Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Nora McKeon
ROME, Oct 19 2021 (IPS)

‘COVID 19 has multiplied hunger and malnutrition challenges. We need transformative action!’ The first speaker at the UN Committee on World Food Security’s (CFS) 49th Plenary Session, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, turned the spotlight on the disastrous impacts of the pandemic that have afflicted communities around the world for close to two years.

Nora McKeon

He was echoed by the presenter of the 2021 edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World for whom ‘COVID is only the tip of the iceberg’, while keynote speaker, Jeffry Sachs, emphasized the multifaceted nature of the crisis, with chronic poverty and conflict at the center.

Delegation after delegation took the virtual floor to share their concerns: Kenya speaking for the Africa Group, Colombia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Norway, Morocco, Peru, Spain, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia, Mali, Cape Verde, South Africa, Uganda, Saint Lucia and more. The impacts of Covid 19 on food security and nutrition are heavy and lasting. The vulnerable are the most effected, within and between countries. Covid has deepened and exacerbated existing structural fragilities and injustices in our food systems. Its causes are multisectoral and cannot be treated in a siloed way.

‘Multilateralism, solidarity and cooperation are key to the way forward’, the President of ECOSOC added, and ‘the CFS is a unique multilateral forum because it brings all the actors together in the name of the right to food’. The text adopted at the end of Day 1 summarized all of these contributions, and deepened concern by drawing attention to the possibility of recurrent pandemics.

With this kind of an opening one could have expected a standing ovation when it was proposed, the following day, that the CFS put together a globally coordinated policy response to the impacts of COVID 19 on food security and nutrition and a proposed precautionary approach towards possible future shocks of this kind.

This proposal was a long time in the building. For a year and a half the CFS’s Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM) had been documenting the experience and proposals of its constituencies and communities and bringing this evidence from the ground into the global debate. Earlier this year an informal ‘Group of Committed’ governments and other CFS participants had come together to push for the CFS to take determined action. How could it fail to live up to its mandate in the face of the most serious threat to global food security the world has faced since the 2007-2008 food crisis?

Just a week before CFS49 the Group of Committed had held a seminar where evidence and proposals for global policy action were presented by national governments, regional and local authorities, small-scale food producers, the urban food insecure, along with UN agencies, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and the CFS’s own High-Level Panel of Experts.

The seminar demonstrated that action is being taken by different actors and authorities at local, national and regional levels, while UN agencies have developed and adopted relevant policy instruments and programmes in their respective sectors. What has been missing thus far is a way of putting the different perspectives and initiatives together into a multisectoral, multilaterally coordinated approach. Filling this gap was the proposal that was put on the table in CFS49.

‘We need a globally coherent and coordinated response to support governments’ efforts and the CFS is the appropriate place for this to happen,’ the Ambassador of Mali had exhorted in his opening address.

So what about the standing ovation? The proposal was supported by countries from the Global South led by African countries, the most affected by injustice in access to vaccines, dependency on food imports, and indebtedness, but including also Mexico, Peru, Morocco, the CSM and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. ‘This is the place to deal with COVID!’ he said. ‘It is the priority food issue today. It wasn’t addressed by the UN Food Systems Summit. The CFS has the mandate and the tools, and the other UN agencies are highly committed to cooperate.’

But, incredibly and unacceptably, the proposal did not pass. It was blocked on specious, procedural grounds by a steamroller coalition of big commodity exporters who push back on any possible limitation that might be placed on global trade in the name of human rights, equity, environmental concerns: the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Russia. The EU, shamefully, was silent.

The implications for inclusive multilateralism, democracy, the needed radical transformation of our food systems are severe. ‘A key barrier to transformation is interference from corporations,’ stated the delegate of Mexico. ‘Governments need to assume their role as agents of change, regulators of food systems, and protectors of the planet, but we can’t do it alone. Global attention is needed and the CFS is the right place for it.’

But The CFS is being held hostage. The arrogance with which a few are ignoring reality, evidence and urgency is leading to an unacceptable increase in the violation of the human rights of the many. Patience is wearing thin. ‘If I’m in this room it’s to honor the concerns of those most affected in my region,’ a member of the Group of Committed asserted in the aftermath of the session.

And the people of her region, along with others from around the world, are raising their voices ever more loudly, as in the counter mobilization to transform corporate food systems organized last July in parallel to the Pre-Summit of the UNFSS [hyperlink]. Radical food system transformation is being built from the ground up and the CFS, however handicapped, is the most resounding global echo chamber for people’s claims.

 

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The IMF and G20 concluded their Annual Meetings without real solutions to debt crises, fiscal austerity and financing shortfalls across the Global South. Credit: hrw.org

By Bhumika Muchhala
NEW YORK, Oct 19 2021 (IPS)

Last week’s annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and G20 finance ministers illustrated that despite a historic debt crisis sweeping across developing countries and their urgent need for external financing for health and economic recovery, global economic institutions governed by rich countries do not possess the political will to deliver meaningful solutions. The inadequacy of the G20’s debt relief framework, which has failed to restructure sovereign debt since its inception, stands without change or any fresh effort to mobilize private sector participation in debt relief.

Despite the broad call to recycle SDRs from rich to poor countries, the few countries that made commitments to do so are employing a conditional loan mechanism which will further drive fiscal consolidation measures in low-income countries.

Deprived of the policy independence and vaccines that allow advanced economies to enact massive fiscal stimulus programs and open their economies, many developing countries are facing a cycle of deflation and despair.

The IMF’s flagship World Economic Outlook (WEO) confirms the entrenchment of global divergence between North and South by reporting that developed countries will return to pre-crisis growth projections in 2022 while developing countries’ recovery will stretch to 2024, in a journey marked by “permanent economic scarring and revenue losses” for the South.

The WEO concludes that unemployment is a major driver of this gap and unemployment rates would be persistently higher if trouble with vaccinations leads to COVID-19 becoming ‘endemic.’

A brand new (and conditional) loan to recycle SDRs?

In the months preceding the largest ever allocation of $650 billion SDRs was issued by the IMF on August 23, a momentum to recycle SDRs from rich to poor countries was generated by a broad range of actors, including the UN, governments and civil society.

A milestone was achieved when G7 leaders committed to voluntarily channel $100 billion of their unused SDRs. Despite this amount falling short of the IMF’s own conservative estimate of the $200 billion financing shortfall in low-income countries between 2021 and 2025, the move was welcomed in light of the unequal distribution of SDRs based on IMF members’ quotas, where over 60% (or $400 billion) of the SDRs go to developed countries.

After France announced it will channel 20% of its SDR allocation to African countries, with a focus on vaccine donations, all eyes were on the Annual Meetings for announcements by other rich countries.

In a virtual panel last week, IMF Managing Director Kristina Georgieva said that the “100 billion number is very achievable,” alluding to several countries who had stated, but not yet committed exact amounts, their intentions to channel SDRs. Given the urgency of fiscal space and external financing across developing countries, more details were expected.

The Fund was tasked by the G20, G7 and IMF membership to design a mechanism to recycle the funds. In response, the IMF proposed two key pathways, that of scaling up the long-standing Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) concessional loan facility for low-income countries and establishing a new Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RST) that would be accessible to middle-income countries.

While both proposals were accepted by the G20 and the G24 group of developing countries in the IMF, years of critique looms over the PRGT for its fiscal consolidation conditions, including by the Fund itself. Empirical research has long illustrated how the PRGT shrinks public expenditure for indispensable social services and employees in health and education and promote regressive taxation measures that disproportionately hurt women and low-income communities.

Meanwhile, the RST, which is still being formulated and will be presented for approval to the Fund’s Board in 2022, is the first loan facility to address balance of payment risks stemming from climate change and pandemics, featuring conditionality related to climate or pandemic preparedness designed and monitored in coordination with the World Bank.

There are three key concerns that already emerge in the little that is currently published or known of the Fund’s design of the RST. First, access to the RST will be contingent on having a conditional IMF loan program already in place. According to one of the only published sources on the RST, it would likely ‘top up’ a regular IMF loan program.

Second, while many in the international community have asked the IMF to support countries with climate transition risks, including financing for a just transition, the RST should not be counted as climate finance. The latter is direct budget support for climate mitigation and adaptation, while the RST addresses budget distortions that may arise from climate change.

Third, it remains to be seen whether the RST’s stated objective of catalyzing private and other multilateral financing will involve creating an enabling environment for the vested interests of private finance in creating investible climate-oriented schemes that yield more for profit than for people.

In a letter to G20 finance officials and the IMF, over 280 civil society organizations and networks, including researchers and academics, called for a set of principles to govern the fair channeling of SDRs to developing countries.

These principles include, for example, attachment of policy conditionality, accrual of more debt, avoiding the double-counting of SDRs as aid, and ensuring access for middle-income countries that are often excluded from multilateral schemes.

The letter stresses the importance of recycling SDRs through grant funding that facilitates budget support for public services and a fair recovery that supports climate justice, and tackles economic and gender inequality, including the unpaid care burden that women bear, and the pandemic exacerbated.

A critical opportunity to progressively alter the basic tenets of development financing in the current global financial architecture has been missed by the Fund and its rich country members.

