensured the Brexit victory, to communication experts transforming the political landscape of Eastern Europe, and to the American right-wing theoreticians who propelled Donald Trump to the White House. An almost carnivalesque cavalcade of colourful characters, many of them almost unknown to the general public. A small group of people is by da Empoli accused of changing the rules of the political game and the face of our societies. He uses the Italian Five Star Movement as a conspicuous example of how a “non-organization” with a “non-leader” and without any statues or charter and no ideology in a short time could become one of Italy´s most powerful political parties.

Gianroberto Casaleggio (1954-2016) was an Italian entrepreneur and politician, who together with the comedian Beppe Grillo founded the political party Movimento 5 Stelle, Five Star Movement. Casaleggio is generally considered to be the brain, the guru, behind this movement. He created its network strategies and edited a highly influential blog written by Beppe Grillo. By the beginning of his political career, Casaleggio had been managing director of Webegg, a “multidisciplinary group for consulting companies and public administration on the net [with an] objective to position companies on the network.” 3 In 2004, he founded Casaleggio Associati, with customers such as Hewlett Packard, Philip Morris, JPMorgan Chase, PepsiCo, Marriott, IBM, and Best Western. In 2005, Casaleggio began to publish Beppe Grillo’s books and the following year Casaleggio Associati carried out comprehensive studies of the role and importance of e-commerce while publishing books and videos about the effectiveness of the web when it comes to convincing people to buy anything and even change their views and opinions. In June 2012, Casaleggio had a private meeting with Michael Slaby, Chief Integration and Innovation Officer for Obama’s electoral campaign, explaining his theories about how the internet could be an essential tool for “direct democracy”. Casaleggio implemented his ideas in support of Beppe Grillo and his populist party. He is now credited with designing a first-rate entrepreneur plan adapting the internet to market strategies influencing political choices of network users. One of Casaleggio´s many controversial methods was the use of ”fake news” and unsubstantiated “facts”.

Casaleggio Associati´s innovative use of the internet for political purposes was only one of many such endeavors. The British company Cambridge Analytica, established in 2013, was until its bankruptcy in May 2018 involved in several political elections, not the least Donald Trump´s presidential campaign. Trump´s infamous advisor Steve Bannon served for a while as Cambridge Analytica’s vice-president. In 2014, British behavioral scientists presented on Facebook a “personality test” called This is Your Digital Life. About 270,000 people activated this Facebook application and unaware provided Cambridge Analytica with their personal data. Methods developed from these data were then used all over the world, sold to political parties and thus allowed to influence electoral processes in countries like Mexico, Malaysia, Brazil, Kenya, and India. Cambridge Analytica was also contracted by campaign managers who tried to convince people to leave the European Union. Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, Cambridge Analytica was hired by Donald Trump’s campaign to advise on how to influence voters by using the company´s comprehensive data bank and efficient, manipulative methods.

In March 2018, former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie went out in the media with information on how the company had acted to influence elections. The same year, a video was released in which Cambridge Analytica´s CEO, Alexander Nix, was captured by a hidden camera while revealing how his company had been involved in elections in about 200 countries and how it had laid traps for politicians by luring them into compromising situations. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom authorized a house search to examine Cambridge Analytica’s servers and could thus prove that accusations leveled against the company had actually been based on unequivocal facts.

In a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, Brittany Kaiser, a former senior director of Cambridge Analytica tells her story; how she as an idealistic intern had been working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and after that obtained a Ph.D. in international law and diplomacy at the Middlesex University in London. In 2014, Kaiser was hired by Cambridge Analytica to ”help commercial and political clients use data insights to solve problems and achieve campaign goals.”

