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The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, speaks with internally displaced people in North East Nigeria. January 2022. Credit: UNOCHA/Christina Powell

By Matthias Schmale
ABUJA, Nigeria, Jul 28 2022 (IPS)

Today in north-east Nigeria, millions of people are facing the painful consequences of a deteriorating food security and nutrition crisis. Food insecurity means not knowing when or where your next meal will come from.

It means, in essence, not being able to meet the basic needs for yourself or your family. As a result, countless families are forced to make alarming sacrifices to survive. Many, particularly children, are at risk of not making it through the lean season.

According to the latest food security assessments, 4.1 million people in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States – three of the states in north-eastern Nigeria, are at risk of severe food insecurity in this lean season. People’s resilience and coping mechanisms have been devastated by more than a decade of conflict.

As food insecurity worsens, so does the risk of malnutrition. In 2022, 1.74 million children under five are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition across the north-east. Mothers who have lost their children to malnutrition can testify to the danger it poses and the sorrow and despair it brings.

While visiting a nutrition stabilization center in the north-east I saw the haunting sight of a child on the brink of death, and it is a memory that continues to leave me troubled.

The food security situation is impacted by many factors, such as insecurity due to ongoing conflict, rising food prices and climate change. This is taking place in a region where people are already facing extreme vulnerabilities.

North-east Nigeria has struggled through 12 years of conflict and instability due to the violence of non-State armed groups like Boko Haram. This year, 8.4 million people need humanitarian assistance, of which about 80 per cent are women and children.

The violence has displaced more than 2.2 million people from their homes. Livelihoods, health services, education and other essential areas have been devastated, depriving millions of people of critical support and the capacity to provide for themselves and their families.

People displaced by violence have few options. Many fled to garrison towns for safety, where going beyond the towns’ protective ditches to practice agriculture or collect firewood puts their lives at risk.

Many vulnerable people have little choice but to resort to negative coping mechanisms to obtain food, such as survival sex, child marriages, begging, child labor or recruitment into armed groups.

Hauwa, a mother in Rann, Borno State, has no access to food and must beg on the street to feed herself and her two children. But it is not nearly enough, and hunger has turned her body into something she no longer recognizes. She says, “This is not my body.” Her story is just one of countless stories of suffering that we hear every day.

The humanitarian community is gravely concerned about the millions of people facing the risk of hunger this lean season and the sacrifices they will make to survive. Every effort must be made to ensure that life-saving programmes continue to deliver food security assistance and respond to acute malnutrition.

Humanitarian and government actors are ready to scale up interventions, but funding is urgently needed.

As part of the USD$1.1 billion required for the 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan for Nigeria, a $351 million multisector response has been developed to save lives and protect the most vulnerable.

Funds are immediately needed, and every contribution can make a difference. You can help get life-saving assistance to the people of north-east Nigeria by donating at: https://crisisrelief.un.org/nigeria-crisis. We need your support now, tomorrow may be too late for Hauwa and countless others.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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View of a demonstration by social organizations in a Buenos Aires square in July. The scene occurs almost every day in the capital of Argentina, a country where poverty has held steady at around 40 percent of the population since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The possibility of a social uprising is one of the fears in the face of the deepening socioeconomic crisis. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

Darío is a locksmith in Flores, a traditional middle-class neighborhood in the Argentine capital, who will have to stop working in the next few days. “Suppliers have suspended the delivery of locks, due to a lack of merchandise or because of prices,” he laments. His case is an illustration of an economy gone mad in a country that once again finds itself on the brink of the abyss.

The problems that have been dragging on in this South American country, where the vast majority of the population has become poorer over the last four years and social unrest is on the rise, exploded this month with an exchange and financial crisis that created enormous uncertainty about what lies ahead.

The Central Bank ran out of dollars, and imports, which in large part are a source of inputs for domestic production, were restricted to the maximum. The result is fear, speculation, increased social unrest and out-of-control inflation, which is causing price references to be lost and some companies and businesses are hedging their bets with preventive increases, or they even decide not to sell.

Today, in the streets and in the media, the questions raised are whether the country is on the eve of a social outbreak and whether President Alberto Fernández, so politically isolated that he is questioned by his own government coalition, will reach the end of his term in December 2023.

At that time, Argentina will be celebrating 40 years of democracy, marked by a succession of economic crises that have left an aftermath of growing inequality and have caused distrust to spread easily in society at the first signs that things are not going well.

The crisis deepened at the beginning of the month, when the Jul. 2 resignation of then Economy Minister Martín Guzmán triggered a 50 percent drop in the parallel exchange rate — known locally as the dollar blue — the only one that can be freely acquired in a country with exchange controls, and this, in turn, further fuelled inflation, which in 2021 stood at 50 percent and this year is already expected to end above 90 percent.

“There has been a series of imbalances in Argentina’s macroeconomy for years, which means that today the government does not have the tools to deal with exchange rate and financial pressures,” Sergio Chouza, an economist who teaches at the public University of Buenos Aires (UBA), told IPS.

“In this country the value of the dollar dominates expectations about prices and as a result it is increasingly difficult to avoid a ‘spiral’ of inflation. At the same time, government bonds have collapsed and are already yielding less than those of Ukraine,” he adds.

Chouza says that the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the major contributing factors in triggering a situation that seems to have gotten out of control.

“There was an expansion of public spending, as in most of the world. But the problem is that while most countries financed it with credit, Argentina could not do so because it was already over-indebted,” the expert explains.

Homeless people who survive by picking through garbage in Buenos Aires sleep on the corner of a central street in Argentina’s capital. In 2021 the country experienced an economic recovery after the first year of the pandemic, but a rise in inflation in 2022 has aggravated the crisis once again. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Social protests

The square in front of the Palacio de Tribunales, in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, is overflowing with people. The youngest protesters hold banners from social movements from poor outlying neighborhoods, but there are also entire families with small children in their arms. Traffic in the surrounding area is completely cut off as the columns of marchers continue to pour in.

It is a Thursday in July, but this is an image that can be seen practically every day in the Argentine capital, where the most vulnerable social sectors are staging a series of protests because, in the midst of the crisis, the government has suspended the expansion of the Potenciar Trabajo program.

This is the name of the National Program for Socio-productive Inclusion and Local Development, which offers a stipend from the government in exchange for four hours of work in social enterprises, such as soup kitchens or urban waste recyclers’ cooperatives.

“In our neighborhoods things have been very hard for many years, but now it’s getting worse because we can no longer afford to put food on the table,” Fernando, who preferred not to give his last name, told IPS. He is a young man from Laferrere, one of the poorest localities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, who was a waiter in a bar before becoming unemployed in 2021. Today he does occasional construction work.

Santiago Poy, a researcher at the Observatory of Social Debt at the private Argentine Catholic University (UCA) tells IPS that, with the combination of currency devaluation and inflation since 2018, wages have lost around 20 percent of their purchasing power.

“Poverty stood at around 25 percent in 2017, climbed to 40 percent in 2019 and remained steady after that. Today there is a feeling of widespread impoverishment, despite the fact that the unemployment rate is only seven percent, because 28 percent of workers are poor,” says Poy, describing the situation in this Southern Cone country of 47.3 million people.

After the height of the pandemic in 2020, social indicators improved in 2021 but are worsening again this year and the vast social assistance network does not seem to be sufficient to curb the decline.

“Social aid is not going to solve things in Argentina, because the macroeconomy is a permanent factory of poverty,” says Poy.

One of the operations carried out last weekend by Economy Ministry personnel in supermarkets in Buenos Aires, in order to control price hikes on basic products and “dismantle speculative maneuvers,” as reported. CREDIT: Economy Ministry

The price race

“I am ashamed to set some prices at which I have to sell such basic things as bread, flour or sugar,” Fernando Savore, president of the Federation of Grocery Stores of the province of Buenos Aires, which groups 26,000 businesses in the country’s most populous region, tells IPS.

Savore says that since the beginning of the year the price hikes by suppliers have been constant, but that they skyrocketed in the first week of July, after the economy minister resigned.

“We have seen increases of more than 10 percent in food and more than 20 percent in cleaning products. I don’t think they are justified, but every time the dollar goes up, prices go up,” says Savore, who adds that grocers are hesitant to sell some products because of uncertainty about the costs of restocking them.

And in a context of overall jitters, the government unofficially leaks rumors about economic measures, which do not then materialize but fuel the sense of uncertainty.

President Fernández said that the lack of dollars would be solved if agricultural producers sold a good part of their soybean harvest, which they are currently withholding, worth 20 billion dollars.

They are obliged to export at the official exchange rate, whose gap with the parallel dollar has reached a record level of more than 150 percent, and they are apparently waiting for a devaluation.

On Jul. 25, the new economy minister, Silvina Batakis, met in Washington with the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, to assure her that this country will comply with the agreement signed with the multilateral lender this year, which includes goals to reduce the fiscal deficit and increase the Central Bank’s reserves.

But in Argentina, few people dare to predict where the crisis is heading, and how quickly it will evolve.

The confluence of the waters with the distinct colors of the pollution of each one: darker waters reflect the urban sewage of the Arrudas River, while brown reflects erosion coming from the upper Velhas River, a natural effect or product of mining visible in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

Torrential water in the streets and none coming out of the taps are two disasters that plague Brazil’s metropolises, especially those located along the upper stretches of rivers, such as Belo Horizonte, capital of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

Floods have become routine, fuelled by the hilly topography, paved-over streams and land-surface impermeabilization in this city of 2.5 million people.

In January and February, as happens every year, torrential rains flooded the roads and swept away cars, furniture, sometimes people, and flooded houses on the valley bottoms, where the streams used to flow freely but are now buried and running in culverts under streets and avenues.

The drinking water supply has remained steady overall, but in 2015 and 2021 the city was on the verge of water rationing due to droughts that began in the previous year. However, some neighborhoods have complained about dry water taps.

About 70 percent of the water consumed in Belo Horizonte comes from the Velhas River basin, whose headwaters are some 100 kilometers south of the city. The supply depends on rainfall upstream and there are no reservoirs to accumulate water.

That is why caring for the headwaters of the rivers and streams, located in the surroundings of Ouro Preto, a historical city that was at the center of Brazil’s 18th century gold rush, and of neighboring Itabirito, is vital for Belo Horizonte.

These cities are still involved in mining, although the industry there is now dominated by iron ore. They are part of the so-called Iron Quadrangle, made up of 25 municipalities that account for the production of almost half of Brazil’s iron ore.

Iron ore mining, in addition to consuming abundant water and polluting rivers, poses a threat of major environmental and human disasters. Two tailings dams collapsed in the Quadrangle, in Mariana in 2015 and in Brumadinho in 2019, killing 19 and 270 people, respectively.

In Brumadinho, the toxic mudflow reached the Paraopeba River, which supplied 15 percent of the inhabitants of Belo Horizonte. Fortunately, three reservoirs on tributaries of the Paraopeba that were not affected are the source of water for most of the metropolitan region, comprising 34 municipalities with a total combined population of six million.

Frederico Leite, Itabirito’s environmental secretary, and his deputy Julio Carvalho, a forestry engineer, in addition to negotiating environmental measures with the mining companies, have been working on cleaning up the Itabirito River, which crosses the city, and on creating a number of small catchments disseminated around the countryside aimed at reducing erosion and retaining water in the soil.

These micro-catchments are “barraginhas” or wide pits dug on gently sloping land to slow down the runoff of rainwater that causes erosion, and “caixas secas,” smaller but deeper pits dug next to roads to collect runoff that damages roadways and clogs up streams with sediment.

Sedimentation is a major problem in the Velhas River, reducing the depth of the river and the quality of its earth-colored waters.

In Ouro Preto, Ronald Guerra, a former secretary of the environment who is an activist in the basin committees, proposes the construction of a succession of small dams to retain water and revitalize forests.

In Belo Horizonte, the battle is against floodwaters and sewage that pollute the watercourses.

“The goal is to once again be able to swim, fish and play in the Onça River by 2025,” like people did 70 years ago, dreams Itamar de Paula Santos, a community leader in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood, one of the most affected by the river’s floods, since it is located on its lowest stretch.

The construction of riverside linear parks and the resettling of residents in nearby areas safe from floods are among the actions that united the city government and community leaders such as Santos and, in other neighborhoods, Maria José Zeferino and Paulo de Freitas. In addition to the environmental benefits, the parks are recreational areas and allow people healthy access to the river.

Apolo Heringer, a physician and university professor, has been fighting since the 1990s to “renaturalize” the Velhas River basin. To this end, he created the Manuelzão Project, a university project inspired by a well-known local literary character.