G20 fails to address record high debt distress

As the G20’s wholly inadequate debt moratorium concludes at the end of 2021, the World Bank reports that the debt burden of low-income countries rose to a record $860 billion and half of the world’s poorest countries are in external debt distress as a result of the pandemic. And yet, the G20’s finance ministers again fail to advance real debt solutions such as debt relief, debt cancellation and fair restructuring mechanisms for countries requesting debt reduction.

Indeed, no new relief scheme or possibility of a debt standstill was announced by the G20 finance minister’s communiqué, even with the imminent closure of its Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI).

Meanwhile, the G20 proved once again their lack of power to increase private sector creditor participation in debt reduction initiatives beyond mere reaffirmations. At the Spring Meetings in April 2021, Mohamed El-Erian, President of Queens’ College, Cambridge and Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz, said at a webinar that the Paris Club process of case-by-case debt treatments is “not enough to overcome coordination problems in the private sector; the Paris Club needs to impose more of a stick for the private sector.”

The inability to regulate the private sector into debt relief participation alludes to how the ‘chutzpah‘ of bondholders is a direct outcome of the way G20 leaders and their central banks have nurtured private finance to become so powerful that they now find themselves unable to curtail its might.

The Jubilee Debt Coalition stated in their press release that the G20 are asleep at the wheel as the debt crisis intensifies in low-income countries, pointing out that the DSSI has suspended less than a quarter of debt payments, while the G20’s Common Framework for Debt Treatments (CF) has restructured no debt.

In particular, private creditors received the largest amount of debt payments, $14.9 billion, and suspended just 0.2% of debt payments. In early 2021, Chad, Ethiopia and Zambia applied to the CF for debt restructuring. So far, none have been successful, in large part due to private lenders refusal to take part in debt reductions.

Meanwhile, the current rise in global interest rates will increase the cost of debt servicing, worsening debt crises and preventing indebted countries from both economic and health recovery.

In response to the wave of debt distress sweeping across the South, the UN Conference on Trade and Development has called for substantive debt relief and outright cancellation. The counterfactual, they state, is another lost decade for development marked by developing countries using their vital public finances for debt payments rather than investing in pandemic and economic recovery.

Even the Fund’s Fiscal Monitor report highlights limitations of the international debt architecture to support orderly restructurings as a core risk for global pandemic recovery.

In stark contrast to the G20, several developing countries at the 76th UN General Assembly in September called for debt cancellation, comprehensive debt restructuring and debt relief linked to middle-income countries or to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Small island and developing states called for debt relief in the context of a new vulnerability index for the provision of multilateral support. Against these segmented scales of political and economic power, a democratization of decision-making in the global debt architecture is increasingly urgent.

As long as the multilateral response to the debt crisis generated by the economic fallout of the pandemic is governed by creditor countries, the decades old imperative to establish a debt workout mechanism capable of carrying out timely and fair restructuring, including debt cancellation, will remain elusive.

Fiscal austerity continues to exacerbate global inequalities

In Georgieva’s policy agenda last week, she underscored that health spending is a priority and that where fiscal space is limited, “lifelines should be increasingly targeted toward the most vulnerable groups.” However, in her institution’s Fiscal Monitor, an explicit priority is placed on reducing deficit and debt levels, “undertaking structural fiscal reforms (such as pension or subsidies reform) … and committing to fiscal rules that lead to deficit reduction in the future.”

The IMF’s historical preoccupation with fiscal consolidation is a reflection of capital market and investor reasoning, in which the only path to securing access to low-cost borrowing for most developing countries is “strengthening the credibility of their fiscal policy.”

Embedded within a financial architecture shaped by a short-term and speculative logic, and pro-austerity bias, the South’s public budgets are subject to private interests that are in diametric opposition to equitable and rights-based development.

Consequently, the priority of securing the confidence of creditors is illustrated by Oxfam’s finding that out of 107 IMF loans, 90 require fiscal consolidation measures across 73 countries. Instead of facilitating public investment in health, education and social protection systems, medium-term policy advice in the loans cut and freeze public wage bills, through which public employees are financed, and increase or expand value-added and general sales taxes.

As UNCTAD puts it, unless the autonomy and impunity enjoyed by global finance is seriously regulated, the potential of fiscal policy to play a structural role in sustained decent work creation and pursuing the right to equitable development is rendered defunct.

Deepening inequality and poverty across the South is a direct result of the failure of effective multilateralism. Between 65 and 75 million people have been thrown into poverty, the gap between the top 10% and bottom 80% mushrooms, and achieving the SDGs by 2030 is rendered close to fantasy in many developing countries.

Women have been dealt the most unequal hand, experiencing at least $800 billion in lost income globally in 2020 while low-wage informal work and unpaid care work has increased beyond measure.

Ultimately, the principles of historical responsibility, distributive justice and interdependency of recovery must guide the centers of financial and economic clout to support rather than hinder health and economic recovery for the most vulnerable regions of the South.

Tinkering on the technocratic smokescreens of power and resource asymmetries created by centuries of colonial history, and more recently by four decades of neoliberalism that has institutionalized a pathologically unequal financialized world economy, will no longer suffice. Structural change is indispensable, precisely because the counterfactual may well be a lost decade for the vast majority of the human race.

Bhumika Muchhala is Senior Researcher and Policy Advocate on Global Economic Governance at the Third World Network.

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 19 2021 (IPS)

The bogey of inflation has been revived. Dubious pre-pandemic economic progress, fiscal constraints and vaccine apartheid were bad enough. Now, ostensibly anti-inflationary measures also threaten recovery and sustainable development.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised downwards its latest global growth forecast. Its latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) warns of a “dangerous divergence” between richer and poorer countries. This has been exacerbated by, but has also worsened national fiscal disparities and the ‘great vaccine divide’.

Anis Chowdhury

Inflation bogey revived
Meanwhile, there is growing talk of ‘stagflation’ – of rising inflation with slow growth and high unemployment, as in the 1970s. Meanwhile, The Economist warns of harmful “wage-price spirals” aggravating vicious circles of rising inflation and wage demands.

But over 70%, or 152 of 209 economists polled believe rising inflation worldwide is due to temporary supply chain disruptions. Heads of major central banks – such as the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank – concur.

Although the IMF agrees, it also urges policymakers to “be on the lookout and be prepared to act, especially if…prolonged supply disruptions, rising commodity and housing prices, permanent and unfunded fiscal commitments, a de-anchoring of expectations, combined with mismeasurement of output gaps [materialise]”.

The IMF’s October 2021 Fiscal Monitor urges governments to take all steps necessary to regain capital markets’ and lenders’ confidence, including by reducing budget deficits. But it also warns against ‘self-defeating’, premature phasing-out of needed recovery measures. Thus, the ‘two-handed’ IMF economists offer contradictory policy guidance.

Wrong diagnosis
But inflation is unlikely to persist. First, labour market deregulation since the 1980s has long eroded workers’ bargaining power. Hence, workers are now more worried about job security, badly eroded in recent decades.

Second, ‘decent’ job creation remains weak in most rich countries after decades of ‘off-shoring’ and labour-saving innovation. Unsurprisingly then, labour shares of national income have been falling since the mid-1970s.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

While jobs typically trail recovery, the current lag is “more severe” than before, notes the IMF. Across the world, labour force participation and employment remain well below pre-pandemic levels, particularly for youth.

The WEO notes private investment fell in 2021’s second quarter, with several new uncertainties responsible. Slower investment and growth also mean less tax revenue and higher debt-GDP ratios. Cutting spending will only make things worse.

Correct diagnosis should be the basis for choice of medication. Contrary to monetarist faith, inflation is not only due to excess money supply. But if supplies are blocked – e.g., due to disasters, conflicts, curfews or transport restrictions – demand easily becomes ‘excessive’.

Inflation is often also due to big suppliers abusing their market power, with powerful firms raising prices with higher ‘mark-ups’. Privatization and deregulation over the last four decades have strengthened these monopolies or oligopolies.

Blunt instrument
The WEO seems more concerned with inflation than employment as financial markets demand monetary tightening, interest rate hikes and fiscal austerity. Bloomberg has urged emerging economies to “brace for rate hikes”, with Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia and others obliging, as The Economist anticipated.

The interest rate is a blunt tool. Inflation is reduced by raising interest rates, cutting growth and increasing unemployment – “tough medicine” indeed. Hawks emphasize how inflation erodes the poor’s purchasing power, but deny their prescriptions do worse.

One must also wonder how interest rate hikes are supposed to address actual problems. For example, in September 2021, global food prices shot up nearly 33% year-on-year, due to extreme weather and pandemic restrictions. Higher rates also certainly could not help when a severe drought hit hydroelectric power generation in Brazil.

Higher interest rates squeeze both private and government spending. Thus, rate hikes will likely trigger a vicious circle of further rate increases and general austerity, slowing recovery and raising debt-GDP ratios.

Raising interest rates in rich countries will also see more capital flight from developing countries and exchange rate depreciations. Already handicapped by vaccine inequity and constrained fiscal space, worsened by modest debt relief and pandemic support from rich countries, raising interest rates will set them further back.

Debt misconstrued
Rising debt levels have understandably been an on-going concern. In 2019, the World Bank warned that post-2008 global financial crisis (GFC) indebtedness was dangerous, noting all previous debt waves had ended in crises.