In April 2018, Kaiser was summoned to give evidence to a British Government committee investigating Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. She confirmed that Cambridge Analytica had indeed used Facebook data to influence elections around the world, admitting that the true scope of the abuse was likely to be “much greater” than the number of 87 million accounts that had been suggested by other whistleblowers, declaring:

Now I’m blowing the whistle on the whole industry. The problem starts with the Silicon Valley tech platforms, which track our every movement and make us easy to target.

da Empoli is probably right when he states that it is not enough to draw attention to similarities between the catastrophic rise of xenophobic and fascist parties of pre-war Europe and today´s populist parties, what we now are witnessing is partly an entirely new phenomenon fuelled by innovative and manipulative technocrats who sell their expertise to unscrupulous politicians. The wicked at heart probably know something that the pure of the heart do not comprehend.

However, are companies based on technical expertise on mass communication evil entities? I doubt if they can be characterized like that. More likely they are like most other big companies trying to find answers to their clients’ demands while expanding and increasing profits for their shareholders. They are part of a complex system, which is extremely difficult to scrutinize and regulate. For example, Wall Street’s collapse in 2008 was not the result of some vicious plan, but of thousands of actors’ self-serving behaviour within an unregulated financial market. The mass manipulation staged by communication companies like Casaleggio Associati and Cambridge Analytica is perhaps just the beginning of a Brave New World where the financial market controls politics to an even greater extent than today. A liquid world described by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman – an existence dominated by a diffuse fear, fragmented and non-anchored, freely floating around without any clear cause or destination, where threats are perceived everywhere, without being clearly defined.4

1 Allen, Woody (1974), “The Scrolls,” The New Republic, August 31.
2 da Empoli, Giuliano (2019) Gli Ingegneri del caos: Teoria e tecnica dell´Internazionale populista. Venezia: Marsilio.
3 Orsatti, Pietro (2010) ”Grillo e il suo spin doctor: La Cassaleggio Associati,” MicroMega No. 5, September 30.
4 Bauman, Zymunt (2007) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press

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

The post How Media Technocrats Manipulate Public Opinion appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Former refugee Sirak Asfaw found it in a suitcase and has protected the crown for the past 21 years.

Credit: UN Environment

By Junjie Zhang
KUNSHAN, Jiangsu, China, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

In the 2014 China-US joint announcement on climate change, China promised to peak its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around 2030. Later this commitment was cemented in the Paris Agreement signed in 2016.

However, China’s climate ambition has been shadowed by its dwindling economic growth rate, which declined from 14.23 per cent in 2007 to 6.6 per cent in 2018.

As the world’s largest emitter and second largest economy, China is striving to strike a balance between economic growth and climate mitigation. The climate-economy trade-off has become even more tricky in recent years especially as the China-US relation sours.

On the one hand, the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement shakes the foundation of China’s climate commitment. On the other hand, the deceleration of economic growth, partly thanks to the ongoing trade war between China and the US, constraints China’s capacity to curb its GHG emissions.

China is searching for efficient means to reduce GHG emissions while continuing to grow its economy rapidly. Its climate mitigation efforts are focused on five areas: upgrading industrial structure, cleaning energy mix, improving energy efficiency, reducing non-energy related GHG emissions and increasing carbon sinks.

These policies are generally aligned with China’s overall economic growth strategy that targets developing new industries such as information technology and renewable energy as well as cutting overcapacities in backward industries such as iron and steel.

Junjie Zhang

China’s structural reform

In order to better design and implement its climate policies, China is in the process of streamlining climate regulations through institutional reform. China’s climate regulatory regime went through significant shakeup in 2018.

The most notable change was the shift of the Climate Change Department from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) to the newly established Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE).

The rationale of the reform is to consolidate the regulations of climate change and environmental pollution. Global warming and air pollution originate from many same sources; air pollution control measures — such as improving energy efficiency, switching from coal to renewables and shutting down backward production facilities — will also lead to GHG emission reductions.

Therefore, the co-control of GHGs and air pollutants, instead of targeting individual pollutants, can lower the cost of both climate and environmental regulations.

Air quality has become a top priority for the central government since 2013. The tightening air pollution control policy becomes a significant contributor to China’s GHG emission reductions.

