Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By External Source
Aug 9 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Holothurians, also known as sea cucumbers, are an important source of income for coastal communities in the Pacific. Their exploitation has grown over the past decades, targeting international markets. In some parts of the world, they are considered a delicacy where they can fetch very high prices consequently, they are being overfished in some areas of the Pacific region.

In 2021 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) added two of the highest value sea cucumber species to its Appendix 2 list, which means that exporting countries are now required to prove that these species are fished in a sustainable way otherwise exporting them is prohibited.

Organised by the Pacific Community (SPC), in the framework of the PROTEGE project, two training sessions on the identification of sea cucumbers, and particularly of the two CITES-listed species, were organised for New-Caledonian local authorities on 18 and 19 July, with representatives of the Fiji Ministry of Fisheries assisting with the training.

The training included a presentation of the provisions of the environment code relating to sea cucumber fishing in New Caledonia, explanations by the Veterinary, Food and Phytosanitary Inspection Service (SIVAP) about the implications of a CITES listing of species, and a step-by-step process to correctly identify 14 species of sea cucumbers, in their live and processed forms. The training is one of the actions held by SPC’s Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability (CCES) and Fisheries Aquaculture and Marine Ecosystems (FAME) Divisions to promote sustainable ecosystems management.

The training was held at a local exporter’s processing plant, which allowed participants to handle and observe the sea cucumber species they should be able to identify. To further assist, an identification guide produced by SPC for New Caledonia was distributed to each participant. A test to validate the knowledge acquired was organised at the end of the day. Its success rate reached 100%!

Sea cucumbers are vital to many communities in the Pacific Islands region, providing a rare opportunity for cash income, particularly in remote areas. They also play a critical role in the health of the marine environment by cleaning the sediments from which they extract their food. They support the development of seagrass beds, which are refuge and food for marine organisms such as fish, dugongs and turtles. For all these reasons, the proper management of this resource is of paramount importance.

The Pacific Community will organise other training sessions in New Caledonia in September and will develop similar trainings for the region in coming months.

Know more about holothurians of commercial interest in the tropical Pacific: https://bit.ly/3oEWVHw

Would you like to learn more about how to identify holothurians? Watch these video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cWawjqWVLU

About PROTÉGÉ

PROTEGE (“Pacific Territories Regional Project for Sustainable Ecosystem Management” or “protect” in French) is an initiative designed to promote sustainable and climate-change-resilient economic development in the European Pacific overseas countries and territories (OCT) by emphasising biodiversity and renewable resources. Implemented by the Pacific Community (SPC) and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), PROTEGE is a regional cooperation project that supports the public policies of the four Pacific OCTs, i.e. New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis & Futuna and Pitcairn.

Dr Svetlana Alexandrova, Medical Director of the Chernihiv Psychoneurological Hospital, and Yevgen Skydan, Technical Specialist, walk Todd Bernhardt and his team through the basement where patients and staff were sheltered during the Russian invasion. Credit: International Medical Corps

By SeiMi Chu
Stanford, Aug 9 2022 (IPS)

During Todd Bernhardt’s visit to Ukraine’s conflict zones, he encountered untold damage to hospitals, healthcare clinics, and communities. The Senior Director of Global Communications at the International Medical Corps also encountered enormous courage.

On one of his visits, Bernhardt met Dr Svetlana Alexandrova, Medical Director of the Psychoneurological Hospital in Chernihiv, a city about two hours northeast of Kyiv that saw fierce fighting during the early weeks of the invasion.

He said Alexandrova was a defiant and committed leader who was not afraid to confront Russian soldiers and tell them to stop destroying the hospital, which treats critically ill patients. Hospital staff proudly told Bernhardt that as the soldiers were getting ready to retreat, they told the staff members that they had a “tough boss.”

“The patients in this hospital have developmental, mental health, and physical challenges that have led to them being hospitalized. In some cases, they are quite old and frail. And during this time, they had to shelter in the hospital basement—a damp and dark place where you would not want to live,” Bernhardt said. He described how hundreds of patients with 30-40 staff were trapped in the basement during the Russian bombardment.

They had to stay in this basement for 40 days and 40 nights without access to water, heat, and electricity. The staff occasionally went out and managed to forage for food during lulls in the fighting. In fear of being shot, they would cook over open fires during the day while being undercover.

A destroyed residential building in Dnipro. Credit: World Food Programme

International Medical Corps’ involvement with Ukraine goes back to 1999 when it provided medical training to doctors and medical supplies and equipment. Now International Medical Corps operates hubs in seven Ukrainian cities—Chernihiv, Dnipro, Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Stryi, and Vinnytsia—that provide relief services and training across the country.

International Medical Corps’ mission is primarily to be a first responder. A big part of its approach is to work within an existing health system, support it, and strengthen it. It also provides medicine or medical equipment, trains doctors, staff, and clinicians, and builds water and sanitation systems.

“We are a first responder. We go in, respond to the disaster, and stay to help strengthen existing systems, to make sure that the community is left stronger than when we first came in,” Bernhardt said, elaborating on International Medical Corps’ mission.

During the Russo-Ukrainian War, International Medical Corps so far has helped 122 hospitals, delivered more than 136,000 water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and non-food items (NFI), provided 53,661 medical services to healthcare facilities, provided 46,592 health consultations, and trained 914 people in psychological first aid.

“We’re trying to provide services to support the most vulnerable populations who suffer during a conflict. That can be children. That can mean the elderly. That can mean the disabled. It especially, unfortunately, means women and girls. We are working as hard as we can to ensure these vulnerable populations get the services they need. And, of course, we’re doing everything we can to ensure that we prevent that kind of violence from occurring in the first place,” Bernhardt said.

Another organization working within the war zones is the World Food Programme (WFP). It focuses on the broken commercial food supply chains providing food, supporting people with cash so people can make their own choices when buying food, and stabilizing and restoring public and private institutions and services.

People gather to receive food from World Food Programme’s food distribution. Credit: World Food Programme

In June, they assisted 2.6 million people in Ukraine through food distributions or cash where markets are functioning. Since March, WFP has transferred over 200 million US dollars in cash and cash vouchers to vulnerable Ukrainians. Fifty-five million US dollars of this was provided in July to close to 800,000 people. Internally displaced people receive 75 US dollars per person for up to three people per family.

WFP has also helped more than 115.5 million people in over 120 countries and territories. They were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in ending hunger.

“At this time, one in three households in Ukraine is food insecure, and the existing systems in Ukraine that feed tens of millions of people are falling apart. Our goal is to see an end to this conflict. Our job as humanitarians is to feed people and save lives. We’re willing to stay there as long as it’s needed to support the population and the most vulnerable people in Ukraine,” stated Kyle Wilkinson, Communications Officer for the WFP.

Kerri Murray, President of ShelterBox, was part of the organization’s first team in Kraków, Poland. ShelterBox provides emergency shelter and essential items to set up households, such as temporary shelters, mattresses, blankets, water purification, tools, solar lanterns, and hygiene supplies.

The Ukraine war has internally displaced nearly 6.5 million people, and ShelterBox focuses on projects to meet the needs of internally displaced people. It also has a project that is helping refugees who fled to Moldova, which has received the most refugees per capita of any European country.

ShelterBox has provided hygiene kits to displaced families – mainly women, children, the elderly, and the disabled. During this displacement crisis, it also provides cash to families fleeing Ukraine into Moldova to buy food, prescription medicines, and basic necessities.

ShelterBox has supported tens of thousands of people in Ukraine and hundreds of families in Moldova.

“Rapidly launching this response in Ukraine was challenging,” Murray said, noting that securing a supply chain and delivering aid into the country was difficult. “But we were absolutely committed to helping these families.”

Artem and Maksim play hockey in Hungary. Credit: Katie Wilkes, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

As the crisis unfolded and intensified, Red Cross supported more than 15 million people in Ukraine and surrounding countries. By teaming with several groups, such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Red Cross helped the wounded with medical care and provided first aid training in Ukraine. Red Cross also had a cash voucher assistance program.

“More than 700 ICRC staff are working in 10 locations across Ukraine to deliver relief items to people displaced from their homes, providing medicines and supplies to health care facilities, restoring water supply for millions of people, and other lifesaving activities,” Susan Malandrino, Communications Lead at American Red Cross. “For its part, the American Red Cross has contributed over 50 million US dollars to Ukraine crisis relief efforts and an additional 7.5 million US dollars to partners on the ground to provide meals and medical supplies within Ukraine.”

Malandrino recalls how a colleague on site met two young brothers from Kyiv, 15-year-old Artem and 10-year-old Maksim. When the war started, Artem and Maksim were at a hockey tournament.

They are currently living in one of the Red Cross shelters.

“While here, they play hockey to take their minds off the stress of missing family left behind in Ukraine. Artem says he talks to his father and grandmother daily and misses walking his dogs, including his favorite small highland terrier,” Malandrino explained.

The Hungarian Red Cross ensures each room has a small refrigerator, private bathroom, clean and fresh sheets, and provides wholesome meals from its restaurant.

“Because of Red Cross support, Artem and Maksim have a comfortable place to live and, for a few moments each day, play hockey and just be kids.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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View of a bridge in severe disrepair on the BR-319 highway, in the heart of the Amazon, which the Brazilian government plans to repave along the 405-kilometer central section, out of a total of 885 kilometers, because it has deteriorated to the point that is impassable for much of the year. Those who venture along it take three times the normal amount of time to drive the entire length, with the risk of seriously damaging their vehicles. CREDIT: Tarmo Tamming/Flickr

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 9 2022 (IPS)

The mandatory initial permit granted by Brazil’s environmental authority for the repaving of the BR-319 highway, in the heart of the Amazon jungle, intensified the alarm over the possible irreversible destruction of the rainforest.

The 885-kilometer highway is the only overland route to Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas with a population of 2.25 million in south-central Brazil. The road runs to another Amazon rainforest city, Porto Velho, capital of the state of Rondônia, population 550,000."Restrictions arose that limited the public hearings to evaluate the studies as early as 2021, and so far there has been no solution to these problems. In addition, the participation of affected populations was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties in attendance, especially for indigenous people." -- Carlos Durigan

The highway emerged as part of the plans of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship to integrate the Amazon rainforest with the rest of the country, through several highways crossing the then almost unpopulated jungle and the promotion of massive internal migration from other regions.

Due to heavy rains and frequent flooding many sections of the road and a number of bridges have fallen into disrepair. Twelve years after its inauguration in 1976, BR-319 was recognized as a largely impassable road, undermined by neglect.

Local interests tried to repave the road and obtained the support of the central government from the beginning of this century.

However, in 2008 and 2009, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) rejected three environmental impact studies, whose approval is essential in Brazil for projects that affect the environment and that have a social impact.

But a fourth study, presented in June 2021 by the National Department of Transport Infrastructure, was approved and the required initial permit was granted by IBAMA, despite criticism from environmentalists.

In recent years IBAMA’s credibility has suffered due to the openly anti-environmental far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, which weakened the environmental agency by cutting its budget and appointing officials lacking the necessary qualifications.

The Brazilian army always deploys members of its engineer brigade to repair roads in remote areas, such as the Amazon rainforest. But in the case of the BR-319 highway between Manaus and Porto Velho, millions of dollars in investments and costly maintenance services are necessary, which prevent its concession to private companies. CREDIT: Brazilian Army

Doomed project

“Restrictions arose that limited the public hearings to evaluate the studies as early as 2021, and so far there has been no solution to these problems. In addition, the participation of affected populations was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties in attendance, especially for indigenous people,” said environmentalist Carlos Durigan.

The environmental impacts assessed were limited to the vicinity of the road, without considering the entire area of influence of the construction work, the director of WCS Brazil, the national affiliate of the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, told IPS by telephone from Manaus.

Moreover, no prior and informed consultation was held with the indigenous peoples and traditional communities that will be affected, a requirement under Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), he said. This incompliance is likely to lead to lawsuits.

The initial permit was obtained under promises of greater protection, inspection and oversight of protected areas – not very credible at a time of weak public authority in environmental questions, with low budgets and reduced human resources, said Durigan, a geographer from southeastern Brazil who has lived in the Amazon rainforest for two decades.

These and other criticisms form part of the evaluation carried out by the BR-319 Observatory, a coalition of 12 social organizations involved in activities in the road’s area of influence. The 14-point review identifies irregularities in the permit granted by IBAMA and the violated rights of the affected population.

The proponents of the BR-319 highway tried to avoid the requirement of impact studies under the argument that it is only a matter of repaving an existing road, with no new impacts. But the courts recognized it as a complete reconstruction.

In fact, of the 885 kilometers, 405 kilometers will have to be repaved and bridges and animal crossings will have to be rebuilt. The remaining 480 kilometers – the two stretches near Manaus and Porto Velho – are already passable.

But the rains and floods that have occurred since last year have broken down the asphalt on many stretches near Manaus, leaving large cracks and holes. Even without repaving, many people venture to travel along the BR-319 in cars, buses and trucks. But it takes two or three days to drive, and often causes damage to vehicles.