With the pandemic, fears have been “looming” again of “catastrophic” debt crises in developing countries. As if governments had much choice, the Wall Street Journal warned, “Governments world-wide gorge on record debt, testing new limits”.

The IMF’s October Fiscal Monitor acknowledges, “there is no magic number for the debt target. Macroeconomic theory does not prescribe a specific debt target; nor is there a clear threshold above which debt might become particularly harmful to economic growth”. This confirms earlier IMF and World Bank findings suggesting exaggeration of debt constraints.

Rather, the focus should be on “the likely growth effects of the level, composition and efficiency of public spending and taxation”. Instead of fixating on overall debt levels, its composition – domestic vs external, public vs publicly guaranteed – deserves more attention.

In fact, debt-financed infrastructure, education, skill development and retraining programmes all enhance growth. IMF research found such infrastructure investment had large growth effects without even raising the debt-GDP ratio.

Deep-seated challenges
The predictable recommendation is ‘belt-tightening’ – via ‘austerity’ and ‘higher interest rates’ – bringing even more economic contraction. Typical structural reform prescriptions – e.g., more labour market liberalization, deregulation, privatization and tax cuts – only make things worse, while regressive tax cuts rarely generate promised growth.

Financialization in recent decades has encouraged more speculation, share buybacks, real property, mergers and acquisitions. Consequently, the real economy has suffered, with inflation rising as productivity growth falters.

But inflation was kept in check by cheap imports and cheaper labour, even as profit margins and executive salaries rose. But neoliberals have not hesitated to claim credit for taming inflation during the Great Moderation via fiscal austerity, debt ceilings and inflation targeting.

Despite fiscal austerity, debt has risen, especially since the GFC. Slower growth has also meant less revenue, further reducing fiscal space. Public investment cuts – particularly for services, infrastructure, research and development – have also hurt productivity growth.

Build forward, not backwards
Every economic crisis is different in its own way. The COVID-19 recession involves both supply and demand shocks. Output has fallen due to lockdowns and value chain disruptions. Demand has also declined with lower incomes, less spending, more jobs lost and greater uncertainty.

When provided, relief measures have sustained some demand. Pandemic restrictions have accelerated digitalization, but other changes are also needed. Reforms must build on COVID-19 transformations for a better future , e.g., by promoting job-intensive green investments, worker reskilling and retraining.

The COVID recession thus offers an unexpected opportunity to ‘build forward better’ to address deep-seated problems to build a better world. This must necessarily involve shedding biased and dysfunctional arrangements, managing markets, guiding private investments, workforce retraining and investing in education, health and social protection.

 

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By Khondaker Golam Moazzem and Abdullah Fahad
Oct 18 2021 (IPS-Partners)

The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) is following the developments of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26. Being one of the major climate-vulnerable countries, Bangladesh is a major party to this international conference. The CPD Power and Energy Study will publish a series of articles on key climate change-related issues highlighting the contexts, main debates and their impact and implications for Bangladesh. Articles will be published in The Daily Star every week till the middle of December 2021.

The 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) is just 15 days away. The COP26 secretariat, the UK and Italian government and governments of the participating countries are finalising their last days of preparation before meeting in Glasgow, UK from October 31 to November 12.

The major point of discussion now is: Will countries reach an agreement on three key issues? (a) phasing out of coal, (b) scaling up nationally determined contributions (NDCs); and (c) raising financing for adaptation.

Different parties and bodies related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and, more specifically with the COP26, such as supreme bodies, subsidiary bodies, constituted bodies, funds and financial entities, ad-hoc working groups and non-party stakeholders, are now busy with dealing with issues.

Different party groups are taking preparation for the COP26, including developing country parties, the African Group, the Arab States, the Environmental Integrity Group, the European Union, the Least Developed Countries, the Small Island Developing States, the Umbrella Group, the OPEC countries, the CACAM, the Cartagena Dialogue, and the BASIC Group, which includes India and China. These groups have diverse offensive and defensive interests which need to be lessened to reach a consensus during the conference.

Global climate debates around COP26

Reaching consensus in the three key debating issues is the most difficult and complex process. First, countries need to agree to phase out coal by 2030 (developed countries) and 2040 (developing countries), abandoning fossil-fueled internal combustion engines.

There is a global call for saying no to any new coal-fired power plants and to join “Powering Past Coal Alliance”. The global coal-based power generation was 2,044,831 MW in 2019, of which 405,205 MW (19.8 per cent) is generated in developed countries and 80.2 per cent in developing countries. Currently, many coal power plants are under construction, which adds up to a capacity of 184,503 MW.

China, one of the biggest global investors of coal power plants, has recently announced that it would no longer invest in new coal power plants abroad. Such an announcement is highly appreciated. However, reaching the target of no-coal in developing countries by 2040, China needs a more aggressive commitment to its domestic use of coal.

Similar commitment will be required from India, with 228,964 MW of coal-based power generation capacity in 2019, for domestic and foreign-based power plants. Developed countries such as the US (246,187 MW), the EU and Japan and developing countries such as Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam need to commit to reducing coal-fired power plants.

Second, an ambitious target setting is necessary with a view to keeping 1.5°C within reach by 2050. As of July 30, 2021, 113 out of 191 parties submitted updated NDCs.

Based on the update, emissions are likely to decrease by 12 per cent by 2030, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently identified that we need about a 45 per cent net anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions reduction from 2010 level by 2030 to keep 1.5°C within our reach.

The current level of emissions will lead to an overall increase in the temperature of the planet by 2.7°C by the end of this century, which would be catastrophic. Will the heads of state of major developed and developing countries come forward with an ambitious commitment of targets for the reduction of carbon emission during the COP26?

Third, in the “Copenhagen Accord” adopted at the COP15 in 2009, developed countries promised jointly to mobilise $100 billion to address the needs of the developing countries by 2020. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the mobilised amount was $79.6bn in 2019.

The richest countries are behind in their commitment that needs to be met before the COP26 takes place. The UK has doubled international climate finance commitments, and this kind of initiative may help reach the target of $100bn on climate finance. The commitment made by the private sector on adaptation is highly discouraging, according to the UN Secretary-General – only 0.1 per cent of the total funding for adaptation.

While the Paris Agreement promised poorer countries technical and financial assistance in loss and damage, putting it in practice yet to be decided. The Santiago Network for Loss and Damage was established as part of the Warsaw International Mechanism in 2019. This COP can be the one where we operationalise the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage.

Article 6 of the Paris Agreement provides a foundation for an international carbon market that presents the possibility of trading emission reductions between countries. The challenge is that it may offer a loophole for not investing in emission reduction strategies while meeting the country’s target.

The Paris Rulebook implementation guideline for the Paris Agreement, which was adopted during the COP24 in 2018, with few unresolved issues, need to be finalised and agreed upon by parties. The COP26 is expected to finalise the Paris Rulebook.

Bangladesh in COP26

Bangladesh has a strong interest in the upcoming climate conference.

First, climate vulnerable countries like Bangladesh are already in climate emergency, characterised by more frequent and severe heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts.

As the current Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) presidency, Bangladesh released Climate Vulnerable Manifesto on September 7 following the CVF high-level exchange on the COP26. The manifesto calls for a “Climate Emergency Pact” in rebuilding the confidence in international climate cooperation.

This pact asks every country to enhance its effort on emission reduction to keep 1.5°C goal alive and 50 per cent of the $100bn climate finance to go to adaptation actions in the most vulnerable developing countries.

It is about time the global community acknowledges this by adopting a “Climate Emergency Pact”. Although there was supposed to be a 50:50 balance between climate change mitigation and adaptation actions, only $20.1bn went to climate change adaptation actions from $79.6bn in 2019.

Bangladesh has asked to include a delivery plan for a 50:50 balance between mitigation and adaptation in the pact. In the pre-COP closing plenary statement, Bangladesh emphasised the importance of the “Climate Emergency Pact” and is also looking for a much stronger role for loss and damages at Glasgow.

Second, it is expected that Bangladesh would make a forward-looking commitment to its nationally determined contributions. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, who is going to head the delegate in the COP26, would consider delivering Bangladesh’s energy transition plan, particularly in case of phasing out of remaining coal-based power plants – those which are in operation, under construction and under planning. In this connection, Bangladesh may seek financial and technical support for the early retirement of coal-based power plants through the energy transition council.

The authors are respectively the research director and a senior research associate of the Centre for Policy Dialogue.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari (far right) holds on to the CARICOM’s symbol of the reparatory justice movement, the reparations baton, in Castries, Saint Lucia. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

The Rastafarian organizations in the Caribbean are determined that the issue of slavery reparations will emerge from the eclipse of COVID-19.

As the world deals with the impacts of efforts to contain the virus’ spread and regional governments tackle vaccine hesitancy and a wave of misinformation, issues not directly related to COVID-19 have had to be temporarily shelved.

However, members of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization are determined to keep the movement for slavery reparations in the minds of citizens and on the agenda of policymakers.

“From the time of emancipation in 1834, our ancestors have been clamoring for reparations. Some leaders have taken heed to the calling, some have ignored it, but the Rastafari nation from its inception has been appealing for reparations, and up to today, we are on that platform,” chairperson of the Caribbean Rastafari Organization, Burnet Sealy told IPS.