Its strategy is to concentrate efforts on a 30-kilometer stretch of the Arrudas and Onça streams, which cross Belo Horizonte, and the Velhas River between the mouths of the two streams.

Eighty percent of the urban pollution in the basin is concentrated there and eliminating it would allow “bringing back the fish and swimming” in the 800 kilometers of its waters.

When hurricanes Opal and Roxanne both hit the Mexican state of Yucatán in a ten-day period in 1995, they destroyed much of the mangrove forest in the small coastal community of San Crisanto. The local people responded by replanting mangroves and clearing channels among the trees to allow water to flow freely. They committed to […]

Activists have asked for gender sensitizing of the police, rather than the so-called Romeo squad. Source: Twitter

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

Romeo is a bad word in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest province with nearly 25 million people.

While the name symbolises love, various shows of affection and love between women and men can be seen as a criminal offence in UP. For their safety, women are advised not to be seen cosying up with their lovers, especially in public places – because the state police department’s anti-Romeo squads could arrest them.

“The Indian Penal Code (IPC) has sufficient sections to arrest and prosecute men harassing women. The anti-Romeo squad has become a tool to harass and embarrass young men and women. It has no place in a civilised democracy,” Bobby Naqvi, senior journalist and former editor of Gulf News, told the IPS. “Disturbing images of these squads harassing youngsters spoil India’s reputation as the largest democracy and a nation where almost 230 million people fall between the age group of 15 years and 24 years.”

Soon after the government was installed in office on March 25, an order was passed reviving the anti-Romeo squads. The squads were first launched in 2017 to safeguard women in public places.

Advocates of women’s rights, including activists Aruna Roy, Kavita Srivastava, Kalyani Menon Sen and lawyers Indira Jaising and Vrinda Grover, had released a joint statement in 2017 demanding that anti-Romeo squads in UP be disbanded immediately and replaced by long-term legal and institutional measures to ensure women’s safety. However, the unpopular squad is now back in action.

Renu Mishra, executive director of the Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI), a Lucknow-based non-profit organisation, sees the anti-Romeo squad as another way to keep women in check.

Women activists say that gender-sensitising of the police, an increase in the number of policewomen, an enabling environment for women to file FIRs, and more frequent convictions are needed.

They argue that the anti-Romeo squads are a physical manifestation of patriarchy that views women as helpless creatures to be protected rather than empowered.

According to Namita Bhandare, a writer on social and gender issues, there is no need for a squad.

In their previous incarnation, stories abounded of the excesses of the squad. Several young men accused of allegedly harassing girls were forced to shave their heads. A female police officer asked a young man to do sit-ups for being in the company of a female friend. A video of the same incident went viral and led to anger against similar excesses.

While crimes against women are high in Uttar Pradesh, activists fear squads like the so-called Romeo Squad will not resolve the issues. Source: Twitter

The Romeo hunters were disbanded, but now that the same government has returned to office for another five years and they are back. In the eyes of the ruling party, the name Romeo conjures up images of an ‘Eve’ teaser, a female harasser and a stalker. The anti-Romeo squads are expected to perform the role of gallant knights who help women safeguard their purity and honour. The UP Police says that they are trying to book as many roadside Romeos as possible to put an end to the harassment of women.

The squads are viewed with fear by many in the community, and when IPS tried to talk to former victims of the anti-Romeo squads, they declined for fear of retaliation.

Despite the squad’s return, there is no indication that crimes against women have decreased. In statistics released earlier year by the National Commission for Women (NCW) more than 31,000 crimes against women were reported, and over half were from Uttar Pradesh.

The anti-Romeo squad seems helpless before politically powerful men who claim to be religious and dress in flowing saffron robes but threaten to rape women.

In April, a video emerged on social media showing a clean-shaven man in saffron robes speaking on a megaphone from inside an automobile. He threatened to kidnap and rape Muslim women.

The speaker was identified as Mahant Bajrang Muni Das of the Maharishi Sri Laxman Das Udasin Ashram in the Khairabad area of Sitapur, some 80 km from Lucknow.

“I am saying this with love for you that I will publicly drag your daughters-in-law and daughters out of your homes and rape them if any Hindu girl is molested in Khairabad. Muslims will be killed if any Hindu is killed here.”

NCW chairperson Rekha Sharma wrote to the state police chief to register an FIR and arrest the accused. Opposition party spokesperson of the Congress party Supriya Shrinate said that Bajrang Muni is an insult to the Hindu religion and his rape threat mocks law and order in UP.

Shrinate told the Chief Minister that he should act against anyone threatening to rape women.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Supporters of a Pakistani political party gather to welcome the party leader for a corner meeting at a village in the Punjab province.

By Nadeem Qureshi
KARACHI, Pakistan, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

In recent days, as Pakistan’s economic woes have intensified, a veritable cottage industry has developed to suggest ways of putting the country back on track.

The latest entrant in this field is the eminent Harvard Economics professor Asim Khwaja. In a long and widely circulated tweet he outlines his analysis of the problem. He argues that the way out is to work to increase productivity. He is not wrong. Indeed, increased productivity is a useful and necessary objective.

The problem however, is that Dr.Khawja and all the other illustrious academics who have contributed to the debate of what has to be done, are missing the point. There is really no dispute about what has to be done. It has been clear for some time.

I outlined the main elements some three years ago in a piece for Daily Times: “Slash imports, boost exports, invest in vital infrastructure, rejuvenate local industry by sharply raising tariff barriers, work on aligning the education system with the job market, the list goes on and on.” This prescription is just as valid, possibly more so, today than it was three years ago.

The point that the academics are missing is not “what has to be done” rather it is “who will do it”. In normal countries, the responsibility would fall on the elected representative of those countries. But in our case, the people who sit in our assemblies simply do not have the ability or desire to do what is necessary.

Sadly, our problem is that whenever there are elections, we succeed brilliantly in putting the worst of our people in parliament. This is the exact opposite of what successful democracies do, or at least endeavour to do, which is to send the best of their people to parliament. And this is why they are successful.

So, why do we in Pakistan get this so wrong? Genuine democracy is conditioned on two important precepts. One, that voters understand the issues. And two, that they are free to vote for the candidates of their choosing. Neither condition obtains in Pakistan.

Feudal control of the levers of power has ensured widespread illiteracy. And vast swathes of the population are obliged to vote the way they are told to vote by their feudal lords. So, voters do not understand the issues and they cannot vote the way they want to.

What we have is not democracy. It is feudalism camouflaged as democracy. This is why the same people or their ilk – the feudal lords and their families – always get elected. And by and large they tend to be corrupt and incompetent. They get elected to parliament to plunder the state not to build it.

And until such time as we replace these “representatives” arguably the worst of our people, with the best nothing, in terms of our economic reality will change. We will continue to decline rather than progress.

So, the challenge for all the well-meaning people, academics and others, is to shift their focus from what needs to be done to the central issue of how do we get genuine democracy in the country.

In previous articles I have suggested a possible solution: Limit the vote to those who have had at least 10 years of schooling. People who are educated have minds of their own. They understand the issues. And they are usually, in my experience, not slave to the feudals.

This is a simple change. It will lead to genuine democracy. And, if enacted, it will change our destiny by truly empowering people and opening the doors of parliament to those who have the competence, energy, desire and will to build the country.

Nadeem Qureshi is founding chairman of the political party Mustaqbil Pakistan and has had a long career in business, mainly in the Middle East. He studied engineering at MIT, and business at Harvard Business School, is fluent in classical Arabic and has published a translation from Arabic to English of a book entitled: Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Coastal view from the Kalinago Territory in Dominica. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 26 2022 (IPS)

The highest deforestation rates since 2009. The third most active hurricane season on record. Extreme rainfall, floods, and landslides displaced tens of thousands of people. Rising sea levels. Glaciers in Peru lost more than half their size. Add the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to the mix, and 2021 was a challenging year for Latin America and the Caribbean.

That’s according to the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean 2021 report, published on July 22. It is the United Nations weather agency’s second annual report.

It states that “sea levels in the region continued to rise in 2021 at a faster rate than globally, notably along the Atlantic coast of South America south of the equator, and the subtropical North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico,” a worrying development for the small island states of the Caribbean and large populations concentrated in coastal communities.

The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season brought 21 named storms that included seven hurricanes and was the sixth consecutive above-average season.

It adds that extreme rainfall led to tens of thousands of homes being destroyed or damaged and hundreds of thousands of people displaced

The record-setting drought in Chile continued in 2021, marking the 13th consecutive year of the “Central Chile Mega-drought,” which placed the country at the center of the region’s water crisis.

“Increasing sea-level rise and ocean warming are expected to continue to affect coastal livelihoods, tourism, health, food, energy, and water security, particularly in small islands and Central American countries,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

Head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) Mami Mizutori said as the second most disaster-prone region in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean are proof of how complex risks can be, adding that shocks that affect one sector can create damaging consequences in another, impacting the most at-risk communities.

“The COVID-19 pandemic offers a quintessential example of how interconnected risks can create severe upheaval, particularly when intersecting with climate change impacts. Last year, the fallout from hurricanes Eta and Iota collided with lingering COVID-19 impacts. The result was that 7.7 million people in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua faced high levels of food insecurity,” she said.

While the report outlines the dire impacts of extreme weather and climate change on the region, it is also prescriptive in its calls for long-term regional and national solutions.

One of these is a ‘risk to resilience’ goal.

The UNDRR head says the Bali Agenda for Resilience is a critical instrument in understanding the nature of risks and promoting mitigation and adaptation measures. The document promotes policies to shield communities from climate and other disasters and thwart a predicted global rate of 1.5 disasters a day by 2030.

“First and foremost is the need for risk management to become a shared responsibility across sectors. Getting on track to achieve the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals requires decision makers to adopt comprehensive climate and disaster risk management that puts people first, using current data and timely information.”

The report also recommends the expansion of access to multi-hazard early warning systems (EWS). Investment in these systems has been touted as one of the most powerful tools to adapt to climate change, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has challenged the WMO to present an action plan that ensures all people everywhere are covered by an early warning system in the next 5 years. The WMO is expected to present that plan to the 2022 UN Climate Conference in Egypt in November.

“Altogether, there is a need for a 1.5 billion US dollar investment in the next 5 years to get 100 percent coverage of early warning services and improve basic observing systems. We have major gaps in island states, Africa, and some parts of Latin America, and that needs to be improved,” the WMO Secretary-General said.

The report’s launch coincides with the impending peak of the annual Atlantic hurricane season. According to officials of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC), there is no question that countries in the region, particularly the small states of the Caribbean and Central America, remain highly vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate

“2021 was yet another very active season. Many countries experienced major flooding and landslides that were compounded by a volcanic eruption in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, causing major dislocation, damage, and loss, and there was heavy rainfall and floods across Guyana, Suriname, and regions of Central America, affecting housing, fresh water sources and increasing food insecurity,” said ECLAC’s Subregional Office Chief Diane Quarless.

Quarless added that for small states in the region, the post-disaster need to continually source or reassign already scarce resources has eroded the ability of countries to build back better. ECLAC is supporting the call to strengthen and expand early warning systems to improve forecasting and planning for multi-hazards.

The State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean report provides science-based, timely information for policymakers on the realities of climate change and weather-related events and the best course of action.

The representatives of the UN agencies involved in sourcing and compiling the report says that the region has the needed data. It is now time to act.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

According to the 2021 World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean report, extreme events have worsened the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Region, especially for the small island states of the Caribbean.

Greenpeace activists submitting a petition by Congolese and international NGOs to the DRC presidency. Credit: Greenpeace - Raphael Mavmbu

By Irène Wabiwa Betoko
KINSHASA, Jul 26 2022 (IPS)

From the fall-out of the pandemic to the interlocking cost of living and energy security crises currently gripping the world, it has been fascinating to see the world’s richest governments bending over backwards to help fossil fuel companies.

Meanwhile households are battling a cost of living crisis while the climate crisis is raging on, threatening lives and livelihoods everywhere – from north to south.

After oil demand and prices briefly fell during the lockdowns of 2020, we’re seeing Big Oil enjoying unprecedented war-time profits, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drives up prices. Recall BP’s boss Bernard Looney crassly comparing his company to a “cash machine”.

This latest boon for fossil fuel companies makes the pledges from last year’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow seem like a distant memory. Indeed, a £420m ($500m) deal for the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] has become increasingly useless in protecting its forests, with oil companies set to cash in and eventually paved the way for more forest destruction.

