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Russia's 9M729 missile reportedly has been tested using a mobile launcher system similar to that used by the 9K720 Iskander-M pictured here on September 18, 2017. Credit: Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation

By Daryl G. Kimball
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 9 2019 (IPS)

Next month, it is very likely the Trump administration will take the next step toward fulfilling the president’s threat to “terminate” one of the most far-reaching and most successful nuclear arms reduction agreements: the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which led to the verifiable elimination of 2,692 Soviet and U.S. missiles based in Europe.

The treaty helped bring an end to the Cold War and paved the way for agreements to slash bloated strategic nuclear arsenals and to withdraw thousands of tactical nuclear weapons from forward-deployed areas.

On Dec. 4, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that Russia had fielded a ground-launched missile system, the 9M729, that exceeds the INF Treaty’s 500-kilometer range limit. He also announced that, in 60 days, the administration would “suspend” U.S. obligations under the treaty and formally announce its intention to withdraw in six months unless Russia returns to compliance. Suspension will allow the administration to try to accelerate the development of new missiles currently prohibited by the treaty.

Noncompliance with the treaty is unacceptable and merits a strong response. But Trump’s public declaration that he will terminate the treaty and pursue new U.S. nuclear capabilities will not bring Russia back into compliance with the INF Treaty. Worst of all, blowing up the INF Treaty with no substitute plan in place could open the door to a dangerous new era of unconstrained military competition with Russia.

Without the treaty, already severe tensions will grow as Washington considers deployment of new intermediate-range missiles in Europe and perhaps elsewhere and Russia considers increasing 9M729 deployments and other new systems.

These nuclear-capable weapons, if deployed again, would be able to strike targets deep inside Russia and in western Europe. Their short time-to-target capability increases the risk of miscalculation in a crisis. Any nuclear attack on Russia involving U.S. intermediate-range, nuclear-armed missiles based in Europe could provoke a massive Russian nuclear counterstrike on Europe and on the U.S. homeland.

In delivering the U.S. ultimatum on the treaty, Pompeo expressed “hope” that Russia will “change course” and return to compliance. Hope that Russia will suddenly admit fault and eliminate its 9M729 system is not a serious strategy, and it is not one on which NATO leaders can rely.

Instead, NATO members should insist that the United States and Russia redouble their sporadic INF Treaty discussions, agree to meet in a formal setting, and put forward proposals for how to resolve issues of mutual concern about the treaty.

Unfortunately, U.S. officials have refused thus far to take up Russia’s offer to discuss “any mutually beneficial proposals that take into account the interests and concerns of both parties.” That is a serious mistake. Failure by both sides to take diplomatic engagement more seriously since the 9M729 missile was first tested five years ago has bought us to this point.

Barring an unlikely 11th-hour diplomatic breakthrough, however, the INF Treaty’s days are numbered. Doing nothing is not a viable option. With the treaty possibly disappearing later this year, it is not too soon to consider how to head off a dangerous and costly new missile race in Europe.

One option would be for NATO to declare, as a bloc, that none of them will field any INF Treaty-prohibited missiles or any equivalent new nuclear capabilities in Europe so long as Russia does not field treaty-prohibited systems that can reach NATO territory. This would require Russia to remove those 9M729 missiles that have been deployed in western Russia.

This would also mean forgoing Trump’s plans for a new ground-launched, INF Treaty-prohibited missile. Because the United States and its NATO allies can already deploy air- and sea-launched systems that can threaten key Russian targets, there is no need for such a system. Key allies, including Germany, have already declared their opposition to stationing new intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

In the absence of the INF Treaty, another possible approach would be to negotiate a new agreement that verifiably prohibits ground-launched, intermediate-range ballistic or cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads. As a recent United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research study explains, the sophisticated verification procedures and technologies already in place under the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) can be applied with almost no modification to verify the absence of nuclear warheads deployed on shorter-range missiles.

Such an approach would require additional declarations and inspections of any ground-launched INF Treaty-range systems. To be of lasting value, such a framework would require that Moscow and Washington agree to extend New START, which is now scheduled to expire in 2021.

The INF Treaty crisis is a global security problem. Without serious talks and new proposals from Washington and Moscow, other nations will need to step forward with creative and pragmatic solutions that create the conditions necessary to ensure that the world’s two largest nuclear actors meet their legal obligations to end the arms race and reduce nuclear threats.

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Excerpt:

Daryl G. Kimball is Executive Director, Arms Control Association

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A Rohingya girl goes to fetch water in Balukhali camp, Bangladesh. Credit: Umer Aiman Khan/IPS

By Leila Yasmine Khan and Daud Khan
AMSTERDAM/ROME, Jan 9 2019 (IPS)

The Rohingya are a minority community living in Rakhine State in Myanmar. The Muslim Rohingya are considered intruders into Buddhist Myanmar – illegal immigrants from bordering Bangladesh. They have been always discriminated against, looked down upon, ostracized, and denied any civil and judicial rights.

In August of 2017, a small group of Rohingya militants launched an attack against local police forces. This incident triggered the worst ever reaction against the Rohingya in which the local non-Rohingya population, Buddhist monks and the local police participated.

The official security forces then took over and undertook mass killings, abuses and abductions. Most of the Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh where about 900,000 refugees now live in camps where they receive essential assistance and basic medical care.  Efforts are being made to negotiate their return to Myanmar but these appear to have little chance of success.

The violence towards the Rohingya, and their displacement from their homes and villages, is likely to wipe out their traditions, culture and lifestyle as well as their mental and cultural constructs. This combination of physical and psychological violence is likely to lead to the elimination of the Rohingya’s identity.

These acts against the Rohingya constitute genocide as set out in the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide passed by the United Nations in 1948 – which define genocide as actions taken to “destroy, in whole and in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.

The violence towards the Rohingya, and their displacement from their homes and villages, is likely to wipe out their traditions, culture and lifestyle as well as their mental and cultural constructs. This combination of physical and psychological violence is likely to lead to the elimination of the Rohingya’s identity.

The Rohingya Crisis has been subject to attention at international level; the international press has given the matter considerable coverage; and the UN Human Rights Council has recommended that the commanders responsible for the violence be brought to trial.

However, much more needs to be done given the number of people affected, the fact that the Rohingya, always a poor and vulnerable group, are being pushed into inhuman suffering; and that the brunt of refugee burden is being borne by a single country (Bangladesh).

Logistic and financial help is needed to address immediate needs, and political and diplomatic pressure is needed to help the Rohingya to return to their homes and to bring to justice those responsible for criminal acts.

This relative lack of attention reflects different factors in developed and developing countries. The rich countries, particularly the USA and European countries, are currently grappling with their own immigration and refugee crisis which largely emanates from problems in the Middle East, Africa and Central America.

Among the increasingly sovereignist governments in many countries, there is a limited appetite for addressing crisis that do not directly affect their economic or social interests. Another possible factor is that the Rohingya crisis, which involves Buddhists as oppressors and Muslims as victims, does not fit well with the current dominant narrative where Muslim fundamentalists are the root cause of terror and violence in the world and provide the political justification for repressive laws and large spending on security and on the military.

Given the lack of interest by the developed world, much responsibility falls on developing countries, especially large neighbors such as China, India, Pakistan and Thailand. These countries should be helping Bangladesh cope with the economic burden of dealing with the refugees and pressurizing Myanmar to take back the Rohingya, grant them civil rights and bring press charges against those that have committed crimes and atrocities.

However, little is being done and this reflects a misguided sense of solidarity among developing countries which results in a reluctance to criticize each other on human rights matters. This is unfortunate.

Bangladesh and its neighbors have experienced rapid economic growth that has raised average incomes and reduced poverty.  However, development is about much more than just increased economic wellbeing. It is also about upholding values, allowing citizens to lead dignified lives free from arbitrary violence, and having access to speedy and reliable justice systems.  This needs to be done domestically and internationally.

Some progress has been made on the domestic front. In India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the judiciary has taken the lead in establishing religious, personal or political rights. Recently high profile judgements by Supreme Courts in these countries include the case of Asia Bibi – a Christian lady accused of blasphemy in Pakistan where the Supreme Court threw out the baseless allegations against her; the ruling by the Supreme Court in India that stated that discrimination on the basis on sexual orientation was against the Constitution and those that felt discrimination could seek redress from a court of law; and the ruling by the Supreme Court in Sri Lanka against the recent constitutional coup and the dissolving of parliament.

In other countries, such as China and Viet Nam, social media activists are taking the lead on rights and justice issues addressing issues such as corruption, cronyism and human rights abuses.

These steps are excellent and timely.  However, there is a moral void in the global system with the traditional upholders of the rule-based international order – particularly northern Europe and the USA- taking a less proactive role.

The most glaring recent example relates to the limited political and economic fallout of the Kashoggi murder. As developing countries, especially in Asia, account for an increasing share of global GDP, they should also take up an increasing share of the task of creating a better and more just world.

Given the nature of what needs to be done, NGOs, social media or the national judicial systems which have played a critical role in the domestic sphere, cannot take the lead. The responsibility for this falls squarely on the shoulders of Governments – they must not fail.

Leila Yasmine Khan is an intendent writer and writer based in the Netherlands.  She has Master’s Degrees in Philosophy and in Argumentation and Rhetoric from the University of Amsterdam; and a Degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome (Roma Tre).  

Daud Khan has more than 30 years of experience on development issues with various national and international organizations. He has degrees in economics from the LSE and Oxford; and a degree in Environmental Management from the Imperial College of Science and Technology.  

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Children from rural areas and disempowered homes are ideal targets for trafficking in India and elsewhere. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 9 2019 (IPS)

Human trafficking is on the rise and it is more “horrific” than ever, a United Nations agency found.

In a new report examining patterns in human trafficking, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that the global trend has increased steadily since 2010 around the world.

“Human trafficking has taken on horrific dimensions as armed groups and terrorists use it to spread fear and gain victims to offer as incentives to recruit new fighters,” said UNODC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov.

Asia and the Americas saw the largest increase in identified victims but the report notes that this may also reflect an improved capacity to identify and report data on trafficking.

Women and girls are especially vulnerable, making up 70 percent of detected victims worldwide. While they are mainly adult women, girls are increasingly targeted by traffickers.

According to the 2018 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, girls account for 23 percent of all trafficking victims, up from 21 percent in 2014 and 10 percent in 2004.

UNODC also highlighted that conflict has increased the vulnerability of such populations to trafficking as armed groups were found to use the practice to finance activities or increase troops.   

Activist and U.N. Goodwill Ambassador Nadia Murad was among thousands of Yazidi women and girls who was abducted from her village and sold into sexual slavery by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, a tactic used in order to boost recruitment and reward soldiers. 