Sealy is known as Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari – part of a move by members of the Rastafarian faith to change the colonial names given at birth and advance the internal healing aspect of the reparations process.

He is a member of the Reparations Committee of Saint Lucia, one of 15 national reparations organizations in the member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) bloc.

In 2013, the group of nations established the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), a body charged with making the ‘moral, ethical and legal’ argument for reparatory justice for organizations of the Caribbean Community.

The CRC is headed by Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.

“It is the greatest crime ever committed against humanity – a crime whose harm and suffering continue to haunt humanity in this 21st century. A crime that has anchored the 21st century within a legacy of untold human suffering, and there is no carpet in the world that is big enough to brush this under,” Sir Hilary told a Slave Trade Remembrance Day online discussion earlier this year.

The movement for reparations in the Caribbean has risen and waned in the last decade. Changes in administration on some islands, with ensuing shifts in policy directions and budgetary priorities, meant that funding for national committees has also been wavered.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequent limitations on movement and in-person gatherings have added another obstacle to the movement.

However, Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari says that despite the challenges, the Rastafarian movement remains committed to healing from the effects of slavery.

“Reparations Cannot Die,” he told IPS.

“We have been educating the masses on what reparations are all about. People think that reparation is just about money, but we are letting them know that this is not true. Reparations really mean repairing the damage that was done as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, continuing to colonial rule. The damage was done mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, culturally.”

CARICOM, which is home to about 16 million people, has its reparations battle fought as part of a 10-Point Plan. Signed in 2013, the plan calls for:

• A full, formal apology for slavery by the governments of Europe;
• A repatriation program to resettle descendants of the over 10 million Africans who were forcefully transported to the Caribbean;
• An Indigenous Peoples Development Program to begin healing for genocide on the native Caribbean populations;
• The establishment of cultural institutions like museums and research centers;
• A program to remedy the public health crisis includes the African descended population in the Caribbean, which has the highest incidence of hypertension and type 2 diabetes globally. Regional health experts and historians say this is directly related to the ‘nutritional experience, physical and emotional brutality and overall stress profiles associated with slavery, genocide, and apartheid;
• Programs to eradicate the high levels of illiteracy that stem from slavery;
• The establishment of an African Knowledge Program;
• Psychological rehabilitation programs;
• Technology transfer;
• Debt cancellation.

“The argument has been won that reparatory justice is inevitable. The issue is how best to achieve it. Who should have the authority to conceptualize and structure it and how to ensure that while it has a reparatory function, it is also at the same time creating a greater sense of justice and humanity in the world,” says Beckles.

The road to reparatory justice has been tough to conceptualize in the Caribbean, and in the face of issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, and a global pandemic, slavery reparations often plummet on the list of priorities for governments.

For champions of the cause, however, the commitment is unwavering.

“It is our responsibility to maintain that focus of our ancestors and see to it that we have reparations,” Ras Bongo Wisely Tafari told IPS.

“This is not a quick fix. It is a long journey, but we refuse to give up. We will never give up the fight. Reparations are a must.”

 

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Women produce between 60 and 80 per cent of food in developing countries but own only 2 per cent of land worldwide. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

While more than a third of all purchased food is wasted in rich, mostly Western States, and a similar percentage is lost in poor countries due to the lack of appropriate harvesting, storage and transportation facilities, over three billion people –or some 40 percent of world population– cannot afford a healthy diet.
Add to these figures –which were released by UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on 16 October this year, marking the World Food Day— another dramatic fact.

According to the World Bank, between 88 and 115 million people are being pushed into poverty as a result of the COVID 19 crisis, with the majority of the new extreme poor being found in South Asian and Sub-Saharan countries where poverty rates are already high.

This number adds to the more than 850 million people sinking already into hunger and extreme poverty, following United Nations estimates.

 

One billion food producers; one billion poor and hungry

These figures all combined raise the number of hungry and poor ​and extremely poor ​people worldwide to over one billion, that’s one in seven persons living on Planet Earth. That’s the same number of people –1 billion– that agri-food systems employ worldwide, more than any other economic sector.

Moreover, the way food is being produced, consumed and wasted exacts a heavy toll on our planet, putting unnecessary pressure on natural resources, the environment and climate, according to FAO.

“Food production too often degrades or destroys natural habitats and contributes to species extinction. Such inefficiency is costing us trillions of dollars, but, most importantly, today’s agri-food systems are exposing profound inequalities and injustices in our global society. Three billion people cannot afford healthy diets, while overweight and obesity continue to increase worldwide,” warns this world body.

 

They produce more, but eat less

Should all this not be enough, another aspect of overwhelming inequalities dominating current time, please also know that rural women make up to 40 percent of all food producers, according to the UN.

Nevertheless, rural women eat less, prioritise available food to their families, let alone bearing with the heavy burden of carrying water, cooking, washing, cleaning, selling food in local markets and streets, among other daily tasks, all of this without having in most cases in poor countries the rights to land property, among others.

Just an example: there are many millions of women who produce between 60 and 80 per cent of food in developing countries but own only 2 per cent of land worldwide, says in this regards the UN Environment Programme.

Furthermore: the UN Women, which devotes its work to promoting gender equalities, estimates that in 2020, some 2.37 billion people did not have access to adequate food.

“This is an increase of almost 20 per cent in just one year, where those most affected were again rural women and girls.”

On this, the entity on 15 October this year, on the occasion of the International Day of Rural Women, reported that across the world, food systems depend on the daily work of rural women.

“They play a variety of essential roles, from raising crops and processing their harvest, to preparing food and distributing their products, ensuring that both their families and communities are nourished.”

“Yet paradoxically those same women often have less access to food and a higher risk of hunger, malnutrition, undernutrition and food insecurity than their male counterparts.”

 

Eating last… and least

One of the causes is armed conflict. On this, Oxfam International reports that overall, 155 million people around the world are living in crisis levels of food insecurity or worse – that is 20 million more than last year. “Around two out of every three of these people are going hungry primarily because their country is in war and conflict.”

Women and girls are disproportionately affected. They face extraordinary dangers to secure food, and yet, too often eating last and eating least. Conflict and displacement have also forced women to abandon their jobs or miss planting seasons, adds this coalition of independent Non-Governmental Organisations, devoted to fighting inequalities.

 

More climate crisis; less humanitarian aid

Last but not least, such harsh inequalities are growing rapidly due to fast developing climate emergency, the drastic cuts in rich countries humanitarian assistance, the predominance of industrial food systems, intensive cultivation and harvesting, etcetera.

What fate for all these billions of hungry and extremely poor people in a world that produces enough to feed all of them?

Will the United States and the other major meat consuming countries choose to significantly reduce their beef consumption and move to plant-based diets as part of measures to address climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss? Credit: Bigstock

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

Probably no country is more closely associated with the hamburger than the United States. It’s fair to say that the hamburger is the country’s culinary icon. It’s the most popular fast food consumed and readily available from coast to coast.

Although some historical accounts chronicle the hamburger being prepared in Wisconsin in 1885, America’s hamburger affair reportedly began in 1904 when the hamburger made its official visible debut at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Since then, the hamburger has become America’s most ubiquitous, dominant, and favorite food.

The United States consumes an estimated 50 billion hamburgers annually. That consumption amounts to about 150 hamburgers for each person per year or 3 hamburgers per person each week of the year

Given its popularity, pervasiveness and impact across the country, it’s worthwhile considering the total number of hamburgers the United States with its population of 333 million consumes annually. Is the total number of hamburgers consumed by the United States annually 1 billion, 5 billion, 25 billion or 50 billion?

The answer to that question is not 1 billion hamburgers. It’s also not 5 billion, nor even 25 billion.

The correct answer is the United States consumes an estimated 50 billion hamburgers annually.

That consumption amounts to about 150 hamburgers for each person per year or 3 hamburgers per person each week of the year. Among U.S. states, hamburger consumption is highest in Oklahoma and Nevada with 267 hamburgers consumed per person annually and lowest is in West Virginia with 171 hamburgers per person each year.

The hamburger has recently emerged as a controversial issue in U.S. politics. Some right-wing groups, politicians and others have warned voters that the Biden administration is “coming for your hamburgers”, cutting 90 percent of red meat from the U.S. diet and limiting each person to one hamburger per month.

The White House dismissed the false claims, saying they were just made up stories with a losing argument. The USDA also called the claims made by Republicans that Biden is trying to limit red meat consumption a fabrication and is not part of the administration’s climate plan nor greenhouse gas emission targets.

However, many in the country, including philanthropists, dietitians, scientists and others concerned about climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss, have called for reducing meat consumption and moving toward a more plant-based diet.

Besides contributing to improvements in human health, reducing the consumption of animal products, especially beef, and eating mostly plant-based foods can significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce animal waste.

Such a change in the diet of the U.S. population of 333 million people, or 4 percent of the world’s population, would make available croplands for human plant food instead of feed for the country’s 94 million cattle, 77 million hogs and pigs, and 518 million chickens, as well as additional land for increased biodiversity.