By linking the climate change issue to the air pollution concern, climate policy can also gain more support from local governments since for them air quality has a much higher priority than climate change.

Credit: UN Environment

The reform enables the climate regulator to take advantage of many policy instruments at the MEE. In 2017, the MEE established a nation-wide emission permit system to consolidate fragmented environmental regulations. It is becoming the core regulatory tool for the emissions from stationary sources.

The emission permit system keeps track of facility-level information about production, emission, and pollution control. Although the system only covers environmental pollutants at this moment, it can be easily adapted to include GHG emissions.

Incorporating GHGs in the emission permit system can ensure that GHG emission reductions are measurable, reportable, and verifiable (MRV). In this sense, shifting the GHG regulation from the NDRC to the MEE helps to harmonise climate and environmental management.

China’s reform of climate regime is overall positive. With the pledge to build ‘a community with a shared future for humankind’, China is determined to continue its path of low carbon development.

The institutional reform has the potential to expedite climate change legislation. Without a law of climate change, the NDRC tended to use departmental rules to regulate GHG emissions. Because the NDRC has powerful influence on economic and energy matters, the rules are generally followed by other ministries and local governments.

In comparison, as a newer and weaker ministry, the MEE is more likely to advocate the rule of law for climate governance. The MEE has strengthened its power through environmental legislation. A case in point is the revised Environmental Protection Law promulgated in 2015.

The new law gave the MEE teeth to dramatically strengthen environmental enforcement. Therefore, the MEE would have more incentive to advocate climate legislation than the NDRC. Should this happen, it will bring China’s climate commitment to the next level.

Mainstreaming climate legislation

The ministerial shake-up also re-opens the debate of alternative climate policy instruments. Specifically, whether to use carbon market or carbon tax to regulate GHG emissions is becoming a live topic again. The Climate Change Department in the NDRC era advocated carbon market.

It created seven regional carbon market pilots in 2013; it also announced the establishment of national emission trading scheme in 2017. When MEE took over the climate regulatory power, it also inherited regional and national carbon markets.

Unlike the NDRC, the MEE has no particular reason to stick to carbon market. Carbon tax should be a viable policy option given that China started environmental tax in 2018. It would be convenient to incorporate GHGs in the existing environmental tax code.

Carbon tax has several advantages over carbon market. In general, carbon tax can provide a more certain price signal to emitters. In China’s context, carbon tax requires legislation, which is important to cement China’s long-term climate commitment. In addition, carbon tax can prevent local governments from interfering the implementation of national climate regulations.

As evidenced in the regional pilots, excessive intervention by local governments can lead to the failure of carbon market. Furthermore, carbon tax can leverage the power of the Ministry of Finance (MOF). The MOF is influential in setting key economic policy agenda. Its involvement can strengthen the compliance and enforcement of climate regulations.

However, the reform of climate regulation also comes with some concerns. The major concern is the weakening linkage between climate change and economic issues. Climate change is not a pure emission problem but also a comprehensive economic problem.

As China’s macroeconomic and energy regulator, the NDRC can move forward the climate agenda by including it in industrial, investment, and energy policies. In comparison, the environmental ministry has much less capacity to influence the national agenda of economic development and energy transition. It will be challenging for the MEE to coordinate various ministries that have more power than the environmental ministry.

A related concern is whether the MEE can tackle the economic and financial challenges associated with the regional and national carbon markets. The MEE has the capacity to ensure the MRV of GHG emission reductions, which is the foundation of a functional carbon market. However, carbon market is intrinsically connected with the financial market.

The MEE needs to work with other ministries, such as the NDRC and the securities regulator, to make sure that the operation of the emission trading scheme does not create unintended economic and financial consequences.

China’s reform of climate regime is overall positive. With the pledge to build ‘a community with a shared future for humankind’, China is determined to continue its path of low carbon development.