Murad recently received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, dedicating it to survivors of sexual violence and genocide.

“Survivors deserve a safe and secure pathway home or safe passage elsewhere. We must support efforts to focus on humanity, and overcome political and cultural divisions. We must not only imagine a better future for women, children and persecuted minorities, we must work consistently to make it happen – prioritising humanity, not war,” she said.

“The fact remains that the only prize in the world that can restore our dignity is justice and the prosecution of criminals,” Murad added.

Sexual exploitation continues to be the main purpose for trafficking, account for almost 60 percent, while forced labor accounts for approximately 34 percent of all identified cases.

Three-quarters of all female victims are trafficked for sexual exploitation globally.

The report also found for the first time that the majority of trafficked victims are trafficked within their own countries of citizenship.

The share of identified domestic victims has more than doubled from 27 percent in 2010 to 58 percent in 2016.

This may be due to improved border controls at borders preventing cross-border trafficking as well as a greater awareness of the different forms of trafficking, the report notes.

However, convictions have only recently started to grow and in many countries, conviction rates still remain worryingly low.

In Europe, conviction rates have dropped from 988 traffickers convicted in 2011 to 742 people in 2016.

During that same time period, the number of detected victims increased from 4,248 to 4,429.

There also continue to be gaps in knowledge and information, particularly in certain parts of Africa, Middle East, and East Asia which still lack sufficient capacity to record and share data on human trafficking.

“This report shows that we need to step up technical assistance and strengthen cooperation, to support all countries to protect victims and bring criminals to justice, and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” Fedotov said at the report’s launch.

Adopted in 2015, the landmark SDGs include ambitious targets including the SDG target 16.2 which calls on member states to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children.

SDG indicator 16.2.2 asks member states to measure the number of victims of human trafficking per 100,000 population and disaggregated by sex, age, and form of exploitation, reflecting the importance of improving data recording, collection, and dissemination.

“The international community needs to…stop human trafficking in conflict situations and in all our societies where this terrible crime continues to operate in the shadows,” Fedotov said.

“I urge the international community to heed Nadia [Murad]’s call for justice,” he added.

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM/ROME, Jan 9 2019 (IPS)

Denis Villeneuve´s film Blade Runner 2049 depicts a future where “bioengineered replicants” are used as slaves and killed if they misbehave. Replicants are manufactured and individualized as if they were real humans. They are even implanted with artificial memories, a measure intended to make them more “mental stable”, able to cope with their wretch existence as slave labourers. Dr. Ana Stelline, a character in the movie, explains how she manufactures memories:

– They all think it’s about more detail. But that’s not how memory works. We recall with our feelings. Anything real should be a mess.

The movie implies that memories often are fictional, created by ourselves, based on our immediate environment and thus influenced by views and manipulations of others. The author Gabriel García Márquez, was like the movie´s Dr. Stelline, a creator of dreams and memories. In all his writing remembering and forgetting are prevalent themes. His most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, portrays a fictitious village called Macondo. In reality a description of García Márquez’s memories of his childhood village it becomes an archetype of all Latin American villages. He retells dreams and stories stored in the minds of Macondo´s inhabitants. García Márquez declared:

– Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers in order to recount it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude shows that memories are not only individual, they are collective as well, shared with an entire community. In 1983, the historian Eric Hobsbawm edited a book called The Invention of Traditions, which described how concepts of ethnicity and nationality create shared identities by endorsing, and even inventing, cultural traits that underscore the uniqueness of certain groups of people. Invented traditions and memories tend to minimize communal crimes committed by flag-waving bigots. They may even serve as a motive for genocide, i.e. “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”1

Genocides are generally blamed on fanatic individuals, thus covering up the fact that horrendous crimes of such magnitude cannot be committed without logistic support and massive propaganda from powerful organisations, mostly national governments, which foster xenophobia to strengthen their own power. Such is the case of each and every one of the genocides committed during the past century. Atrocities like German mass killings of Herero and Namaqua in Namibia, 1904-1908 (between 34,000 to 110,000 civilians were slaughtered),2 mass killings of Armenians in Turkey, 1914-1922 (700,000 to 1,800,000 dead, at the same time an estimated 500,000 to 900,000 Greeks and 200,000 to 750,000 Assyrians were killed), Italian mass killings in Libya, 1923-1932 (leaving 80,000 to 125,000 dead), mass killings committed by Croatian Ustaše, 1941-1945 (350,000 to 600,000 dead, while Serbian Chetniks killed 47,000 to 65,000 Croats and Bosnians), Indonesian mass killings, 1965–66 (500,000 to one million dead), Bangladesh mass killings, 1971 (300,000 to 3 million dead), Burundian mass killings, 1972-1983 (80,000 to 210,000 dead), mass killings in East Timor, 1975-1999 (85,000 to 196,000 dead), mass killings in Cambodia, 1975-1979 (14,000 to 3 million dead), mass killings of Somalian Isaaqs, 1988-1991 (50,000 to 200,000 dead), mass killings of Bosnians, 1992-1995 (8,000 to 39,000 dead), Rwandan mass killings, 1994 (500,000 to one million dead), mass killings of Iraqi Kurds, 1986-1989 (50,000 to 200,000 dead), mass killings of Congolese Bambutis, 2002-2003 (60,000 to 70,000 dead).

State sponsored killings were extreme when it comes to crimes committed in the name of National Socialism and Bolshevism (particularily in its Stalinist shape), two political systems based on control and exclusion not only of human beings, but of history and memories as well. Nazi Germany caused the death of 5 to 6 million Jews, 3 million USSR prisoners of war, more than 12 million civilians in occupied territories, and between 130,000 and 500,000 Romani people. Leaders of Stalinist Soviet Union were guilty of the Holdomor, a man-made famine killing between 2 and 7 million Ukrainians and 1,5 million dead in Kazakhstan under similar circumstances, 200,000 deaths during forced migration of Chechens, 110,000 deaths during NKVD operations in Poland and between 100,000 and 300,000 Poles killed in Volhynia and Galicia.

Few Governments like to be reminded of such atrocities. Some are even forgotten by the general public, or furiously denied by populist nationalists. For them massacred people are as worth- and featureless as out-of-order replicants were to their owners in Blade Runner 2049.

The climax of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is based on a true event not far from the author´s birthplace. In 1928, Colombian military opened fire on striking plantation workers, killing an unknown number. In the novel, the company’s director summons up a whirlwind washing away not only Macondo, but any recollection of the massacre. In the novel´s final scene we learn that it is a tale based on a manuscript that a mysterious visitor had left with an ancestor of one of the main characters: “Melquíades had not put events in the order of man´s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way they coexisted in one instant.”

A beautiful picture of how our memories work. They erase some episodes, while amplifying others. The novel finishes on a tragic note. The manuscript declares that what is lost, is lost forever. The past century has left us with the weight of millions of dead. They did not learn from history. “Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.” We will probably experience the same fate. We erect monuments over wars and heroes, but prefer to forget, or minimize, horrendous crimes committed in the name of distorted memories, a falsified history glorifying a past that never existed.

1The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
2These and other figures are based on the lowest and highest estimates found in relevant literature.

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.

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

After US President Donald Trump withdrew from Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving twelve countries on the Pacific rim, on his first day in office, Japan, Australia and their closest allies proposed and promoted the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to draw the US back into the region to counter China’s fast-growing power and influence.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Geostrategic deal to re-engage US in East Asia
The modest projected gains claimed by the most popularly used trade models are based on dubious methodologies. President Obama had explicitly promoted the TPP for geostrategic reasons even though both US government cost-benefit analyses found very modest gains from the free trade agreement (FTA).

With miniscule real trade gains from the original TPP, US withdrawal has made benefits from the regional agreement even more trivial. Without the US market, the TPP’s supposed benefits largely disappeared with the CPTPP. Hence, while its proponents hope the CPTPP will re-engage the US as hegemon in the region, TPP advocates have become even more desperate for US participation.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), the main TPP and CPTPP advocate, claimed most (85%) growth gains from non-trade measures (NTMs), not trade liberalization per se. Such claims were largely refuted by the 2016 US International Trade Council (ITC) report.

The World Bank used PIIE consultants to make even more exaggerated claims of TPP gains in early 2017, ignoring most costs and risks. CPTPP advocates have made even more extravagant claims about supposed benefits since.

To make matters worse, besides the meagre trade gains, enhanced intellectual property rights (IPRs) and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions will fetter developing countries’ ‘catch-up’ economic prospects. Besides raising costs, e.g., for buying medicines and technologies, strengthened IPRs will further limit technology transfer.

ISDS will enable foreign investors to sue CPTPP governments, not in national courts, but rather, private arbitration tribunals. Besides undermining national judicial sovereignty, small country governments with limited legal resources will be disadvantaged. Ironically, Trump’s US Trade Representative now rejects reciprocal ISDS for undermining US sovereignty!

From the frying pan into the fire
Informed analysts know that CPTPP losses, costs and risks are much greater than for the TPP while gains will be more trivial despite cheerleaders’ claims to the contrary. More worryingly, very few developing country negotiators have actually scrutinized and understood the likely implications of the 6350 page TPP agreement.

Some minor changes were made to the TPP agreement for the CPTPP. Several onerous provisions were amended, and some others suspended, leaving most unchanged. Only a few CPTPP governments secured ‘side letters’, exempting them from some specific clauses.

Thus, most onerous TPP provisions remain. The CPTPP has committed Malaysia to further trade liberalization, accelerating deindustrialization, besides constraining the growth of modern services, development finance and ‘policy space’.

With the economic slowdown of the last decade wrongly attributed to the end of trade expansion since 2009, and the more recent ‘populist-nationalist’ reversal of trade liberalization, wishful thinking has emerged that the CPTPP will somehow magically enhance economic growth and progress.

Developmental, multilateral FTA needed
Increased market access for exports typically requires trade liberalization by others, but trade liberalization also undermines food and industrial production. Recognizing such problems after the end of the Uruguay Round of trade talks led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the mid-1990s, most developing country members have since sought to ensure that WTO rules are more development-friendly, launching a Development Round at its Doha biennial ministerial conference in late 2001.

As trade liberalization advocate Jagdish Bhagwati has argued, bilateral and plurilateral FTAs have long undermined WTO-led trade multilateralism. At the national level, developing country governments should amend legislation and policy in line with their needs, especially for development, not at the behest of corporate lobbyists or geostrategic priorities.

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Excerpt:

Forty years ago, on the 7th of January 1979, the Vietnamese army overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime.
Between April 1975 and January 1979 about 1,5 to 2 million Cambodians died, a quarter of the population. 