One of the potholes in the BR-319 highway, where the asphalt laid in the 1970s has disappeared. Inaugurated in 1976, the Amazon artery became impassable a decade later and attempts to repave it have so far failed. CREDIT: Tarmo Tamming/Flickr

More deforestation

Environmentalists fear that deforestation, illegal occupation of public lands and the invasion of indigenous lands, which are already occurring along nearly 200 kilometers of the southern section, will spread along the entire highway and its surrounding areas.

This region close to Porto Velho is the area where deforestation in the Amazon has grown the most in recent years.

A usable BR-319 would spread environmental crimes, forest fires and violence generated by land disputes in the middle section of the highway, activists warn.

In fact, 80 percent of Amazon deforestation occurs along the highways that are the arteries leading to the settlement of the rainforest, along with smaller roads branching off from the highways, environmentalists say.

Such effects are already well-known along other Amazonian highways in areas that are more populated and deforested than the territory between Manaus and Porto Velho, bathed by the Madeira and Purus rivers, two of the major tributaries of the Amazon, both of which have their headwaters in Peru. The Madeira basin also extends through much of central and northern Bolivia.

A stretch of the BR-319 highway with an ironic sign pointing to the nearby town of Realidade (Reality). The 885-kilometer road that runs between the Amazonian Madeira and Purus rivers requires high maintenance costs due to frequent flooding, since most of it is located on land that floods in the rainy season. CREDIT: Alberto César Araújo/Amazonia Real

Doubtful economic feasibility

BR-319 faces another uncertainty, which is economic viability. It crosses what is at least for now a sparsely populated area, except for Manaus. The cost of repaving is not small, as the effort includes many bridges and earthworks to stabilize land that floods during the rainy season along many stretches, even though the road is located on higher ground between the Madeira and Purus rivers.

The highway also needs continuous upkeep, as is already the case in the stretch near Manaus, where the necessary repairs have not yet been completed after flooding caused by heavy rains that lasted from October 2021 until well into this year, Durigan pointed out.

Even so, the demand for the repaving of the central section of the highway is very popular, enjoying almost consensus support, the activist acknowledged. The argument in favor of the road is that Manaus is isolated by land, and depends on air or river transport to connect with the rest of Brazil and to be able to export its industrial production.

Since the 1960s, Manaus has had an industrial park and a free trade zone, supported by large subsidies that are regularly extended and will remain in force at least until 2073. These benefits shore up the electronics, motorcycle and beverage industries in the city, despite its remote location and distance from the main domestic markets.

In addition to a reduction in the city’s isolation, the population of Manaus hopes to see a drop in food prices, thanks to a workable road that would allow better access to products from Rondônia, an Amazonian state where agriculture and cattle raising have been developed.

But the beneficial effect of agriculture 900 kilometers away is doubtful. Other Amazonian cities, such as Belém, capital of the eastern Amazon jungle state of Pará, also pay dearly for their food, particularly fresh produce, because they have not developed horticulture.

New anti-Amazon wave

Along with the repaving of BR-319, Brazil’s Amazon rainforest faces other threats from infrastructure projects.

Another resurrected plan is a road through a conserved forest area on the border between Brazil and Peru. It would cross the biodiversity-rich Serra do Divisor National Park.

This plan also looks unfeasible because of its questionable economic viability and due to the severe environmental restrictions it would face.

Three railways are also planned for exports from Mato Grosso, the southeastern Amazonian state that is Brazil’s largest producer of soybeans, corn and cotton, and small and medium-sized hydroelectric plants are projected, especially in the states of Rondônia and Roraima, the latter on the border with Venezuela.

In addition to resistance from environmentalists and indigenous peoples, these projects now face a new stumbling block, or a new counter-argument: climate change, said Sergio Guimarães, coordinator of the Infrastructure Working Group, a network of 47 social organizations.

This is a variable that requires at least a review of all these projects, he told IPS by telephone from Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso.

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A woman paints a mural for Peace and Reconciliation in Colombia. Credit: UNMVC/Jennifer Moreno

By Alexander Kozul-Wright
GENEVA, Aug 9 2022 (IPS)

For the first time in its contemporary history, Colombia has a left-wing government. The presidency of Gustavo Petro, who took the reins August 8, marks a significant break from the political status quo. He also represents a stiff test for U.S. influence in Latin America.

Colombia is Washington’s most enduring ally in the region, and in recent years their relationship has been built around combatting the nation’s drug cartels. But despite major efforts to curb supply, Colombia remains a top source of cocaine for the United States.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recently estimated that Colombia’s cocaine harvest hit a record high in 2020. On the back of new coca varieties (the base ingredient for cocaine) and better cultivation techniques, Colombia’s potential output reached 1,228 tonnes in 2020. This was triple the 2010 level and four times greater than in the early 1990s, when Pablo Escobar was at the height of his infamy.

Since launching its controversial ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have supplied more than $13 billion in military and economic aid to Colombia. To little avail.

According to a 2021 United States’ Drug Enforcement Agency report, over 90 percent of the cocaine seized in the U.S. originates from Colombia. The U.S. remains the biggest consumer market for Colombian cocaine.

Petro is among those who have denounced the U.S.’s counter-narcotics strategy as counterproductive. In particular, he’s taken aim at US-backed aerial fumigation campaigns to destroy coca fields.

He favours expanding crop substitution programs that provide credit, training and enhanced land rights to rural farmers. For Petro, tackling Colombia’s violent drug trade is bound up with the county’s historic land ownership inequality.

He has also been an ardent critic of Colombia’s free-trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S. for pushing farmers into coca production and for exacerbating Colombia’s over-reliance on fossil fuel and coffee exports.

At the same time, imports from America’s highly subsidized agricultural sector have displaced whole segments of Colombia’s agrarian economy, forcing thousands of farmers into coca production.

Petro’s election campaign called for “smart tariffs” to protect Colombia’s rural farmers from U.S. imports and, by extension, criminal activity. “The free trade agreement signed with the United States handed rural Colombia to the drug traffickers,” he told the Financial Times in May. What’s more, he noted that “agricultural production cannot be increased if we do not renegotiate the FTA.”

An ex-member of the M-19 guerrilla group, Colombia’s new president has vowed to tackle asymmetric trade relations in line with land reform and the drug trade. But he will likely face severe opposition from the armed forces, who themselves fought leftist guerrilla movements during Colombia’s 52-year civil conflict.

Further, the military have a longstanding role in the U.S.-led war on drugs. For his part, Petro has accused Colombia’s top brass of corruption and human rights abuses, even since the Government-Farc peace treaty of 2016.

Elsewhere, the President faces a divided congress and deep hostility from landowning elites. It will require skilful manoeuvring to unite a fractured country around his domestic policies. And even if Petro can generate sufficient national support around his policy aims, he would still need to convince the Biden administration to back-track on the U.S.’s ideological commitment to free trade.

So, what cards can Petro play?

His opening gambit is likely to be a financial argument. While cocaine overdoses claim far fewer lives than opioids, the fiscal costs associated with interceding cocaine into the U.S. are staggering.

Navy and Coast Guard seizures alone cost American taxpayers US$56 billion in 2020, to say nothing of land border expenditures. State funds are also used for cocaine-linked policing, incarcerations and medical treatment.

The current geopolitical landscape may also provide Petro with an unlikely Trump card. Given President Joe Biden’s condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he will be careful avoid pushing Colombia (which he has described as a security “linchpin”) into a closer embrace with Cuba and Venezuela, who are diplomatically aligned with the Kremlin.

To isolate Russia even further, Biden will likely soften America’s stance in renegotiating its FTA with Colombia.

Last month, senior representatives from the Biden administration met with Petro to discuss, among other things, the FTA. While the U.S. has taken tentative steps towards renegotiating the deal, Petro should be wary of a favourable result.

Over the past twenty-five years, an intricate web of government and military bureaucracy has been constructed around U.S.-Colombian counter-narcotics operations. It will be difficult to disentangle.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is a Geneva-based researcher for the Third World Network

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 9 2022 (IPS)

The world economy is on the brink of outright recession, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Ukraine war and sanctions have scuttled recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over 80 central banks have already raised interest rates so far this year. Except for the Bank of Japan governor, major central bankers have reacted to recent inflation by raising interest rates. Hence, stagflation is increasingly likely as rising interest rates slow the economy, but do not quell supply-side cost-push inflation.

Anis Chowdhury

IMF U-turn unexplained
The IMF chief economist recently advised, “Inflation at current levels represents a clear risk for current and future macroeconomic stability and bringing it back to central bank targets should be the top priority for policymakers”.

While acknowledging the short-term costs of raising interest rates, he has never bothered to explain why inflation targets should be considered sacrosanct regardless of circumstances. Simply asserting inflation will be more costly if not checked now makes for poor evidence-based policy making.

After all, only a month earlier, on 7 June, the IMF advised, “Countries should allow international prices to pass through to domestic prices while protecting households that are most in need”.

The Fund recognized the major sources of current inflation are supply disruptions – first due to pandemic lockdowns disrupting supply chains, and then, delivery blockages of food, fuel and fertilizer due to war and sanctions.

US Fed infallible?
Without explaining why, US Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell insists on emulating his hero, Paul Volcker, Fed chair during 1979-87. Volcker famously almost doubled the federal funds target rate to nearly 20%.

Thus, Volcker caused the longest US recession since the 1930s’ Great Depression, raising unemployment to nearly 11%, while “the effects of unemployment, on health and earnings of sacked workers, persisted for years”.

Asked at a US Senate hearing if the Fed was prepared to do whatever it takes to control inflation – even if it harms growth – Powell replied, “the answer to your question is yes”.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

But major central banks have ‘over-reacted’ time and again, with disastrous consequences. Milton Friedman famously argued the US Fed exacerbated the 1930s’ Great Depression. Instead of providing liquidity to businesses struggling with short-term cash-flow problems, it squeezed credit, crushing economic activity.

Similarly, later Fed chair Ben Bernanke and his co-authors showed overzealous monetary tightening was mainly responsible for the 1970s’ stagflation. With prices still rising despite higher interest rates, stagflation now looms large.

North Atlantic trio
Most central bankers have long been obsessed with fighting inflation, insisting on bringing it down to 2%, despite harming economic progress. This formulaic response is prescribed, even when inflation is not mainly due to surging demand.

Powell recently observed, “supply is a big part of the story”, acknowledging the Ukraine war and China’s pandemic restrictions have pushed prices up.

While admitting higher interest rates may increase unemployment, Powell insists meeting the 2% target is “unconditional”. He asserted, “we have the tools and the resolve to get it down to 2%”, insisting “we’re going to do that”.

While recognizing “very big supply shocks” as the primary cause of inflation, Bank of England (BOE) Governor Andrew Bailey also vows to meet the 2% inflation target, allowing “no ifs or buts”.

While European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde does not expect to return “to that environment of low inflation”, admitting “inflation in the euro area today is being driven by a complex mix of factors”, she insists on raising “interest rates for as long as it takes to bring inflation back to our [2%] target”.

April Fools?
Much of the problem is due to the 2% inflation targeting dogma. As the then Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand – the first central bank to adopt a 2% inflation target – later admitted, “The figure was plucked out of the air”.

Thus, a “chance remark” by the NZ Finance Minister – during “a television interview on April 1, 1988 that he was thinking of genuine price stability, ‘around 0, or 0 to 1 percent’” – has become monetary policy worldwide!

Powell also acknowledged, “Since the pandemic, we’ve been living in a world where the economy has been driven by very different forces”. He confessed, “I think we understand better how little we understand about inflation.”

Meanwhile, Powell acknowledges how changed globalization, demographics, productivity and technical progress no longer check price increases – as during the ‘Great Moderation’.

Bailey’s resolve to get inflation to 2% is even more shocking as he admits the BOE cannot stop inflation hitting 10%, as “there isn’t a lot we can do”.

Although it has no theoretical, analytical or empirical basis, many central bankers treat inflation targeting as universal best practice – in all circumstances! Thus, despite acknowledging supply-side disruptions and changed conditions, they still insist on the 2% inflation target!

Interest rate, blunt tool
Central bankers’ inflation targeting dogma will cause much damage. Even when inflation is rising, raising interest rates may not be the right policy tool for several reasons.

First, the interest rate only addresses the symptoms, not the causes of inflation – which can be many. Second, raising interest rates too often and too much can kill productive and efficient businesses along with those less so.

Third, by slowing the economy, higher interest rates discourage investment in new technology, skill-upgrading, plant and equipment, adversely affecting the economy’s long-term potential.

Fourth, higher interest rates will raise debt burdens for governments, businesses and households. Borrowings accelerated after the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and even more during the pandemic.

Monetary tightening also constrains fiscal policy. A slower economy implies less tax revenue and more social provisioning spending. Higher interest rates also raise living costs as households’ debt-servicing costs rise, especially for mortgages. Living costs also rise as businesses pass on higher interest rates to consumers.

Policy innovation
The recent inflationary surge is broadly acknowledged as due to supply shortages, mainly due to the new Cold War, pandemic, Ukraine war and sanctions.