Whether China can further move forward its climate agenda hinges on the determination of the top leader, which is influenced by the economic consequence of climate mitigation and the global climate commitment. The new environmental ministry has the right expertise and resources to design and implement climate policies.

The ‘war against air pollution’ which had been declared in 2013 has demonstrated the MEE’s capacity to tackle the tough challenge of environmental pollution. Once climate change becomes the top item on its agenda, there is no doubt the MEE can support China’s climate ambition.

This article was originally published in International Politics and Society

*Duke Kunshan University is committed to building a world-class liberal arts university that offers a broad range of high-quality, innovative academic programs. It was established as a partnership between Duke University in the United States and China’s Wuhan University.

The post China Wants to Mainstream Environmental Protection appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Junjie Zhang is Director of the iMEP Program and Environmental Research Center and Associate Professor of Environmental Economics at Duke Kunshan University*.

The post China Wants to Mainstream Environmental Protection appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Asian Development Bank
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Oct 2 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Bangladesh’s capital has some of the worst traffic in the world. But hope is on the way in the shape of a new mass rapid transit system.

Six MRT lines are planned to open between 2021 and 2035, and ADB has provided a grant to help plan the system. ADB’s next step proposed is a technical assistance loan for a detailed design of Line 5-South.

The post Getting out of a Jam in Dhaka appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Tropical skin disease Leishmaniasis leaves scars and brings stigma for Kenyan communities affected.

A 2009 study found that almost 250,000 children worked in auto repair stores, brick klins, as domestic labourers, and as carpet weavers and sozni embroiderers in Jammu and Kashmir. A new study says financiers in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure slave-like working conditions globally. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

Financiers in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure slave-like working conditions globally, according to a new study.

A group of experts known as the Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking say that banks and other finance bodies can adopt policies to reduce the 40.3 million men, women and children who are victims of forced labour.

Their 172-page report, Unlocking Potential: A Blueprint for Mobilising Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking, calls for more financial probes into people-smuggling rings and greater support to those freed from slave-like conditions. 

“Slavery and human trafficking are big business, reckoned to generate 150 billion dollars every year over the broken backs, hearts and dreams of people young and old,” said Dutch foreign minister Stef Blok, one of the report’s co-authors.

The report paints a bleak portrait of modern slavery, which sees one in every 185 people globally forced to work in an illicit sector that compares in scale to the trade in illegal drugs and counterfeit goods.

Modern forms of slavery include debt bondage, where workers are forced to toil for free in service of a debt, forced marriage, domestic servitude, and forced labour, in which workers face violence or intimidation.     

Modern-day slaves can be found doing everything from begging to gold-mining, but the biggest sectors in the 150-billion-dollar-a-year global business are housework, manufacturing and construction. A quarter of those involved are children. 

James Cockayne, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at United Nations University, said human trafficking and slavery represented a “tragic market failure” . 

“Modern slavery leaves us all worse off because it treats people as disposable objects rather than full economic and social agents,” said Cockayne. 

“We collectively lose out on a huge amount of potential that is currently locked up.”

Tackling the scourge will be a struggle, says the report. Getting the number of exploited workers down to zero by 2030 will involve releasing 10,000 victims of modern slavery every day for the next 11 years.  

Financial institutions can help to achieve that target by boosting resources for financial probes into people-trafficking rings and lifting the lid on firms that turn a profit through slavery, according to the report’s authors. 

Banks can get better at spotting the illicit cash flows linked to people-smuggling rings, and can cooperate more with other institutions to identify and combat the abuse of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. 

As well as turning people into slaves, trafficking ringleaders have also been known to hijack the financial identities of their victims for money laundering purposes. Once they regain their freedom, some victims also find that they have low credit ratings. 

Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Price for his microfinance scheme and assisted on the commission, says banks should invest more in digital and social finance schemes to make poor people less vulnerable to traffickers.

“Large numbers of people around the world remain unbanked,” said Yunus.