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In the Siraro District of Ethiopia, extreme weather patterns are increasing. Since 2005, people have endured five droughts. Credit: Peter Lüthi / Biovision

By Peter Lüthi
ZURICH, Switzerland, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

The unusually hot summer of 2018 showed that climate change affects a central part of our lives: agriculture. The severe drought in Liechtenstein led to large losses in the hay harvest.

In countries of the Global South, the consequences of climate change are already much more drastic. In Africa, for example, extreme weather conditions threaten food security for millions of people.

East Africa has encountered droughts at increasingly shorter intervals in recent years, most recently in 2005-6, 2009, 2011, 2014-15, and 2017.

Apart from drought, the conditions for agriculture are also becoming increasingly difficult due to the gradual rise in temperature, salinization and changing rainy seasons.

Serious consequences include decreasing availability of food and increasing conflicts over water–both obstacles to development opportunities of the affected states and possible triggers for migration.

Agriculture is also the cause

Agriculture and the food system are not only victims but also causes of climate change. The term “food system” refers to the entire food cycle, from production to harvesting, storage, distribution, consumption, and disposal.

This cycle produces significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. Paradoxically, modern industrial agriculture aims to intensify operations to compensate for the loss of production caused by climate change.

However, using ever more fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers, and agrochemicals increases emissions of climate-damaging gases instead of reducing them. Industrialized agriculture causes additional problems as well, including large-scale deforestation, immense water consumption, soil compaction and erosion, chemical pollution of the environment, and biodiversity loss.

This exacerbates the overexploitation of natural resources and increases climate change vulnerability.

In the project “Food security in rural Ethiopia” by Biovision and Caritas Vorarlberg, the village communities of the Siraro district dig erosion control ditches.
This is important for preserving and enhancing natural resources. Credit: Peter Lüthi / Biovision

Carrying on like in the past is no longer an option

“Industrial agriculture has reached a dead end—there is no option to continue as before,” warns Hans Rudolf Herren, winner of the World Food Prize and longtime president of the Biovision Foundation.

The renowned agronomist and entomologist urges global agriculture to embrace organic, multifunctional, healthy and sustainable practices that take agroecological principles into account, rather than striving for the highest possible yields.

This option is now also recognized by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as a response to the many challenges of climate change.

Diversity increases resilience

Climate change is a complex problem involving various factors. This calls for holistic solutions. These include agroecology adapted to the local political, social, and natural conditions.

An important principle of agroecology is the promotion of diversity. The more diverse an ecosystem is, the more flexible it can react to changes, recover from disturbances, and adapt to new conditions.

Diversified agroecosystems use synergies from mixed cultivation or agroforestry systems and rely on natural fertilizers from compost and manure.

Agroecology combines traditional and new knowledge. This includes locally adapted and robust plant varieties and animal breeds. Efficiency-enhancing measures, such as irrigation systems, are becoming increasingly important.

At the societal level, fair trade conditions and market access for all producers are important, as is responsible governance. The latter is necessary to coordinate and issue appropriate political policies.

Save money for drought periods: Barite Jumba from Siraro learned how to raise and breed chickens in Biovision and Caritas Vorarlberg’s project. With the income from her egg business, she buys surplus vegetables to sell at a profit on the market.
This enables her to save money for food when her own supplies run out. Credit: Peter Lüthi / Biovision

Acting at all levels

A breakthrough for agroecology principles will require dialogue between all actors involved. Only then can the course of agriculture change towards a joint sustainable future.

This is the aim of the Biovision Foundation’s advocacy team. Together with an alliance of goal-oriented organizations and states, these agroecology advocates succeeded in establishing the demand for sustainable agriculture as part of the UN’s 17 sustainability goals in New York in 2015.

The Biovision Foundation supports the achievement of these goals both for agriculture and for climate protection at three levels:

Here at Biovision, we focus on raising public awareness for sustainable consumption and on establishing a network to implement sustainability goals.

At the international level, the advocacy team discusses agroecology with interested country representatives to position agroecology principles in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In the project “Advocacy for Agroecology,” Biovision supports countries with concrete recommendations for action and a coordinated policy dialogue to plan climate-friendly agroecological measures.

Through various grassroots projects in Africa, Biovision has demonstrated various concrete examples of successful application of these measures. LED’s support to train and inform smallholders is of crucial importance for farmers to have the ability to prepare themselves for the consequences of climate change.

*This article was first published in “Blickwechsel”, the magazine of the Liechtenstein Development Service LED.

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Excerpt:

Peter Lüthi is in Communications at the Biovision Foundation for Ecological Development, Zurich

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Roberto Savio is founder of IPS Inter Press Service and President Emeritus

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

The person most qualified to write the foreword for this latest work by Riccardo Petrella, In the Name of Humanity, would actually be Pope Francis, who, using other words but speaking of values and making denouncements, has often argued what the reader will find in the following pages. I quote him, because words like “solidarity”, “equality”, “social justice” or “participation” – now used only by Pope Francis I – have now disappeared from today’s political vocabulary. I was called to this task because I have spent my life in favour of information that would give citizens the tools to be conscious actors. But the reason why from a “professional” I have become an “activist” in the campaign for world governance is precisely because I see information as directly responsible for the drift in which we find ourselves.

Roberto Savio

Riccardo Petrella is a central point of reference for those who have not yet given up on seeing the governance of globalisation in terms of values and ideals. Riccardo has behind him a long series of struggles for a different economy and has denounced the dangers of neoliberal globalisation from the outset. We owe it to him if the theme of “commons” began to be debated, in particular that of water as a public good, at a time when the Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi was pushing for its privatisation. He did so in an era – the period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall – which today seems distant but which was of exceptional intellectual and political violence. Anyone who did not blindly adhere to the “single thought” introduced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury (the so-called Washington Consensus) was seen as either a nostalgist of the Soviet era or a dangerous subversive. Petrella, with few other economists, had the strength to oppose the Washington Consensus, deriding the general inebriation which reached levels that today seem impossible. I still remember a conference held by IPALMO in May 1991 in Milan, where the then director general of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero, described the world as still blocked by the concept of nation or regional agreements (such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement) now overtaken by the course of history. Globalisation was to have eliminated all frontiers, we were to have had a single currency, there were to been no more wars and the benefits of globalisation were to have rained down on all the citizens of the world, something that the theory of development and redistribution had failed to do. It took a generation of disappointed and marginalised people for the truth to become evident.

This book is the result of forty years of study, research, and social and academic engagement by Riccardo, gathered here in an organic way. It is a holistic engagement, with a humanist vision of the economy, of society and of the consequences of the crisis that dominates us. Reading it, faced with the wealth of data and reflections it offers, the African proverb comes to mind: “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground”. But beyond the contents, what makes the book stimulating is that it communicates a moral engagement and a human empathy rare in this era of transition from a world that is unsustainable to one that is inevitable, but which we cannot yet see well. In his Letters from Prison, Antonio Gramsci wrote that “in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears”.

Petrella analyses these symptoms in a meticulous but clear way, and they are symptoms for which today’s politics and finance certainly have no answer. The book is an organic work, analysing each symptom on the basis of data and proposals, helping us to walk in the shadow evoked by Gramsci. Finally we see that there are alternatives to the drift of a world of finance which – in the search for profit – comes into collision with the very productive economy of which it was only to have been a lubricant. And in turn politics, like the productive economy, is subject to the world of finance. Today, the production of goods and services, that is, the sphere in which men and women play a role, accounts for one-fortieth of financial transactions. Greed has led banks to engage in more and more criminal actions: since the Great Crisis of 2008, major banks have paid a total of 220 billion dollars in fines …

According to numerous historians, the course of history has been changed above all by two factors: Greed and Fear. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it even came to be said that history had ended, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, and that we were entering a post-ideological world. The unification of the world into a single winning ideology, capitalism, was to have led to the end of clashes, in a united international reality dedicated to economic growth. What Fukuyama did not see is that capitalism without controls was to take the world back in time. On this Petrella offers incontrovertible data and echoes Oxfam when it says that in 2020 social inequalities in Britain will be equal to those of the era of Queen Victoria, when an unknown German philosopher was writing some chapters of Das Kapital in the Reading Room of the British Museum … The statistics on inequality are known to all: in the last two decades, capital has become increasingly concentrated in a few hands and a large part of humanity sees its level of life, health and education decrease, to the point that the International Monetary Fund is even beginning to whisper that inequality is a brake on growth.

As for Fear, it took the Brexit to start seeing the rapidly growing nationalist, xenophobic and populist drift in European countries (and also in the United States with Donald Trump). Fear has transformed countries that once were a symbol of civic-mindedness and tolerance – like the Netherlands and the Nordic countries – into racist countries that even confiscate the few personal jewels of refugees (Denmark). In just two years, the advance of the extreme right in Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – until now considered a series of local coincidences – is finally creating a debate in traditional parties that have no concrete response to the causes of Fear. Also because, as Petrella says, we are faced with a system that is a factory of poverty, which is not a natural phenomenon but a creation of the system itself. The challenges to be solved all derive from wrong answers. Peace is being tackled with an increase in military engagement, the environment with ecological devastation, democracy with the privatisation of political power. Justice is witnessing an increase in injustice, the economy is in a financial and speculative drift, and the sense of life of citizens – who have lost the value of solidarity and accept the commodification of all that surrounds them – is crumbling. No concern is voiced that more is being spent per person on marketing in the world than on education …

The drift in which we find ourselves is affecting democracy, which has become a formal process, devoid of the conscious and active participation of citizens. In the Name of Humanity observes what should now be clear to all and is certainly not to the system in power: we are at a global impasse that no one, with the paradigms in place, is able to solve. In an analytical but communicative way, this is the starting point for the list of Gramsci’s shadows: the lack of representation of humanity, the use of God, Nation and Money to transform into destroyers those who are still convinced of being constructors; and the data of the global impasse. Herein lies the importance of the book.

The analysis of the transitional era in which we find ourselves is roughly divided into two schools of thought. The first is that of those who believe that the current system is perhaps in crisis but that the answer may come from politicians – perhaps new ones – who, in every country, are able to give concrete and efficient answers with bold reforms. The second, and growing, school of thought argues that the current system is the cause of the problems to be solved and that without deep changes in vision and strategies the drift will continue.

This latter school of thought – which, moreover, is followed only by a small number of victims, many of whom are on the margins of society or are so frustrated as to take refuge in individual pessimism without hope – is a school strong in analysis and denunciation but poor in proposals. And it is here that the book offers its own positive originality: an organic and holistic plan of proposals which invoke a pact for Humanity as the basis for the re-foundation of society. A re-foundation that declares poverty illegal, that leads to disarmament and the end of speculative finance … However, in order to achieve this re-foundation, it is necessary to return to talking about values and finding a consensus and world participation around them, because without common values it is not possible to build together and without a global response national or local actions serve little. This book, as well as being an analysis, is also a manual for action.