 

 

It is estimated that it takes 1,800 gallons (6,814 liters) of water to produce one pound (0.45 kilogram) of grain-fed beef in the U.S. Also, it is estimated that 6.5 pounds (3 kilos) of greenhouse gases are released to produce the beef for just one-quarter pound (113 grams) hamburger.

One alternative to the beef hamburger is the veggie burger, which has long existed in many Eurasian diets. The veggie burger has become a growing U.S. fare for many, especially for younger eaters and those with health concerns who are choosing to avoid or reduce their red meat consumption.

Instead of meat, the patty in the veggie hamburger is made from vegetables, legumes, grains, seeds, and other plant-based ingredients. While available in most supermarkets, many have turned to popular recipes to prepare veggie burgers at home.

Several years ago fast food hamburger chains in cooperation with food companies began offering plant-based hamburgers with the taste of meat. Instead of using ground beef, the meatless hamburger is based on processed plant-based foods that are specially designed to resemble the taste of beef. In addition, sales of plant-based meat in supermarkets are increasing rapidly across the country.

The plant-based processed hamburgers contribute less greenhouse gas emissions, use less water and land than the traditional hamburger based on beef. However, those burgers can be high in saturated fats and sodium, both of which are linked to obesity, heart disease and high blood pressure.

Some U.S. elected officials do not believe that plant-based meat is an answer to climate change and moving towards green energy. Also businesses in many U.S. states object to reductions in meat consumption as it would decimate those working in the beef industry and have collateral economic damage.

Despite the U.S. government’s avoidance of the issue of meat consumption, concerns about climate change, environment degradation and biodiversity loss are challenging the country’s relationship with the hamburger.

Climate scientists have advised U.S. officials that the raising of cattle is unsustainable and generates high levels of greenhouse gases. In addition, producing beef involves the destruction of forests and other habitats to make way for pasture and for growing fodder to be feed for cattle.

The United States accounts for the largest amount of beef consumed annually by a single country. Of the world’s 59 billion kilos (130 billion pounds) of beef produced in 2020, the United States led with 21 percent, followed by China at 16 percent, the European Union at 13 percent and Brazil nearly at 13 percent. Together the top ten countries consumed about 83 percent of the total beef produced in 2020.

 

Source: Beef 2 Live (USDA).

 

Beef consumption per capita, however, varies among those top ten countries. For 2020 Argentina took the top position among those countries with 54 kilos of beef per person, followed by the United States and Brazil at 38 and 36 kilos per person, respectively. The lowest levels of beef consumption in 2020 among the ten countries were China and India at 7 and 2 kilos per person, respectively.

 

Source: Beef 2 Live (USDA).

 

Will the United States and the other major meat consuming countries choose to significantly reduce their beef consumption and move to plant-based diets as part of measures to address climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss?

Politics, business interests, dietary preferences and cultural habits together strongly point to a likely answer to that question. In brief, beef consumption can be expected to continue in the United States as well as in other top major beef consuming countries well into the future.

Perhaps the United States, and maybe even other countries, will end the affair with the automobile, which has resulted in 290 million cars on U.S. roads?

Perhaps the United States, and other countries, will shift to renewables and eliminate fossil fuels, which account for about 60 percent of the electricity generation in the U.S.?

Perhaps the United States, and other countries, will decide to move toward population stabilization, instead of the currently projected U.S. population of 400 million by around midcentury?

Or perhaps more likely, the United States and other countries will simply continue with business as usual with, of course, a large order of fries alongside that hamburger to go with the disastrous consequences of climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

 

The construction of the Tat Sat Community Academy (TaSCA) in Kasasa, Uganda. While the project seeks to improve the livelihoods of all community members, there is a particular emphasis on uplifting women and girls. This is of greater importance now, with the COVID-19 pandemic having an outsized effect on women and girls across the world. Credit: Sylvester Mwanja, TaSCA Project Manager

By Ronald Kibirige and Scott Frank
TRONDHEIM, Norway / DENVER, USA , Oct 18 2021 (IPS)

As we honored women and girls last week, on the annual International Day of Rural Women on October 15, we want to highlight how a community is coming together to change the lives and livelihoods of rural women and girls in Uganda.

While the Tat Sat Community Academy Project (TaSCA) in Kasasa, Uganda, seeks to improve the livelihoods of all community members, there is a particular emphasis on uplifting women and girls. This is of greater importance now, with the COVID-19 pandemic having an outsized effect on women and girls across the world.

According to The World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap Report, school closures globally saw 1.54 billion children staying home, including 743 million girls. This shift has created barriers for access to health services, nutrition, and economic opportunities.

TaSCA board member Namayega Agnes says that in her rural community of Kasasa, women and children have not been given an equal chance for financial progress, development and contribution to the wellbeing of the community.

She also says challenges are more severe for girls, who face constant pressure to drop out of school to marry or pursue other perceived pathways to stability.

The TaSCA project, she believes, creates a gender balance – a shift in the current perceptions about the women and the girls in the community to be equally productive members of the community.

TaSCA is a community-led project being implemented by the TaSCA Kasasa Community Board (TKCB) in partnership with the Peace Africa Children’s Ensemble, a local nonprofit chosen by the community to help develop the project.

The effort is being supported by The InteRoots Initiative, a nonprofit organization which we co-founded a few years ago after previously collaborating together. Through an innovative model we call roots-up philanthropy, InteRoots is working to support the community members of Kasasa who are building TaSCA, which will include a school, savings and credit co-op, and cultural institution.

We hope TaSCA will provide equity in education, access to financing and financial support networks, and preservation of cultural practices. Additionally, community members also receive support with access to microlending through the Savings and Credit Cooperative Organization (SACCO), which will provide community financing, student/family financial support and economic education.

The community has said that it is imperative that along with access to microlending, students learn how to handle finances so that they can be equipped in the future for other opportunities.

Of immediate interest to the community is using the SACCO to invest in a mill, which will be used by the farmers in the community to produce locally instead of outsourcing at a high cost. The locally sourced food will also be available to the school’s students and staff members.

The Graduate Enterprise Fund, meanwhile, will allow students, upon graduation, to submit a plan for set-aside funds for purposes that will further goals. This may include continuing their education or starting a business.

The community board must approve the plan, and graduates will receive financial support for around one to two years, providing economic stability beyond graduation.

As stated above, now is the time for such initiatives. Because of the pandemic and its effects, it is estimated that an estimated 96 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty, of whom 47 million are women, according to UN Women.

We cannot stand idly by as we watch our fellow citizens of the world face such challenges and obstacles. We are excited by the potential TaSCA can have and are eagerly awaiting its opening in 2022.

Now more than ever, communities must come together to transform and uplift women and girls, especially in rural areas that may face greater barriers to access to health care, technology and education.

We hope Kasasa will be a model for others and we are heartened by the support the community has received so far. For updates on TaSCA and InteRoots’ work, please visit InteRoots.org.

Ronald Kibirige is co-founder and board chair of The InteRoots Initiative. Scott Frank is co-founder and executive director of the organization.

 

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Food table banking is turning the tables on the systematic and systemic financial exclusion of women. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Oct 15 2021 (IPS)

Pascaline Chemutai’s five acres of land located in the country’s breadbasket region of Rift Valley recently produced 115 bags of maize, each weighing 90 kilograms. She tells IPS that of these, 110 bags will be transported to traders in Nairobi and neighbouring Kiambu County at a negotiated price of $23 per bag.

In all, she will have pocketed about $2,500, a significant amount in the village. Not only will she have enough to feed her family of five, but to pay for their school fees and other basic needs. Besides maize farming, Chemutai sells milk to residents in town.

The 45-year-old farmer widowed eight years ago with five young children says that her life as a farmer was made possible and is sustained through table banking.

“My husband was in charge of our farm and handled all business related to the farm. I knew how to farm because I grew up cultivating land, but I had no money to buy seeds and fertilizer or knowledge on the business side of farming,” she says.

Fortunately, a year before the demise of her husband, Chemutai joined a table banking group under the Joyful Women Organization (JOYWO), a registered NGO focused on the economic empowerment of women.

As the name suggests, women place their savings on a table and immediately loan each other accumulated funds.
“Women knew of village saving groups where contributions were spent on household items such as cups, plates and even beddings. We were now learning about saving and borrowing,” she says.

Sharon Alice Anyango says that the simple concept of table banking, where a group of 10 to 35 members use the group-based strategy to fundraise by saving, placing their savings on a table, and borrowing immediately, has turned tables on the systematic and systemic financial exclusion of women.

“Table banking is addressing the primary challenges that women face when dealing with banks and other financial institutions. Where they needed collateral that they did not have to access bank loans, today, they successfully fundraise amongst themselves,” says Anyango, a project officer at the Ministry of Public Service, Youth and Gender.

JOYWO, whose current patron is Rachael Ruto, the wife of Deputy President William Ruto, claims to have a revolving fund of at least $27 million in the hands of its estimated 200,000 members across 1,200 table banking groups in all parts of the country.

“Other estimates show that so popular is the table banking movement that cumulatively, table banking groups throughout the country circulate approximately $550,000 to $730,000,” Anyango says.

She explains that only women were involved at the start, but as they started to accumulate funds, men became interested.

“Men have seen the magic,” she says.