The DRC, home to most territory of the world’s second largest rainforest, prides itself in being a “solution country” for the climate crisis. However, the country, which already sees deforestation rates second only to Brazil, has already stated last year its intention to lift a 20 year ban on new logging concessions.

As of April this year, the DRC is set on trashing huge areas of the rainforest and peatland and – as of this week – it’s set to auction no less than 27 oil and three gas blocks.

Oil exploration and extraction would not only have devastating impacts on the health and livelihoods of local communities, but the oil driven “resource curse” raises the risk of corruption and conflict.

This auction also is sacrificing at least four parts of a mega-peatland complex, often labelled a carbon bomb, along with at least nine Protected Areas (contrary to denials by the Congolese Oil Ministry).

Following the enlargement of the auction this week, it also poses a direct threat (https://www.ft.com/content/5ea6f899-bb55-478f-a14a-a6dd37aae724) to the Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site made famous thanks to a Netflix documentary on a previous campaign to keep the oil industry out of it.

Instead of steering us into a climate catastrophe,the international community must stop serving as the handmaiden of Big Oil. Instead, let’s see them focus on ending energy poverty by supporting clean, decentralised renewable energies. Whether it’s the cost of living crisis unfolding on our doorsteps or climate destruction sweeping the globe – the solutions are the same.

Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi must abandon the colonial notion of development through extractivism and look at its legacy in Africa, which has only deepened poverty and hardship for Africans. It has only served to enrich a small and closed circle of local beneficiaries and foreign nations.

It is telling that Africa’s largest oil producer, Nigeria, is also the one with the highest number of people suffering extreme poverty (just behind India) and with the highest number of people without access to electricity. Instead of following an economic model that hurts both people and nature, the DRC should resist pressures from greedy multinationals and prioritise connecting 72 million of its people to the grid.

You can bet Big Oil is salivating at the chance to seize yet more profits from climate destruction. Yet shamefully, none of the eight members who are part of the Central African Forest Initiative that is paying £420m of taxpayers’ money to protect DRC’s forests – the UK, the EU, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea – have uttered one word against this prospective oil auction.

That’s not surprising, given the “forest protection” deal does nothing to prevent oil activity in peatlands or anywhere else.

As Boris Johnson approaches his final weeks in office, his own environmental legacy and that of the COP26 risk being all targets, no action. Speeches are made and press releases are disseminated, while the rights of vulnerable people everywhere are being run over by short-sighted extractive industries.

Instead, I would like to see donor countries like the UK government, as host of the COP26 and one of the chief architects behind the DRC forest protection deal, to work with my country to move beyond the model of destructive extractivism and leapfrog towards a future of renewable and clean energy for all.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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The writer is the International Project Leader for the Congo Basin Forest, Greenpeace Africa

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 26 2022 (IPS)

Like so many others, Africans have long been misled. Alleged progress under imperialism has long been used to legitimize exploitation. Meanwhile, Western colonial powers have been replaced by neo-colonial governments and international institutions serving their interests.

‘Shithole’ pots of gold
US President Donald Trump’s “shitholes”, mainly in Africa, were and often still are ‘pots of gold’ for Western interests. From 1445 to 1870, Africa was the major source of slave labour, especially for Europe’s ‘New World’ in the Americas.

Anis Chowdhury

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa noted “colonised Africans, like pre-colonial African chattel slaves, were pushed around into positions which suited European interests and which were damaging to the African continent and its peoples.”

The ‘scramble for Africa’ from the late nineteenth century saw European powers racing to secure raw materials monopolies through direct colonialism. Western powers all greatly benefited from Africa’s plunder and ruin.

European divide-and-conquer tactics typically also had pliant African collaborators. Colonial powers imposed taxes and forced labour to build infrastructure to enable raw material extraction.

Racist ideologies legitimized European imperialism in Africa as a “civilizing mission”. Oxford-trained, former Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson – an unabashed apologist for Western imperialism – insists colonialism laid the foundations for modern progress.

Richest, but poorest and hungriest!
A recent blog asks, “Why is the continent with 60% of the world’s arable land unable to feed itself? … And how did Africa go from a relatively self-sufficient food producer in the 1970s to an overly dependent food importer by 2022?”

Deeper analyses of such uncomfortable African realities seem to be ignored by analysts influenced by the global North, especially the Washington-based international financial institutions. UNCTAD’s 2022 Africa report is the latest to disappoint.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

It does not guide African governments on how to actually implement its long list of recommendations given their limited policy space, resources and capabilities. Worse, their proposals seem indistinguishable from an Africa-oriented version of the discredited neoliberal Washington Consensus.

With 30% of the world’s mineral resources and the most precious metal reserves on Earth, Africa has the richest concentration of natural resources – oil, copper, diamonds, bauxite, lithium, gold, tropical hardwood forests and fruits.

Yet, Africa remains the poorest continent, with the average per capita output of most countries worth less than $1,500 annually! Of 46 least developed countries, 33 are in Africa – more than half the continent’s 54 nations.

Africa remains the world’s least industrialized region, with only South Africa categorized as industrialized. Incredibly, Africa’s share of global manufacturing fell from about 3% in 1970 to less than 2% in 2013.

About 60% of the world’s arable land is in Africa. A net food exporter until the 1970s, the continent has become a net importer. Structural adjustment reform conditionalities – requiring trade liberalization – have cut tariff revenue, besides undermining import-substituting manufacturing and food security.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 24% of the world’s hungry. Africa is the only continent where the number of undernourished people has increased over the past four decades. About 27.4% of Africa’s population was ‘severely food insecure’ in 2016.

In 2020, 281.6 million Africans were undernourished, 82 million more than in 2000! Another 46 million became hungry during the pandemic. Now, Ukraine sanctions on wheat and fertilizer exports most threaten Africa’s food security, in both the short and medium-term.

Structural adjustment
Many of Africa’s recent predicaments stem from structural adjustment programs (SAPs) much of Africa and Latin America have been subjected to from the 1980s. The Washington-based international financial institutions, the African Development Bank and all donors support the SAPs.

SAP advocates promised foreign direct investment and export growth would follow, ensuring growth and prosperity. Now, many admit neoliberalism was oversold, ensuring the 1980s and 1990s were ‘lost decades’, worsened by denial of its painfully obvious consequences.

Instead, ‘extraordinarily disadvantageous geography’, ‘high ethnic diversity’, the ‘natural resource curse’, ‘bad governance’, corrupt ‘rent-seeking’ and armed conflicts have been blamed. Meanwhile, however, colonial and neo-colonial abuse, exploitation and resource plunder have been denied.

While World Bank SAPs were officially abandoned in the late 1990s following growing criticism, replacements – such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers – have been like “old wine in new bottles”. Although purportedly ‘home-grown’, they typically purvey bespoke versions of SAPs.

With trade liberalization and greater specialization, many African countries are now more dependent on fewer export commodities. With more growth spurts during commodity booms, African economies have become even more vulnerable to external shocks.

Can the West be trusted?
Earlier, G7 countries reneged on their 2005 Gleneagles pledge – to give $25 billion more yearly to Africa to ‘Make Poverty History’ – within the five years they gave themselves. Since then, developed countries have delivered far less than the $100 billion of climate finance annually they had promised developing nations in 2009.

The Hamburg G20’s 2017 ‘Compact with Africa’ (CwA) promised to combat poverty and climate change effects. In fact, CwA has been used to promote the business interests of donor countries, particularly Germany.

Primarily managed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, CwA has actually failed to deliver significant foreign investment, instead sowing confusion among participating countries.

Powerful Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development governments successfully blocked developing countries’ efforts at the 2015 Addis Ababa UN conference on financing for development for inclusive UN-led international tax cooperation and to stem illicit financial outflows.

Africa lost $1.2–1.4 trillion in illicit financial flows between 1980 and 2009 – about four times its external debt in 2013. This greatly surpasses total official development assistance received over the same period.

Africa must unite
Under Nelson Mandela’s leadership, Africa had led the fight for the ‘public health exception’ to international intellectual property law. Although Africa suffers most from ‘vaccine apartheid’, Western lobbyists blocked developing countries’ temporary waiver request to affordably meet pandemic needs.

African solidarity is vital to withstand pressures from powerful foreign governments and transnational corporations. African nations must also cooperate to build state capabilities to counter the neoliberal ‘good governance’ agenda.

Africa needs much more policy space and state capabilities, not economic liberalization and privatization. This is necessary to unlock critical development bottlenecks and overcome skill and technical limitations.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Community-led restoration of mangroves along Kenya's coastal shorelines is ongoing. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Jul 25 2022 (IPS)

The swish of calm waters followed by unexpectedly high tides and violent waves is now too familiar for the fisher community along Kenya’s 1,420-kilometer Indian Ocean coastline.

“When a very dark cloud hovers around the ocean, it is a signal that it is very angry, releasing very strong waves from its very depth. When this happens, the ocean will only calm down by taking a life. Fishermen are killed by sudden strong waves every year,” Aisha Mumina, a resident of Makongeni village in Kilifi County, tells IPS.

Kassim Zara says the fish population is on the rise in tandem with mangrove conservation and restoration efforts in Jimbo village, Kwale County. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

But even during such high tides, Mwanamvua Kassim Zara, a local fish trader, says the stock has significantly declined. Before, high tides meant more fish because they would run to the safety of thick mangrove roots for shelter, feeding and breeding.

Today, she says, fishers can no longer cast their net beyond the coral reef and expect a harvest. Even the popular Dagaa, a tiny silver fish and a most preferred delicacy in Vanga Bay in Kwale County with a population of over 8,700 households, has all but disappeared.

“I buy a bucket of fish from the fishermen at 40 to 45 US dollars, up from 20 to 25 US dollars. The high prices are then transferred to our customers who buy one kilogram of boiled, dried and salted fish at 3 US dollars up from 2 US dollars,” she tells IPS.

Kassim considered diversifying into rice farming, but even that presents a new set of challenges. While the tides are not sweeping fish to the shores and into the fishers’ nets, the high tides flood adjacent rice farms. This makes it impossible to access the farms, leading to the destruction of crops.

In Jimbo village, she says parents were afraid to send their children to Jimbo Early Childhood Education (ECD). In high tides, water from the adjacent Indian Ocean would flood the school, putting the lives of children at risk.

The ongoing soft engineering efforts to restore mangroves on the shorelines of Kwale’s Vanga Bay area. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

But Kassim says a promising community-led, community-driven initiative is progressively addressing their most pressing climate change-related concerns. This hope is to restore mangroves and unleash their hidden superpowers to store three to five times more carbon than terrestrial forests.

Once dismissed as dirty and swampy wetlands, the maze of lush green mangroves lining meandering water channels along Kenya’s coastline were extensively encroached upon, degraded and mangrove trees felled at a rate of 0.5 % per year from 1991 to 2016, according to the Kenya Forest Services (KFS).

Relying on indigenous knowledge, indigenous ethnic groups along Kenya’s coastline, including the Digo, Duruma, Shirazi, Wapemba and Wagunga people, discovered that the more they cut down mangroves for firewood, building material, fishing equipment and trade, the more fish disappeared. With these changes came higher and more powerful waves and floods.

“Even as various fish species such as milkfish, mullet fish and octopus slowly disappeared and fishermen could no longer cast their nets past the coral reef and catch a prawn, crab or other shellfish, it took time to see the connection,” Harith Mohamed Suleiman, a member of Kwale’s Vanga Bay indigenous communities tells IPS.

Ongoing soft engineering efforts to restore mangroves on the shorelines of Kwale’s Vanga Bay area. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Mangroves are the first line of defence against Indian Ocean-related catastrophes. Mangrove roots provide fish with feeding and breeding grounds. They enable close to all fishing activities to be carried out along shallow inshore areas within and adjacent to the mangroves, according to the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI).

“It took us many years to understand that mangroves are the breeding and nursery grounds for many fish species around here. By losing mangroves, we were losing our lifeline. We make money from fishing, tourism, bird watching, beekeeping and honey from mangrove forests is unique and valuable,” Suleiman expounds.

Oscar Kiptoo, a conservationist and researcher at KFS, says mangroves are government reserve forests under KFS either singly or in partnership with the Kenya Wildlife Service when mangroves grow in marine parks and reserves. The total mangrove cover in this East African nation, he says, is approximately 61,271 hectares.

Lamu County has 37,350 hectares, Kilifi 8,536 hectares, Kwale 8,354 hectares and 3,260 hectares in Tana River. Mombasa has 3,771 hectares of mangroves distributed along Port Reitz and Tudor Creeks.