In this sense it is important that In the Name of Humanity sees the light in a moment of generational sacrifice. My generation, overwhelmed by Greed and Fear, by selfishness and the decline of politics, lives parameters of retirement and security that young people can only dream of. The British referendum clearly demonstrated how the older generations are above all self-referential and feel no inter-generational responsibility. The elderly voted 65% for Brexit, deciding the future of young people, who were 75% in favour of Remain. This is the result of the absence of common values and the dramatic lack of policies for engaging young people, while those of fiscal rigour and priorities for the survival of the financial system abound – the most emblematic demonstration of current priorities. To save banks from the 2008 crisis, it is estimated that so far the contribution to finance has amounted to eight trillion dollars. Youth policies do not exceed 500 million dollars.

It is no wonder that young people take refuge in a pessimistic individualism, creating their own communities only virtually on the Internet; that they lack representation and participation and, above all, for the first time in modern history, idols and points of reference. Petrella’s book is an important instrument for young people because it transmits a message of hope that does not exist today. It is not inevitable that the world will continue like this. We have the instruments to change it. But to do that we have to go back to talking about values and going back to speaking with and understanding each other. In the Name of Humanity should be distributed free in schools …

Fifteen years have passed since the first meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, where we – protagonists of different stories – gathered to denounce the unsustainability of neoliberal globalisation. The scepticism and rejection that accompanied the WSF process have not prevented the Washington Consensus from today being just a discredited instrument of the past and the proponents of globalisation from admitting that the denunciations of the WSF had a real basis. As Petrella says, we can only emerge from the crisis with bold measures. This book will be received as a utopia, or rather a chimera, by the beneficiaries of the current system. In 15 years time, it will be interesting to see how many will have been be forced to admit that the analyses and the actions that Petrella proposes were not so far from the course of history.

Those who shoot at the stars can take heart from a Sri Lankan legend … there was a young boy who shot an arrow at the stars every night and was laughed at at until one day the king organised an archery contest and that boy won because he was the one who shot furthest!

The post Time for a new Paradigm appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Roberto Savio is founder of IPS Inter Press Service and President Emeritus

The post Time for a new Paradigm appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Returnee migrants volunteering for the International Migration Organisation (IOM) are campaigning in Nigerian markets against irregular migration by sharing their own stories of strife. Credit: Sam Olukoya/IPS

By Sam Olukoya
BENIN CITY, Nigeria, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

Thousands of migrants mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa have died or ended up in slavery as they attempt to travel to Europe irregularly through the desert and across the sea. Many were recruited by traffickers who deceived them into believing that the passage to Europe would be safe and easy.

The International Organization for Migration, IOM, has embarked on a peer-to-peer campaign aimed at letting vulnerable people know the real dangers.

Migrants who returned home after their failed attempt to reach Europe have been engaged volunteers to tell their harrowing stories in markets and other public places in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital.

The voice from the Public Address system urges people to travel the right way and not to kill themselves with the dangerous journey through the desert and sea. Messages like this were spread within some Lagos markets by returning migrants.

 

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The post Getting to the Heart of Irregular Migration in Nigeria’s Markets appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Alexander López Savrán, a 32-year-old engineer who innovated the standard fixed-dome biodigester to make it possible to create distribution networks from materials readily available in Cuba, stands next to one of these systems in the rural town of La Macuca, in Cabaiguán, Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

Black plastic pipes, readily available on the mainly empty shelves of Cuba’s shops, distribute biogas to homes in the rural town of La Macuca, buried under the ground or running through the grass and stones in people’s yards.

The strong blue flame in the kitchens of the eight homes supplied by producer Yuniel Pons is thanks to engineer Alexander López Savran, who innovated the standard fixed-dome biodigester to create distribution networks with the few basic materials available in this Caribbean island nation.

“A new biodigester has been designed to obtain pressure, which means that biogas can be distributed more than five kilometers away without the need for a compressor or blower. That is where the innovation lies,” the engineer, who lives in the city of Cabaiguán, capital of the municipality of the same name, where La Macuca is located, in the central province of Santi Spíritus, told IPS."Three years ago I had a big mess with animal waste, until I sought advice and began to make biogas…We are working on expanding the corrals so that another biodigester can benefit 15 more families, who have already been selected.” -- Yuniel Pons

López, 32, made headlines in 2017 when he received the Green Latin America Award in Ecuador, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology included him among the 35 young Latin Americans whose innovations improved the lives of their communities.

With a long-standing movement of biogas promoters and current regulations for private pork production favorable to its expansion, Cuba faces the challenge of creating efficient distribution networks to further exploit this ecological resource and raise the quality of life of rural localities, amidst an anemic economy.

“We started by taking a close look at the problem,” López recalled. “We had pork-raising centers that needed biodigesters, but the volume they were going to produce would be much greater than the consumption of those state facilities. On the other hand, we didn’t have the equipment to be able to distribute it.”

This fuel arises from the decomposition of organic matter, especially cattle manure and human feces. But on many farms with biodigesters there is a surplus of methane gas which, if not used, puts pressure on the equipment and is often released into the atmosphere, contributing to pollution.

In addition, biogas is most efficient for cooking because up to 70 percent of the energy is lost when it is used to generate electricity or fuel a vehicle.

“Two factors were considered: we had too much energy and there are difficulties in cooking food in the communities due to deficits in access to energy or electricity costs,” López said, referring to the dependence of most Cuban households on electric appliances.

After two years of study and design, López came up with the first prototype, which over time “has changed structurally to gain in efficiency, durability and performance,” he said, when interviewed by IPS in Pons’ home, where Pons lives with his wife Sandra Díaz and their son.

Sandra Díaz regulates the flame in her kitchen, which uses biogas from the innovative biodigester installed on her family’s land, in La Macuca, Cabaiguán, in the province of Santi Spíritus, in central Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Most of the biodigesters designed by López have been built as part of the Biomás Cuba project, which is coordinated by the state-run Indio Hatuey Experimental Pasture and Forage Station, located in the province of Matanzas, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

This initiative, which seeks to bring about energy sustainability in the Cuban countryside, provides part of the inputs, while the producer provides another part, to build the biodigester, which with fixed-dome technology is expensive because it requires a large volume of building materials but is compensated with distribution and 40 years of durability.

López estimated that his 10-cubic-meter biodigester costs the equivalent of 1,000 dollars in Cuba, but with an efficiency equal to that of a standard 15-cubic-meter biodigester. Less profitable are the polyethylene biodigesters, which cost about 800 dollars, serve just one home and have a useful life of up to 10 years.

So far, 10 biodigesters have been built with this local innovation in four localities of Cabaiguán: El Colorado (two), Ojo de Agua (one), Juan González (six) and La Macuca (one), which supply 102 homes and improved the lives of 600 people, saving 65 percent of electricity consumption per household.

And the technology was also replicated in Matanzas, although the engineer lamented the lukewarm reception by decision-makers with respect to the biodigester, which could contribute to the national plan for renewable energies to provide 24 percent of electric power by 2030, compared to just four percent today.

In well-equipped corrals, Pons keeps between 100 and 150 pigs behind his house as part of an agreement between state companies and private producers that in 2017 produced a record 194,976 tons, which did not, however, meet the demand of the country’s 11.2 million inhabitants. And that total was apparently not surpassed in 2018.

“Three years ago I had a big mess with animal waste, until I sought advice and began to make biogas,” recalled the producer, who is supported by Biomás. “We are working on expanding the corrals so that another biodigester can benefit 15 more families, who have already been selected.”

Farmer Yuniel Pons and his wife Sandra Díaz stand next to the biodigester installed by their house, which with its innovative system supplies energy to the kitchens of eight homes in La Macuca, a rural settlement in the municipality of Cabaiguán, in central Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

After lighting the gas stove in his kitchen, Diaz, a homemaker, explained that “cooking food like this is faster, it’s wonderful… I used to cook with an electric hotplate and pressure cooker, but they were almost always broken,” she said.

The network reaches the modest home of Denia Santos and her family, who live next door to Pons. “Now I cook with biogas and I also use it to boil (disinfect) towels and bedding, something I did with firewood that I would chop up myself,” said Santos, who takes care of her mentally disabled son.

Other benefits described by families who have biogas are that it is a better way to cook food for their animals and boil water for human consumption, and that it generates a strongersense of community as everyone is responsible for maintaining the biodigester.

José Antonio Guardado, national coordinator of the Movement of Biogas Users, which emerged in 1983 and today has more than 3,000 members spread throughout almost all of Cuba’s provinces, said he was happy with the trend in Cuban agriculture to create solidarity biogas networks.

Guardado told IPS that there is “greater awareness, political support and participative activities in the context of local development,” although obstacles to distribution persist because “materials in the market are not optimal, sufficient or affordable” and “there is a lack of institutional infrastructure to provide this service in an integrated manner.”

Meanwhile, in El Cano, outside of Havana, the solidarity plans of farmer Hortensia Martínez have come to a halt despite the fact that she used her own resources to build a biodigester with a traditional fixed 22-cubic-meter dome on her La China farm, to supply the farm itself and share with five neighboring homes.

“Now I plan to give it a boost, but we haven’t been able to implement it because we don’t have the connections to the community’s houses and it has valves, special faucets and a type of hose that makes it possible to bury the network underground,” the farmer, who is well-known for her community projects, especially targeting children, told IPS.

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The post Local Innovation Facilitates Solidarity-Based Biogas Networks in Cuba appeared first on Inter Press Service.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, a regulatory body of the UN, April 13, 2017. Rhodes, from Sierra Leone, retired a few weeks early from his job in December, amid allegations he had engendered a hostile workplace for women.

By Barbara Crossette
Jan 7 2019 (PassBlue)

Amid a busy December, when the United Nations was focusing on important conferences on climate change and migration and year-end holidays loomed, a case of harassment that never got the traction it arguably deserved ended in a traditional UN way: it disappeared.

On Dec. 14, the chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, which regulates salaries and working conditions for staff members across the vast UN system, quietly resigned, after a year of dodging allegations that he had created a hostile and “unhealthy” environment for women who rejected his sexual advances.

The chairman of the commission, Kingston Rhodes of Sierra Leone, who held the rank of UN under secretary-general, was due to retire at the end of 2018, when his second term ended. His sudden, early resignation was exactly what the women who filed a complaint feared: Rhodes hung on and walked free. Four of those women had aired their allegations in a letter to Secretary-General António Guterres.