Now the table banking fraternity allows men to join, but the groups’ constitutions ensure that at least 70 percent of the members and all the leadership positions are women.

Chemutai says that their table banking group of 20 members currently has a revolving fund of $30,000. She has taken loans valued at $2,000 to fund various farming and animal husbandry ventures in the last year.

“Seeds, fertilizer, labour, tractors and veterinary services, salary for my farm boy and feeds for my cows cost a lot of money. I borrow from the group and repay, and this cycle repeats itself every year, and all my activities are running smoothly,” she tells IPS.

“Table banking has also linked me to a reliable market. We started interacting with other table banking groups from other parts of the country, and that is how I managed to find a market. I sell all my maize to other women in table banking groups within Nairobi and Kiambu counties. I would never have met these women if it was not for table banking,” she says.

Chemutai’s story is in line with research from the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition that points to “a high probability that any agricultural product that we buy has been produced by a woman. Women’s contribution is essential for the food security of entire communities and for the farming production of many developing and rural communities.”

The research further points to the many gender disparities that prevent women such as Chemutai from accessing financing. On paper, Chemutai does not own an asset to be used as collateral despite having access to five acres of land because the land is ‘ancestral’ land.

As per the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition and undoubtedly true for many women in agriculture, “when women are guaranteed the same access as men to community resources, services and economic opportunities, production increased, the economic and social benefits of the community improve, and malnutrition and poverty are reduced.”

Celebrated every October 16, as the global community marks yet another World Food Day under the theme “Our actions are our future. Better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life”, gender experts, such as Anyango, tell IPS that this is the level of access that women need to feed the global population.

Agriculture is still the largest employment sector for 60 percent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Women like Chemutai also make up two-thirds of the world’s 600 million small livestock managers, according to the U.N’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Despite their contribution to agriculture, financing is still largely not affordable, available, and accessible to women farmers. In this East African nation where the table banking movement is more concentrated in rural areas, women now have a lifeline to fund agricultural activities with loans taken under friendly terms and conditions.
Anyango asserts that women must be at the centre of World Food Day’s collective action across 150 countries to promote worldwide awareness of global hunger and the need to ensure healthy diets for all.

 

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Street Library in Mayotte, July 2016. Credit: François Phliponeau/ATD Fourth World - Centre Joseph Wresinski

By Olivier De Schutter and Donald Lee
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2021 (IPS)

In September 2021, children in the northern hemisphere returned to school after the summer break. For some, the end of the holidays signaled a return to normalcy and to the joys of learning after facing months of school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For the majority of children in the Global South, however, the return to reality looked grimmer.

Digital divide leaving billions behind

Many children have been unable to pursue their education due to school closures reported in over 188 countries. While governments have sought to implement solutions for children to continue learning from home using broadcast and Internet-based remote learning policies, nearly one third of children worldwide could not make use of these solutions. UNICEF notes that three quarters of these students either come from rural areas, belong to the poorest households, or both: these children have been left behind due to the digital divide. As a result, the organization estimates that more than one billion children are at risk of falling behind on education.

Furthermore, many parents who had lost their source of income due to the pandemic had no choice but to remove their children from school so that they could help their families. Sadly, child labor has risen for the first time in two decades: 160 million children are now estimated to be working, about 8 million more than in 2017, mainly in the agricultural sector; 9 million more at risk of doing so due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Inequality and the pandemic

While the pandemic has exacerbated the inequalities children suffer in schooling, such inequalities are not new. The World Bank estimates that while 96 percent of children complete their secondary education in OECD countries, that rate is only 35 percent in low-income countries. In 2018, an estimated 258 million children and youth – mainly from poor households – were out of school.

Whereas the number of children, adolescents and youth excluded from education fell steadily in the decade following 2000, progress has stalled since, especially for poor children in low-income countries: in 2014, only one quarter of the poorest children in these countries completed primary school. Indeed, in low and lower-middle income countries, the likelihood of enrollment in primary and secondary schools still depends on parental income and education levels to a significant extent.

Festival of Learning in Guatemala, November 2015. Credit: Sulma Flores/ATD Fourth World – Centre Joseph Wresinski

Financial barriers to opportunities

Several important mechanisms are at work. While nearly 90 percent of low-income countries officially provide free primary education, the hidden costs remain high: transportation costs, learning materials and school supplies may be prohibitive, preventing parents from sending their children to school. Moreover, more than 40 percent of low-income countries charge fees for lower-secondary education. This may discourage parents who live on low incomes to send their children to school, especially given the high opportunity costs involved where the alternative to high school education is to contribute to the family income by working. Lowering these financial barriers can significantly improve enrollment and attendance rates.

Even when children are enrolled in formal education, other obstacles prevent them from effectively learning. Children from poor households routinely face exclusion and discrimination. A participatory action research project led by ATD Fourth World in Belgium found that the shame experienced by children in poverty was one of the key obstacles to successful schooling. Shame, as well as fear of abuse, also prevents students from poor families and their parents from engaging with teachers.

Children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds also tend to be better prepared for formal education. As a result, across nearly all countries, the family background of a student (parental education, socioeconomic status, conditions at home) remains the single most important predictor of learning outcomes.

In France for example, the difference in outcomes on the tests of the Programme for International Student Assessment between the richest and poorest students amounted to 115 points in the science performance, the equivalent of about three years of schooling. A vicious cycle emerges: parents and children from low-income households may lose their motivation to prioritize schooling because they perceive their chances of performing well as low.

Children in Kenya who dropped out of school cited the difficulty of performing well, rather than costs, parental pressure, or other factors, as a major reason for leaving. This leads low-income households to underinvest in education, thus perpetuating poverty from one generation to the next and relegating equality of opportunities to a distant dream.

Public action is urgently needed

Increasing public budgets going to education is essential to break the cycles of poverty.

Educational systems must avoid, at all costs, reproducing inequalities that are inherited from childhood, especially for children from families living in poverty. There is a strong relationship between public investment in education and social mobility, especially for developing economies and in relation to primary education.

The Education 2030 Framework for Action provides that States should allocate at least 4 to 6 percent of their GDP, and/or at least 15 to 20 per cent of public expenditure, to education. Indeed, recent research, examining case studies from seven countries — from Brazil to Vietnam and from India to Namibia — demonstrates the benefits of public education and its potential for social transformation.

Fostering inclusive education

We need well-trained (and well-paid) teachers who are present and engage with children. We need schools that reduce the role of selection and assessment based on academic performance alone and instead that value each child for what they contribute to the classroom. We need schools that are fully accessible to everyone – regardless of age, gender, class or disability. And, we need more extracurricular opportunities after school hours that are open to all children at no additional charge, since children from poor households are far less likely to partake in afterschool activities, particularly in music and sports, than their peers from wealthier families.

A recent report presented to the United Nations General Assembly, underscores the urgent need for inclusive education. Schools must not be spaces of failure, but rather places where children can discover their talents and abilities, where they earn qualifications that enable them to keep learning or to find a job in which they can continue to develop. They must be places where collaboration – rather than competition – is nurtured and valued, and where otherness is accepted and cherished.

Inclusive education can also challenge stereotypes about the poor, and the associated discrimination they often suffer: in New Delhi, India, when elite schools catering to students from wealthy households were required to set aside 20 per cent of places to children from poorer families, pro-social behaviour among students increased, and prejudice against children from poor backgrounds diminished.

Schools have too often been seen as institutions that select, rank and exclude. They should instead empower, value and include. This will allow them to fully contribute to breaking the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty, condemning children from low-income households to a life-long sentence for a crime they have not committed.

Olivier De Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Professor at UCLouvain and Sciences Po (Paris). On 20 October, he will present a report on the persistence of poverty to the UN General Assembly. Donald Lee is President of the International Movement ATD Fourth World and a former senior economist at the United Nations in New York.

 

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• FEATURED TRANSLATION – FRENCH

Credit: wwww.imf.org

By Alexander Kozul-Wright
GENEVA, Oct 15 2021 (IPS)

The guardians of the global economy convened in Washington this week to discuss their latest global growth forecasts. The World Bank-IMF Board of Governors meetings have been squarely focused on the global response to COVID-19, with economists warning of slowing momentum in wealthy nations and grossly uneven recoveries across the developing world.

Still, since February 2020 governments around the world have deployed US$16 trillion in fiscal support measures to combat the pandemic. These vast sums have provided emergency lifelines to health care systems, businesses, and households.

High fiscal expenditure and low tax revenues raised government debt in 2020 to a record 97% of world GDP. It is projected to stabilise at 99% this year, according to the IMF’s latest Fiscal Monitor, published Wednesday. The report also contends that “exceptional policy responses triggered by the pandemic pose a challenge for discerning the best path forward for fiscal policy.”

Typically, governments deploy a two-pronged approach to fund spending: they can either borrow more or raise taxes (or both). Quantitative Easing (QE) represents another, unconventional policy choice that authorities have turned to in recent economic crises.

QE is shorthand for a set of unorthodox monetary policies in which a central bank purchases government debt (as well as other assets) to increase money supply and lower interest rates. It is designed to spur consumption and investment and, in turn, shore up GDP growth.

While central banks in advanced economies (AEs) have deployed QE since the 2008 financial crisis, constraints are more binding in emerging markets (EMs) economies.