Increasing interest rates may slow price increases by reducing demand, but does not address supply constraints, the main cause of inflation now. Anti-inflationary policy in the current circumstances should therefore change from suppressing domestic demand, with higher interest rates, to enhancing supplies.

Raising interest rates increases credit costs for all. Instead, financial constraints on desired industries to be promoted (e.g., renewable energy) should be eased. Meanwhile, credit for undesirable, inefficient, speculative and unproductive activities (e.g., real estate and share purchases) should be tightened.

This requires macroeconomic policies to support economic diversification, by promoting industrial investments and technological innovation. Each goal needs customized policy tools.

Instead of reacting to inflation by raising the interest rate – a blunt one-size-fits-all instrument indeed – policymakers should consider various causes of inflation and how they interact.

Each source of inflation needs appropriate policy tools, not one blunt instrument for all. But central bankers still consider raising interest rates the main, if not only policy against inflation – a universal hammer for every cause of inflation, all seen as nails.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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The female guardians of Venezuela’s Imataca Forest Reserve | An FAO-GEF project, which also aims to increase gender equality in the forestry sector, has continued supporting the Kariña women in actively leading the development of their territories and the conservation of the area’s biodiversity. Credit: FAO

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Aug 8 2022 (IPS)

Nothing –or too little– has changed since Hollywood started producing its spectacular western movies. Rough men, ranchers, mercenary killers, saloons, cowboys, guns, gold fever, the ‘good sheriff’… and the ‘bad indians”. Those movies were anything but fiction–they were real history.

Add to this mix, the deeply-rooted, widely dominating culture of the so-called “white supremacy.”

Consequently, the hollywoodian production has constantly depicted the “indians” as savage and ruthless, uncivilised people who devastate the lands of well-intentioned colonisers, burn their homes, steal their horses, kill them, and hang their skulls as trophies.

Asia has the largest concentration of Indigenous Peoples with 70.5 %, followed by Africa with 16.3 %, and Latin America with 11.5 %. In Canada and the United States of America, Indigenous Peoples represent 6.7 % of the total population

The show goes on. And the victims are the same ones: the Indigenous Peoples.

Century after century, the indigenous peoples have been living in their lands in a perfect harmony with Nature, on which their life dependens. They know how to guard precious natural resources and are the custodians of 80% of biodiversity.

But, tragically, the very richness in natural resources which the original people of Planet Earth have been keen to conserve and preserve, soon stood behind their dramatic fate.

 

The modern cowboys

Exactly like in those movies, the world’s biggest modern, intrepid cowboys–the giant private corporations, have been systematically depleting those natural resources for the sake of making profits.

The current world ranchers and their cowboys appear to be the big business of timber, livestock, intensive agriculture, mono-culture, mining, carbon, oil, dams, land grabbing, luxurious resorts, golf camps, wild urbanisation, and a long etcetera.

The consequences such depletion are, among many others:

 

• While humanity used to cultivate more than 6.000 plant species for food, now instead fewer than 200 of these species make major contributions to food production, now only 9% account for 66% of total crop production. Once depleted, big business supplants Nature with synthetic food.

 

• Over the last 50 years, the global economy has grown nearly fivefold, due largely to a tripling in extraction of natural resources and energy that has fuelled growth in production and consumption.

 

• Three quarters of the land and two thirds of the oceans are now impacted by humans. One million of the world’s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction, and many of the ecosystem services essential for human well- being are eroding.

 

• Around one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction.

 

• The Planet is losing 4.7 million hectares of forests every year – an area larger than Denmark.

 

They are the ancestors

The number of indigenouos peoples is estimated at nearly 500 million, similar to the combined population of the European Union’s 27 member countries, or the total inhabitants of two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers–the United States and the Russian Federation.

The figure refers to those who identify themselves as being indigenous or indegenous descendents. Many others opt for no admitting themselves as such, due to worldwide growing wave of xenophobia.

According to the United Nations, Indigenous Peoples consider 22% of the world’s land surface their home. They live in areas where around 80% of the Planet’s biodiversity is found on not-commercially-exploited land.

And at least 40% of the 7,000 languages used worldwide are at some level of endangerment. Indigenous languages are particularly vulnerable because many of them are not taught at school or used in the public sphere.

 

Key facts:

 

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that:

 

• There are in fact more than 476 million Indigenous Peoples in the seven socio-cultural regions of the world, in 90 countries, belonging to more than 5,000 different groups.

 

• Asia has the largest concentration of Indigenous Peoples with 70.5 %, followed by Africa with 16.3 %, and Latin America with 11.5 %. In Canada and the United States of America, Indigenous Peoples represent 6.7 % of the total population.

 

• Indigenous Peoples make up 6.2% of the global population with the majority living in middle-income countries.

 

• Indigenous Peoples represent more than 19% of the extreme poor.

 

• Indigenous Peoples’ territories encompass 28% of the surface of the globe and contain 11% of the world’s forests.

 

• Indigenous Peoples’ food systems have high levels of self-sufficiency ranging from 50 % to 80% in food and resources generation.

 

Abused also by job markets

 

Meanwhile, Indegnous Peoples are considerably abused also by the job markets. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO):

 

• Globally, 47% of all Indigenous Peoples in employment have no education, compared to 17% of their non-indigenous counterparts. This gap is even wider for women.

 

• More than 86% of Indigenous Peoples globally work in the informal economy, compared to 66% for their non-indigenous counterparts.

 

• Indigenous Peoples are nearly three times as likely to be living in extreme poverty compared to their non-indigenous counterparts.

 

Indigenous women

Indigenous women are the backbone of Indigenous Peoples’ communities and play a crucial role in the preservation and transmission of traditional ancestral knowledge, states the 2022 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August)

They have an integral collective and community role as carers of natural resources and keepers of scientific knowledge. And many indigenous women are also taking the lead in the defence of Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories and advocating for their collective rights worldwide, the UN further explains.

“However, despite the crucial role indigenous women play in their communities as breadwinners, caretakers, knowledge keepers, leaders and human rights defenders, they often suffer from intersecting levels of discrimination on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity and socio-economic status.”

 

Poverty, illiteracy, no sanitation, no health services, no jobs…

Indigenous women particularly suffer high levels of poverty; low levels of education and illiteracy; limitations in the access to health, basic sanitation, credit and employment; limited participation in political life; and domestic and sexual violence, reports the World Day.

Besides, their right to self-determination, self-governance and control of resources and ancestral lands have been violated over centuries.

Small but significant progress has been made by indigenous women in decision-making processes in some communities, achieving leadership in communal and national roles, and standing on the protest frontlines to defend their lands and the planet’s decreasing biodiversity.

“The reality, however, remains that indigenous women are widely under-represented, disproportionately negatively affected by decisions made on their behalf, and are too frequently the victims of multiple expressions of discrimination and violence.”

In short, the world’s human ancestors have systematically fallen defenseless victims to subjugation, marginalisation, dispossession, exclusion, stigmatisation and discrimination.

Simply, claiming their due rights implies losing business profits.

A child has her teeth examined remotely. The Daktari Smart technology means children in rural Kenya are linked to specialist care in big centres. Credit: Daktari Smart

By Wilson Odhiambo
Nairobi, Aug 8 2022 (IPS)

New telemedicine technology, Daktari Smart, aims to mitigate the gap between child patients and medical specialists in rural Kenya.

Officially launched in November 2021, the system was built to help sick children have easy access to medical specialists minus the cost of being physically present (remote/digital access). According to them, this will help optimise the delivery of healthcare systems.

Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentist Board estimate that the current patient-to-doctor ratio is 6,355 to 1. These statistics highlight the difficulty that patients have in accessing qualified medical personnel and specialists. Patients from rural and marginalised areas are especially disadvantaged, with some dealing with a total lack of adequate facilities. Others are left to contend with referrals that see them delay treatment.

Daktari Smart thus comes in as the “haven” that these patients had been waiting for, targeting over 32,000 children in Homabay, Samburu, Baringo and Lamu counties in its first phase of operation.

“Daktari Smart is a telemedicine device that offers connections between different counties or locations and the provider of the services,” says Olivia Achieng, program coordinator at Gertrude’s Hospital Foundation.

“This telemedicine system involves electronic medical devices connected to form a platform that enables the clinical workers at the different counties to interact directly with the specialists and sub-specialists in Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital.”

Like many developing countries, Kenya is characterised by limited health facilities in rural areas. Most health specialists and special care facilities are located in the city, mainly Nairobi. Kenyatta National Hospital, Nairobi hospital, and Aga Khan Hospital are among the largest and most reputable hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, but are over 400 kilometres from Lamu, Homabay, and Samburu counties.

Specialists include paediatricians, surgeons, psychiatrists, and neurologists – the list is long.

“The poor doctor-to-patient ratio makes it hard to get specialists in far-flung areas, making it hard for these patients to get the quality care they deserve. To get the specialist care they need, they will need to travel to cities like Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret or Nakuru, which is expensive and time-consuming. This is the gap that Daktari Smart is trying to bridge,” Achieng explained.

Rather than send the patient to a different facility or hospital, the referral process will now be able to be done within the same facility. The patient will be booked and referred over the telemedicine platform.

According to Achieng, the system comprises several electronic devices such as a stethoscope, vital sign monitor, derma scope, electrocardiogram, and ultrasound machine, among many other medical devices assembled to form the telemedicine platform.

Children in rural Kenya can now benefit from a full health assessment without travelling for miles to urban centres. Credit: Daktari Smart

All these devices are attached to a monitor, which allows the specialist to see the patient’s information in real-time. This means that the specialist doesn’t have to rely on second-hand information or someone else’s interpretation of the patient’s condition because they can see everything as it is transmitted first-hand.

Anyango said that once the specialist in Nairobi is done attending to the children he is with, he can then go to the telemedicine room and see whether he has any bookings from Lamu, Samburu, Homabay or Baringo county.

“It is also important to note that this is a paediatric referral platform which means that before a child is referred, he or she has to be properly assessed by the health worker to determine whether or not the case requires a specialist’s attention,” she said.

The M-PESA Foundation invested over Ksh 168 million (about 1.4 million US dollars) in the project, with the expectation of bringing on board two more needy counties and ensuring they can help as many patients as possible.

“One of our main pillars under M-PESA Foundation is healthcare. For this particular telemedicine program, we have partnered with Gertrude’s Hospital Foundation, Gertrude’s Hospital and Safaricom PLC,” said Karen Basiye, Director, Sustainable Business, Social Impact and M-PESA Foundation.

“Our aim is to address the delays in receiving adequate healthcare in rural and underserved areas through telemedicine, starting with Samburu, Homabay, Baringo and Lamu Counties. Two other counties will be brought on board in the next phase of this program,” Basiye told IPS.

“Patients, who have children aged up to 21 years, who would otherwise have to spend a significant amount of time and money on travelling long distances to urban areas to seek care, will now be able to receive specialist care from their local health facility. As a foundation, we are the program’s main funder, investing over Ksh 168 million towards the initiative over the next three years,” added Basiye.

Basiye said that the bandwidth requirement for the system is low, ranging from 512kps to 2Mbps, which makes it suitable for use in rural areas with poor internet connectivity.

“The mission and vision for Gertrude’s Hospital Foundation are to ensure the poor and the needy in the community are taken care of. We noted that the hard-to-reach areas in Kenya are underserved in terms of medical specialists, and this project thus enables us to offer the health part, while M-PESA Foundation helps with the financial side,” Anyango continued.

Dr Alex Owino, Medical Superintendent, Katulani Sub- County hospital, Kitui, agrees that Daktari smart is a great initiative given the few specialist doctors who handle delicate and complex medical cases.

“Most of these specialist doctors are found in major towns, which makes access to specialist care by patients from rural areas very difficult as they have to use a lot of resources just to get to them,” Owino told IPS. “The whole of Kitui county, for instance, has only three paediatricians serving it, which means that general practitioners like ourselves will have to cover the gaps”.

“Having specialists use technology to provide care for patients in hard-to-reach areas will thus lead to better health outcomes as it cuts the need for movement for patients who need help and health workers who may need training,” Owino said.

Owino explained technology is quickly revolutionising medicine with various gadgets and applications being introduced to help improve areas of weakness that have mainly been witnessed in developing countries.

“This technology will not only help the patients but also be very useful in helping improve the knowledge and skills for the health workers in those areas,” Owino concluded.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Students protest in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, against budget cuts in education. Black students, generally the poorest, suffer the most from the deterioration of schools, the reduction of scholarships, the shrinking of school meal programs and the loss of opportunities to study. CREDIT: CPERS- Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 8 2022 (IPS)

The battle against racism and inequality will be a long one in Brazil, because a prejudice against the intellectual capacity of blacks is a problem rooted in the national culture, and even in the minds of Afro-Brazilians themselves, as well as highlighted in the country’s official history.

The basic idea spread is that Brazil is the creation of its Portuguese colonizers, especially with regard to everything that requires brains, lamented Luciana da Cruz Brito, professor of history at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB).

Few recognize Machado de Assis, considered the greatest Brazilian writer, and Mario de Andrade, another great writer and leader of the modernist movement of a century ago, as black.