Rhodes’ staff even organized a farewell party for him, in place of a holiday party, and employees were urged to help defray the costs.

Thalif Deen, a correspondent at the UN for Inter Press Service, who was almost alone in his persistent reporting on the harassment story, wrote on Dec. 14 what women working for the commission had been predicting, “The UN’s heavily-hyped ‘zero tolerance’ policy on sexual abuse is being ridiculed once again.”

Equality Now, an international organization advocating for women’s rights, had been following the case for more than a year, since the allegations surfaced in November 2017. The organization had also formally asked for intervention by Guterres, who was reported to have said he found the allegations made by the women on the commission staff “credible.”

One complainant was Shihana Mohamed, a human-resources policies officer on the commission. In an interview with PassBlue last summer, she discussed several systemwide principles that she charged had been violated by Rhodes, who had created a “hostile” and threatening working environment.

While Rhodes — as an elected, not appointed, official — was not required to abide by some employee rules, one that he had at least publicly endorsed was a systemwide UN code of conduct. Under the heading “Harassment and abuse of authority,” it says:

“Harassment in any shape or form is an affront to human dignity and international civil servants must not engage in any form of harassment. International civil servants have the right to a workplace environment free of harassment or abuse. All organizations must prohibit any kind of harassment. Organizations have a duty to establish rules and provide guidance on what constitutes harassment and abuse of authority and how unacceptable behaviour will be addressed.

“International civil servants must not abuse their authority or use their power or position in a manner that is offensive, humiliating, embarrassing or intimidating to another person.”

The International Civil Service Commission, which has 15 commissioners from around the world and a staff of about 40 people, is not a remote body based far from the UN. It is across the street from UN headquarters in a building housing other UN offices. Yet for months, the UN Secretariat, including the office of the secretary-general, took the position that technically, the commission was an independent entity, having been created by the General Assembly and fully in charge of its own affairs.

Equality Now took issue with that explanation from the start. Yasmeen Hassan, the organization’s global executive director, said in a letter to Guterres in July, endorsed by nine other advocacy groups, “You are in a unique position to defend your staff against harassment, physical and psychological, by any others in the United Nations workplace.”

Although the complaint filed in November 2017 could have been acted on quickly, it took five months for the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the UN’s investigative arm, to begin considering the case and apparently to decide whether it had standing to investigate the commission.

When the investigation began, another seven months elapsed before it issued a report, according to the Inter Press Service, which has a global readership. The findings were sent to the commission in mid-December 2018 and have not been made public by that body or by the Secretariat.

Throughout the time that Rhodes was under investigation, he carried on blithely ignoring the complaints. For example, in a speech on July 9, he congratulated himself on the successes of his tenure.

“Twelve years ago when I was first appointed Chair of the Commission, I set out my vision for a revitalized Commission, which would reassert its leadership role and deepen engagement with the overall reform taking place in the organizations of the United Nations common system,” he said.

“At the time, I urged members of the Commission to recommit to the concept of a unified, high performing, merit-based international civil service which emphasizes and rewards performance. . . . Looking back, I take pride in seeing how much has been accomplished and the extent to which we were able to realise that vision together.”

Rhodes was allowed to continue in his post without interference from fellow commissioners or Guterres until less than two weeks from his scheduled retirement date. The details of what prompted his unexpected — earlier (so to speak) — resignation have not been made public.

He will be replaced as chairman by Larbi Djacta of Algeria. A member of the commission, Djacta is a diplomat who has also worked with UN peacekeeping.

After the resignation of Rhodes was announced, Shihana Mohamed, the complainant noted above and a leading figure in the campaign to expose the difficult conditions for women at the commission, publicized the details of her own experiences in a statement to Equality Now. She said, in an abridged version of her story:

“I was sexually harassed by the Chairman of the ICSC, Mr. Kingston Rhodes, for over 10 years — and I was not the only one,” Mohamed said. “Because I said NO to his repeated sexual advances, Mr. Rhodes denied me promotions, and excluded me from duty travels, training, assignments, projects, Commission sessions and working groups. In 2016, I was on sick leave for 3 months due to the stress caused by the hostile office environment and retaliation by the ICSC management.

“His quiet resignation just two weeks before the end of his term is a slap in my face and barely a slap on his wrist.”

The post Another UN Harassment Case Quietly Disappears appeared first on PassBlue.

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The post Another UN Harassment Case Quietly Disappears appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Rhoda Weeks-Brown is general counsel and director of the Legal Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

By Rhoda Weeks-Brown
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 7 2019 (IPS)

Al Capone had a problem: he needed a way to disguise the enormous amounts of cash generated by his criminal empire as legitimate income. His solution was to buy all-cash laundromats, mix dirty money in with clean, and then claim that washing ordinary Americans’ shirts and socks, rather than gambling and bootlegging, was the source of his riches.

Rhoda Weeks-Brown

Almost a century later, the basic concept of money laundering is the same, but its scale and complexity have grown considerably. Were Capone alive today, he would have to run his washers and dryers around the clock to keep pace with demand; the United Nations recently estimated that the criminal proceeds laundered annually amount to between 2 and 5 percent of global GDP, or $1.6 to $4 trillion a year.

Money laundering is what enables criminals to reap the benefits of their crimes, including corruption, tax evasion, theft, drug trafficking, and migrant smuggling. Many of these crimes pose a direct threat to economic stability. Corruption and tax evasion make it difficult for governments to deliver sustainable and inclusive growth by diminishing the resources available for productive purposes, such as building roads, schools, and hospitals. Criminal activity undermines state authority and the rule of law while squeezing out legitimate economic activity. And money laundering may create asset bubbles in markets like real estate, a common vehicle.

A recent example illustrates the point. A Guinean minister helped a foreign company obtain important mining concessions in exchange for $8.5 million in bribes. Falsely reporting that money as income from consulting work and private land sales, the minister transferred it to the United States and bought a luxury estate in New York. But his effort to turn ill-gotten gains into a seemingly legitimate asset was ultimately unsuccessful; last year, he was convicted of money laundering.

In some ways, expensive homes are the modern mobster’s collection of laundromats. A public advisory issued by US authorities last year indicated that over 30 percent of high-value, all-cash real estate purchases in New York City and several other major metropolitan areas were conducted by individuals already suspected of involvement in questionable dealings. The governments of Australia, Austria, Canada, and other countries have concluded that their own real estate markets could also be used to invest and launder dirty money.
More worrying still, dirty money—along with clean—may be a source of funding for terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist groups need money, lots of it, to compensate fighters and their families; buy weapons, food, and fuel; and bribe crooked officials. Similarly, proliferation does not come cheap. For example, North Korea has reportedly devoted a substantial portion of its scarce resources to developing nuclear weapons.

Countries with weak anti–money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regimes could be called out by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global standard-setting organization. Once countries come to be viewed as vulnerable to illicit financial flows, their banks may face long-term reputational damage, costly demands for additional documentation on the part of international business partners, and the loss of correspondent banking relationships. This may marginalize already fragile economies, threaten remittance channels and foreign direct investment, and drive financial flows underground. So ignoring AML/CFT or delaying related reforms is no longer an option.

Thankfully, this message is starting to resonate. Under the leadership of the FATF, and with the support of the IMF, United Nations, World Bank, and other stakeholders, almost every country has criminalized money laundering and terrorism financing and established a legal framework to freeze terrorist assets.

But this work is far from finished. Whether because of lingering legal and institutional loopholes or innovation on the part of criminals (or both), there is no shortage of money laundering scandals in the news. As a case in point, investigators are currently probing the possibility that the better part of $233 billion in payments was laundered through the Estonian branch of Danske Bank from 2007 to 2015.

Rapidly developing financial technology has further complicated the picture. Mobile money transfers, distributed ledgers, and virtual currencies have legitimate and productive uses but can also be used to conceal or facilitate criminal activity. Put another way, nearly cost-free consumer payments and nearly untraceable ransom payments are two sides of the same (Bit)coin.

So how should countries prioritize their response to this evolving and globalizing challenge?

First, they should heed the FATF’s call to understand and address the threats that stem from changing technology, but should do so without stifling financial innovation and inclusion. The objective should be to increase transparency—to know who is behind financial transactions, where, and for what purpose—without unduly increasing transaction costs or driving financial flows underground.

Second, they should remove legal and practical barriers to international cooperation. Detecting money laundering and terrorism financing requires both safeguarding and sharing financial intelligence, and deterring criminals requires following the trail of dirty money or money intended for nefarious purposes, wherever it leads.

Finally, they should continue to strengthen the effectiveness of their efforts to mitigate identified risks. Whether national AML/CFT laws are perfect or not, beyond laws on the books, consistent (and persistent) implementation is critical to achieving durable results.

Given its mandate to preserve economic stability and financial integrity, the IMF maintains an extensive AML/CFT program, which includes active participation in international efforts to raise awareness of the threat and generate effective responses, along with the provision of advice and know-how to over 100 of its members—and counting.

What are some examples of these efforts? To name just a few, in Ukraine, we are working with national authorities to prevent banks from being misused by corrupt officials. As a result, regulatory sanctions for AML/CFT violations are increasing and the reporting of suspicious transactions is on the rise, yielding a significant number of corruption investigations and prosecutions of high-level public officials.

In Libya, we helped the authorities craft a new AML/CFT law that criminalized terrorism financing and established the legal basis for the imposition of sanctions against recognized terrorists.

And in the Caribbean, where the withdrawal of correspondent banking relationships is a critical concern, we convened international banks and their local counterparts to foster bilateral cooperation in addressing information gaps and meeting regulatory expectations. One global bank that had left the region has now decided to reestablish ties with some local banks.

The IMF is committed to helping its members identify today’s dirty money laundromats—and close them down. The stakes have never been higher.

The link to the original article: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2018/12/imf-anti-money-laundering-and-economic-stability-straight.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

The post Stopping Criminals from Laundering Their Trillions appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Rhoda Weeks-Brown is general counsel and director of the Legal Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The post Stopping Criminals from Laundering Their Trillions appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Stella Paul
SHWE THAUNG YAN, Myanmar, Jan 7 2019 (IPS)

In 2015, Worldview International Foundation began a mangrove restoration project, planting saplings of the trees on about 121 hectares of land in Myanmar’s Ayyerwady region.

In this video, Aung Aung Myint tells IPS when the mangrove restoration began and elaborates on the main species that have been planted. Originally, Myint says, the condition of the soil was concerning, but has increased over the years.

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The post Turning Mangrove Trees into Sustainable Assets for Myanmar appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Getty Images

By Jagriti Gangopadhyay
NEW DELHI, Jan 7 2019 (IPS)

A Chinese researcher has claimed that he helped make world’s first genetically edited babies but the development may come at a heavy cost. A designer baby is a GM human embryo with appropriate qualities which have been shaped as per the instructions received from the parents.