EMs lack the deep financial markets observed in AEs, relying instead on foreign investors (attracted by high interest rates) to cover deficits. As such, measures designed to lower interest rates are seen to deter foreign investors and place downward pressure on domestic currencies.

What’s more, EM governments with access to central bank financing are, rightly or wrongly, thought to exercise less fiscal discipline than their AE counterparts. In turn, rampant quantitative easing risks undermining monetary policy credibility.

In large part, this concern underscores why EM policy makers attribute so much importance to central bank independence – a nebulous concept under normal circumstances, let alone in a crisis, but critical when thinking about the impact debt monetization can have.

First, the erosion between fiscal and monetary policy risks stoking runaway inflation by expanding the monetary base. And second, even if government bond yields are not immediately driven up by money creation, it could happen over the medium-term, raising the cost of future debt financing.

The trade-off between continuing to support economic activity and preserving fiscal space (room in the government budget for extra spending) is therefore thornier for EMs than AEs. “EM central banks are trying to find ways of financing their budgets without being accused of printing money”, says Yilmaz Akyuz, former chief economist at UNCTAD.

“Just as in 2009, the IMF is already talking about returning to ‘normal’ central bank policies”, he noted. Indeed, another IMF report published this week cast aspersions on EM quantitative easing, decrying a lack of policy experience and warning about the “threat of exiting these types of programs.”

But despite the Fund’s repeated exhortations, the central bank of Indonesia (BI) recently pledged to continue buying trillions of rupiah (billions in US$ equivalent) worth of government debt. The ‘burden-sharing’ agreement, unveiled in July 2020, was designed to help finance the 2020 fiscal deficit in the wake of Covid-19.

Last year, BI purchased long-dated government bonds in both primary and secondary markets, in addition to rebating interest payments for certain types of debt. Overall, BI financed roughly half of Indonesia’s 6.1% (of GDP) deficit in 2020, lowering debt repayment costs and providing greater scope to respond to the pandemic.

Back in 2020, the bond-purchasing scheme was deemed a “one-off”, and was widely expected to conclude this year. In August 2021, however, the central bank pledged to extend deficit financing into 2022.

Since August, the price of both government bonds and the rupiah have remained relatively stable. And so long as investors maintain their trust in BI independence and the government’s commitment to fiscal sustainability, Indonesia’s experiment with unorthodox economic policy looks set to continue.

Alexander Kozul-Wright is a consultant for the Third World Network (TWN)

 

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One of the Argentine small farmer groups participating in the digital marketing project uses agroecological irrigation and tomato crushing techniques in the province of Mendoza. CREDIT: Nicolás Heredia/Alma Nativa

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

“The biggest problem for family farmers has always been to market and sell what they produce, at a fair price,” says Natalia Manini, a member of the Union of Landless Rural Workers (UST), a small farmers organisation in Argentina that has been taking steps to forge direct ties with consumers.

The UST, which groups producers of fresh vegetables, preserves and honey, as well as goat and sheep breeders, from the western province of Mendoza, opened its own premises in April in the provincial capital of the same name.

In addition, it has just joined Alma Nativa (“native soul”), a network created to market and sell products from peasant and indigenous organisations, which brings together more than 4,300 producers grouped in 21 organisations, and now sells its products over the Internet.

“Selling wholesale to a distributor is simple, but the problem is that a large part of the income does not reach the producer,” Manini told IPS from the town of Lavalle in Mendoza province."The aim is to mobilise consumers to buy products from Latin American ecosystems that are made with respect for the environment, while small producers benefit from visibility and logistical support so that local products reach the entire country.” -- Guadalupe Marín

The rural leader argues that, due to cost considerations, farmers can only access fair trade through collective projects, which have received a boost from the acceleration of digital changes generated by the covid-19 pandemic.

Alma Nativa is a marketing and sales solution formally created in 2018 by two Argentine non-governmental organisations (NGOs) focused on socio-environmental issues: Fibo Social Impact and the Cultural Association for Integral Development (ACDI). Their approach was to go a step beyond the scheme of economic support for productive development projects.

“Back in 2014 we began to ask ourselves why small farmer and indigenous communities could not secure profitable prices for the food and handicrafts they produce, and to think about how to get farmers to stop depending on donations and subsidies from NGOs and the state,” Fibo director Gabriela Sbarra told IPS in an interview in Buenos Aires.

Sbarra was a regular participant in regional community product fairs, which prior to the restrictions put in place due to the pandemic were often organised in Argentina by the authorities, who financed the setting up of the stands, accommodation and travel costs from their communities for farmers and craftspeople.

It was only thanks to this economic aid that farmers and artisans were able to make a profit.

“The effort was geared towards finding a genuine market for these products, which could not be sold online because it is very difficult to generate traffic on the Internet and they cannot reach supermarkets either, because they have no production volume. Informality was leaving communities out of the market,” Sbarra explained.

Three cooperatives in the Chaco region, the great forested plain that Argentina shares with Bolivia and Paraguay, are dedicated to honey production and are part of the Alma Nativa project, through which they sell their products to consumers throughout the country via the Internet. CREDIT: Nicolás Heredia/Alma Nativa

E-commerce, the new market

So the founders of Alma Nativa knocked on the doors of Mercado Libre, an e-commerce giant born in Argentina that has expanded throughout most of Latin America. The company agreed not to charge commissions for sales by an online store of agroecological food produced by local communities.

Alma Nativa then set up a warehouse in the town of Villa Madero, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where products arriving from rural communities throughout the country are labeled for distribution.

“The pandemic has created an opportunity, because it helped to open a debate about what we eat. Many people began to question how food is produced and even forced agribusiness companies to think about more sustainable production systems,” said Manini.

Norberto Gugliotta, manager of the Cosar Beekeeping Cooperative, emphasised that the pandemic not only accelerated the process of digitalisation of producers and consumers, but also fueled the search by a growing part of society for healthy food produced in a socially responsible manner.

“We were prepared to seize the opportunity, because our products were ready, so we joined Alma Nativa this year,” said the beekeeper from the town of Sauce Viejo. Gugliotta is the visible face of a cooperative made up of some 120 producers in the province of Santa Fe, in the centre of this South American country, who produce certified organic, fair trade honey.

Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is an agricultural powerhouse, with a powerful agribusiness sector whose main products are soybeans, corn and soybean oil, which in 2020 generated 26.3 billion dollars in exports, according to official figures.

Behind the success lies a huge universe of family farmers and peasant and indigenous communities. According to the latest National Agricultural Census, carried out in 2018, more than 90 percent of the country’s 250,881 farms are family-run.

But the infrastructure and technological lag in rural areas is significant, as demonstrated by the fact that only 35 percent of farms have Internet access.

The deprivation is particularly acute in the Chaco, a neglected region in the north of the country, home to some 200,000 indigenous people belonging to nine groups whose economy is closely linked to natural resources, according to the non-governmental Fundapaz.

Indigenous artisans from the Pilagá community in the northern province of Formosa, within the Gran Chaco region, have begun selling their baskets online throughout Argentina. CREDIT: Rosario Bobbio/Alma Nativa

New platform for indigenous handicrafts

Communities from the Chaco, a vast region of low forests and savannas and rich biodiversity covering more than one million square km in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, which is home to a diversity of native peoples, also began to market their handicrafts over Mercado Libre in the last few weeks.

“This initiative originated in Brazil with the ‘Amazonia em Pé’ programme and today we are replicating it in Argentina, in the Gran Chaco area. It seeks to build bridges between local artisans and consumers throughout the country,” explained Guadalupe Marín, director of sustainability at Mercado Libre.

“The aim is to mobilise consumers to buy products from Latin American ecosystems that are made with respect for the environment, while small producers benefit from visibility and logistical support so that local products reach the entire country,” she told IPS in Buenos Aires.

On Sept. 27, Mercado Libre launched the campaign “From the Gran Chaco, for you”, which offers for sale more than 2,500 products in 200 categories, such as baskets, indigenous and local art, decorative elements made with natural fibers, honey, weavings and handmade games.

It includes not only Alma Nativa, but also Emprendedores por Naturaleza (“entrepreneurs by/for nature”), a programme launched by the environmental foundation Rewilding Argentina, which works for the conservation of the Chaco and now promotes the sale of products made by 60 families living in rural areas adjacent to the El Impenetrable national park, the largest protected area in the region.

“The idea for the project arose last year, after we conducted a socioeconomic survey among 250 families in the area that found that the only income of 98 percent of them comes from welfare,” said Fatima Hollmann, regional coordinator of the Rewilding Argentina Communities Programme.

She told IPS that “people raise livestock for subsistence and sometimes work on fencing a field or some other temporary task, but there are no steady sources of employment in El Impenetrable.”

“That is why we are trying to generate income for local residents,” Hollmann explained in an interview in Buenos Aires. “Our production lines are focused on ceramics, since most people have built their houses there with adobe. Many also know how to make bricks and we have held trainings to teach people to turn a brick into an artistic piece, inspired by native fauna, which transmits the importance of conserving the forest.”

According to the figures released by the expert during the first week of the programme “From the Gran Chaco, for you” in early October, 644 products were offered for sale, of which 382 were sold to buyers from more than 10 Argentine provinces, including 100 percent of the textiles available and 76 percent of the wooden handicrafts.