“Most believe that the Rebouças were white, whose last name is on a Rio de Janeiro tunnel and avenues in São Paulo and Porto Alegre, which pay homage to them,” Brito told IPS by telephone from Cachoeira, a city of 33,000 inhabitants in the state of Bahia, where the UFRB’s Center for Arts, Humanities and Literature is located.

The brothers André and Antonio Rebouças were the first black engineers in Brazil, responsible for the construction of several ports, railroads and highways. The former was also prominent in the Paraguayan War or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870, which united Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay) and in the movement for the abolition of slavery.

Brazil was the last Western country to put an end to slavery, by a law signed by Princess Isabel de Bourbon e Bragança, daughter of Emperor Pedro II, on May 13, 1888. The Brazilian monarchy would fall 18 months later, to a military coup that proclaimed the country a republic.

Highlighting the step taken by the princess as a decisive and even unique measure is part of the whitening of the history of Latin America’s largest and most populous country.

This official history seeks to conceal or downplay the role of abolitionists and of the black movement, which celebrates Black Consciousness Day every Nov. 20, the date of the assassination of the hero of the black struggles, Zumbi, in 1695.

Ignoring black history

White historiography, in which indigenous and black people are not counted as full subjects, is a great barrier to the struggle against racism, and to reducing Brazil’s notorious inequality, Brito said, recalling the conclusions of another black woman historian, Beatriz Nascimento, who was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro in 1995, at the age of 52.

From abolition to the first decades of the 20th century, the Brazilian elite deployed a campaign of “white supremacy, which considered blacks an obstacle to the vision of European nationhood and the mixing of races a sabotage to Europeanization,” she said.

The whitening policy included the promotion of European immigration to replace slave labor in the coffee harvest and other agricultural and industrial activities.

Black participation in the most productive agricultural sectors, in industrialization and the emergence of a national bourgeoisie, with the rise of artisans to entrepreneurs, was ignored, and this strengthened their exclusion, wrote Joel Rufino dos Santos, a historian and writer who died in 2015, in his book “El Saber del negro” (The Knowledge of Blacks).

But the whitewashing of history, with the systematic erasure of black knowledge and talent in the construction of the nation, is “a perverse and effective policy” in neutralizing anti-racism efforts and will therefore prolong the problem, said Brito.

Brazil’s history ignores blacks even though they make up 56 percent of the population. Among other forms of discrimination, it limits their participation to brute, dehumanized labor, destroys self-esteem and hinders the progress of people of African descent by spreading the belief that blacks are intellectually less capable. CREDIT: Courtesy of Luciana Brito

Epistemicide

“It destroys self-esteem and instills in the minds of black students the message that they are not capable of learning, of being creative. It’s a barrier to learning, children go to school out of obligation, not to learn,” she said.

It is “epistemicide,” said Natalia Alves, a history teacher who volunteers at Educafro (Education and Citizenship of Afrodescendants and the Destitute), a non-governmental network of educational centers that facilitate the inclusion of the poor, especially blacks, in universities, through scholarships and preparatory courses.

Epistemicide is the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge, or the suppression or death of forms of knowledge of peoples considered marginal by the colonial or dominant culture.

Blacks are treated as “abject objects” and the fact that the first universities were founded in Africa is ignored, as is the fact that the arrival of enslaved Africans contributed to Brazil’s agricultural development and to the gold mining boom that enriched the current state of Minas Gerais, she told IPS by e-mail from Rio de Janeiro.

The gold boom in southern Minas Gerais, which began at the end of the 17th century and peaked in the following century, owes a great deal to people from Africa. This golden period saw the birth of historic cities such as Ouro Preto, initially Vila Rica and today a tourist center whose ancient churches give a central place to sculptures of Antonio Francisco Lisboa alias Aleijadinho, a black man.

The Portuguese colonizers did not know much about mining and metallurgy, so they brought slaves with knowledge of these activities from the Gold Coast, an extensive area along the coasts of present-day Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, Laurentino Gomes wrote in the second volume of his trilogy “Slavery”.

Gomes is a journalist who became a highly successful writer of books on Brazilian history.

Brazil’s official history erases the intellectual contributions of people of African descent to the construction of the country, condemning them to precarious jobs and marginalization in Brazilian society, according to Natalia Alves, a volunteer history teacher at Educafro, a non-governmental network of centers that facilitate access to university for black and poor people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Natalia Alves

Black protagonists made invisible

There are many examples of the intellectual, technical or artistic protagonism of Afro-descendants who are largely invisible or neglected. This is the case of important black women writers, such as Carolina Maria de Jesus, who recounted her life in a favela or shantytown in the 1960s, and Conceição Evaristo, both now belatedly recognized, according to Alves.

In addition, the teaching of the history of African and indigenous cultures in primary and secondary schools, as required by a 2008 law, is not implemented as it should be, and the media “reinforce stigmas” by reporting on police massacres in the favelas, which occur frequently in Rio de Janeiro, she said. Poverty ends up becoming the culprit.

The advances achieved by Afro-descendants and the poor include university entrance quotas started by the State University of Rio de Janeiro in 2000 and made mandatory nationwide by a 2012 law.

This type of affirmative action, aimed at reducing inequalities, is effective, according to data and studies.

In the United States, where affirmative action measures began to be adopted in the 1970s, blacks have reached the presidency – Barack Obama (2009-2017) – and the position of secretary of state – Colin Powell (2001-2005) and Condoleezza Rice (2005-2009) – in addition to achieving prominence in film, music and sports.

“The civil rights movement exposed U.S. racism to the world in the 1950s and 1960s, then quotas produced that number of prominent blacks, even though they are a minority,” just 13 percent of the U.S. population, stressed Brito, who specialized in the study of slavery in Brazil and the United States.

In Brazil, Afro-descendants (including blacks and people of mixed-race) make up 56 percent of the country’s population of 214 million, according to the official census. But they are still a minority (38 percent) in the universities and have the worst indicators in poverty, unemployment and murders, totally disproportionate to their share of the population.

However, the country adopted university quotas for blacks and the poor four decades after the United States. The results should emerge in a few more decades, the professor hopes.

But “what does a black body raised to the power structure actually change, if it does not change the structure of racism, which continues to provoke violence and where recent murders of young black men sparked the massive ‘Black Lives Matter (#Blacklivesmatter)’ protests?” asked Alves.

The 50 percent quotas in public universities for high school students from public schools, where the majority are black, do not take into account the reality of areas such as the Recôncavo region of Bahia, where 80 percent of the population is black, said Professor Brito.

In addition, the budget cuts imposed on them by the current far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro have reduced scholarships and resources, mainly to the detriment of poor students, she stressed.

On the airwaves - DJ Ulu, Mama Nessa and Mama Trina (left to right).

By External Source
TONGA, Aug 8 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Tonga was still picking up the pieces after the Hunga volcanic eruption and tsunami waves when the pandemic reached its shores.

The volcano’s ashfall had damaged roads, polluted water and destroyed crops. The tsunami waves battered homes and strewn debris inland. The telecommunications services connecting people to their families were just coming back online as news of the first COVID-19 cases broke.

A lockdown was swiftly announced to curb an uncontrolled spread of the virus. Though a critical public health intervention, it was an additional blow to the island nation – compounding the issues for many people already struggling to rebuild after Hunga.

In response, the Talitha Project – an NGO committed to empower young women ages 10 to 24 to make informed decisions through informal education, lifeskills and development programmes in Tonga – took to the airwaves.

The new radio programme Tui ha’o Sei ‘Amanaki Lelei (Positive Sei) aims to support young people through this challenging time. A significant 55% of the population of Tonga – more than half are young people under 25.[1]

“We saw that the people’s confidence was low because they were traumatised by these unpredictable crises,” explained Vanessa Heleta, Founder and Director of the Talitha Project in Tonga. “We decided to create a radio programme particularly targeting youths to direct their focus to find positiveness in the midst of all the chaos.”

“It’s a part of our recovery process that, even though we had these major climate disasters and now a health crisis, we need to realise that life has to go on with a positive direction. Even if it’s a little step, we have to reboot and reorder because there are so many great things ahead and we really want to see our young people become the best version of themselves.”

Vanessa, Katrina and Alokoulu

Vanessa is joined by colleagues from the Talitha Project including Mama Trina (Katrina Ma’u Fatiaki), Funky Mary (Mele Fonua) and DJ Ulu (Alokoulu) and the team makes for easy and inspiring listening.

“It’s been great to hear from youth and also parents who say ‘we love your show its real, authentic and you talk from the heart’,” shared Katrina. “Feedback like this continues to remind us about our purpose as agents of change.”

“The show has helped lift the morale and self-esteem of youth. With the circumstances we are in – from natural disasters to pandemic – it’s times like this, we need to uplift each other and support each other which is what the show is all about”.

To date, the hosts have discussed a range of issues including the importance of cultivating a positive attitude, healthy relationships and making the right choices. Many of these topics have been listener requests – a positive sign, according to the team, as they want to ensure that the programme is engaging for young people.

Although there have been calls for a daily radio spot, Tui ha’o Sei ‘Amanaki Lelei has been a weekly, one-hour show since it started on 22 February. Vanessa hopes to see the radio programme continue as long as it is needed.

“We are in lockdown and people are recovering at different stages,” she said. “We have been supporting one another at this time and need to continue doing so. This lockdown can be a blessing as well for families to reconnect and also taking into account the different abuses in households during this time. “

The Tui ha’o Sei ‘Amanaki Lelei programme is airs Wednesdays from 8 to 9pm on 88.6FM and livestreamed on the Talitha Project’s Facebook page.

The Talitha Project is supported by the Pacific Girl programme – funded by Australia and managed through the Pacific Community (SPC) Pacific Women Lead.

[1] 55,270 of Tonga’s 100,651 population (55%) according to the Tonga 2016 Census of Population and Housing. This figure is the sum total of: Less than 1 year of age; Children aged 1-14; and Youth aged 15-24.

Women with tree seedlings. Sunka Shea Women’s Cooperative is a women-led cooperative that is setting an example for sustainable commodity production through their shea butter production cooperative. © A Rocha International. The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is commemorated annually on August 9. Credit: Sunkpa Shea Women's Cooperative

By Jamison Ervin
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 8 2022 (IPS)

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, commemorated annually on August 9, is a day to celebrate the many contributions of the 476 million Indigenous peoples worldwide.

As the world grapples with a planetary crisis of both biodiversity loss and climate change, scientists and policy makers are racing to find viable solutions. Increasingly, they are recognizing that the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples could well provide cost-effective nature-based solutions.

For example, the authors of a recent national environmental assessment in Australia have for the first time recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledge in avoiding catastrophic fires; a new federal program in Canada provides funding for Indigenous coastal guardians, in recognition of their unique knowledge; and Indigenous knowledge of tiger behavior is helping avoid human-wildlife conflicts in Nepal.

This is a radical departure from the past, when the knowledge and efforts of Indigenous peoples has traditionally been marginalized or discredited.

The emerging recognition of the importance of Indigenous knowledge of the natural world is part of a broader dawning awareness that there are cracks in our global capitalist system – cracks that if allowed to continue to grow, pose an existential threat to humanity.

The front page headline from the Financial Times in 2019, “Capitalism. Time for a Reset,” summarizes what is needed – a profound transformation in the global status quo on how we protect, restore and manage natural resources, and a reset on our relationship with Indigenous peoples, especially women and youth.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first Equator Prize, a UNDP-led partner initiative that recognizes Indigenous peoples and local communities from around the world who use sustainable nature-based solutions to achieve their local development needs.

Joining 264 winners from the past, among this year’s ten winners, selected from a pool of over 500 nominations from 109 countries, are several examples that illustrate the social and economic transformations needed to put Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous women, at the forefront of a new pact with nature.

At the forefront of restoration knowledge

The Associação Rede de Sementes do Xingu from Brazil brings together women from 25 Indigenous and agricultural communities to collect and commercialize over 220 different species of native seeds for large-scale ecological reforestation of the Amazon and the Cerrado.

In doing so, they have generated more than $700,000 in local incomes, financially empowering Indigenous women throughout the region. The organization also partners with local research institutions to exchange and blend local and technical knowledge, practices, and research to combat industrial agriculture and mass deforestation, seed by seed.

Restoration is a social and ecological imperative; the latest Global Land Outlook found that as much as 40% of the world’s lands are degraded. And while the global community has pledged to restore a billion hectares of degraded land by 2030, it is through the knowledge and action of community members such as those from the Associação Rede de Sementes do Xingu that can help make these pledges a reality.

The Organización de Mujeres Indígenas Unidas por la Biodiversidad de Panamá is an Indigenous, women-led organization in Panama uses Indigenous knowledge of conservation techniques to protect jaguars, while preserving both their territory and their culture.

The recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems found that more than a million species are at risk of extinction, and large predators such as jaguars are especially vulnerable to disruptions in habitat connectivity, particularly in a place such as Panama, which serves as a narrow connectivity corridor between continents.

The Indigenous knowledge and actions of OMIUBP play an essential and outsized role in safeguarding the future of jaguars in the Americas.