In the dystopian novel, Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932, the setting is a futuristic world. The novel is set in London where citizens are being nurtured in artificial wombs and engineered through childhood indoctrination programmes into predestined categories based on their intelligence and skills. Though this novel was written decades ago, today, genetically modified (GM) children seem to be the next step towards transforming family structures across the globe. Though no designer baby has been born as yet, in a technology driven world, it is going to soon become a reality.

Already, Genomic Prediction, a company based in New Jersey, USA, plans to offer tests to calculate the risk of complex conditions like heart disease of an unborn child. The cost of human gene sequencing too is dropping—from $1,000 today, it could drop to below $100 over the next few years. In simple terms, a designer baby is a GM human embryo with appropriate qualities which have been shaped as per the instructions received from the parents. The process through which designer babies are produced is known as gene editing.

Next, these cuts are restored through non-homologous end joining or homologous recombination that result in the desired edits. Using molecular scissors, cuts can be made at certain locations of the genome. Specifically, designer babies were conceived so that children would be free from any life-threatening disease. For instance, if either of the parent has a history of a terminally ill disease in their family, the GM baby will be immune to that disease. Through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and pre-genetic testing, the doctor will be able to identify the genes which could carry the potential danger of that disease.

Those genes will be muted before the fertilisation of the egg and the fetus produced will be devoid of any anomaly. Given the noble cause associated with gene editing, it is important to understand the ethical challenges of such a process as well the consequences of such a technology in determining the future of families across the globe.

Politics of the body

In his seminal work Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault had argued that with the advancement of medical sciences, an individual will gradually lose the right over one’s body. This argument is increasingly becoming true with the intrusion of technology in reproductive health. In addition to parents succumbing to technology to satisfy their needs, there are several ethical challenges involved with designer babies.

Given the newness of the technology, it is difficult to predict how the designer baby will grow up to be. It is also too early to calculate the side effects of this kind of technology. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that the unborn child’s consent is not taken before the process of gene editing. This is a huge ethical challenge. Moreover, GM babies are bound to create more inequality in society. This technology is expensive and only a certain section of society will be able to access it. Hence, the designer babies will mostly be born with fair skin and skills which will result in securing lucrative jobs. Thus the technology will be used to perfect the body and the mind of the unborn baby and will result in the growth of homogeneous individuals.

The gender factor

India witnessed the debate around designer babies when the health wing of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) announced that eugenics could be used to enable dark skinned Indian parents to have fair and high IQ children. RSS stressed on Ayurveda which has the abilities to purify the entire population of the country. The health wing of the RSS indicated that if the mother eats right and then it will be possible to have a customised baby.

The emphasis on fair and high IQ babies clearly indicates, the RSS’ vision of the future population of India. In addition to producing fair and high skill set producing children, gene editing will lead to discrimination on the basis of gender as well. In India, this technology will be used in sex selection as well. One of the features of this technology is that it can scan the sperms of the male partner. Given India’s history of preference for the male child, there are fears that the sperm with the male gene will be injected and more male children will be born.

Additionally, genetically engineered babies will also expand the gap between the West and the Third World. Since, this form of technology will be expensive in countries such as the US and countries of Europe, a large number of foreigners will travel to various Third World countries such as India, Bangladesh and Nepal and avail the technology at much cheaper rates. Genetically engineered babies as a form of technology is still in its infancy. However, given the upsurge in egg banking, IVFs and surrogacy, experts feel that this technology will garner popularity.

Past experiences show that due to lack of regulation, Third World countries were exploited by people in rich nations to satisfy their parenting needs. Since discussions around gene editing, gene engineering and designer babies have already started doing the rounds, it is important for international bodies such as the World Health Organization to set guidelines and regulatory measures at the very onset.

• The link to the original article:
• https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/science-and-technology/designer-babies-can-lead-to-growth-of-homogenous-individuals-62257

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Excerpt:

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is a post-doctoral fellow at the Manipal Center for Humanities, Manipal, India

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Source: PATTAYAUNLIMITED.COM

By Mohammed Mamun Rashid
Jan 6 2019 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Employment in fisheries and aquaculture around the globe has grown faster than the world’s population. The sector provides jobs to tens of millions and supports the livelihoods of hundreds of millions.

Bangladesh, the world’s largest deltaic zone, is crisscrossed by big rivers and their tributaries and distributaries. Moreover, as a land with an abundance of torrential monsoon rains, most of the plain lands remain inundated during the monsoon season, thus turning the countryside into a big reservoir of freshwater for almost half the year. These huge, inland, sweet water bodies together with the expanse of saline water in the Bay of Bengal provide the basis for a large and diversified fisheries sector. Fisheries have always played an integral role in the lives of the people of Bangladesh. It is more ancient than the profession of agriculture itself.

The fisheries sector of Bangladesh contributes 3.69 percent to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and fish accounts for 60 percent of national animal protein consumption. The sector also plays an important role in rural employment generation and poverty alleviation. Traditionally, low-caste Hindus have been engaged in the fishing profession. The Jaladas (slaves of the sea) belong to the Hindu fisherfolk community which is made up of caste-bound people. In most cases, they live in segregated paras which are localities within a village. The high-caste Hindu and the Muslim aristocracy and gentry carefully avoid any social mingling with them. Traditional fishing communities, which mainly comprise Hindus, are being put under pressure by incoming Muslims who have taken up fishing as their profession. The newcomers are either self-employed or find employment as labourers. The majority of Muslims opt for fishing due to population pressure, economic constraints in agricultural sector, and adverse effects of climate change.

Many elite rich men entered the fisheries sector in the 1960s. The then aristocratic Bengali word motshojibi had been introduced instead of the word jele. What is noteworthy is that the word jele is not included in fisheries act, rules, ordinance, and policy though motshojibi and mach chashi are included in such documents. According to the National Fisheries Policy 1998, about 1.2 million people were engaged in full-time work in the fisheries sector and 12 million people were engaged in part-time work. It is important to include the word jele in policy documents in order to know their number and their contribution to the national economy. It would also help us to understand their socio-economic conditions and undertake different initiatives for improving the lives and livelihoods of fishing communities. However, there is no updated information on fishermen based on para, source of fishing, religion, socio-economic conditions and position. But we do get the number of fishermen from different studies, surveys and project reports. But these things are not always consistent or continuous. According to the Coastal District Information 2005 under Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan, the majority of traditional fishermen are Hindus in 19 coastal districts.

The majority of Jaladas families are in financial debt and receive short- and long-term loans from relatives, neighbours, and businessmen. Their incomes usually increase during Hilsa fishing season. The scope for savings for this community is limited. Due to their dire situation, they spend mostly on food rather than clothes and other things. It is during the off-season that they face financial crises which occur round the year. The majority of Jaladas don’t own boats but nets. Some don’t own either; they work in others’ boats or hire boats for fishing. Many adolescent boys accompany their fathers during fishing. A few of them receive primary education but fail to continue. Fishermen don’t get loan facilities from financial institutions due to a lack of mortgage-free loan provisions in government banks. The average size of many fishermen families is 5 to 7 which is higher than the national average. The rate of early marriage within this community is higher due to abject poverty and social insecurity. And youth delinquency is also a major problem.

Jaladas don’t own lands. They mainly live on khas (government-owned) land, embankments, and accreted char land in huts. Due to the depletion of fish, piracy, and lack of capital, these people remain stuck in the vicious cycle of poverty. They do not even have pure drinking water as they live in over-populated areas.

Even though they have been in the fisheries sector for generations, they do not have a voice when it comes to policies and laws. Furthermore, they are not well-informed about clauses of the fisheries law although they are punished under this law.

Jaladas believe that it is not easy for them to switch to other professions. This is a socio-psychological barrier. Some even consider themselves to be “sinners” as they earn a living by catching innocent fish. They identify themselves as “slaves of the sea” without hesitation. They also believe they are destined to carry this curse their whole life.

The Jaladas community has distinct socio-economic, political, cultural, technological and informational characteristics. Water, nets, boats, rivers and the sea are central to their lives and livelihood. They are socially neglected, economically insolvent, politically pressured, culturally ill-treated, technologically backward, not up-to-date with information, and geographically isolated and vulnerable. The government of Bangladesh should address these issues pertinent to the Jaladas community in relevant sectoral policies so that these people can live with dignity and their rights protected.

Mohammed Mamun Rashid is Programme Manager, Civic Engagement, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB).
Email: rashidmamuns@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Excerpt:

The long-forgotten Jaladas community and their need for policy inclusion

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A view of houses with solar panels on their rooftops in the Maria Pires Perillo housing complex, two kilometres from the city of Palmeiras de Goiás. With 740 homes, it is the largest solar energy project in social housing complexes in the state of Goiás, in central Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
PALMEIRAS DE GOIÁS, Brazil, Jan 4 2019 (IPS)

“Solar energy makes my happiness complete,” said Divina Cardoso dos Santos, owner of one of 740 houses with photovoltaic panels on the rooftops in a settlement on the outskirts of this central Brazilian city.

“The first blessing was thishouse,” said the 67-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 14. “I paid 600 reais (155 dollars) a month for rent in the city of Palmeiras, and now I pay monthly quotas of just 25 reais (6.50 dollars) for this house, which is mine,” she told IPS.

Her retirement pension, which for the past two years has assured her an income equivalent to the minimum wage (250 dollars) a month, and visits from a daughter who lives in Switzerland are “other blessings,” which preceded the solar panels, which allow her to save almost the entire cost of the electricity bill – about 15 dollars a month.

The Maria PiresPerillo Residential complex, a group of 740 homes that began to house poor families in 2016, is a social housing project of the Housing Agency (AGEHAB) of the state of Goiás, in west-central Brazil.

Located two kilometres from Palmeiras de Goiás, a city of 28,000 people, it is the largest of the four residential complexes that AGEHAB will supply with solar energy. The agency is a pioneer in Brazil in includingsolar power in housing programmes.

“We would like to build all the new housing complexes with solar panels and also install them in the ones built previously,” Cleomar Dutra, president of AGEHAB, told IPS.

The agency subsidises the installation, granting 3,000 reais (780 dollars) to each family, through the”ChequeMaisMoradia”programme for the improvement of homes. The money covers the cost of two solar panels and the necessary equipment, such as inverters, cables and supports.

But this year’s devaluation of the Brazilian currency, the real, drove up the cost of the panels and other equipment, which is almost all imported. Additional resources for the facilities in the Palmeiras complex, which are yet to be completed, had to be sought, said Dutra.