An estimated 1,850 hectares of Mombasa County’s mangrove cover are degraded, with more than 1,480 hectares destruction reported in Tudor Creek, mainly because mangrove wood is resistant to rot and insects and therefore highly valuable for building material.

Suleiman explains how three adjacent villages in Kwale County formed the Vanga Jimbo Kiwengu (VAJIKI) Community Forest Association to restore, conserve and protect mangroves voluntarily.

Suleiman, the chair of VAJIKI, says the initiative was inspired by Gazi and Makongeni villages in Kilifi County. These communities pioneered the first of its kind carbon offset project in the world to successfully traded mangrove carbon credits. They worked under the Mikoko Pamoja Community group with support from the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI).

Kassim, from the VAJIKI community, says the community initially did not succeed because they lacked knowledge about mangrove species and zoning. There are mangroves for the shoreline and those that do best on the mainland.

“Since 2016, educated people from the government have been teaching us how to plant and protect mangroves. They tell us mangroves are the roots of the ocean, the same way that a tree cannot grow without trees, so it is with the ocean. We cannot benefit from the ocean if we destroy mangroves. We learn how to use mangroves as a wall around the ocean to protect us from high tides, and we see the fruits of our work,” Kassim says.

Suleiman agrees, adding that the VAJIKI project is a 460 hectares mangrove initiative officially launched in 2019. He says 450 hectares (1,112 acres) will be conserved, protected, and allowed to rejuvenate naturally. The remaining 10 (25 acres) will be reforested over two decades.

Out of the 450 hectares (1,112 acres), he says 250 hectares (618 acres) are on the mainland and at significant risk of continued over-exploitation, and another 200 hectares (494 acres) are on the uninhabited Sii Island. Although unexploited, mangroves on Sii Island are at significant risk from loggers.

Suleiman says the VAJIKI community is committed to ensuring that the island remains free from all human activity, including illegal fishing and dynamite use. According to KFS, approximately 250 fish and 124 coral species are protected by the Sii Island mangroves.

“The VAJIKI community is in talks with government representatives to pioneer a transboundary mangrove conservation and restoration initiative that will start from Mombasa, through Kwale County and into Tanzania. We are in close proximity with other indigenous communities on the Tanzania side of the border. We have no language or cultural barriers,” he says.

Suleiman says they have learnt mangrove seedlings have a higher survival rate when prepared for planting in a seed nursery. Mangrove seedlings will have been collected in the expansive mangrove forest, packed in sacks, soaked in salty or marine water and stored for planting for six months. At least 100 community members volunteer for the exercise on seed planting days.

Mangrove seeds are seasonal, and their availability throughout the year varies from species to species. For instance, Ceriops Tagal seeds are available in February and March, Rhizophora mucronata seeds are available in March and June, and Avicennia marina seeds are available in April and May.

The VAJIKI community plants at least 3,000 seedlings of mangroves annually and targets to sell carbon credit worth 48,713 US dollars per year by accumulating 5,023 tons of carbon above ground. Their records show that the 2020/21 period brought carbon credits worth 44,433 US dollars.

This is where a private developer had once built a hotel on the shores of Vanga Bay in Kwale County, leading to significant deforestation of mangroves. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Suleiman says the VAJIKI Community sells above-ground carbon calculated using direct measurements of mangrove biomass. Kiptoo says these measurements are taken using traditionally established forest inventory techniques.

He says the process entails collecting tree measurements, including height, crown area or wood density, and diameter at breast height within the designated plots. These measurements, he says, are then used “as an input to the allometric equation, also known as biomass estimation equations, to provide biomass estimates.”

Suleiman says these calculations require technical know-how. The VAJIKI community relies on the Association for Coastal Ecosystem Services (ACES), a charity registered in Scotland, to coordinate the entire process, including the actual carbon trading, because they have access to viable international markets.

“Women in Kiwengu village delivered at home or in other villages because Kiwengu Dispensary did not have a maternity (ward). But we bought a bed using the money, and women are safe to deliver at the dispensary. Our children can go to nursery school because we built a barrier to prevent floods from entering the school. Rice farming is possible now because the floods have reduced in the last two years,” Kassim says.

In Makongeni Kilifi County, Naima Juma says her nine-year-old daughter was accosted and nearly assaulted on her way to fetch water; “we used to walk for two kilometres looking for freshwater because our waters are too salty. But now everyone in the village has water close to their homes through communal taps or own household taps.”

Providing clean water to the community, improved health care, sanitation, education and infrastructure to the benefit of Juma and 4,500 community members was made possible through the Mikoko Pamoja (mangroves together) initiative.

Records show the Mikoko Pamoja community-based group has 117 acres of mangrove plantation, restoring the degraded shorelines of Gazi bay by planting approximately 2,000 seedlings annually and another 2,000 on the mainland. The project captures an estimated 2,000 tons of carbon below and above ground. Records show the project currently earns at least 25,000 US dollars annually from carbon trading.

“Our community leaders and chiefs usually invite us to a meeting to discuss how the money should be spent. We usually choose projects that benefit all of us,” Juma tells IPS.

Community initiatives, Suleiman says, are so strong that a private developer who once destroyed acres of mangroves to build a beach hotel and restaurant just meters away from the shoreline demolished the facility due to community resistance. Other developers similarly deforested large chunks of mangroves to build salt pans – the projects have since been terminated.

Kiptoo says ongoing community-led initiatives are hitting all the right targets as they are a win for climate, biodiversity and communities.

Due to ongoing community-based and community-led initiatives, he says the country is successfully halting the degradation and deforestation of mangroves.

The dense mangrove forested area on the Tanzania side of the border. On the Kenyan side, communities are leading mangrove restoration efforts. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Keeping with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to adopt the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem proclamation marked annually on July 26, between 2019 and 2022, KFS says over 16.7 million mangroves seedlings have been planted.

Suleiman says community-led initiatives are not without their fair share of challenges. “A lack of understanding of various mangrove species available and where they grow best is the main problem as there are species that thrive on the mainland and others along the shoreline.

“A lack of knowledge on planting methods, either through a nursery or simply picking a seedling and directly sticking it in the ground, issues of seedling spacing, and all these factors affect the survival rate. VAJIKI started planting seedlings years ago, but until recently, when we started interacting with scientists, the survival rate was only 10 percent.”

He encourages coastal communities to partner with scientists and the government because with an increased understanding of mangroves, the survival rate will improve. Other benefits will follow – like increased carbon dioxide trapped in mangroves and money earned from carbon trading that can be used to support community projects. All these significantly improve lives.

Kassim says her beloved Dagaa, a staple in the Vanga bay community, is slowly returning to the shores and within reach of fishers. She says business is booming and that fish prices would have already gone down if it were not for ongoing inflation and the fuel cost.

This feature was reported with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Benoit Thierry, is Sahel Office Director of International Fund for Agriculture Development, Dakar

By Benoit Thierry
DAKAR, Senegal, Jul 25 2022 (IPS)

The current Ukraine-Russia conflict is dominating the global media to the point of overshadowing longer protracted crisis that no longer make headlines, but are still rife. Such is the case with the on-going Sahel crisis, one of the world’s most neglected ones, where acute poverty, the dramatic effects of climate change and rising armed conflicts have become the norm for more than a decade. A situation further exacerbated by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic.

Benoit Thierry

The Sahel region, known for its nomadic herders and resilient agriculture systems, spans 6000 km across a dozen of countries south of the Sahara desert, which include Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad for a population of approximately 150 million. They share a common geography, a similar climate and way of life, but they are also among the poorest countries in the world, ranking last in the Human Development Index. According to the UN Refugee Agency, the region counts more than 4.6 million people who have lost their home today, including 2.7 million people who are internally displaced and running away from conflict and drought. They no longer have a livelihood and need to rely on humanitarian aid for their survival.

However, as vital as it is, humanitarian aid cannot provide a long-term solution. More coordinated responses that address the underlying causes of the crisis are required. For this reason, the three UN agencies specialised in food and agriculture, namely the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), have joined forces with the G5 Sahel, the regional organisation established in 2014 by the five most affected Sahel countries. Together and with the participation of Senegal, they have launched a US$180 million programme to improve the livelihoods and economic means of rural producers in the region and scale up successful pilot activities. Through it, a common approach is implemented, capitalizing on rural development work of past decades, particularly in supporting farmers and herders’ associations.

At IFAD we have a long experience working with rural producers in the region, however, until now, we tended to implement programmes nationally, in agreement with national governments. Currently, IFAD is financing 20 programmes and projects in G5 Sahel countries plus Senegal for a total of US$1 billion.

With the existence of regional Sahel organisations, we can now focus our efforts at regional level, knowing that many of the issues cut across national borders, and work in partnership with all the governments and international agencies concerned. This is for the benefit of the poorest, which is the purpose of the joint Sahel programme, known as the Regional Joint Programme Sahel in Response to the Challenges of COVID-19, Conflict and Climate Change (SD3C). In addition to financing, IFAD is contributing its long experience in implementing agricultural projects at local level, FAO is bringing its in-depth knowledge and research in agriculture, and WFP its expertise working in conflict areas.

An estimated 25 million people in the Sahel are nomadic pastoralists who are increasingly more desperate to find grazing areas for their cattle herds because of the effect of climate change. As they expand grazing areas into farming land, conflicts with sedentary farmers are on the rise leading to a decline in food production, when at the same time the population is increasing. According to UN forecast, population in the Sahel should more than double to 330 million people by 2050. How will they eat if the issue of food production and productivity is not addressed today through agriculture investment and adequate planning?

The programme looks to increase food production and yields through climate-resilient agricultural practices, a key aspect in a region where 80 percent of agriculture is estimated to be affected by climate change. With climate experts forecasting temperatures in the region, currently averaging 35 degrees Celsius, to rise by at least 3 degrees by 2050, there is even more urgency to implement climate resilient measures today.

Beyond the key issue of agriculture, the programme is also focussing on promoting cross-border trade and transactions and peace building at community level. Women, who typically have limited access to land and finance, are making up to 50 per cent of the programme’s participants. About 40 per cent are young people, who face high rates of unemployment and receive help in launching productive activities to create jobs and generate decent incomes. Landless people and transhumant pastoralists also benefit. The overall strategy is designed to meet the challenges of emergency, development and peace following a rapid intervention approach based on the scaling up of existing and efficient responses and approaches. Under implementation since 2021, the program will continue up to 2027 and expand to other countries in the Sahel region.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

Benoit Thierry, is Sahel Office Director of International Fund for Agriculture Development, Dakar

A child eating WFP high-energy biscuits as part of WFP's nutrition assistance in Batangafo town, northern Central African Republic. Credit: WFP/Bruno Djoyo

By Alexander Müller, Adam Prakash and Elena Lazutkaite
BERLIN / TERNI, Italy, Jul 25 2022 (IPS)

A growing mountain of data and analysis points to an unprecedented global crisis in the making, due to the convergence of “Four Cs” (Conflict, Covid, Climate and Costs).

As most recently highlighted at the recent UN High-Level Political Forum on the Sustainable Development Goals (HLPF), the intersection of poverty, climate vulnerability and geopolitical dynamics could unleash the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.

Why is this crisis different?

All food crises are intrinsically linked to spikes in fossil fuel prices. Recent episodes (such as the food price crises of 2007-2009 and 2012) display several common characteristics: increased demand for biofuels as an alternative energy source; and the diversion of massive amounts of food grains to intensive, and unsustainable livestock sectors in countries with an already high and unhealthy consumption of animal protein.

However, until now, severe impacts on food availability have been avoided thanks to favourable weather conditions that have helped to quickly restore market equilibria.
Not this time.

While the root of the current crisis is strongly linked to incessant pressure on food systems to deliver energy and meat, high fertilizer prices mean that production costs are outpacing farmgate prices of food, discouraging farmers from maintaining or increasing production.

This adds yet another layer of complexity to the “perfect storm” that has already been gathering. Covid-19 looms large over the ability of supply chains to deliver food. Conflict (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) has siphoned-off enormous amounts of food destined for international markets as well as driving up the price of crude oil, which is highly influential in determining prices of fertilizer – the critical input in global agri-food value chains.

(Note: On July 22, The United Nations, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine signed an agreement in Istanbul aimed at delivering Ukrainian grain to world markets. The deal was the result of months of negotiations as world food prices skyrocketed amid increasing grain shortages connected to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres heralded the agreement as a major diplomatic breakthrough. “Today there is a beacon on the Black Sea. A beacon of hope—a beacon of possibility, a beacon of relief—in a world that needs it more than ever.”)