At the forefront of sustainable supply chains

The Sunkpa Shea Women’s Cooperative of Ghana, an Indigenous, women-led cooperative, is setting an example for sustainable commodity production through their shea butter production cooperative. The cooperative has redefined production practices in the region by developing a Community Resource Management Area that includes zones of for production areas, no-take zones and limited-use areas.

Their management plan also includes ecosystem restoration with Indigenous food forests, as well as traditional fire management practices that mitigate wildfire risk in this drought-prone region of Ghana. By integrating their organic production into international supply chains, they are improving the lives of 800 women, while safeguarding biodiversity and eliminating deforestation.

While hundreds of companies have pledged to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains, few have achieved this goal. It is through progressive groups such as the Sunkpa Shea Women’s Cooperative of Ghana that we see true progress.

The International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, commemorated annually on August 9, with the theme of the role of Indigenous women in the preservation of traditional knowledge, is a timely reminder of the profound transformations we need now, and the need to foster the vital role of women in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge at the core of Indigenous identity, culture, and heritage.

This year’s Equator Prize winners are an inspiration that these transformations are already underway, and that effective women-led solutions to our planetary crises are at hand.

Learn more about the winners on the Equator Initiative’s website, and join us for a celebration on November 30 at the virtual Nature for Life Hub.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Manager, UNDP’s Global Programme on Nature for Development

A group of alleged gang members is presented to the media by police authorities in El Salvador on Jul. 20 as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the war against gangs waged in this Central American country under a state of emergency. But families of detainees and human rights organizations warn that in many cases they have no links to criminal organizations. CREDIT: National Civil Police

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 5 2022 (IPS)

The body of Walter Sandoval shows a number of dark bruises on his arms and knees, as well as lacerations on his left eye and on his head – signs that he suffered some kind of violence before dying in a Salvadoran prison, accused of being a gang member.

The evidence of the beating is clear in photographs that Walter’s father, Saúl Sandoval, showed to IPS.

Walter, 32, was one of those who died in Salvadoran prisons after being detained by the authorities in the massive raids that the government of Nayib Bukele launched at the end of March, under the protection of the decreed state of emergency and the administration’s fight against organized crime and gangs.

The young man, a farmer, died on Apr. 3, in the parking lot of the hospital in Sonsonate, a city in the west of the country where he was transferred, already dying according to the family, from the police station in Ahuachapán, a city in the department of the same name in western El Salvador.

He had been transferred to the police station after his Mar. 30 arrest in the Jardines neighborhood of the municipality of El Refugio, also in the department of Ahuachapán.

“They tortured him in the dungeons of the Ahuachapán police station,” his father told IPS.

He added that his son had been hanging out with friends, getting drunk. A few minutes later, a police patrol picked him up on charges of being a gang member, which the family vehemently told IPS was not true.

“He never received medical assistance, he died in the hospital parking lot,” the father added."They tortured him in the dungeons of the Ahuachapán police station. He didn't receive medical assistance, he died in the hospital parking lot." -- Saúl Sandoval

He says the only explanation he has for why the police detained Walter is because “they wanted to get the day’s quota.” What he meant is that police officers are apparently supposed to arrest a specific number of gang members in exchange for benefits in their assigned workload.

Deaths like Walter’s, if the participation of police is confirmed, are the most violent and arbitrary expression of the human rights violations committed since the government began its plan of massive raids, in what it describes as an all-out war on gangs.

Since late March, the Salvadoran government has maintained a state of emergency that suspended several constitutional guarantees, in response to a sharp rise in homicides committed by gang members between Mar. 25 and 27.

In those three days, at least 87 people were killed by gang members, in a kind of revenge against the government for allegedly breaking an obscure under-the-table agreement with the gangs to keep homicide rates low.

The state of emergency has been in place since Mar. 27, extended each month by the legislature, which is largely dominated by the ruling New Ideas party. Since then, violent deaths have dropped to an average of three a day.

Among the constitutional rights suspended are the rights of association and assembly, although the government said it only applies to criminal groups that are meeting to organize crimes. It also restricts the right to defense and extends the period in which a person may be detained and brought before the courts, which is currently three days.

The government can also wiretap the communications of “terrorist groups”, meaning gangs, although it could already do so under ordinary laws.

After the state of emergency was declared, homicides dropped again to around two or three a day, and there are even days when none are reported.

But some 48,000 people have been arrested and remanded in custody, accused by the authorities of belonging to criminal gangs. And the number is growing day by day.

However, the families of detainees and human rights organizations complain that among those captured are people who had no links to the gangs, known as “maras” in El Salvador, which make up an army of a combined total of around 70,000 members.

On Jun. 2, rights watchdog Amnesty International stated in an official communiqué that “Under the current state of emergency, the Salvadoran authorities have committed massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment, and at least 18 people have died in state custody.”

But President Bukele, far from being receptive to criticism, dismisses and stigmatizes the work of human rights groups, referring to their representatives as “criminals” and “freeloaders” who are more interested in defending the rights of gang members than those of their victims.

Walter Sandoval is one of the young men who have died with signs of torture in El Salvador’s prisons under the state of emergency in force in the country since the end of March. The police captured him without any evidence linking him to gangs, said the young man’s family – part of a pattern that has been documented by human rights organizations. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Sandoval family

Silent deaths and torture

The local human rights organization Cristosal has documented nearly 2,500 cases of arrests which, according to the families, have been arbitrary, with no basis for their loved ones to have been detained under the state of emergency.

The organization has also monitored press reports and social networks and has carried out its own research to establish that, as of Jul. 28, some 65 people had died while detained in the country’s prisons or in police cells as part of the massive police raids.

Some of the deceased showed obvious signs of beatings and physical violence, as was the case with Walter and other cases that have been widely reported in the media.

The official reports of these deaths received by family members are vague and confusing, such as that of Julio César Mendoza Ramírez, 25, who died in a hospital in San Salvador, the country’s capital, on Jul. 15.

The official report stated that he had died of pulmonary edema, i.e., his lungs filled with fluid, but also stated that the case was “being studied.”

Suspicions that the deceased were victims of beatings and torture during their imprisonment are not ruled out by their relatives or by human rights organizations.

“The cause of death given to the relatives in the hospital sometimes differs from the legal medical examination, and that leads one to think that something is going on,” lawyer Zaira Navas, of Cristosal, told IPS.

She added: “There are also families who say they were told it was cardiac arrest, but the victims have bruises on their bodies, which is not compatible (with the official version).”

And in the face of doubts and accusations that beatings and torture are taking place under the watchful eye of the State, the authorities simply remain silent and do not carry out autopsies, for example, which would reveal what really happened.

Navas remarked that, even within the state of emergency, “the detentions are arbitrary” because the procedure followed is not legally justified and many people are detained simply because of telephone complaints from neighbors – with which other human rights defenders coincide.

Another problem is that among these 2,500 complaints by families, about 30 percent involve detainees who have chronic diseases or disabilities or were receiving medical or surgical treatment, according to Cristosal’s reports.

The prison staff do not allow family members of the sick detainees to bring their medication, although in a few rare cases they have authorized it.

“We have seen deaths because it is presumed that they have been tortured, beaten, etc., but there have also been deaths of people who have not been given the medication they need to take,” Henri Fino, executive director of the Foundation for Studies on the Application of Law (FESPAD), told IPS.

Regarding the dubious role played by the government’s Institute of Legal Medicine (IML), in charge of conducting the forensic examinations to inform families about the cause of deaths, Fino said that in his opinion it has no credibility.

Especially, he added, now that members of the so-called Military Health Battalion have been stationed since Jul. 4 at several IML offices, presumably to assist in various tasks, including forensic exams, given the shortage of staff.

“What collaboration can they (the military) provide, if they are not experts, and the only reason they are in the IML is to exercise oversight?” Fino said.

Media war

Some of the people who have died in jails or prisons, who were arrested under the state of emergency, were described by the local media as victims of arbitrary, illegal detentions, in contrast with Bukele’s propaganda war claiming that all the detainees are, in fact, gang members.

The press has highlighted the case of Elvin Josué Sánchez, 21, who died on Apr. 18 at the Izalco Prison located near the town of the same name in the department of Sonsonate in western El Salvador.

The media have referred to him as the “young musician”, because he had been learning to play the saxophone, and they have described him as a decent person who was a member of an evangelical church in the area.

But according to neighbors, Sánchez was well-known as an active gang member in his native El Carrizal, in the municipality of Santa Maria Ostuma, in the central department of La Paz.

“They saw him well-armed on farms in the area, along with other gang members, and he told the owners not to show up there anymore, or they would kill them,” a resident of that municipality, who asked not to be identified, told IPS.

Contradictions like this have strengthened local support for Bukele’s insinuations that the independent media are in favor of gang members and against the government’s actions to eradicate violence in the country.

In fact, opinion polls show that a majority of the population of 6.7 million support the president’s measures to crack down on the maras.

But even though Sánchez was recognized by neighbors as a gang member, his arrest should have been carried out following proper procedures and protocols, based on reliable information proving his affiliation to a criminal organization.

This is something the police do not usually do in these massive raids where it is impossible for them to have the evidence needed on each of the nearly 48,000 detainees.

Nor did the fact that he had been a gang member merit him being beaten to death, since his human rights should have been respected, said those interviewed by IPS.

Despite increasing public awareness of (and regulations on) plastic pollution, the global plastic crisis is only getting worse. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS.

By External Source
Aug 5 2022 (IPS)

This spring, I taught a new undergraduate course in environmental sociology. Most of my students took the course because they were curious to see what their desire to live more sustainably had to do with sociology.

By the third week – after a deep dive into the troubling connections between fossil capitalism (the dependence of capitalism on fossil fuels), waste colonialism (the unjust international trade and disposal of hazardous waste between countries) and environmental injustice – a few students said glumly that they had thought the course would be more optimistic.

The negotiations will be challenging, however, given businesses’ vested interests in keeping regulations focused on waste rather than production. Now, it’s urgent that we push back against greenwashing and work towards a global mandate for limiting unsustainable plastics growth

During the fourth week, we explored the well-documented history of climate denial and deception among fossil fuel companies, as well as the related “deceit and denial” tactics of the tobacco, lead and chemical industries. “Do you think it’s really true?” one student asked me imploringly. “Do you think that businesses are really that unsustainable and will never change?”

I hesitated. I wanted my students to consider complex environmental problems from a critical sociological perspective, but I didn’t want to lead them down a pessimistic path. “Well,” I admitted, “I did just write a book about the plastics industry with the subtitle ‘how corporations are fuelling the ecological crisis and what we can do about it’”.

It’s hard to avoid pessimism when you witness firsthand the obstinacy of socially and environmentally damaging industries. Early in 2019, I attended a plastics industry conference in the wake of the marine plastic crisis, prompted by public outrage over viral images of marine wildlife choking on plastic. The crisis prompted a swift response from plastic-related corporations, who attempted to frame the problem in terms of littering and waste rather than overproduction. “We need to get the image of plastic in the oceans out of the public’s mind,” exclaimed a corporate executive at the conference. “We need to make plastic fantastic again.”

Since the dramatic rise of plastic production across the world after the second world war, petrochemical and plastics companies have fought to expand and protect their markets through creating demand for plastic products, denying toxic risks and shifting blame for pollution onto consumers. And despite increasing public awareness of (and regulations on) plastic pollution, the global plastic crisis is only getting worse.

My new book, Plastic Unlimited, sheds light on the corporate roots of this crisis. In it, I address the concept of the “corporate playbook” used by big oil, big tobacco, and, more recently, big plastic.

 

Playbook tactics

The corporate playbook often contains a common repertoire of strategies used by controversial industries to conceal or cast doubt on the harmful effects of their products. Champions of these strategies have been dubbed “merchants of doubt” and accused of offences from downplaying the health risks of smoking to funding climate change denial.

As researcher David Michaels wrote in his exposé Doubt is Their Product, “the manipulation of science by the plastics industry was at least as flagrant and as self-serving as any other industry” he had researched – including the tobacco industry. Michaels was referring to the vinyl chloride scandals of the 1960s and 1970s, when leading chemical companies conspired to hide evidence about the toxic health effects of the vinyl chloride monomer on workers in chemical plants.

Big industry’s track record continues today. It has denied the toxic hazards of myriad petrochemicals and plastic products, funded climate misinformation campaigns, misled the public about the effectiveness of recycling, and lobbied to thwart and delay environmental regulations. During the pandemic, it also lobbied to promote single-use plastic bags as the “sanitary choice”.

Leading corporations also use offensive tactics, including directing attention to their role as so-called innovators in green tech. Take the circular economy, for example. It sounds like a great idea to try to eliminate waste by shifting from a linear “take-make-waste” economy to one in which existing materials are reused for as long as possible. But, crucially, no global or national policy visions of a circular economy for plastics go so far as to call for limiting plastic production altogether.

In fact, the plastics industry promotes the weakest form of the circular economy – recycling – which means plastic production can keep going, despite the reality that most items going into a recycling bin will end up being burned or dumped.