Divina Cardoso dos Santos stands in front of her house in a social housing complex, for which she pays a monthly fee of about 6.5 dollars, on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Palmeiras de Goiás. That’s 24 times less than the rent she used to pay. On the neighbouring rooftop can be seen a solar water heater, which all of the homes in the neighbourhood have. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“Not all of the houses will have solar panels, because some did not sign the financing contract for the ‘Cheque Mais Moradia’,” said Pedro de Oliveira Neto, the 32-year-old technician who runs the facilities at the Maria Perillo Residential Complex, installed by Nexsolar.

Oliveira has been doing this work for the past four months, after taking a specialised course. Before that, he worked in the meat industry and in mining. Now he wants to stay in the field of solar energy, “which has a future, it’s innovation,” he told IPS.

Actually, most of the houses in the complex have solar panels, but few of them generate their own energy. After they are installed, other conditions must be met in order for the local power company, Enel from Italy, to connect each home’s system to the grid.

The process began in March 2017 when solar units were installed in three homes as a test.

Patricia Soares de Oliveira, 31, married with an eight-year-old daughter, was included in that first installation. Her electricity bill fell to one-fifth of the previous one. Now she pays about four dollars a month.

“We have two TV sets, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a computer and fans,” she told IPS to explain how much electricity they use.

“Now we want to reduce the water bill, which costs us 10 to 12 times more than electricity,” she complained.

Her family also no longer has to pay rent because they were granted a home in the complex. Whereas they used to pay 350 reais (90 dollars) a month they now pay just 25 reais (6.50 dollars) per month, the fee for the small portion of the financing that the owners have to pay.

The low cost of the home is due to a subsidy of up to 20,000 reais (5,200 dollars) granted by AGEHAB, through the ‘Cheque Mais Moradia’ programme for construction, to poor families with incomes of up to three minimum wages (about 740 dollars), said Dutra, the head of AGEHAB.

Two workers install solar panels on a house in the Maria Pires Perillo housing complex, an additional benefit for the poor families who are buying their homes at a very low cost. The Goiana Housing Agency of the state government of Goias, in central Brazil, subsidises most of the housing and the solar energy. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The families settled in the complex are only paying the complementary financing from the Federal Economic Fund, a government bank.

“A 44-square-metre house, like the ones in the complex, are built with materials that cost 29,000 reais (7,500 dollars), but the cost can be reduced if the purchase is collective,” estimated Dutra. So the ‘Cheque Mais Moradia’ is insufficient, but almost enough.

If the beneficiary families are in charge of construction, working together collectively, or if the mayor’s office provides the labour, the houses can be built practically without running up a debt, Dutra said.

The housing complexes are aimed at the most needy local families, since AGEHAB does not have the resources to assist everyone, she said.

Palmeiras de Goiás was included in the system because the population grew well above the state average, due to immigration. New meat, dairy and animal feed industries attracted many people looking for work.

Generating electricity from solar panels is a novelty of the last two years in the Goiás housing programme, but solar energy was already used in social housing projects for heating water – there are solar boilers on every rooftop.

It is a cheaper and more accessible technology, quite widespread in Brazil, even in the Northeast region, where people are not used to bathing with hot water, due to the high local temperatures.

Patricia Soares de Oliveira, who was the first to receive solar panels as a test in 2017, stands in front of her house and next to an electric meter that reads “danger of electric shock”. Her power bill in this social housing complex on the outskirts of Palmeiras de Goiás in central Brazil has fallen to one-fifth of what she previously paid. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Photovoltaic electricity generation has immense potential in Brazil. In the Midwest, solar radiation from a 30-square-metre rooftop could produce five times the electricity consumed by a low-income family, estimated Dennys Azevedo, an engineer who is works manager at AGEHAB.

That generation would be enough for 3.5 households consuming the national average, 157 kilowatts/hour per month, he told IPS.

But the rules set by the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), the Brazilian regulatory body, do not allow consumers to sell the energy they generate. The only benefit they receive is that the energy that they generate and consume is deducted from their electric bill.

The houses of the Maria Perillo Residential complex, for example, only have two solar panels, which occupy only about one-fifth of the rooftop. An additional panel would exceed the consumption of local families.

That rule, which does not exist in countries that have greatly expanded solar generation, such as Germany, is difficult to eliminate because of “pressure from distribution companies that would lose market share,” said Azevedo.

In addition, these power companies want to charge a tax for distributed (decentralised) solar generation, basically a tax for the use of the power lines, a cost that is currently subsidised, according to them. But “we’ve all already paid an availability tax” for the power grid, said the engineer.

Another restriction is the importation of equipment not yet manufactured in Brazil. The prices depend on the exchange rate, and any devaluation of the national currency makes everything more expensive, making planning impossible, he argued.

In addition, multiple expensive taxes raise the prices of solar equipment in Brazil, cancelling out part of the cost reduction for all solar energy components, said Azevedo, who explained that efforts are being made to avoid that taxation, “perhaps by buying equipment through the United Nations,” and to obtain funds for new projects.

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GGGIs Principle Investment Officer Tero Raassina presenting on rice husk energy opportunities.

By GGGI
Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (GGGI)

In November 2018, a team of GGGI investment and bio-economy specialists have been travelling around the Ayeyarwady Delta and meeting members from national and regional government, NGOs, farming associations, businesses and communities to scope potential bio-economy commodities and investments that will enable socially inclusive green growth, and support national goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation in coastal areas.

In a series of workshops and site visits, GGGI facilitated discussions on the range of current value chain activities in the region to assess what key stakeholders see as the barriers to developing or scaling up these activities. One such value chain that was consistently identified was the bi-products of rice grain processing.

Participants from regional government, rice mills and NGOs discuss the barriers to expanding rice husk bio-economies.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Myanmar produced over 25 million metric tonnes of rice in 2016, of which the Delta region harvests almost half of. There are hundreds of small to medium sized rice mills in the region. Consultation participants described that during the harvesting and milling process, a considerable volume of less valuable bi-products are produced. These include the rice bran, rice straw which is often burnt, and rice husk which is often dumped directly (illegally) in waterways, causing widespread impacts to river and drinking water quality, and navigational safety.

Alternatively, there are a number of existing rice husk bio-gasification plants that use outdated technologies resulting in heavily polluted waterways. Similarly, there are existing rice husk fuel pellet facilities but participants frequently said these plants emit a foul smell.

Visualisation of rice bi-products

Initial value chain analysis shows these low-value bi-products can be used to make higher value products that can increase the income of rice farmers and millers and provide affordable energy to the wider region. The Delta has a low level of electrification at approximately 10% and suffers from chronic power shortages. This power shortage not only limits business development but also contributes to widespread deforestation of the mangroves for fuel wood. The government’s General Administration Department stated “rice husk to energy should be the first priority. If we can use this waste then everyone will benefit”.

The potential economic, social and environmental benefits of this value chain are timely for the Delta, with high proportions of landless rural households and reportedly the highest rates of mangrove deforestation in Asia. The potential investments in this value chain could significantly contribute to achievement of Myanmar’s Nationally Determined Contribution greenhouse gas mitigation targets and REDD+, climate change adaptation (including the NAPA), the Agricultural Development Strategy, and Myanmar’s Sustainable Development Plan.

Potential outcomes of rice husk energy for climate change.

GGGI visited an existing rice husk bio-gasification plant in the Delta and the operators discussed barriers to its development such as high startup costs and lack of affordable finance with up to 13% loan interest being reported. The financing shortfalls also limits access to modern clean technologies that are causing other environmental impacts.

GGGIs Myanmar Programme Officer Thiha Aung discuss issues at the Kyaiklat rice husk power plant.

This early analysis will feed into further in-depth value chain assessment by GGGI to design tailored financing solutions and social interventions that are pro-poor and lead to socially inclusive improvements.

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Left: Traditional three-brick. Centre: Original design of the cookstove. Right: The fuel efficient cookstove.

By GGGI
Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (GGGI)

In November 2018, a team of GGGI social development, and green investment specialists have been talking to representatives from national and regional government, NGOs, cookstove manufacturers and households from rural communities on how to increase the distribution and usage of fuel efficient cookstoves.

Fuel efficient cookstoves, or ‘improved’ cookstoves, have clear benefits over the traditionally used open three-brick method and even the original design of the cookstove. Most notably, the improved design is more fuel efficient and requires less fire wood to be collected, resulting in reduced deforestation and time-saving for households, particularly for women.

Although cookstoves are used in rural communities throughout Myanmar, their usage in the Delta is more problematic due to the rate of deforestation of mangrove forests for firewood. Mangroves are a critical forest type for climate change mitigation as they store up to 4 times the amount of carbon as other forest types. The mangrove forests of the Delta are also critical for disaster risk reduction during severe weather events and are foundation for sustaining coastal fishery-based livelihoods.

Potential outcomes of fuel efficient cookstoves for climate change.

In a series of workshops and site visits around the Delta, GGGI facilitated discussions as to why distribution and usage of fuel efficient cookstoves remains low. Cookstove manufacturers discussed barriers to their production, including costs and difficulties with attaining and transporting raw materials, a lack of access to start-up finances, labour-intensive manufacturing process, and a lack of marketing and promotion of product. Numerous problems were consistently mentioned by buyers, including inconvenient design, unfamiliarity with product benefits, remote communities lack access to distributers, and that fuel efficient cookstove is often more expensive than the original cookstove design.

The time required for drying cookstoves during manufacture is problematic, especially during monsoon season. Taken at a cookstove manufacturer in Kalarkon, near Pathein.

Figure 2 Cookstove manufacturing is time and people intensive, taking up to 15 days to produce the final product. Taken at a cookstove manufacturer in Kalarkon, near Pathein.

GGGI presented initial ideas for providing novel investment solutions to increase distribution and usage of fuel efficient cookstoves across the Delta. These have included linking the proven carbon savings of the fuel efficient cookstove to distributed ledger or ‘blockchain’ technology to access carbon credits from the international carbon market. This technology could connect the carbon emission savings of the cookstove to the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or CORSIA, to a domestic custodian bank, and various partners for manufacturing, certification, distribution and implementation. These credits can then be used to increase job opportunities, provide funding for increased distribution and subsidise the product price.

GGGIs Analyst Diana Quezada presents on financing solutions for improved cookstoves. With Principle Investment Officer Tero Raassina and Myanmar’s Programme Officer Thiha Aung.

The potential economic, social and environmental benefits of this investment solution are important for the Delta, with high rural population density and reportedly the highest rates of mangrove deforestation in Asia. The potential outcomes of this solution are aligned with Myanmar’s polices and strategies for climate change mitigation, adaptation, reforestation and sustainable development. It has potential for notable benefits for women by creating many decent, year-round employment opportunities during manufacture, by reducing the time being spent on firewood collection, and reducing respiratory ailments due to smoke inhalation. This benefit of time savings may also allow increased opportunities for girls to engage in educational activities and for women to focus on developing additional income streams.