Due to our energy-hungry and inefficient food systems, over seven units of fossil fuel energy are required to produce one unit of food – from farm to retail.

Adding to the complexity of these developments is the accelerated impact of the climate crisis on global agriculture. The upshot is that the world is facing record food costs in 2022.

These “Four Cs” are instigating a scenario that could be more severe than anything we’ve seen in the past five decades, mirroring the hunger crisis of the 1970s in which millions perished from hunger.

Moreover, overall prospects for a global bumper grain crop are increasingly dim. Recent satellite surveillance shows that excessive dryness and heat stress could lead to a five million tonne shortfall in the EU wheat harvest and a combined eight million tonne contraction of wheat output in the US and India.

This adds to uncertainty about continued blockage of wheat supplies from Ukraine, which had a pre-conflict capacity of storing 60 million tonnes of grains and oilseeds.

One hopeful sign is that Ukraine has begun shipping small but increasing quantities of food via land routes, with significant volumes also passing through the Danube River. Several international initiatives are also underway to unblock supply chains and compensate for storage infrastructure destroyed by Russia.

These include US support for new silos along the border with Romania and Poland, and Turkey’s offer to help reinstate Ukraine’s exports from the Black Sea. However, any delays to these initiatives could force many Ukrainian farmers into bankruptcy, jeopardizing global food security for years to come.

Can we crisis-proof our food systems?

The war in Ukraine has thrown into sharp focus – yet again – to just how vulnerable our energy and food systems are to shocks, including geopolitical tensions. Dependence on a few countries for energy and fertilizer needs, poses exceptional and unacceptable risks.

Faced with severe food shortages, many countries will undoubtedly turn to Russia, which is set for an excellent food harvest this season, raising prospects of “weaponizing grain” in retaliation against sanctions.

Behind the geopolitics of blockades on Ukrainian grain is an untold story of a fragile, overly-centralized global food system, constructed and promoted by the richer nations and their corporations, that was already vulnerable to shocks long before the tanks rolled in.

Added to these continuing uncertainties, is the increasing impact of climate extremes to global food production. Once largely associated with the African region, drought is wreaking havoc to food systems around the world. A record-breaking drought reordered plantings in the United States, heat stress in India has led to a reported 10-35 percent decline in crop yields with more heatwaves predicted prompting a ban on the country’s wheat exports, with restrictions on food shipments instigated by another 34 countries.

Devastating heatwaves and the worst drought in 70 years are also being felt in northern regions of Italy driving up prices by as much as 50% , while the Horn of Africa is being ravaged by the worst drought in four decades. With only one percent of arable land equipped for irrigation in the region, the longer-term prognosis for strengthening climate resilience is disturbing, to say the least.

Unfortunately, the global response so far has largely taken the same laissez faire approach that was proposed in the wake of previous crises. In Einstein’s words, it is tantamount to “doing the same thing(s) over and over again and expecting different results.”

To achieve the fundamental reform needed, our food systems need to be set on a transformative pathway, necessitating the redesign around intertwined action.

Restoring sanity

It would be wishful thinking to expect that the world will ever be free of multiple crises. The question, therefore, is how to construct a more resilient global food system to shocks from wherever they might arise.

In the short-term, emergency measures are needed to safeguard access to food for those who are hardest hit from high food prices. Moratoriums on the biofuel and livestock feed sectors would free up sufficient quantities of grain to avoid a hunger crisis. Food stocks, where abundant, should also be released to ensure that the most at risk have affordable and open access to food.

A communiqué issued at the close of the recent G7 Summit in Germany unveiled plans to boost fertilizer production and promote the supply of organic fertilizers. G7 leaders also encouraged the release of food from stockpiles and agreed not to introduce any new public subsidies for fossil fuel sectors, even as they called for additional temporary investment in the natural gas industry to mitigate current supply shortages.

In parallel to these emergency measures, we urgently need to embark a more resilient pathway in the medium- to long-term. Even were the war in Ukraine to end tomorrow and supply chains to return to “normal” we must shift the current paradigm of dependency on climate-destroying mineral fertilizers. We must make hard choices to wean ourselves off conventional monocultural agriculture towards more diverse, localized and ecosystem-sensitive food systems.

Science tells us that nitrogen-based fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, can contribute to 40 percent of cereal yields. Continuing to depend on fertilizer supplies from a few countries is therefore tantamount to holding nearly 8 billion people to ransom.

It is increasingly clear that to avert the impact of such geopolitics, policy makers must make serious attempts to delink world food security from fossil fuel-based and climate-destroying inputs. Incentivizing inexpensive and readily available and proven technologies – such as agroforestry and other agroecological practices – boosts soil health, improves the availability of nutritious food, and strengthens climate resilience.

Repurposing a mere fraction of current perverse subsidises for the fossil fuel sector, which amount to an astounding US$ 7 trillion per year, is a critical step towards enabling such a transformation.

Ultimately, however, we need to value our food systems differently by including their total footprint on human health and the environment. Ignoring the “true cost” of food production has led to a focus on cheap and non-nutritious food that is linked to the global obesity pandemic and a greater risk of zoonotic disease spillovers.

The benefits of such a True Cost Accounting (TCA) approach would be manifold: a reduction in food waste, a far more productive and sustainable agricultural sector that respects our natural capital, and a sense of realism in achieving greenhouse gas targets under the Paris Agreement.

Dismantling the 4 Cs

Decoupling the world’s food systems from fossil fuel-based inputs would be a major step forward in solving long-term global hunger. A necessary first step towards such transformation is to design pathways in which the global north shares its food stockpiles instead of diverting grains to fuel cars and promoting unsustainable livestock production.

Such repurposing requires immediate investment in renewable energy and the manufacture of bio-fertilizers. Organic fertilizers are integral to the circular economy, which is an increasingly important model for planetary sustainability.

Equally, the overuse of mineral fertilizers needs to be addressed, especially given their role in creating additional input demand, which in turn leads to higher prices, while compounding environmental degradation.

While the G7 Leaders’ communiqué is a refreshing breakaway from tradition, the world still has much to learn from history. The world was ill-prepared in the 1970s, the 2000s as well as today. Arguably, solutions to fix increasingly complex and intertwined food systems are difficult.

Vested interests, a lack of governance and a system of economic accounting that undervalues our natural and societal capital are challenges under which transformation of our food systems needs to happen. This task is by no means underestimated, but bold action is needed to ensure food systems become more crisis-proof.

As an emergency step, prioritizing food for people “over all else” would build up trust especially between developing regions in need and the G7. And trust is also a very scarce resource in the world of today.

Alexander Müller is Managing Director (based in Berlin), Adam Prakash is Research Associate (based in the UK), Elena Lazutkaite is Research Associate (based in Berlin)

Töpfer Müller Gaßner, a Think Tank for Sustainability, based in Berlin.

About TMG
TMG Research gGmbH is a Berlin-based research organization with an African regional hub in Nairobi and projects across several countries in Africa. Together with partners at the local, national and international levels, TMG explores transformative solutions for entrenched sustainability challenges, with a focus on four thematic clusters: Food Systems, Land Governance, Nature-Based Solutions and Urban Futures.

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By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jul 22 2022 (IPS)

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights sits at the top of the UN’s human rights system. It’s a crucial role for the victims of violations and the many civil society activists who look to the UN system to set and apply human rights norms, monitor the human rights performance of states and hold rights violators to account.

And there’s a job vacancy. In June, the current High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, announced she wouldn’t be seeking a second term when her current time in office ends in August.

Her announcement was unsurprising: no one has held the role for two full terms. The High Commissioner can find themselves trying to strike impossible compromises between upholding rights, keeping powerful states onside and respecting the UN’s cautious culture.

They can end up pleasing no one: too timid and cautious for civil society, too critical for states that expect to get away with violating rights.

Bachelet is no stranger to the charge of downplaying human rights criticism. Most recently her visit to China attracted huge controversy. Bachelet long sought to visit China, but when the trip went ahead in May, it was carefully stage managed by the Chinese state, which instrumentalised it for PR and disinformation purposes.

Key qualities for the job

Looking ahead, it’s time to think about who should do the job next. The UN system doesn’t have long to identify and appoint Bachelet’s successor, and candidates are already putting themselves forward.

But the process must be inclusive. There’s a clear danger of the selection process leading to the hurried appointment of a candidate acceptable to states because they will not challenge them.

To avoid this, civil society needs to be fully involved. Candidates should face civil society questioning. The criteria by which the appointment is made should be shared and opened up to critique.

Michelle Bachelet, the outgoing High Commissioner for Human Rights. Credit: OHCHR

Civil society has plenty of ideas about the qualities the ideal candidate must have. Above all, the holder of the role must be a fearless human rights champion who promises to stand independent of states and not be afraid of upsetting rights-violating states or the UN’s bureaucratic niceties. They should be a public figure and leader prepared to cause a stir if necessary.

This means they should have a strong grounding in international human rights law, crucial at a time when several states are reasserting narrow concepts of national sovereignty as overriding long-established international norms. The UN system needs to get better at defending international laws against this creeping erosion.

The successful candidate should also have a proven background in human rights advocacy and working with the victims of rights violations. The candidate should be fully committed to social justice and to defending and advancing the rights of excluded groups that are most under attack – including women, LGBTQI+ people, Black people, Indigenous people, migrants and refugees, and environmental rights defenders.

They must always be on the side of those who experience rights abuses, acting as a kind of global victims’ representative.

The style they should adopt in office should be one of openness and honesty. They should be willing to work with civil society and listen to criticism.

They should work to embed human rights in everything the UN does, including its work on peace and security, sustainable development and climate change. They should develop the currently underutilised mandate of the office to act on early warning signs of human rights emergencies and bring these to the attention of other parts of the UN to help prevent crises, particularly since the UN Security Council is so often deadlocked.

They should stand up for the UN’s various human rights mandate holders and special experts, and push for them to be able to make genuinely unimpeded visits to states where they can scrutinise rights that are under attack.

While diplomatic skills are important, the approach of backroom negotiations and trade-offs, the style of which Bachelet was accused, should be avoided. This is not a technocratic role. It is about showing moral leadership and taking a stand. The next High Commissioner should not try to negotiate with states like China. They should lead the condemnation of them.

A pivotal moment

This is a potentially pivotal moment. The need has never been greater. Human rights are being attacked on a scale unprecedented in the UN’s lifetime. When it comes to the key civic rights – the rights to association, peaceful assembly and expression – the global situation deteriorates year on year.

Around the world, 117 out of 197 countries tracked by the CIVICUS Monitor now have serious violations of these rights.

If civil society’s calls are not heeded, the danger seems clear: the position could drift into irrelevance, becoming hopelessly compromised and detached from the moral call that should be at its centre.

It’s time for the UN to show it’s serious about human rights, and guarantee that rights are at the core of what it stands and works for. This also means it must revisit the funding situation: the UN human rights system may have well-developed mechanisms but they’re chronically underfunded.

Human rights get just over four per cent of the UN’s regular budget despite it being one of the UN’s three pillars, alongside development and peace and security, making the work highly dependent on voluntary contributions, which are never sufficient.

The next High Commissioner must push for progress in funding and in the realisation of the UN’s Call to Action on Human Rights. To help ensure this, the UN’s human rights commitment must first be signalled by the appointment of a fearless human rights champion to its peak human rights role.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Editor-in-Chief at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance. He is one of the lead authors for CIVICUS Lens and the 2022 State of Civil Society Report

The UN’s empty corridors when the world body went into a lockdown mode because of the Covid-19 pandemic beginning March 2020. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 22 2022 (IPS)

The United Nations is planning to host a high-level “in-person” General Assembly session, September 20-26, with over 190 world leaders and delegates listed to speak, including heads of state, heads of government, high-ranking ministers and senior officials.

The world body is apparently on a risky path, with hundreds of delegates due in New York for the opening of the 77th session—and, most worryingly, at a time when a new Covid-19 variant BA.5 is sweeping across the United States, including New York.

In a letter addressed to the President of the General Assembly, E. Courtenay Rattray Chef de Cabinet, says “while there is strong support for the return to a pre-pandemic General Debate, as reflected by the level of inscriptions by Member States in the provisional list of speakers– and an improvement in the environment as compared to the last two years– we also recognize that we are not free from the Coronavirus and its impact.”

“As such, there is a need to be prudent in our facilitation of the General Debate and High-level Week.”

Under a business-as-usual scenario, occupancy at UN Headquarters will increase significantly this September, particularly in meeting rooms and in the General Assembly and Conference buildings.