What’s more, recycling uses a lot of energy. Chemical recycling, for instance, involves returning plastics to their original molecular states to be used again. Although it’s promoted as a solution to the plastic crisis, it’s a toxic, carbon-intensive process that’s effectively the same as incineration.

Here’s some good news: in March 2022, the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi agreed on a mandate for a new global treaty to address the crisis. This was a landmark achievement towards creating legally binding measures to prevent toxic plastic pollution.

Many scientists, activists and organisations insist that any resulting treaty must include a cap on plastic production. The negotiations will be challenging, however, given businesses’ vested interests in keeping regulations focused on waste rather than production. Now, it’s urgent that we push back against greenwashing and work towards a global mandate for limiting unsustainable plastics growth.

Alice Mah, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT (ABC) are using artificial intelligence to help eradicate Banana Bunchy Top Disease (BBTD). The disease threatens the livelihoods of farmers and impacts food security. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Aug 5 2022 (IPS)

A group of scientists involved in finding solutions to minimize the impact of a devastating banana virus in Burundi have developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool for monitoring the disease.

United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) research shows that the Banana Bunchy Top Disease (BBTD), caused by the Banana Bunchy Top Virus (BBTV), is endemic in many banana-producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The virus was first reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the 1950s and has become invasive and spread into 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The disease has been reported in Angola, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zambia. The latest findings, however, show that BBTD is currently a major threat to banana cultivation and a threat to over 100 million people for whom the banana is a staple food.

The AI development team, led jointly by Dr Guy Blomme and his colleague Dr Michael Gomez Selvaraj from the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT (ABC), tested the detection of banana plants and their major diseases through aerial images and machine learning methods.

This project aimed to develop an AI-based banana disease and pest detection system using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to support banana farmers.

A graphic shows the impact of Banana Bunchy Top Disease (BBTD). Credit: Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT (ABC)

While farmers struggle to defend their crops from pests, scientists from ABC have created an easy-to-use tool to detect banana pests and diseases.

The tool, which has proven to provide a 90 percent success in detection in some countries, such as the DRC and Uganda, is an important step towards creating a satellite-powered, globally connected network to control disease and pest outbreaks, say the researchers.

During the testing phase, in collaboration with a team from the national agricultural research organization of Burundi – ISABU, two sites where the banana bunchy top disease is endemic in Cibitoke Province were compared with an area free of the disease in Gitega Province (Central).

Cibitoke Province is BBTD endemic and lies in a frontier zone bordering Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Performance and validation metrics were also computed to measure the accuracy of different models in automated disease detection methods by applying state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to detect visible banana disease and pest symptoms on different parts of the plant.

Researchers set out the reasons detecting disease in bananas is so vital.

“In East and Central Africa, it is a substantial dietary component, accounting for over 50% of daily total food intake in parts of Uganda and Rwanda.”

Bananas are also the dominant crop in Burundi. The surface area under cultivation is estimated at 200,000 to 300,000 ha, representing 20 to 30% of the agricultural land.

Data from Burundi’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock indicate food security and nutrition continue to worsen, with 21 percent of the population food insecure. They say this could be exacerbated by various plant diseases such as BBTD.

While banana is crucial to people’s food security and livelihoods, experts also argue that BBTD could potentially have a devastating economic and social impact on the continent.

“Based on the fact that when BBTD comes in, it is initially a very cryptic disease and does not display spectacular symptoms,” Bonaventure Omondi, a CGIAR researcher who collaborated on this project and who works on related banana diseases and seed systems projects, told IPS in an interview. While it was crucial to stop the disease early, it was also challenging, which is why the AI solution was vital.

Agriculture experts say that the East African Highlands is the zone of secondary diversity of a type of bananas called the AAA-EA types. These bananas are genetically close to the dessert banana types but have been selected for use as beer, cooking, and dessert bananas.

Banana cultivation in Burundi is grouped into three different categories. Banana for beer/wine in which juice is extracted and fermented accounts for around 77 percent of the national production by volume. Fourteen percent of bananas are grown for cooking, and finally, about five percent are dessert bananas which are ripened and directly consumed.

With recent advances in machine learning, researchers were convinced that new disease diagnosis based on automated image recognition was technically feasible.

“Minimizing the effects of disease threats and keeping a matrix mixed landscaped of banana and non-banana canopy is a key step in managing a large number of diseases and pests,” Omondi said.

As an example of how this emerging technology works, researchers focus on data sets depicted on banana crops with disease symptoms and established algorithms to help identify plantations where the disease is present.

Prosper Ntirampeba, a banana grower from Cibitoke Province in north-western Burundi, told IPS that he harvested fewer bunches of bananas in the latest season because of BBTD that spread through his farmlands.

“We have been forced to uproot infected plants since this disease reached our main production area. This resulted in a huge extra cost burden,” he said.

In another case, with the detection of BBTD, agricultural officials under instruction from researchers advised farmers to remove all infected ‘mats’ where several hectares of diseased plants had been destroyed. This is the key to eliminating the disease in Busoni, a remote rural village in Northern Burundi.

Although some farmers often resist uprooting their banana plants, Ntirampeba said it was vital to eliminating the disease.

“The disease is likely threatening livelihoods of most farmers who are dependent on the crop,” he told IPS.

Currently, other novel disease surveillance methods are also being developed by ABC researchers in Burundi, including drone-based surveillance to determine local disease risk and delimit recovery areas.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Credit: HarvestPlus

By Victor Ekeleme and Kalejaiye Olatundun
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 5 2022 (IPS)

In Nigeria, women play key roles in food and nutrition security through their contributions to agricultural production, their influence on how to allocate household income, and their efforts to ensure proper nutrition for all household members.

However, malnutrition remains widespread among rural women and children in Nigeria, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the current global food crisis.

To help meet this challenge and empower farming women to improve nutrition, the CGIAR’s HarvestPlus program is deepening its longstanding partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Agricultural Development Program (ADP)—specifically, through the ADP’s Women in Agriculture (WIA) Extension Program.

(CGIAR (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) is a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security. CGIAR research aims to reduce rural poverty, increase food security, improve human health and nutrition, and sustainable management of natural resources).

The WIA platform has proven to be a sustainable and effective mechanism for women to reach out to other women with agricultural information and technologies. Notably, the WIA approach helps break through religious and cultural barriers that may prevent some women from gaining access to life-improving knowledge and resources.

HarvestPlus is strengthening the knowledge and capacity of about 500 WIA women officers in several states on the promotion of healthy feeding practices, nutrition, and promotion of biofortified crops and foods.

The officers will then be able to include biofortification messages and trainings as part of their activities with women in the communities where they work, with the aim of motivating women farmers and their families to produce, process, distribute, and consume biofortified crops and foods.

WIA training in Imo state

At trainings in Imo state, located in South East Nigeria, 32 WIA officers were selected from different senatorial districts and local government areas to learn how to create awareness about biofortification, and how to process some newly developed biofortified crop-based foods, especially snacks, complimentary foods and traditional meals.

Elsie Emecheta leads the WIA Imo state chapter. She is an advocate for fostering the success and security of smallholder farmers. Within the last few years, she has helped strengthen collective influence to shape policy debates on issues that affect women and girls; she has also supported the national mission to end hunger and malnutrition by raising awareness through nutrition health talks and training.

She has highlighted deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, and other micro-nutrients, which are widely prevalent across the country and have led to the decline in the physical and mental development of children, and ill health among adults, especially women and lactating mothers. Emecheta also has campaigned to integrate gender issues in agricultural policies and programs.

Emecheta was pleased that the training was expanding her team’s knowledge of biofortified crop and food production and processing. “Hidden hunger is a big problem. In today’s Nigeria, it has been confirmed through research that malnutrition is the main cause of maternal and child illness. We are here to learn more about biofortification and how to develop finished products from these nutrient-enriched crops,” she said.

Emecheta added: “Following this [training], we will be involved in enlightening women in rural areas. We are hoping that the officers will be inspired to mainstream biofortified crops and foods in their messaging and training with women. We believe they will be well-equipped to implement this knowledge in their various zones and communities.”

WIA trainings attract diverse group

The training for WIA officers also drew women agri-preneurs and influencers, representatives of rural cooperatives, and from some NGOs engaged in gender and livelihood programs. Emecheta was happy the event has raised awareness about the critical role of women in agriculture and how direct support for female business owners will play a role in ensuring a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable food system in the South East of Nigeria.

“As part of the training, the women will be exposed to the technologies for producing products such as snacks, complementary foods, and traditional household meals from biofortified cassava, and maize. We have introduced them to processing the products for business and home consumption. We have about 32 women undergoing the training,” said Emecheta.

Emecheta and her group have developed a new-found entrepreneurial spirit, spurring women to invest in biofortified cassava and maize cultivation. She is very confident that the opportunities afforded by the HarvestPlus initiative in Imo state will help the participants establish themselves as positive influencers of other women, successful biofortified crop farmers, processors, and marketers.

Olatundun Kalejaiye, Nutrition and Post-Harvest Officer at HarvestPlus, was excited to be part of the efforts to ensure women can make better nutrition choices while also improving their income generation abilities as this will lead to inclusive economic growth for women in Imo state.

For her, building a food-secure future starts when one woman is empowered to know that she doesn’t need to be wealthy before her family can be well nourished. What women need is the right knowledge of nutrition and how to choose their foods, how to combine them and how to prepare them.

If one woman is nutrition smart, she can influence her daughters, daughters-in-law, nieces, grandchildren, and on and on, from generation to generation.

Said Kalejaiye: “We have women who have come for this training without an idea of what biofortification is all about. This is an opportunity to educate and sensitize them and create the needed awareness about the potential for women and children in the communities where they live.”

The HarvestPlus program of the CGIAR focuses on helping to realize the potential of agricultural development by delivering gender-equitable health and nutritional benefits to nutrition-vulnerable populations.

HarvestPlus currently works with Nigerian partners to promote vitamin A-biofortified cassava, maize, and orange sweet potato. By the end of 2021, 1.8 million smallholder farming families were growing vitamin A cassava and 1.6 million were growing vitamin A maize.

Women are priority participants in all aspect of HarvestPlus’ work.

Victor Ekeleme is a Corporate Communications Professional based in Lagos, Nigeria and Olatundun Kalejaiye is Agriculture4Nutrition Expert, Gender Promoter, Member – Nutrition Society UK

To learn more, visit the HarvestPlus website, or contact us.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Aug 4 2022 (IPS)

The largest ever settlement in Canadian legal history, 40 billion Canadian dollars, occurred in 2022, but it didn’t come from a court – it followed a decision by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In 2016 the Tribunal affirmed a complaint that the Government of Canada’s child welfare system discriminated against First Nations children. (First Nations are one of three groups of Indigenous people in Canada).

When I heard about that amount and subsequently how the government was negotiating the details of that settlement, I was astounded. Although I’ve had an interest in and reported regularly about human rights in the past three decades, my most intense experience has been here in Nepal, where for a couple of years I worked at the United Nations human rights office.

Nepal’s Human Rights Commission has a long history of having its recommendations virtually ignored by the government of the day. In fact, since 2000, only 12% of the NHRC’s 810 recommendations have been fully implemented. So when I compared the situation in Nepal to the tribunal’s decision and aftermath in Canada, my first question was ‘how’? How could the human rights situation in the two countries be so different that one government was compelled to pay out $40 billion for discrimination while another could virtually ignore recommendations?

First, I have to confess that my understanding of the human rights framework in Canada and Nepal was lacking. As today’s guest, Professor Anne Levesque from the University of Ottawa, explains, Canada, like Nepal, has a federal human rights commission (as well as commissions in its provinces). But Canada also has the tribunal, a quasi-judicial body that hears complaints and can issue orders. Nepal however, lacks a human rights body that has legal teeth.

But is that the whole story, or are there other reasons why the Government of Canada must – and does – pay up when it loses a human rights case while the Government of Nepal basically files away the NHRC’s recommendations for some later date? Nepal, by the way, is not a human rights pariah. It is serving its second consecutive term on the UN Human Rights Council and the NHRC has been given an ‘A’ rating by an independent organization for conforming to international standards.

 

Resources

As a lawyer who’s helped fight for the rights of First Nations children, here’s what you need to know about the $40 billion child welfare agreements – article by Anne Levesque

Ruling of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal

Public advocacy for the First Nations Child Welfare complaint

 

Pictured at her home in Harare, 91-year-old Idah Hanyani, better known as Gogo Chihara, a staunch opposition supporter in Zimbabwe, dons a yellow T-shirt adorned with the portrait of the country’s top opposition leader Nelson Chamisa whom she has vowed to back as she fights for political change in this Southern African nation. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS.

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 4 2022 (IPS)

Idah Hanyani, popularly known as Gogo Chihera, has backed the opposition since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980.

Born in Wedza, a district in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East province, the 91-year-old first supported United African National Council (UANC).

At home in Glenview, Harare’s high-density suburb, Hanyani told IPS she has featured at opposition rallies for years. During her interview, she was reclining on her brownish leather sofa donated to her by the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) president Nelson Chamisa.