Ingvild Solvang, GGGIs Global Leader on Gender and Social Development added “access to improved cookstoves is a global challenge, which if solved has the potential to reduce communities’ reliance on fuel wood. Improved cookstoves have positive impacts on deforestation, but also communities spend much time and resources on fuel collection, which contributes to time-poverty particularly for women and girls. Improved cookstoves have a can improve indoor pollution, which causes health problems for children, vulnerable and elderly family members, and those mainly in charge of cooking, typically women.”

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Integrated fish ponds and forestry at a LIFT-funded climate smart agriculture project, Bogale.

By GGGI
Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar, Jan 4 2019 (GGGI)

In November 2018, GGGI have been exploring potential investments in agriculture, forestry and fishery value chains that not only increase economic and social development, but also reduce deforestation pressures and increase the extent of mangrove forests. GGGI investment, forestry policy and bio-economy specialists have been consulting with communities, NGOs and government in the Ayeyarwady Delta to understand the factors that are critical to achieve fully inclusive, sustainable success, and support national goals of climate change mitigation and adaptation in coastal areas.

The conservation of mangrove forests is a notable policy priority for Myanmar. Mangroves are widely acknowledged to offer life-saving protection to coastal communities against the impact of extreme weather events, storm surges and tropical cyclones. In addition their contribution to climate change adaptation, mangrove forests store up to 400% more carbon than other forest types (particularly in their soils) which makes their conservation important to maintaining the stability of global climate. Unfortunately, Myanmar’s mangrove forests are disappearing at the highest rates of any country in Asia, and therefore have a disproportionate impact on greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The potential economic, social and environmental benefits of finding a solution to ensuring the sustainability of forest management are very timely for the Delta. The potential investments in mangrove conservation, and associated value chains could significantly contribute to achievement of Myanmar’s Nationally Determined Contribution targets, as well as key sectoral polices and strategies for climate change mitigation and REDD+, adaptation and sustainable development.

In a series of workshops and site visits, GGGI facilitated discussions on the range of current forestry and fishery value chain activities in the region to assess what stakeholders see as the barriers to developing or scaling up these activities.

Dr Aaron Russell, Ingvild Solvang, Luis Miguel Aparicio and Programme Officer Thiha Aung met with remote communities and Forest Department on the Delta to discuss community forest restoration activities.

The establishment of community forestry projects are seen as a useful means to stabilize and reforest mangrove forests. Local communities strongly recognize the importance of mangroves to provide households with firewood, house and boat building materials. However, a frequently overlooked benefit from mangroves is that they provide natural habitat for Myanmar’s highly sought-after mud-crabs, prawns, blood cockles, and other fish species. Some of these lucrative delicacies provide income for large numbers of landless rural households in the Delta.

Consistent stories were heard during the mission. Existing laws restrict those wanting to own and manage lands. In some communities up to 70% of the population may be effectively landless. There is a shortage of livelihood opportunities in the Delta, and many are forced to seasonally migrate to cities to find work. Mangroves and other forests are often illegally logged as people have no other household cooking fuel options, or have no other option to make an income. There is a large demand for mangrove fuel wood and charcoal from the Delta that reaches as far as Yangon. The catches of crabs, fish and prawns are falling due to lost mangrove habitat, leading to fishers to selling all they catch, including juveniles and females with eggs. This is leading to a cycle of debt for many landless people of the Delta, and as stated by a spokesperson of the Department of Fisheries “we need to conserve the mangroves to increase fishery value chains; their destruction is the primary reason for recent fishery stock depletion”.

Due to their remote location and unaffordable transport costs, many are unable to travel to the markets to sell their goods. Instead they rely on selling to a buyer who comes to them but are forced to sell at often half the market price. Many landless people want to diversify their incomes but lack access to affordable finance without a land title, or knowledge of market demands.

“Community Forestry could ensure people’s rights to sustainable use of forest resources, improve people’s livelihoods also in fishery value chains. These synergies between social, environmental and economic benefits are good examples of what green growth is about”, says Dr. Aaron Russell, Country Representative for GGGI in Myanmar.

Village community members show us their catch of mud crabs that are ready to be sold to the buyer. Fishers know that selling juvenile or female crabs is not sustainable but they have few income options in remote areas.

Initial value chain analysis shows that with the right financial, technological and institutional interventions, integrated community-based mangrove-fisheries management could be sustainable, would provide more diversity in incomes for the landless, thereby strengthening incentives to maintain and reforest mangroves.

In addition to mudcrab value chains, supplementary value chains that have the potential to contribute to these communities’ incomes are to integrate coconut palm or nipa palms and other shade trees around fish/prawn/crab ponds or integrated with the existing farms in agroforestry arrangements. Coconuts provides food, offers many applications for natural coconut fibres, and have the potential for export of virgin coconut oil. Nipa palm similarly has useful fibres, can be useful for livestock feed and there are indications of export demand for nipa palm buds. In addition, there are numerous natural extracts from mangroves that are used across south-east Asia as dyes and pigments, and even with medicinal properties that are underexplored in Myanmar. While individuals can improve their incomes on individually owned land, the sustainability of mangroves and recovery of many fishery species are more likely to be achieved if the economic needs of the whole community are taken into account.

Potential outcomes of integrated community forestry for climate change.

NGO Local community engagement in participatory workshop to assess potential for community forestry activities.

The mission team concluded that the promotion of community forestry and associated value-chains should form a key component of GGGI’s Coastal Landscape Restoration program. This early analysis will feed into further in-depth integrated value chain assessments by GGGI to design tailored solutions and interventions that are pro-poor and lead to socially inclusive benefits from direct and indirect use of restored and protected mangrove areas.

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Farmers planting during a rainy season in Dali, North Darfur, Sudan. Credit: UN Photo / Albert Farran

By Dan Shepard
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 4 2019 (IPS)

Record global greenhouse gas emissions are putting the world on a path toward unacceptable warming, with serious implications for development prospects in Africa. “Limiting warming to 1.5° C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics, but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, cochair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III.

But IPCC, the world’s foremost authority for assessing the science of climate change, says it is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5° C—if, and only if, there are “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities.” For sub-Saharan Africa, which has experienced more frequent and more intense climate extremes over the past decades, the ramifications of the world’s warming by more than 1.5° C would be profound.

Temperature increases in the region are projected to be higher than the global mean temperature increase; regions in Africa within 15 degrees of the equator are projected to experience an increase in hot nights as well as longer and more frequent heat waves.

The odds are long but not impossible, says the IPCC. And the benefits of limiting climate change to 1.5° C are enormous, with the report detailing the difference in the consequences between a 1.5° C increase and a 2° C increase. Every bit of additional warming adds greater risks for Africa in the form of greater droughts, more heat waves and more potential crop failures.

Recognizing the increasing threat of climate change, many countries came together in 2015 to adopt the historic Paris Agreement, committing themselves to limiting climate change to well below 2° C. Some 184 countries have formally joined the agreement, including almost every African nation, with only Angola, Eritrea and South Sudan yet to join. The agreement entered into force in November 2016.

In December 2018, countries met in Katowice, Poland, for the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—known as COP24—to finalise the rules for implementation of the agreement’s work programme. As part of the Paris Agreement, countries made national commitments to take steps to reduce emissions and build resilience. The treaty also called for increased financial support from developed countries to assist the climate action efforts of developing countries.

But even at the time that the Paris Agreement was adopted, it was recognized that the commitments on the table would not be enough. Even if the countries did everything they promised, global temperatures would rise by 3° C this century. According to the IPCC, projections show that the western Sahel region will experience the strongest drying, with a significant increase in the maximum length of dry spells. The IPCC expects Central Africa to see a decrease in the length of wet spells and a slight increase in heavy rainfall.

West Africa has been identified as a climate-change hotspot, with climate change likely to lessen crop yields and production, with resultant impacts on food security. Southern Africa will also be affected. The western part of Southern Africa is set to become drier, with increasing drought frequency and number of heat waves toward the end of the 21st century.

A warming world will have implications for precipitation. At 1.5° C, less rain would fall over the Limpopo basin and areas of the Zambezi basin in Zambia, as well as parts of Western Cape in South Africa. But at 2° C, Southern Africa is projected to face a decrease in precipitation of about 20% and increases in the number of consecutive dry days in Namibia, Botswana, northern Zimbabwe and southern Zambia. This will cause reductions in the volume of the Zambezi basin projected at 5% to 10%.

If the global mean temperature reaches 2° C of global warming, it will cause significant changes in the occurrence and intensity of temperature extremes in all sub-Saharan regions. West and Central Africa will see particularly large increases in the number of hot days at both 1.5° C and 2° C. Over Southern Africa, temperatures are expected to rise faster at 2° C, and areas of the southwestern region, especially in South Africa and parts of Namibia and Botswana, are expected to experience the greatest increases in temperature.

Perhaps no region in the world has been affected as much as the Sahel, which is experiencing rapid population growth, estimated at 2.8% per year, in an environment of shrinking natural resources, including land and water resources.

Inga Rhonda King, President of the UN Economic and Social Council, a UN principal organ that coordinates the economic and social work of UN agencies, told a special meeting at the UN that the region is also one of the most environmentally degraded in the world, with temperature increases projected to be 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the world.

Largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, the Sahel is regularly hit by droughts and floods, with enormous consequences to people’s food security. As a result of armed conflict, violence and military operations, some 4.9 million people have been displaced this year, a threefold increase in less than three years, while 24 million people require humanitarian assistance throughout the region.

Climate change is already considered a threat multiplier, exacerbating existing problems, including conflicts. Ibrahim Thiaw, special adviser of the UN Secretary-General for the Sahel, says the Sahel region is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with 300 million people affected.

Drought, desertification and scarcity of resources have led to heightened conflicts between crop farmers and cattle herders, and weak governance has led to social breakdowns, says Mr. Thiaw. The shrinking of Lake Chad is leading to economic marginalization and providing a breeding ground for recruitment by terrorist groups as social values and moral authority evaporate.

*Africa Renewal, which is published by the United Nations, reports on and examines the many different aspects of the UN’s involvement in Africa, especially within the framework of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). It works closely with the many UN agencies and offices dealing with African issues, including the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa.

The post Global Warming: Severe Consequences for Africa appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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Dan Shepard is a UN public information officer specializing in sustainability issues--including SDGs, biodiversity & climate change.

 
Africa Renewal*

The post Global Warming: Severe Consequences for Africa appeared first on Inter Press Service.