“With a view to mitigating this impact, our planning assumptions reflect an emphasis on basic protective measures and a decrease in the number of attendees, as much as reasonably possible”, the letter said.

On July 21, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre formally announced that US President Joe Biden, who is scheduled to address the General Assembly on September 20, tested positive for COVID-19.

“He is fully vaccinated and twice boosted and experiencing very mild symptoms. He has begun taking Paxlovid. Consistent with CDC guidelines, he will isolate at the White House and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time,” she added.

In a July 20 report, Cable News Network (CNN) said “in the United States, BA.5 has become the dominant strain and is driving a significant spike in cases — more than 120,000 a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), though experts say that number may be more like 1 million, given the underreporting of home test results.

Europe, meanwhile, has seen a tripling of new Covid-19 infections over the past six weeks, with nearly 3 million reported last week, accounting for almost half of all new cases worldwide. Hospital admissions in Europe over the same period have doubled.

“The end of the last remaining restrictions on international travel and return of large gatherings, like music festivals, are among the factors helping the virus to spread, experts say. And the number of cases may actually be higher than data shows because countries have significantly pared back testing and surveillance, making it difficult to judge the true extent of the current surge’, said CNN.

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the spike in infections was a harbinger of an even worse situation to come, calling on countries to urgently reintroduce mitigation strategies before it was too late.

“It’s now abundantly clear we’re in a similar situation to last summer — only this time the ongoing Covid-19 wave is being propelled by sub-lineages of the Omicron variant, notably BA.2 and BA.5, with each dominant sub-lineage of Omicron showing clear transmission advantages over the previously circulating viruses,” WHO’s regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge, said in a statement.  

Though intensive care admissions remain relatively low, as infection rates rise among older populations, deaths are mounting — almost 3,000 people a week are dying from Covid in Europe.

But in order to protect delegates and staff alike, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, having considered the recommendations of the UN’s Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Committee, has decided on the following guidelines:

** As a condition of entry to the compound, all persons will be required to attest that they have not had symptoms of, or been diagnosed with, COVID-19 in the last 5 days.

** Masks are to be worn by all attendees at all times when indoors, except when directly addressing a meeting or consuming food/beverages.

** Apart from a limited number of high-level side events, for which preparations are well under way, side events are to be conducted virtually or off-site.

** United Nations departments and offices will not be hosting or co-hosting in-person side events or luncheons during the high-level week.

** Bilateral booths will be available with seating for 2 principals and 6 advisers (3 per side).

** Permanent Missions are encouraged to manage COVID-19 cases and determine any subsequent action regarding case exposures among their own attendees and guests, including notification to other delegations or to the President of the General Assembly.

** United Nations staff who are not required to be on-site to support the proceedings will be mandated to work remotely for the full week.

Further information, including the number of access cards provided for the General Assembly Hall, will be contained in an Information Note for delegations that will be issued as A/INF/77/4.

“The Organization will continue to closely monitor the COVID-19 metrics in New York City. Therefore, the steps outlined above remain subject to modification should conditions change, as the Secretariat continues to ensure that the work of the Organization is conducted as safely and effectively as possible,” letter said.

After several on-again, off-again pandemic lockdowns, the United Nations returned to near-normal beginning March 2022.

A circular from Guterres said “based on the new guidelines, we are now able to institute associated changes in our workplace, returning to full operational capability while still prioritizing the health and safety of personnel, and balancing the operational needs of the Organization”.

Guided by the Senior Emergency Policy Team and the Occupational Safety and Health Committee in New York, mask use was voluntary throughout the UN building and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), mostly denied entry since March 2020, were given access to the UN premises.

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ENDS

The Zimbabwe National Water Authority says it will drill 35,000 boreholes by 2025 countrywide, focusing on parched rural areas where erratic rainfall has affected both people and livestock. However, there is concern about groundwater levels. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
Bulawayo, Jul 22 2022 (IPS)

Faced with cyclical droughts and low water levels in supply dams, Zimbabwe is turning to boreholes for relief, raising concerns about already precarious groundwater levels across the country.

The Zimbabwe National Water Authority says it will drill 35,000 boreholes by 2025 countrywide, focusing on parched rural areas where erratic rainfall has affected both people and livestock.

The climate change-induced water crisis has not spared the country’s national parks, forcing sector officials to turn to groundwater for relief.

A 2021 review by the Southern African Development Community’s Groundwater Management Institute said Zimbabwe’s capital city Harare had 28,000 registered boreholes, with 80 percent of the population “dependent on groundwater for potable supply.”

“With such dependency, it becomes imperative that the resource is well monitored for sustainable management, and to enhance well-informed decisions at policy formulation level,” the report said, adding, “groundwater is a finite source.”

President Emmerson Mnangagwa recently launched a nationwide Presidential Borehole Scheme targeting urban areas where some residents have gone for years without running water.

The drive to turn to underground water supplies comes despite earlier warnings by the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (ZINWA) that the country needed to be cautious in tapping groundwater.

The post-Mugabe administration has upped the drilling despite what experts say is continued poor rainwater seepage to raise the groundwater table, highlighting the country’s struggles with climate change and its adaptation efforts.

This is happening despite concerns from experts regarding what they have called “limited knowledge on aquifer recharge areas and rates,” further exposing the long-term sustainability of groundwater resources.

“If you over-abstract groundwater, you will obviously deplete it,” said Professor Innocent Nhapi, a consultant and climate-resilient development scholar.

“We need to increase our knowledge on groundwater resources by establishing a dedicated institute for training and research on groundwater. We then need to use modern techniques for quantifying the groundwater resources we have. From this knowledge, we need to prepare groundwater management plans for different sub-catchments,” Nhapi told IPS.

The country’s major towns, including the second city Bulawayo, continue to face crippling water shortages, with residents questioning the water quality from the municipality boreholes.

It has become customary for residents to experience rolling water cuts by the local municipality. This has meant long queues at boreholes, with some wondering why the boreholes take so to fill the buckets.

“Water does not pump as quickly as it used to. We take too much time in the queue,” said Nomazulu Nxumalo, a local home keeper.

The situation is even dire in low rainfall rural areas in the country’s southwest, where villagers and civil servants, such as teachers, share one borehole.

“You need plenty of strength to pump water these days,” said Leonard Maphosa, a teacher based in Lupane, about 170km from Bulawayo.

“I think the water is now far, far below. We have a well that has since been filled with sand because it does not have any more water,” Maphosa told IPS.

Officials remain concerned about the ability of the country’s aquifers to store water, considering rainfall’s erratic spells.

“Short, intense rainfall whilst providing a lot of water doesn’t provide enough time for the water to infiltrate and percolate into aquifers. A greater percentage of the water flows away as quick runoff,” said Tirivanhu Muhwati, a climate scientist and project coordinator at the country’s climate and environment ministry.

“This, however, does not mean that the boreholes should not be sunk as an adaptation measure. It simply means that the boreholes have to be fitted with water-use efficiency mechanisms, and demand-side management measures have to be instituted,” Muhwati told IPS.

For years, experts and government officials have noted that a lasting solution to Zimbabwe’s water crisis despite seasonal floods is the construction of dams. Still, as in many other sectors, authorities have cited a lack of resources for constructing them.

Despite population expansion, big cities such as Bulawayo have not built any new dams since the country’s independence in 1980, forcing authorities to sink more boreholes for relief.

“As more surface runoff is expected, the country should intensify the building of dams to capture the surface water,” Muhwati told IPS.

“This should be supported by the associated water conveyance infrastructure to where the water is required for agricultural, commercial, and domestic use. Groundwater can then be used only as a last resort,” he said.

Zimbabwe is not the only country in the region turning to groundwater.

The World Bank says due to climate variability, which has altered the availability of surface water, southern African countries are seeking relief by sinking boreholes, but the resource is already compromised by “threats of depletion.”

According to the World Bank, “at least 70 percent of the people living in southern African countries rely on groundwater as their primary source of water.”

For Zimbabwe, where another estimated 70 percent of the country’s population lives in rural areas, groundwater is the only available resource highlighting the country’s challenges towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6), which seeks to ensure the availability of water for all by 2030.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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The Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed and President Sahle-Work Zewde of Ethiopia met with the people of Somali who are suffering from drought-provoked crises. February 2022. Credit: UNECA/Daniel Getachaw

By Amina J. Mohammed
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 21 2022 (IPS)

The “Africa We Want” – as outlined in Agenda 2063 – embodies the African Union’s bold vision of an integrated, prosperous, and peaceful continent.

An Africa shaped by its own narrative, informed by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force on the world stage. The United Nations shares this vision and its realization through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Today’s event provides a global platform for African Member States and the United Nations and partners to share progress and reaffirm that giving light to this vision remains our shared priority. Sadly, Africa’s development gains are at risk, as a consequence of the current three ongoing crises.

First, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The effects of the pandemic have reversed progress made over the past two decades, and further shrank an already limited fiscal space.

Social inequalities have been exposed and exacerbated in nearly every sphere: in vaccine distribution, in economic growth, in access to education and health care, and in terms of job and income losses.

For the first time in over 20 years poverty has increased. Women and informal workers have been disproportionately affected.

Second, climate change continues to threaten Africa’s future. Droughts, floods and hurricanes are growing in number and severity and African countries are on the front line. Even though this week, we are witnessing record hight temperatures in Europe and UK, where forest fires and homes burring have taken lives.

COP27 in Egypt will be the African COP. It will be the opportunity to build on the outcomes of Glasgow and to signal the ambition of the stock take COP28.

There is a unique opportunity to lift the ambition and keep the promise of the 2030 Agenda, including the Paris agreement and the promise of the Agenda 2063.

To scale-up and speed-up investments in climate adaptation solutions that that protect people and ecosystems, building resilience for the crises to come.

Third, the war in Ukraine.

The war is not only causing immense human suffering — it is now precipitating a global food, energy, and finance crisis. 71 million people in developing countries have fallen into poverty in the space of just 3 months, as a direct consequence of global food and energy price surges.

People living in regions like the Sahel and the Horn of Africa are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. As the Secretary-General has warned, “there is a real risk that multiple famines will be declared in 2022. And 2023 could be even worse.”

The Africa we want is still within reach. To get there, we need to change our mindsets and turn the triple crisis into an opportunity. To do so, we must focus on five, amongst many of our key issues:

First, building effective and reliable policy frameworks and institutions.

To be clear: policy choices have the capacity to make or break this world. Without a forceful policy response to today’s challenges, there is a risk that inequality will become entrenched.

For an inclusive economic recovery, policy responses need to put human capital and future resilience at the centre of policy making. We need to promote the complementarity between formal and informal social protection networks as tools to achieve income distribution.

Second, we must future-proof Africa’s infrastructure by investing in connectivity and digital technologies.

The launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area provides an exciting opportunity for African countries to industrialize, diversify and digitize their economies, and enhance regional cooperation and resilience.

Third, education and skills-development are enablers of Africa’s industrialization.

Digital skills, science, technology, engineering and mathematics need to be integrated into the curricula of African schools and education institutions. This is the only way that the continent will be able to build a skilled workforce that is able to realize the fourth industrial revolution.

The Transforming Education Summit that the Secretary-General will convene in September will help to radically redesign our education systems for the world of tomorrow, today.

Fourth, achieving sustainable energy for all across the continent.

The global rise in energy prices that we are witnessing should prompt African countries to accelerate energy access and a just transition, including through scaled-up domestic renewable energy production and energy efficiency. But this is an opportunity for foreign direct investment in many of these economies that will pave a way for that industrialization that we speak to.

Finally, we need an overall of our approach to financing.

In the short term, African countries need immediate relief to ensure they can survive the immediate next years — through the re-channeling of unused Special Drawing Rights, increased concessional grants, and the renewal of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative.

In the long term, we will need to re-prioritize where and how investments get made. This requires massively scaling up investments in the sectors that remain critical to bolstering resilience and inclusive growth.

And this requires redistributing funds away from sectors that undermine these efforts—while supporting a just transition for all in the process.

The Africa We Want is not only good for the Continent — it is good for the world.

Building the Africa We Want means delivering the urgent scale in the support that Africa needs, it also means putting at the centre our youth and women.

Now is the time to urgently rescue the SDGs in Africa and lay the foundation for the ambition of the 2063 Agenda – and in the world at large.

Today, let us recommit to our ambitious vision and to continue to work alongside African countries to realise a greener, more sustainable, and more inclusive future for all.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United nations, in an address to the Joint High Level Dialogue on Africa, 20 July 2022.

The Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC), the first-ever continent-wide gathering of African leaders, citizens, and interest groups, gathered in Kigali from Monday, Jul 18 to Jul 23 to discuss the role of protected areas in conserving nature. Rwanda hosted the conference in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). CREDIT: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
Kigali, Jul 21 2022 (IPS)

For many years, East African countries were considered wildlife trafficking hotspots. Now conservation organisations have started to mobilise all stakeholders to combat the illegal trade that targets animals – some to the edge of extinction.

“A slight progress has been made in combatting the illicit trade of wildlife and their products, but Governments from the region still face grave challenges posed by the fact that they are mostly single-species focused on their conservation efforts,” Andrew McVey, climate advisor at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from East African region told IPS.

According to experts, while countries are committed to cooperation and collaboration to combat poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking within the shared ecosystems, organised criminal networks are cashing in on elephant poaching. Trafficking ivory has reached unprecedented volumes, and syndicates are operating with impunity and little fear of prosecution.

Delegates at the first Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) noted the lack of strict sanctions and penalties for illegal activities and limited disincentives to prevent poaching, trafficking or illicit trade impacted efforts to counter wildlife trafficking across the region. The gathering in Kigali was organised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Fidele Ruzigandekwe, the Deputy Executive Secretary for Programs at the Rwandan-based Greater Virunga Transboundary Collaboration (GVTC), told IPS that sharing information, community empowerment and enforcing laws and judiciary system were among crucial factors needed to slow the illegal trade of wildlife. The GVTC is a conservation NGO working in Greater Virunga Landscape across transborder zones between Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“There is also a need to rely on technology such as high-tech surveillance devices to combat wildlife poachers and traffickers,” Ruzigandekwe added.

Elephant tusks are of high value in the Far East, particularly in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where many use them for ornamentation and religious purposes. Both scientists and activists believe that despite current mobilisation, the demand is still increasing as transnational syndicates involved in wildlife crime are exploiting new technologies and networks to escape from arrests, prosecutions, or convictions

Although some experts were delighted to note that countries had made some progress in cooperating to fight trans-border wildlife trafficking, estimates by NGO TRAFFIC indicate that about 55 African Elephants are poached on the continent every day.

INTERPOL has identified East Africa as one of several priority regions for enhanced law enforcement responses to ivory trafficking.

Reports by the INTERPOL indicate that law enforcement officials recently discovered an illegal shipment of ivory inside shipping containers, primarily from Tanzania. It was to be transported to Asian maritime transit hubs.

Both scientists and decision-makers unanimously agreed on the need to mobilise more funding to support measures to tackle ivory trafficking.

“Duplication of conservation efforts and inadequate collaboration among countries has been one of the greatest challenges to implementation,” Simon Kiarie, Principal Tourism Officer at the East African Community (EAC) Secretariat, told IPS.

To cope with these challenges, member countries of the EAC, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, South Sudan, and Rwanda, have jointly developed a Regional Strategy to Combat Poaching and Illegal Trade and Tra­cking of Wildlife and Wildlife Products which is being implemented at the regional and national levels.

The strategy revolves around six key pillars, including strengthening policy framework, enhancing law enforcement capacity, research and development, involvement of local communities and supporting regional and international collaboration.

During a session on the sidelines of the congress, many delegates expressed strong feelings that when the elephant population is threatened by poaching, local communities suffer too.

“Through the illegal trade in wildlife, local communities lose socially and economically important resources (…) the benefits from illegal wildlife trade are not shared among communities,” Telesphore Ngoga, a conservation analyst at Rwanda Development Board (RDB), a government body with conservation in its mandate told IPS.

The Rwandan Government introduced a Tourism Revenue Sharing programme in 2005 to share a percentage (currently 10%) of the total tourism park revenues with the communities living around the parks.

The major purpose of this community initiative is to encourage environmental and wildlife conservation and give back to the communities living near parks, who are socially and economically impacted by wildlife and other touristic endeavours.

Manasseh Karambizi, a former elephant poacher from Kayonza, a district in Eastern Rwanda, who became a park ranger, told IPS that after being sensitised about the dangers of wildlife hunting, he is now aware of the benefits of wildlife conservation.

“Thanks to the income generated from tourism activities from the neighbouring national park, communities are benefiting a lot. I am now able to feed my family, and my children are going to school,” the 46-year-old father of five said.

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The media could play a vital role in the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) a webinar on the media and SDGs heard. Credit: Juliet Morrison/IPS

By Juliet Morrison
New York, Jul 20 2022 (IPS)

With the latest United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Report revealing that much progress toward the SDGs has been reversed, the UN has focused on how to amplify the goals and hold member states accountable for tackling them amid current crises.

A webinar in July 2022 on the power of the media for achieving the SDGs sought to answer these questions. Organized by the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), the forum featured a discussion about best practices for covering SDG topics and ensuring coverage of global issues resonated with local audiences.

UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) President Colleen Vixen Kelapile stressed that the media plays a pivotal role in tackling the goals.

“The media industry is a vital stakeholder in achieving the SDGs. It is key in promoting solidarity and reinforcing accountability from the global leaders so that they take the necessary bold decisions to realize the transformation we urgently need,” he said.

But getting the message across effectively to the public requires making policy concepts accessible to readers, Steve Herman, Voice of America (VOA) Chief National Correspondent, said. He noted that policy could often be relayed in high language, which can be difficult to understand without prior knowledge of the issue.

“We cannot just pare at all these acronyms that are used by the United Nations and other agencies. […] What we need to do is relate the story to people’s lives,” he said.

Former BBC News Science Editor David Shukman asserted that journalists need to be innovative when writing to ensure that concepts are understandable to the public.

“The whole sustainability agenda is cursed with appalling terminology. So, there’s a premium of finding ways of stripping that up,” he said.

Audiences need to understand the implications of complex concepts involved in measuring SDGs. By making these accessible, like with a football field deforestation analogy, they will resonate with audiences. Credit: Unsplash

He pointed to his football pitch analogy as a tactic that has helped people understand the severity of deforestation rates.

The football field analogy represents the average amount of Amazon rainforest destroyed every minute. In 2019, the rate was three football fields.

Metaphorical devices like the football pitch are useful because the reader can better contextualize the situation and make sense of it, Shukman noted.

Comparisons are also helpful for comprehending the scale of crises. Large numbers alone are hard for human brains to grasp.

“By making connections and by using language that resonates, the message does get through,” he said.

Incorporating more connections and context should also apply to international stories, Angelina Kariakina, Head of News of Ukraine’s public broadcaster UA: PBC.

When reporting on foreign events, she stressed that journalists should consider how their native region will be impacted. This can improve public understanding of the scale of crises.

“For some countries [the war in Ukraine] is quite far away, but it is our job, the global media, to explain how the global economy works, how we are connected, and what are the risks. I think it is the same challenge in terms of any coverage,” she said.

She pointed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has severely affected the global food supply.

Ukraine provides 10% of the world’s wheat supply and nearly half its sunflower oil. But Russian blockades have cut off access to key ports where Ukraine ships its exports, resulting in the world being cut off from the supply.

The impacts are far-reaching. Food prices have risen significantly, deepening global food insecurity. UN food agencies have warned that 49 million people in 43 different countries are at risk of falling into famine conditions.

“It’s not just a breaking news story in part of Europe,” she said.

Panelists also discussed the need for fresh angles on stories about longstanding global issues, such as climate change or pollution.

Herman mentioned that highlighting the voices of those affected as opposed to experts can be helpful because it resonates with the audience.

“You need to relate it to the individual and tell personal stories. I like to give up the reliance on experts who are sitting behind a desk somewhere. It has much more of an impact if you are on the ground telling these stories with a lens that’s focused on the people that are affected,” he said.

Sharing stories of success or resilience is another way to reframe topics.

By reporting on SDG issues in fresh ways, ECOSOC President mentioned that the media can help propel action toward the goals, which is vital for “humanity’s hope for survival.”

“Journalists can be the inspiration and can inject motivation and energy to scale up efforts in achieving the human prosperity that the world is yearning for,” he said.

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Roberto Savio

By Sebastián Do Rosario and Federico Larsen
ROME, Jul 20 2022 (IPS)

For years, Russia’s relations with the European Union and the United States have been one of the main areas of conflict in the media. Washington and Brussels accuse Moscow of manipulation and disinformation and, after the invasion of Ukraine, decided to close their media outlets to Russian companies.

Excerpts from the Q&A:

Q: What do you think about the way this issue has been handled and what repercussions could it have on the management of the media, especially non-mainstream media such as Inter Press Service (IPS) or OtherNews?

A: Information has always been used by power, both economic and political. Information is, by definition, top-down. Whoever transmits it, whether in print form in newspapers and magazines, or in electronic form on radio and TV, sends it to an audience that cannot intervene in the process. That is why power has always tried to use it.

The Gutenberg era represented by this phenomenon lasted six centuries. Communication, which is a more recent phenomenon and which until now has only been possible with the Internet, is different. Communication is horizontal: I am a receiver, but I can also be a sender. There, power has much more power.

The media that provide information are closer and closer to power, they are no longer a business, and every year they are less and less powerful. And politics today is increasingly oriented towards social media. The most recent example was former US President Donald Trump, who had 80 million followers with Twitter (during his tenure at the White House) and completely gave up control of the media. (Trump was permanently banned from twitter in January 2021, right after he supported the attack on the capitol. So, Trump doesn’t actually have any twitter followers now.).

It must be added, however, that the Internet has been captured by the market, which has eliminated the horizontality we all hailed in the beginning. Today we have moved from the era of Gutenberg to the era of Zuckerberg, and we users are data, not people.

This is of great importance for young people, who today find themselves involved in vertically created turmoil, brought about by search engines, which divide users into affinity groups, thus eliminating dialogue, because when someone from part A meets someone from part B, they clash, end up insulting each other, without listening or sharing. And search engines, in order to keep the user, prioritise what generates the most impact, so that the strangest news ends up taking precedence.

The extreme polarisation of America would not have been possible without social media. Newspapers increasingly focus on events and abandon processes, and international relations cannot be understood without analysing the process in which events take place.

In Nairobi in 1973 there were 75 foreign correspondents; today there are three. No European TV has correspondents in Africa. It is therefore easy for a government to decide to expel correspondents, but it is almost impossible to shut down social networks, even if autocratic governments try to do so. That is why the Russian public knows little about the reality of the war.

But if someone is determined, they can always find a way to overcome censorship, even if it is a skill of the young, the old are not on the Internet and still rely on traditional media.

In Italy, the main daily newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, had the front page for forty days with a nine-column headline dedicated to Ukraine. This was followed by the first twenty pages, all dedicated to Ukraine. The rest of the world had disappeared. And the same happened with most of the European media.

Only with the French elections were newspapers forced to give significant space to Macron and not Zelensky. In this respect, representatives of the quality American press, such as the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have been more balanced. Of course, the longer the war goes on, the more the repetition of events in the media becomes insufficient.

But the European press, like Europe itself, has sided with NATO, and with little argument. In Russia, of course, the press has been an amplifier for the government. The US media, for its part, often at odds with the government on domestic and national issues, tends to support the official foreign policy position. Factors such as national identity, nationalism and a lack of knowledge of international realities in newsrooms come into play.

It was surprising to see the European press become a megaphone of NATO positions. Putin was demonized as was Hitler, and Zelensky praised as a Greek hero. The Russians are portrayed as barbarians killing Minos. There has never been any negative news about Ukrainians, when in war violence and dereliction of ethics are inevitable and unfortunately widespread.

It is as if the Cold War has never ended, and we are ready to accept an escalation that can become scorching hot. GDP has contracted, the cost of living is rising, inflation is on the rise, and so far, there has been no reaction. This is really surprising.

For OtherNews, which is a news service on global issues, it was a very complex challenge. OtherNews represents a new design. The idea is that the non-profit association is owned by the readers, who can become members by paying a modest annual fee of 50 euros.

They elect the board of directors and discuss the editorial line, thus guaranteeing full independence and a pluralistic and inclusive line. There are 12,000 readers, in 82 countries around the world: academics, international civil servants, global civil society activists, etc.

Q: How would you define the role of the media in covering the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?

A: The war in Ukraine is exclusively an affair of the global North. The global South is only a victim of the increase in food, energy and transport. In Africa it has reached 45% of the population. Articles from the North were criticised by readers from the South and vice versa.

OtherNews lost almost 300 readers, almost all from the North, for publishing articles that criticised or questioned the war. I believe that this North-South divide will increase with the explosion of the multipolar world, as the values on which multilateralism was based are disappearing.

An ‘active non-alignment’ could be recreated, which the press in Europe and the US will struggle to understand. The West still believes it is the centre of the world, the United States in particular.