“We must … create social businesses, that is, businesses dedicated to solving problems without seeking monetary returns personally, focusing on reducing, and ultimately eliminating the human trafficking and modern slavery.”

The report was driven by the Liechtenstein Initiative, a public-private partnership that is supported by Barclays, Bank of America, HSBC, Wells Fargo, BMO Financial Group and other well known finance brands.

“The financial sector possesses huge potential to help end modern slavery and human trafficking and to maintain the integrity of the international financial system,” added Blok.

“It can create moral capital markets, and can therefore be a powerful force for good, first and foremost by supporting the victims of these criminal business practices.”

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• As Fathers Die, Kashmir’s Children Become Breadwinners

The post Wall Street can Free the World’s 40 Million Modern-Day Slaves appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The government says at least 25 soldiers were killed and about 60 more are missing after the attack.

Panoramic view of Vargeão, the town where Anélio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer and large producer of biogas electricity in southern Brazil, lives. The 3,500 inhabitants of the municipality are largely small farmers who descend from Italian immigrants that came to Brazil in the 20th century. As the main economic activity in the western state of Santa Catarina, pig farming represents great potential for biogas production. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
VARGEÃO, Brazil, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

“Biogas is the best energy, it has no contraindications,” and if you combine it with solar it becomes “the best energy business,” at least in Brazil, says Anélio Thomazzoni.

His enthusiasm is not merely rhetorical. He raises about 38,000 pigs on his property, Gavea Farm, and uses their manure to produce biogas that generates electricity, about 280,000 kilowatts/hour, for his own consumption and for third parties.

He is also building a larger biodigester and is preparing to install 6,000 square metres of solar panels on idle land on his farm, to generate another 130,000 kilowatt hours per month, in a region where a typical family consumes less than 1,000 kilowatts per month.

“I will have solar energy during the day and electricity from biogas when there is no sun”, the “most profitable forula in the world” in terms of energy and with benefits to the environment, Thomazzoni said.

“In addition, solar energy will allow me to save part of the biogas that I will convert into biomethane,” he told IPS on his 100-hectare farm that he owns with his brother.

Biomethane, a fuel equivalent to natural gas, is produced by purifying biogas. It should become more important as a result of the government’s plan to create a “new natural gas market” with a supply at reduced prices due to the growing deep-water production off Brazil’s shore.

“Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (Abiogas), told IPS, “The gas pipeline network only supplies areas near the coast, so in the interior of the country the solution will be locally produced biogas.”

Trucks will have biomethane in a country where they are already made to run on natural gas, he said. The country has 1.9 million cargo vehicles, which provide 60 percent of cargo transport and move most of the agricultural production, according to transportation authorities.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Thomazzoni, who has lived all of his 56 years in the municipality of Vargeão, population 3,500, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, is alive and well.

Pig farmer Anélio Thomazzoni stands between the three biodigesters with which he currently produces biogas for the generation of 280,000 kilowatt/hours on his farm in the small municipality of Vargeão, in southern Brazil. Part of the biofuel will be purified to transform it into biomethane, while 6,000 square metres of solar panels are installed to generate 130,000 kilowatts/hour. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

He is building a new farm on another 50-hectare property, to raise an additional 30,000 pigs, but genetically improved breeding animals. In addition to meat, they will produce biogas, electricity and biofertiliser.

The Thomazzoni family moved from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, to Vargeão in 1957, in one of the waves of southern migration to the north and west of the country.

Initially dedicated to traditional crops, such as corn and later soy, he shifted to pig farming three decades ago. In 2003 they had about 10,000 pigs and began to produce biogas, in response to a demand from environmental authorities, in a state with strict environmental requirements.

He owned the first biodigester in western Santa Catarina, thanks to credits from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

Since 2015 it has been generating electricity from biogas, after two years of technological difficulties and a near bankruptcy, because the distribution concessionaire, Centrales Eléctricas de Santa Catarina, demanded the installation of cables and took 20 months to authorise the generation of electricity.