She said she has never missed a single major opposition rally since she waded into opposition politics following this Southern African nation’s independence four decades ago.

“I’m not new to opposition politics. I supported the opposition UANC led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa before he (Muzorewa) handed me to Morgan Tsvangirai when the MDC was formed in 1999. Muzorewa announced that a new political party had been formed before he personally handed me to Tsvangirai to back his party at its formation, which I have supported until Tsvangirai died in 2018,” Hanyani told IPS.

A mother of four, three of whom have died, Hanyani said she has eleven grandchildren. The country’s economic crisis has not spared her family, so they cannot support her.

“This is why I have told them to register to vote in the coming 2023 elections, and most of them have heeded my advice,” said Hanyani.

Hanyani said only Olga, one of her grandchildren based in the United Kingdom, is supporting her.

Her husband died in 2004.

Hanyani said she has become popular all over the country, featuring at opposition CCC rallies, backing the opposition through thick and thin as one of the country’s senior citizens who have thirsted for political change in the face of Zimbabwe’s deteriorating economy.

On February 20 this year, she (Hanyani) was part of a sea of supporters that thronged Zimbabwe Grounds in Highfields poor income suburb where her party, CCC had a rally addressed by the party’s leader Nelson Chamisa ahead of the March 26 by-elections.

In March this year, Gogo Chihera was also featured at the CCC rally in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city.

“At every CCC rally I attend, I sit next to my son, the President, Chamisa and the chairperson of the party,” she said, balancing her chin on her hands that held her walking stick.

Hanyani said she knows she has become a sensation in the opposition CCC, even occupying the high table at every major opposition rally.

For her, the opposition rallies have become a great source of joy.

“At every CCC rally, I feel overjoyed, like I am being possessed like I am being filled by some strange supernatural powers. At rallies where I go, people scream when they see me walking and, at times, dancing with the support of my walking stick. People shout – Chihera, come on, Chihera, come!” she said.

Not spared by Zimbabwe’s worsening economic hardships, Hanyani said the opposition CCC president Chamisa had stepped in to directly supply her with food parcels every month.

Not only that, but her outstanding support for Chamisa has seen her receiving a gift of sofas from the youthful 44-year-old leader earlier this year.

“Chamisa buys me food every month. With just a phone call to him, Chamisa can send someone with food to me. Just last month, Chamisa bought me these leather sofas. He is a leader motivated by love. I love that boy; he is a great leader,” said Gogo Chihera.

Hanyani’s support for Zimbabwe’s youngest opposition leader has become undying.

“I love Chamisa’s leadership dear. He has love and mercy like Jesus. Come what may, I love Chamisa until I die. I don’t fear anything or anybody else. I support Chamisa with all my heart, with all my mind. I can even stand out now in the street or climb a tree and announce how much I support Chamisa without any fear,” she told IPS.

But even as she backs Chamisa and the opposition CCC, her mistrust for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which manages polls here, has shrivelled her hope for transparent elections.

“I personally don’t and can’t trust ZEC because Zanu-PF, at every election, sends its thugs to chase Chamisa’s election agents at polling stations in order to stuff ballot boxes with fake votes in favour of the ruling party,” she said.

In a country where political intolerance stands rather on the high side, Hanyani also said: “I don’t like Zanu-PF people”.

“I don’t like people who support Zanu-PF even in my eyes, my mind and my heart. They don’t dare come here because they back our suffering,” said Hanyani.

She said she does not fear being attacked owing to her political affiliation, claiming that “Zanu-PF supporters are afraid of me. They know I speak my mind freely without fear in their face.”

She said Zimbabwe’s First Lady Auxilia Mnangagwa embraced her three years ago when she visited her area.

“Auxilia Mnangagwa in 2019, when she came here leading some clean-up campaign, hugged me before she knew I was in the opposition. When she later knew I was an opposition supporter, she handed me her cap, a white one which I still have kept. I don’t know why she gave it to me. Whether or not that was a way of saying to me come to Zanu-PF, I don’t know,” said Hanyani.

Hanyani claimed that she has many friends who have secretly told her that they back Chamisa behind the scenes because they fear being terrorised by ruling party supporters.

“My friends come secretly telling me that they are with me in supporting Chamisa because they are afraid of violent Zanu-PF supporters. I am a bishop of change here in my area, and everybody here knows me. I know people want change now,” she said.

The aged Hanyani claimed that even some Zanu-PF supporters in her area were confiding in her about their secret support for Chamisa’s opposition CCC.

She said they (Zanu-PF supporters) claimed they only supported their party during the day and switched to the opposition CCC by night, fearing being brutalised.

During Zimbabwe’s Independence Day celebrations this year, Hanyani instead castigated the celebrations.

“I am pained by this year’s independence celebrations because many people, even with this independence, are suffering. I hate Mnangagwa. Mugabe was 100 percent better than him.”

Taking to the popular opposition slogan of the day, Hanyani said, “Mukomana ngaapinde hake” —- loosely translated to mean “let the young man enter”, referring to letting Chamisa take the reins of power.

Ecstatic about the impending Zimbabwe elections next year, Hanyani said: “If ever Chamisa is declared winner in 2023, even the birds of heaven will come down rejoicing, the angels of Jesus Christ.”

“I will be the happiest person alive then. Come elections next year,” she said.

Hanyani, at 85 after the 2018 elections, made news headlines when, with many other opposition activists, she stormed the Constitutional Court to tell President Mnangagwa’s lawyers that she wanted the vote “they had stolen” back.

This happened following the disputed 2018 presidential elections, which Mnangagwa won after a Constitutional Court ruling.

On the day of her IPS interview, Hanyani claimed she had only had tea and plain bread in the morning, claiming she was starving.

Nevertheless, as she parted ways with IPS, she broke into song and dance, praising Chamisa.

“Chamisa, Chamisa, why do you do that? Beware of enemies in the country; Chamisa; Chamisa; your enemies are plentiful in the country; do you see the enemies?” sang the elderly Hanyani.

Ironically, Chamisa has survived a litany of assassination attempts.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Antonio Guterres
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 4 2022 (IPS)

The war in Ukraine continues to have a devastating impact on the people of that country. Civilians are dying in the most tragic circumstances every day. Millions of lives have been destroyed or put on hold.

This war is senseless, and we must all do everything in our power to bring it to an end through a negotiated solution in line with the UN Charter and international law.

We are doing all we can to reduce suffering and save lives in Ukraine and the region, through our humanitarian operations. And Martin Griffiths will be able to soon brief you on those developments.

But the war is also having a huge and multi-dimensional impact far beyond Ukraine, through a threefold crisis of access to food, energy and finance.

Household budgets everywhere are feeling the pinch from high food, transport and energy prices, fueled by climate breakdown and war.

This threatens a starvation crisis for the poorest households, and severe cutbacks for those on average incomes.

Many developing countries are drowning in debt, without access to finance, and struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and could go over the brink.

We are already seeing the warning signs of a wave of economic, social and political upheaval that would leave no country untouched.

That is the reason why I set up the Global Crisis Response Group: to find coordinated global solutions to this triple crisis, recognizing its three elements – food, energy and finance – that are deeply interconnected.

The GCRG has presented detailed recommendations on food and finance. I believe we are making some progress, namely on food.

Today’s report looks at the energy crisis, with a wide array of recommendations.

Simply put, it aims to achieve the energy equivalent of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, by managing this energy crisis while safeguarding the Paris Agreement and our climate goals.

I would like to highlight four of the recommendations of the report.

First, it is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities and at a massive cost to the climate.

The combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to $100 billion.

I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times.

And I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet.

Second, all countries – and especially developed countries – must manage energy demand. Conserving energy, promoting public transport and nature-based solutions are essential components of that.

Third, we need to accelerate the transition to renewables, which in most cases are cheaper than fossil fuels.

Earlier this year, I outlined a 5-point plan to spark the renewables revolution.

Storage technologies including batteries should become public goods.

Governments must scale up and diversify supply chains for raw materials and renewable energy technologies.

They should eliminate red tape around the energy transition, and shift fossil fuel subsidies to support vulnerable households and boost renewable energy investments.

Governments must support the people, communities and sectors most affected, with social protection schemes and alternative jobs and livelihoods.

Fourth, private and multilateral finance for the green energy transition must be scaled up.

Renewable energy investments need to increase by factor of seven to meet the net zero goal, according to the International Energy Agency.

Multilateral development banks need to take more risks, help countries set up the right regulatory frameworks and modernize their power grids, and mobilize private finance at scale.

I urge shareholders in those banks to exercise their rights and make sure they are fit for purpose.

Today’s report expands on these ideas, and Rebeca Grynspan will elaborate on them in a moment.
 
Every country is part of this energy crisis, and all countries are paying attention to what others are doing. There is no place for hypocrisy.

Developing countries don’t lack reasons to invest in renewables. Many of them are living with the severe impacts of the climate crisis, including storms, wildfires, floods and droughts.

What they lack are concrete, workable options. Meanwhile, developed countries are urging them to invest in renewables, without providing enough social, technical or financial support.

And some of those same developed countries are introducing universal subsidies at gas stations, while others are reopening coal plants. It is difficult to justify such steps even on a temporary basis.
 
If they are pursued, such policies must be strictly time-bound and targeted, to ease the burden on the energy-poor and the most vulnerable, during the fastest possible transition to renewables.

Footnote: Launching the third brief of the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres thanked the GCRG Task Team, coordinated by Rebeca Grynspan, and the Energy Workstream, for making this report possible.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in his address to the UN press corps while launching the third brief by the Global Crisis Response Group on Energy.

Venezuelan migrant Manuela Molina (not her real name) was promised a decent job in Trinidad, but minutes after her arrival she was forced into a van and taken to a secret location. Credit: IOM Port of Spain

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Aug 3 2022 (IPS)

Human beings have proved to be capable of producing innumerable practical inventions while much too often making the worst use of them. Take the case, per example, of how criminal groups heavily rely on digital platforms to trap and enslave their victims also for extracting and selling their organs.

Yes, technology now dominates most of human activities and, surprisingly enough, it is now presented as the perfect life-saving solution for the smallest and poorest households worldwide. Simply, it has replaced the precious human knowledge, which has been acquired over thousands of years.

And technology is now utilised by the world’s biggest ‘warlords’ to bomb unarmed civilians with drones, also carrying nuclear heads.

Meanwhile, internet and digital platforms are used by criminal gangs to recruit, exploit and control the victims of their human trafficking lucrative business. Among other crimes, victims of trafficking are also targeted for “organ harvesting.”

No wonder then that the 2022 World Day Against Trafficking in Persons (30 July) has focused on the use and abuse of technology as a tool that can both enable and impede human trafficking.

 

What’s behind human trafficking?

“Conflicts, forced displacement, climate change, inequality and poverty, have left tens of millions of people around the world destitute, isolated and vulnerable,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres ahead of World Day.

The COVID-19 pandemic has separated children and young people in general from their friends and peers, pushing them into spending more time alone and online, said Guterres.

“Human traffickers are taking advantage of these vulnerabilities, using sophisticated technology to identify, track, control and exploit victims.”

 

Slave markets, also in refugee camps

Obviously, given the clandestinity of these inhuman operations–and the negligent complicity of official authorities–, the number of victims is practically impossible to calculate.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that the number of “detected” trafficked persons amounts to over 150,000. Other estimates talk about as many as one million.

More than 60% of known human trafficking victims over the last 15 years have been women and girls, most of them trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Meanwhile, the criminal gangs’ operations have been extended everywhere, even in refugee camps.

In the article: Slave Markets Open 24/7: Refugee Babies, Boys, Girls, Women, Men…, IPS reported that, in addition to slave selling and buying deals in public squares, as reported time ago in ‘liberated’ Libya, a widespread exploitation of men, women, and children has been carried out for years at refugee camps worldwide.

One of them is a Malawi refugee camp, where such inhumane practice has been reported by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Malawian Police Service.

“I even witnessed a kind of Sunday market, where people come to buy children who were then exploited in situations of forced labour and prostitution,” said UNODC’s Maxwell Matewere.

The camp is also being used as a hub for the processing of victims of human trafficking. Traffickers recruit victims in their home country under false pretences, arrange for them to cross the border into Malawi and enter the camp.

Many other refugee camps, as it is the case of the Za’atari camp in Jordan, where tens of thousands of Syrian refugees are located once they had to flee the 11-years long devastating war on their country, are also suspected of being stage for human trafficking. And the list goes on.

 

The Dark Web

Often using the so-called “dark web”, online platforms allow criminals to recruit people with false promises, informs the UN, adding that technology anonymously allows dangerous and degrading content that fuels human trafficking, including the sexual exploitation of children.

On this, the UNODC explains that as the world continues to transform digitally, internet technologies are increasingly being used for the facilitation of trafficking in persons.

With the rise of new technologies, some traffickers have adapted their modus operandi for cyberspace by integrating technology and taking advantage of digital platforms to advertise, recruit and exploit victims.

 

Recruited through social media

Everyday, digital platforms are used by traffickers to advertise deceptive job offers and to market exploitative services to potential paying customers, explains UNODC.