But today, mainly because of the need to prioritise national interests over international cooperation, a path opened by (former President Ronald) Reagan and (former British Prime Minister Margaret) Thatcher in 1981, we have moved from a multilateral to a multipolar world. In the Bush junior era, neo-conservatives preached the arrival of an American century, that the US should remain the dominant power. Since then, the US has lost in every conflict it has been involved in, from Iraq to Afghanistan.

And Trump took the logic of the end of multilateralism to the extreme, advising all countries to put their own interests first. Today the result is that the multipolar world is not based on the idea of international cooperation for peace and development, but on the most brutal competition.

And Biden now wants to revive multilateralism. But it is too late. Biden will lose the mid-term elections in November and become a lame duck, with a Congress of Trumpist Republicans vetoing everything. And in 2024 Trump is likely to return, and this whole NATO boom will go into deep crisis. But until November, if the war does not escalate and remain as it is, the European press will basically keep the war helmet on.

Q: After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the identity of the international blocs seems to have reconfigured: on the one hand, the United States and the European Union, which defend the liberal tradition, have drawn a very wide dividing line, at home and abroad, between ‘pro-Russian’ and ‘pro-democratic’; on the other hand, Russia, China and their allies are considered ‘illiberal’. What do you think of this construction and what can it lead to in the future?

A: This vision of a world divided into two blocs, China and Russia on one side and liberal democracies, Europe and the United States, on the other, is an easy illusion to see. In this multipolar world, countries stand alone.

A good example is Turkey, which is part of NATO, but does not participate in the embargo against Russia and is very close to China. Or India, which continues to buy Russian arms, is on China’s New Silk Road, but does not want any problems with the US. Indonesia, which has always been a loyal US ally, continues to maintain Putin’s participation in G20 despite US protests.

And also in Europe: Hungary and Poland are openly defying Brussels, splitting into a pro-NATO Poland and a pro-Russia Hungary. Saudi Arabia, Washington’s great ally, ignores Biden’s request to increase oil production, despite having been invited to the summit of democratic countries convened by Biden. This homogeneous bloc of liberal countries is a good marketing slogan, but it crumbles at the slightest analysis.

Q: How do you see the impact of US domestic political polarisation on the international scene? Why?

A: The Cold War was a confrontation between two political and ideological visions that clashed in a proxy war. America is no longer Kennedy’s America and it is no longer Obama’s America. It is a country where political polarisation has reached unprecedented extremes. In 1980, 12% of Democrats and 15% of Republicans told the Pew Institute that they would not want their daughter to marry a man of the other party. Today it is 91% of Democrats and 96% of Republicans.

And the US Supreme Court is already part of this polarisation. 72% of Republicans believe Trump was a victim of electoral fraud. And the crowd that stormed the Capitol is described by the Republican Party as a ‘display of political opinion’. Is this the exemplary leader of democracy’s fight against the world’s dictators? And we are only at the beginning of a process of radicalisation.

Right-wing states, with the endorsement of the Supreme Court, are banning abortion, reducing social protections, minority voting power and changing schoolbooks. With the return of Trump, or Trumpism, in two years the coexistence between the two camps will become even more difficult and few will see America as the beacon of the free world. And that won’t matter much to Trump either.

Q: What lessons do you see for Latin America, both politically and economically, after Donald Trump’s four years in office? And for Europe?

A: My opinion is that there will be great chaos in international relations, with a growing power struggle between the United States and China, with Russia, which we had the intelligence to push into Beijing’s arms. Of course, this struggle will be disguised as something political, but in reality, it will be a pure struggle for economic and military hegemony.

It is a fight that the US cannot win. And China is a self-referential country that has never left its borders and has built walls to keep the enemy out. While the US has exploited its soft power, its music, food, clothing, sports and lifestyle, China has little interest in this kind of imperialism.

I have been going to China since 1958 and have always been struck by how little they care to make a foreigner understand Chinese culture. But there are tens of thousands of Chinese students studying abroad, while the same cannot be said of Americans. The two countries are two big islands, which consider themselves surrounded by inferior nations.

Latin America has always been considered a second-rate region by the US, despite many declarations, and I doubt that China sees the region beyond its raw materials and Latin Americans beyond its buyers.

My opinion, especially in light of Trump’s experience, is that Latin America should adopt a policy of active non-alignment, declaring that it will not get involved in a proxy war that is not in its interest, and that it will do exactly what the multipolar dynamic advises: put its interests as a region first.

This would give it greater consideration and weight in international negotiations, and a clear advantage in a world divided by the New Cold War that is brewing. A war that, unlike the current NATO war against Russia, cannot be military, because it would mean the destruction of the planet. Of course, history and the present do not help to have great faith in the intelligence of power.

The big problem is that Latin America continues to be a continent divided by the inability to leave behind the experience of its ancestors. It is the most homogeneous region in the world, much more so than Asia and Africa, and in some ways more so than Europe and the United States, since the latter are experiencing a real disintegration.

However, the Latin American integration process has been an optical illusion. Latin America is a region of permanent political experimentation, which has stifled any economic logic due to the rivalry between successive presidents, between whom there is a constant change of compass.

I fear that instead of putting up a united front in the face of the next cold war, they will allow themselves to be bought off individually, convinced that they are doing what is best for their country. The only thing that can change the situation is a great popular movement. But this has always been directed at global issues, such as women or the environment, and of course at national issues: never at regional issues.

And in the press, the issue of integration has at best been relegated to its bureaucratic aspects, to the various bodies that have sprung up and failed in modern times. So, in my opinion, I don’t think we have learnt a real lesson from what has happened in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall to express an inclusive regional policy, with a strong identity, and which places us as important players in the inter-national arena of this century.

Sebastián Do Rosario and Federico Larsen are researchers at the Institute for International Relations of Mar del Plata, Argentina. The interview was first published in the newsletter of the Institute.

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Excerpt:

Interview with Roberto Savio by Sebastián Do Rosario and Federico Larsen

Scene from the racial justice—Black Lives Matter -- protests in Washington, DC following the death of a Black man named George Floyd during a violent police encounter in Minnesota, USA. Credit: Amnesty International, Alli Jarrar

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 20 2022 (IPS)

The French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), once famously remarked: “I disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend unto death, your right to utter them.”

But that political axiom hardly applies to multiple governments in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America—including Greece, UK, Thailand, Hong Kong, India, Myanmar, Chile, France, Democratic Republic of Congo and Cyprus – where the right to protest, along with freedom of speech, are increasingly in jeopardy.

The government clamp down– on free speech and right to protest– has also taken place in Sudan, Belarus, Turkey and Colombia.

The London-based human rights organization, Amnesty International (AI), says protesters across the globe are facing a potent mix of pushbacks, with a growing number of laws and other measures to restrict the right to protest; the misuse of force, the expansion of unlawful mass and targeted surveillance; internet shutdowns and online censorship; and abuse and stigmatization.

AI says the right to protest is “under unprecedented and growing threat across all regions of the world”, as the organization launched a new global campaign to confront states’ widening and intensifying efforts to erode this fundamental human right.

According to AI, “from Russia to Sri Lanka, France to Senegal, and Iran to Nicaragua, state authorities are implementing an expanding array of measures to suppress organized dissent.”

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said that in recent years “we have seen some of the biggest protest mobilizations for decades”.

She pointed out that Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and the climate change movements have inspired millions the world over to take to the streets and online to demand racial and climate justice, equity and livelihoods, and an end to gender violence and discrimination.

Elsewhere, she said, people have stood up in their thousands against police violence and killings, state repression and oppression.

Asked for a response, Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, told IPS major political transformations in history have been catalysed through protest.

“Sustained mass mobilisations have resulted in significant rights victories including expansion of women’s right to vote, decolonization in the Global South, passing of essential civil rights laws, dismantling of military dictatorships, victory over apartheid, legalisation of same-sex marriage, recognition of the climate emergency and much more,” he said.

“Exercise of the right to peaceful protest is powerful check on high level corruption, abuse by the powerful and authoritarianism. Yet, because of this it remains a much abused and much reviled by right by anti-democratic forces,” declared Tiwana.

Over the past year, according to the latest CIVICUS Monitor, civil society across the world has faced a variety of legal and extra-legal restrictions as captured in the Monitor.

The CIVICUS Monitor currently rates 39 countries and territories as Open, 41 rated as Narrowed, 42 rated as Obstructed, 50 rated as Repressed and 25 rated as Closed.

Andreas Bummel, Executive Director, Democracy Without Borders, told IPS the ability to express dissent and discontent through peaceful protest is a fundamental human right and a key component of democracy.

“Restricting and denying this democratic right is plain wrong. This new campaign is important and comes at the right time,” he said.

Spelling out the outcomes of the recently-concluded 50th Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the US State Department said the United States co-sponsored a resolution on “the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of peaceful protests”.

This resolution urged member states “to facilitate peaceful protests by providing protesters with access to public space within sight and sound of their intended target audience and to promote a safe and enabling environment for individuals to exercise their rights to freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association– both online and offline.”

AI says its “Protect the Protest” campaign is aimed at challenging attacks on peaceful protest, stand with those targeted and support the causes of social movements pushing for human rights change.

“Almost without exception, this wave of mass protest has been met with obstructive, repressive and often violent responses by state authorities. Instead of facilitating the right to protest, governments are going to ever greater lengths to quash it”.

“This is why, as the world’s biggest human rights organisation, we have chosen this moment to launch this campaign. It’s time to stand up and loudly remind those in power of our inalienable right to protest, to express grievances, and to demand change freely, collectively and publicly,” said AI in a statement released July 19

A range of issues including the environmental crisis, growing inequality and threats to livelihoods, systemic racism and gender-based violence have made collective action ever more necessary. Governments have responded by introducing legislation imposing illegitimate restrictions on the right to protest.

For example, says AI, “we have seen blanket bans on protests, as seen in Greece and Cyprus during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, a new law contains provisions providing police officers with wide-ranging powers, including the ability to ban ‘noisy protests’, while in Senegal, political demonstrations in the centre of Dakar have been banned since 2011, precluding protests near government buildings”.

Governments of all kinds are also increasingly using emergency powers as a pretext to clamp down on dissent. This was seen at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in countries including Thailand, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a government-imposed ‘state of siege’ has provided military and police officers with extensive powers to restrict protest in the provinces of Ituri and North Kivu since May 2021.

“Governments across the world are justifying restrictions by arguing that protest constitutes a threat to public order and by stigmatizing protesters, branding them “troublemakers”, “rioters”, or even “terrorists”. By casting protesters in this light, authorities have justified zero-tolerance approaches: introducing and misusing vague and draconian security laws, deploying heavy handed policing, and taking pre-emptive deterrent measures.”

This approach was witnessed in Hong Kong, where the National Security Law and its expansive definition of “national security” have been used arbitrarily, among other things, to restrict protest.

And, in India, the anti-terror Unlawful Prevention (Activities) Act (UAPA) and the crime of “sedition”, have been used repeatedly against peaceful protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders.

While governments have long relied on aggressive tactics to police protests, security forces have increased the amount of force they use in recent years.

AI said so-called less lethal weapons, including batons, pepper spray, tear gas, stun grenades, water cannons, and rubber bullets are routinely misused by security forces.

And, since the early 2000s, AI has documented a trend towards the militarisation of state responses to protests, including the use of armed forces and military equipment.

In countries including Chile and France security forces in full riot gear are often backed by armoured vehicles, military-grade aircraft, surveillance drones, guns and assault weapons, stun grenades and sound cannons.

During the mass uprising that followed the 2021 coup in Myanmar, the military used unlawful lethal force against peaceful protesters. More than 2,000 people have been killed, according to monitors, and more than 13,000 arrested since the military seized power.

“People who face inequality and discrimination, whether based on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age, disability, occupation, social, economic or migratory status are also more affected by restrictions on their right to protest and face harsher repression”, according to AI.

For example, women, LGBTI and gender-non-conforming people are facing different types of gender-based violence, marginalization, social norms and legislation.

In countries including Sudan, Colombia and Belarus, women have been sexually assaulted for participating in protests, while in Turkey, for example, Pride marches have been banned for years.

“Our campaign comes at a critical juncture. The precious right to protest is being eroded at a terrifying pace, and we must do all we can to push back,” said Callamard.

“Countless protesters have been killed in recent years, and it is partly on their behalf that we must now raise our own voices and defend our right to speak truth to power through protests in the streets and online.”

Footnote: The briefing, Protect the Protest!: Why we must save our right to protest, is available here.

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