“I had stopped dreaming,” having purchased the generators and equipment and with no way to pay the loans that were falling due, Thomazzoni said.

A new biodigester, three times bigger than the previous ones, is under construction at the Thomazzoni brothers’ Gavea farm in southern Brazil. To the sides are some of the 32 sheds where pigs are raised in different phases of their lives: maternity, nursery and fattening. In the last two decades the business has diversified with the production of biogás, electricity and biofertilisers. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The road to success also included other setbacks, such as the loss of a biodigester canvas carried off by heavy winds.

“I planned and did everything we have here,” says the agribusinessman, pointing out some of his own “inventions” with which he replaced equipment so expensive in the market that “it would have made my business unviable.”

One is the use of water heated by an electric generator that pumps it through tubes that run into the biodigester, raising the internal temperature to boost the fermentation and productivity of the manure, especially during the wintertime when temperatures go down.

Another is a compressor that injects air into the biodigester, at a cost of 180 reais (45 dollars) – 330 times cheaper than the three filters he had purchased. “There are swindlers in the market who hinder biogas projects,” he said.

He uses the semi-solid waste from the biodigestion process, technically known as digestate, as fertiliser for planting hay, which is more productive because it is a perennial crop that is incorporated into an “integrated production” system as livestock feed. Corn and soy only produce two alternating annual crops, he explained.

Biogas is at the center of a chain that is the very “description of the circular economy,” according to Gardemann, also director of Geo Energética, a company that runs a large biogas from sugarcane waste project in the state of São Paulo.

Anélio Thomazzoni stands next to one of the three electric generators on his farm in southern Brazil. In addition to electricity, the equipment heats the water that is pumped through tubes running into the biodigesters to raise the temperature high enough to ferment pig manure. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The waste from the production of food or livestock feed is used to produce biogas, whose by-product is returned to the soil as nutrients for new food production, he pointed out.

“Biogas is a 24-hour battery,” he said, to emphasise that it is “continuously available energy that can be stored and used at any time” of the day or night, qualities that are more necessary now, when the use of intermittent sources such as wind and solar power is on the rise.

Abiogas aims to raise the share of biogas to 10 percent of Brazil’s energy mix, up from less than one percent today. It has the potential to supply “40 percent of the national electricity demand or substitute 70 percent of Brazil’s diesel consumption,” according to the industry association.

“The announced potential is not always real,” warned Ricardo de Gouvêa, Santa Catarina state secretary of agriculture, at the Southern Brazilian Forum on Biogas and Biomethane, held Sept. 4-6 in Chapecó, a city in the western part of the state.

Of the agricultural inputs, listed as the main source, half are not used or have other uses such as direct planting, because there is still no fully validated technology and the benefits of biogas often do not offset the costs of implementation, especially for small-scale producers, he said.

But “biogas is in fact the best source and now is its turn,” said Péricles Pinheiro, head of New Business at CHP Brazil, a company that provides equipment and solutions for distributed generation of electricity produced from gas.

It represents more continuously available energy at a time of unstable electric supply due to the growing use of intermittent sources, the approaching end of the useful life of 80,000 kilometres of transmission lines, and a distortion in national consumption data, he argued.

The higher cost of energy in the hours of greatest consumption, from 5 to 9 PM, made many consumers turn to their own diesel generators in the evenings, causing an apparent “drop” in demand after dark, when people turn on their lights and many household appliances.

If this information is not taken into account, the operation of the national power grid can increase the risk of blackouts. Biogas would help reduce that risk by expanding its share of the energy mix, Pinheiro said.

Related Articles

• Biogas Makes Pig Farming More Sustainable in Southern Brazil
• Producing Clean Energy from Pigsties in Brazil
• Producing Energy from Pig and Poultry Waste in Brazil

The post Combining Biogas and Solar, the Best Energy Deal in Brazil appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Many state-regulated brothels have closed amid pressure from women's rights and religious opponents.