“Victims are recruited through social media, with traffickers taking advantage of publicly available personal information and the anonymity of online spaces to contact victims.”

Patterns of exploitation have been transformed by digital platforms, as webcams and live streams have created new forms of exploitation and reduced the need for transportation and transfer of victims.

 

Trafficking in armed conflicts

A group of UN-appointed independent human rights experts, known as Special Rapporteurs, has recently underscored that the international community must “strengthen prevention and accountability for trafficking in persons in conflict situations”.

Women and girls, particularly those who are displaced, are disproportionately affected by trafficking in persons for the purpose of sexual exploitation, forced and child marriage, forced labour and domestic servitude, they warned.

“These risks of exploitation, occurring in times of crisis, are not new. They are linked to and stem from existing, structural inequalities, often based on intersectional identities, gender-based discrimination and violence, racism, poverty and weaknesses in child protection systems,” the experts said.

 

Structural inequalities

According to the independent human rights experts, refugees, migrants, internally displaced and Stateless persons are particularly at risk of attacks and abductions that lead to trafficking.

And the dangers are increased by continued restrictions on protection and assistance, limited resettlement and family reunification, inadequate labour safeguards and restrictive migration policies.

“Such structural inequalities are exacerbated in the periods before, during and after conflicts, and disproportionately affect children”, they added.

 

Targeting schools

Despite links between armed group activities and human trafficking – particularly targeting children – accountability “remains low and prevention is weak,” the UN Special Rapporteurs underlined.

Child trafficking – with schools often targeted – is linked to the grave violations against children in situations of armed conflict, including recruitment and use, abductions and sexual violence, they said.

“Sexual violence against children persists, and often leads to trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy and forced marriage, as well as forced labour and domestic servitude”.

 

Organ harvesting

The independent human rights experts also highlighted that in conflict situations, organ harvesting trafficking is another concern, along with law enforcement’s inability to regulate and control armed groups and other traffickers’ finances – domestically and across borders.

“We have seen what can be achieved through coordinated action and a political will to prevent trafficking in conflict situations,” said the group of Special Rapporteurs, advocating for international protection, family reunification and expanded resettlement and planned relocation opportunities.

Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country’s situation. The positions are honorary, and the experts are not paid for their work.

 

Protection services ‘severely lacking’

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on 29 July warned that protection services for refugees and migrants making perilous journeys from the Sahel and Horn of Africa towards North Africa and Europe, including survivors of human trafficking, are “severely lacking”.

“Some victims are left to die in the desert, others suffer repeated sexual and gender-based violence, kidnappings for ransom, torture, and many forms of physical and psychological abuse.”

All the above is just another tragic evidence of how big is the ‘dark web’ of the world’s so-called decision-makers.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte (on screens) of the Philippines addresses the UN General Assembly’s 76th session last year. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Barry Mirkin
DAVAO CITY, Philippines, Aug 3 2022 (IPS)

With the national election and transfer of power in the Philippines from outgoing President Duterte to incoming President Marcos Jr. in July 2022, it seems an appropriate time to briefly take stock of the country’s current demographic situation, as well as recent related developments.

According to the biennial global estimates and projections of world population issued by the United Nations Population Division in 2022, the Philippines population climbed to 114 million by mid-2021.

A global milestone will be achieved in November 2022, when world population is expected to breach the 8 billion mark. Population projections foresee that by 2050, the rise in world population will be concentrated in eight countries, one of which is the Philippines.

The country’s total fertility continues its gradual decline, falling to 2.5 births per woman in 2021. Some staggering statistics for the Philippines reveal that from the years 2004 to 2020, 36 in every 1,000 Filipino girls aged 15 to 19 years had already given birth.

A UNFPA staff member walks to a damaged health centre in General Santos on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Credit: UNFPA Philippines

Furthermore, during that period, one-half of all births were unintended. In comparison, world fertility is estimated at 2.3 births per woman and 1.5 births per woman in South-East Asia, of which the Philippines is part.

Abortion remains illegal in the Philippines, despite the over one million illegal and unsafe procedures estimated to be carried out annually. Anyone undergoing or performing an abortion risks up to six years in prison. It is the only country in the world, other than the Vatican where abortion remains illegal under any grounds.

While the Philippines is a global outlier concerning its stance on abortion, it should be noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down Roe versus Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States and thus creating a firestorm of protests.

As a consequence, a number of state governments are seeking to severely restrict abortion access.

In one of the few recent legislative successes regarding population, the Philippine Parliament in 2021 raised the legal age of sexual consent from 12 years, the lowest in Asia to 16 years. Nevertheless, the law contains a “Romeo and Juliet exemption” to protect younger lovers.

Other Parliamentary developments have proven to be unsuccessful. For example, in a country wrought with conservative values and a powerful Church, divorce continues to be illegal, except for the minority Muslim population (eight per cent of the total population), despite a number of attempts over the years to legalize divorce.

Annulment, an option to divorce can take up to four years, may only be granted on narrow legal grounds and at great financial expense. A Civil Partnership Bill has recently been introduced in Parliament, as a means of affording some legal protections to gay couples in a country that forbids same-sex couples from marrying. The bill, however, faces stiff Parliamentary opposition.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there were a record number of repatriated overseas Filipinos (OFWs), some 792,000 in 2020, due to COVID-related lockdowns and restrictions.

Under this program administered by the Philippine government, Filpinos work abroad on fixed-term contracts, usually in the oil-exporting countries of the Arab Region and generally for periods of one to two years, but with the possibility of renewal.

On a more positive note, the Filipino diaspora, i.e., those living and working abroad in 2021, estimated at between 10 to 12 million, remitted US$ 37 billion to the Philippines, a 5 per cent increase from the previous year.

The Philippines benefitted directly from the job creation and wage gains in the United States, which accounted for almost 40 per cent of remittance receipts. Other major remittance sources were Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

The top four global remittance recipients are India, Mexico, China and the Philippines, The United States has been the major source of global remittance outflows, amounting to US$ 75 billion in 2021.

Despite the ravages of the global COVID pandemic, remittances have proven to be highly resilient, as well as a major contributor to Philippine economic growth. According to World Bank projections, despite the ravages and uncertainty of the Ukraine crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, remittance flows to low and middle-income countries are expected to grow by four per cent in 2022.

Always a source of nurses for other nations, the significant exodus of nurses from the Philippines, amid the coronavirus pandemic has climbed, as 25 per cent more Filipino nurses migrated to the United States during the first nine months of 2021 than during the same period in 2020.

Based on the recent increases in COVID cases in the United States, as well as in other parts of the world, the departure of Filipino nurses is likely to continue and grow.

Given the country’s current demographic trends and future population projections, combined with the various failed legislative initiatives, the Philippines is unlikely to experience major demographic changes, at least in the near term.

In other words, same old, same old.

Barry Mirkin is former chief of the Population Policy Section of the United Nations Population Division.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Young people take part in a pro-democracy demonstration in Myanmar. Credit: Unsplash/Pyae Sone Htun

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 3 2022 (IPS)

A spike in state-sanctioned executions worldwide – including in Iran, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and more recently Myanmar – has triggered strong condemnations from the United Nations and several civil rights and human rights organizations.

As Covid-19 restrictions that had previously delayed judicial processes were steadily lifted in many parts of the world, says Amnesty International (AI), judges last year handed down at least 2,052 death sentences in 56 countries—a close to 40% increase over 2020—with big spikes seen in several countries including Bangladesh (at least 181, from at least 113), India (144, from 77) and Pakistan (at least 129, from at least 49).

Other countries enforcing the death penalty, according to AI, include Egypt, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, Belarus, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), China, North Korea, Viet Nam and Yemen.

In military regimes, such as Myanmar, the armed forces play a triple role: judge, jury and hangman.

Dr Simon Adams, President of the Center for Victims of Torture, the world’s biggest organization that works with torture survivors and advocates for an end to torture worldwide, told IPS the recent execution of four pro-democracy activists by Myanmar’s military junta represents a sickening return to the “politics of the hangman’s noose”.

Arbitrary detention and torture have also been committed on an industrial scale, he said.

The military regime has detained over 14,000 people and sentenced more than 100 to death since the (February 2021) coup. While many governments around the world have condemned the recent hangings, it is going to take more than words to end atrocities in Myanmar, he pointed out.

“People are crying out for targeted sanctions on the Generals, for an arms embargo, and for Myanmar’s torturers and executioners to be held accountable under international law”, said Dr Adams, who also helped initiate the case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, where The Gambia is trying to hold Myanmar accountable for the genocide against the Rohingya.

The London-based Amnesty International (AI) said last May that 2021 “saw a worrying rise in executions and death sentences as some of the world’s most prolific executioners returned to business as usual and courts were unshackled from Covid-19 restrictions.”

Iran accounted for the biggest portion of this rise, executing at least 314 people (up from at least 246 in 2020), its highest execution total since 2017.

This was due in part to a marked increase in drug-related executions—a flagrant violation of international law which prohibits use of the death penalty for crimes other than those involving intentional killing, said AI.

Antony J. Blinken, US Secretary of State, said last week the United States condemns in the strongest terms the Burma military regime’s executions of pro-democracy activists and elected leaders Ko Jimmy, Phyo Zeya Thaw, Hla Myo Aung, and Aung Thura Zaw for the exercise of their fundamental freedoms.

“These reprehensible acts of violence further exemplify the regime’s complete disregard for human rights and the rule of law.’

Since the February 2021 coup, he pointed out, the regime has perpetuated violence against its own people, killing more than 2,100, displacing more than 700,000, and detaining thousands of innocent people, including members of civil society and journalists.

The regime’s sham trials and these executions are blatant attempts to extinguish democracy; these actions will never suppress the spirit of the brave people of Burma, (Myanmar), he added.

“The United States joins the people of Burma in their pursuit of freedom and democracy and calls on the regime to respect the democratic aspirations of the people who have shown they do not want to live one more day under the tyranny of military rule,” Blinken declared.

Condemning the execution of the four democracy activists by the military regime in Myanmar, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said last week: “I am dismayed that despite appeals from across the world, the military conducted these executions with no regard for human rights. This cruel and regressive step is an extension of the military’s ongoing repressive campaign against its own people.”

“These executions – the first in Myanmar in decades – are cruel violations of the rights to life, liberty and security of a person, and fair trial guarantees. For the military to widen its killing will only deepen its entanglement in the crisis it has itself created,” she warned.

The High Commissioner also called for the immediate release of all political prisoners and others arbitrarily detained, and urged the country to reinstate its de-facto moratorium on the use of the death penalty, as a step towards eventual abolition.

Meanwhile, in a statement released August 2, Liz Throssell, a Spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva said : “We deplore the hanging today of two men in Singapore and are deeply troubled by the planned execution of two others on 5 August.

The two, a Malaysian and a Singaporean, were hanged at Changi Prison this morning after they were convicted in May 2015 of drug trafficking and their appeals subsequently rejected.

Two other men, Abdul Rahim bin Shapiee and his co-accused Ong Seow Ping, are currently expected to be executed on Friday after Bin Shapiee’s family was notified of his fate on 29 July.

They were both convicted in 2018 of possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking and their sentences upheld on appeal. In the past, co-accused persons have almost always been executed on the same day.

“We urge the Singapore authorities to halt all scheduled executions, including those of Abdul Rahim bin Shapiee and Ong Seow Ping. We also call on the Government of Singapore to end the use of mandatory death sentences for drug offences, commute all death sentences to a sentence of imprisonment and immediately put in place a moratorium on all executions, with a view to abolishing the death penalty”, the statement said.

“The death penalty is inconsistent with the right to life and the right to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and there is growing consensus for its universal abolition. More than 170 States have so far abolished or introduced a moratorium on the death penalty either in law or in practice,” she noted.

Agnes Callamard, AI Secretary-General, said that “China, North Korea and Viet Nam continued to shroud their use of the death penalty behind layers of secrecy, but, as ever, the little we saw is cause for great alarm.”
⁠
The known number of women executed also rose from nine to 14, while the Iranian authorities continued their abhorrent assault on children’s rights by executing three people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime, contrary to their obligations under international law.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia more than doubled its number of executions, a grim trend that continued in 2022 with the execution of 81 people in a single day in March, according to AI

As well as the rise in executions seen in Saudi Arabia (65, from 27 in 2020), significant increases on 2020 were seen in Somalia (at least 21, from at least 11) South Sudan (at least 9, from at least 2) and Yemen (at least 14, from at least 5). Belarus (at least 1), Japan (3) and UAE (at least 1) also carried out executions, having not done so in 2020.

Significant increases in death sentences compared to 2020 were recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (at least 81, from at least 20), Egypt (at least 356, from at least 264), Iraq (at least 91, from at least 27), Myanmar (at least 86, from at least 1), Viet Nam (at least 119 from at least 54), and Yemen (at least 298, from at least 269), AI said.

In several countries in 2021, AI said, the death penalty was deployed as an instrument of state repression against minorities and protestors, with governments showing an utter disregard for safeguards and restrictions on the death penalty established under international human rights law and standards.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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