Liverpool defender Joel Matip will miss Wednesday's Champions League match with Red Bull Salzburg after being injured at Sheffield United.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit. PHOTO: LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

By Habibullah N Karim
Oct 1 2019 (IPS-Partners)

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its latest warning saying that the world’s oceans are rising twice as fast as they did in the last century due to fast-disappearing ice-sheets in the Antarctic and Greenland. The IPCC predicts that as much as two-thirds of the permafrost could be gone before the end of the current century, further exacerbating carbon dioxide emissions as humongous amounts of CO2 trapped in the permafrost would be released in the process. In other words, all the apprehensions about climate change are much more menacing than anticipated earlier, making for huge shifts in climate patterns that will wreak havoc on the coastal cities and habitations around the world. On the one hand, rising sea levels will inundate low-lying coastal areas and, on the other hand, all the entrapped heat in the oceans will give rise to far more destructive cyclones more frequently. The world as we knew it in the pre-industrial era is gone for ever.

The level of change in the climate that humans have already caused can no longer be labelled an innocuous “climate change” but rather a pernicious “climate crisis”. This new reckoning is bound to cause major setbacks in countries like ours and should surely cause major headaches to socio-economic planners.

Bangladesh sits at the head of the funnel that directs all the atmospheric turbulence above the Indian Ocean to the narrow mouth of the Bay of Bengal, putting us at the receiving end of this huge climate crisis. But do we see anyone blowing the whistles on this one? The government seems complacent with the high growth rates the nation has achieved in recent years but all such growth prospects will be in serious jeopardy if we fail to address the climate crisis on a war footing.

15-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg stunned the world leaders last week at the UN General Assembly with her in-your-face proclamations on how climate change, nay, climate crisis, has robbed our children of their right to a prosperous future in a world sinking in its oceans and churning in its storms. That the world must rise in a body to counter the effects of anthropogenic global warming and arrest the rising global temperatures and devote resources to “carbon sequestering” is causing world leaders to cringe in their seats. Many world leaders are taking bold steps and major economic measures to counter climate change and many more are rising to the challenge being prodded by a fearless teenager from Sweden who dared to cross the Atlantic in a solar powered boat instead of taking a carbon-gushing plane ride to attend the UNGA meeting in New York. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)—the global compact of climate Tsars—has been working on creating awareness and pushing for remedial actions on climate change for nearly three decades now but the world needed the prodding of a sharp-tongued and fiercely committed Greta Thunberg to jolt world leaders into fervent action on the impending climate crisis.

Bangladesh is a poster-child for climate change that brings to fore all the disastrously harmful effects of global warming; in all climate conferences Bangladesh is at the dead centre of discussions on how to mitigate the effects of and adapt to climate change but not much planning and activity is visible yet on the home front. Rather we had been in the news for all the wrong reasons, when Green Climate Fund resources were plundered by a government-sanctioned private bank that almost went belly up last year.

Sweden is a country with a large coastline where the effects of global warming is causing rapidly changing shorelines as the sea creeps inward relentlessly. Of course, Sweden has reasons to be highly concerned but it is a thinly-populated country with a high per capita income. It has the wherewithal and landmass to put up with climate change. That this nation of only 10 million has produced a Greta Thunberg to ring the carillon bell on climate change makes our lack of action in this area all the more poignant.

Bangladesh may not have as large a coastline as Sweden but our fragile coastline hosting the largest mangrove forest of the world and a population 17 times larger than Sweden’s at the mercy of the elements make it imperative that someone as fearless and as passionate as Greta comes forward to bell the cat on climate crisis before we become climate fodder. There is certainly no dearth of derring-do teenagers here as evidenced by the traffic revolt of the teens earlier this year. The clock is ticking for a climate uprising. Is anyone listening?

Habibullah N Karim is an author, policy activist, investor and serial entrepreneur. He is a founder and former president of BASIS and founder-CEO of Technohaven Company Ltd. Email: hnkarim@gmail.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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