“The alternative is to cut down the native forests,” Hollmann says. “We are proposing a transition from an extractivist economy to a regenerative one, which contributes to the reconstruction of the ecosystem, and gives consumers in the cities the chance to contribute to that goal.”

Excerpt:

This article is part of IPS' coverage of World Food Day, celebrated Oct. 16, whose 2021 theme is: Grow, nourish, sustain. Together.

By External Source
Oct 14 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Our lives depend on the world’s agri-food system.

Every time we eat, we participate in the system.

A sustainable agri-food system is one in which sufficient, nutritious and safe foods are available to everyone.

This means nobody goes hungry or suffers from any form of malnutrition.

Today’s agri-food systems are exposing profound inequalities and injustices in our global society.

More than 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

That’s 40% of the world’s population.

By contrast, 2 billion people are overweight or obese.

This is due to poor diets and sedentary lifestyles.

55% of the world’s population resides in cities.

By 2050, this number will increase to 68%.

Related health-care costs could exceed USD1.3 trillion per year by 2030.

The world’s agri-food system currently employs 1 billion people – more than any other sector.

But, smallholder farmers produce more than 33% of the world’s food…
…despite poverty, a lack of financing, training and technology.

So, food production often degrades or destroys natural habitats and contributes to species extinction.

The world’s food systems are responsible for more than 33% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

14% of the world’s food is lost due to inadequate harvesting, handling, transportation and storage.

17% of the world’s food is wasted on a consumer level.

Solutions do exist. Make #WorldFoodDay your day.

World Food Day 2021: Our Actions are our Future.

 

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Unable to support her family with the earnings from her farm due to land degradation, Jennifer Kamba (on the right), a smallholder farmer in Machakos county of Kenya, now works as a part-time cook and caterer. Credit: IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

Jenifer Kamba, 33, has always loved farming – a love passed on to her by her late husband after they married 14 years ago. The young farmer duo grew maise, pepper and vegetables on their two-acre farm in Kivandini of Kenya’s Machakos county. Even after her husband died five years ago, Kamba didn’t stop farming.  However, of late, the soil looks dry, and her production has declined considerably.

“The land is not what it used to be,” she says, “Even a few years ago, my vegetables were beautiful. The pumpkins were big, juicy and my husband sometimes sold some into the local market. But now, they are small and crooked in shape. It feels as if something has sucked the life out of my land.”

Unable to feed herself and her two school-going children from the earnings of her farm, Kamba now takes up seasonal work such as cooking in her wealthier neighbours’ homes.

The ailing factor of Kamba’s land – increasing degradation due to extreme weather events such as droughts and below-average rainfall – is a challenge that farmers worldwide face today, linked to climate change.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), more than 2 billion hectares worldwide are currently affected by the decline in the quality or arability of land. In Africa, where the livelihood of 70% of the population depends on agriculture, 22 million hectares are degraded. This directly affects the yield, pushing farmers, especially those like Kamba who have small landholdings, into poverty.

Machakos, which lies 56 km east of the country’s capital Nairobi, has been identified by the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) as one of the most drought-prone counties. In the past ten years, the county has witnessed at least four severe droughts that have caused significant damage to soil health.

“This is something we are taking very seriously,” says Dr Ruth Kattumuri, Senior Director for Economic, Youth and Sustainable Development at the Commonwealth Secretariat. “Land degradation is a two-sided challenge as it is both caused by climate change and contributes to it. Supporting our member countries with sustainable land management efforts is of utmost importance for us.”

Jenifer Kamba’s farm. The farm used to yield enough to support her family, but now she has had to turn to part-time employment to make ends meet. Credit: IPS

While climate change is worsening droughts and erratic rainfall, leading to desertification and soil erosion, Kattumuri adds that deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices are also driving up emissions at the same time.

“Rural communities, smallholder farmers, and the poor are adversely affected,” she says.
According to a 2016 study by Kenya Livestock and Research Institute, 22 % of Kenyan land area has degraded between 1982 and 2006, including 31 % of croplands.
The Kenyan government has adopted various measures to fight land degradation and promote sustainable land management.

In September 2016, the government announced that it would restore 5.1 million hectares of degraded land. According to an estimate by the World Resource Institute, 65 million acres across the country were restorable for future use. In its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), submitted first in 2015, the government committed to creating a tree cover for at least 10% of its total land area to mitigate climate change. Together, the moves are expected to improve livelihoods, curb climate change, safeguard biodiversity and more.

But the problem, say some, is that implementation of these measures has been sporadic, and very few of the most severely affected people, especially women, are aware of them.

The story of subsistence farmers Ruth Mutinda, 41, and her sister Beth, 37, in Mwala village of Machakos is an example: the sisters who jointly own a small farm have seen a sharp decline in their yield of maise, beans and pigeon peas in the past six to seven years.

The village is near Kitui – another county affected by successive droughts, including one in the current year. According to the NDMA, the prevailing drought situation is mainly attributed to the delayed onset of the March to May long rains.

Mutinda sisters say that insufficient rain has increased the heat, which, in turn, has ‘stolen the moisture’ off the farm. In addition, the water level in their village river has also decreased due to the drought and random sand-mining activities, leaving them without an alternative means to water their land.

“There is a small river at the edge of our village. Earlier, we fetched water from there for our farms. But now we can only fetch few buckets for washing and cooking. So, if there is no water, how can the land be good again?” asks Beth.

Though the NDMA has mentioned several measures to support the drought-affected farmers across the nation, including Machakos and Kitui, the sister duo seems unaware of those. They have also not heard of any land restoration initiatives and think that regular irrigation is the only way to increase soil fertility.

The only external support Beth and Ruth ever received was a few fruiting tree saplings from the Rural Resource Center – a local NGO. But the dry soil of the farm couldn’t sustain their growth.

Landscape view of Mwala village in Machakos county. The Commonwealth Living Land’s Charter, which aims to get member countries to integrate sustainable land use management into their national climate action plans, focusing on nature-based solutions, could assist areas affected by climate change. Credit: IPS

The apparent “disconnect” between the policy and its intended beneficiaries is evident in degraded land restoration and climate action in general, says Leonida Odongo, Executive Director of the Nairobi-based NGO Haki Nawiri Afrika. Her organisation fights for marginalised communities’ rights to climate justice and food justice.

She maintains that climate change solutions often fail to envisage how many ways women on the frontline are affected.

“In Africa, the climate crisis means women are travelling longer distances in search of water; it means Gender-Based Violence in the household; it means conflict as communities fight over pasture and water; it means the emergence of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. It means the death of people and animals and forced relocation. It’s time to act and avert his crisis,” says Odongo.

Ceciele Ndjebet, President of African Women’s Network for Community Management of Forests (REFACOF) in Cameroon, feels that women do not enjoy the benefits of climate action, including sustainable land management, because they do not have access to finance.
This especially applies to NGOs and community-based organisations that directly know women’s climate challenges and can bridge the gap between policies and communities but cannot provide solutions because of the uphill battle to access finance.

“I heard a lot about Green Climate Fund (GCF) and others, that there is funding available. But is that funding available to civil society organisations? I doubt. All the accreditation processes are complicated; we think we need political will for all those who want to recognise what the civil society has to say or the role to play. We need that political will from our government to recognise that we should be part of the solution,” says Ndjebet.

The Commonwealth Living Lands Charter could help address these concerns. The charter is a proposed initiative of the Commonwealth that aims to get its member countries to integrate sustainable land use management into their national climate action plans, focusing on nature-based solutions.

Under the proposed Commonwealth Call to Action on Living Lands, the Commonwealth Secretariat will support member states to access funding to scale up nature-based solutions in implementing their NDCs that address land degradation.

“We are conducting consultations with our member countries and regions. The aim is to bridge the gaps between climate change, nature and land degradation policies. We want to ensure that what we eventually propose to our heads of government for adoption can be a basis for inclusive, sustainable land management,” says Unnikrishnan Nair, Head of Climate Change at the Commonwealth Secretariat. “That includes women, rural communities and other vulnerable populations – we should not leave anyone behind.”

The Living Lands Charter, if adopted by Commonwealth leaders, will serve as an agreement among the 54 member countries to work towards climate-resilient and sustainable land management by integrating the targets of the three Rio Conventions — the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (UNCBD), the Land Degradation Neutrality targets (UNCCD), and the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC).

Focus areas to be explored include climate-resilient agriculture, soil and water conservation and management, sustainable green cover and biodiversity, and the active engagement of indigenous people.

The combined action is expected to propel the progress in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 15 – Life on Lands.

Could this new initiative help the much needed financial and technological support trickle down to women in the climate change frontline communities, including Kamba and Mutinda sisters?

Time will tell.

Meantime, Jennifer Kamba isn’t giving up hope yet on her land: “I just hope when my children grow up, this land will still produce food for them,” she says, with a flicker of dreams for the future in her eyes.

 

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By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

“Now is the time for a stronger, more networked and inclusive multilateral system anchored in the United Nations,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his latest report “Our Common Agenda.” Indeed, there is a fork in the road: we can either choose to breakdown or to breakthrough.

Yasmine Sherif

Making this moral choice and adopting this legal imperative is more relevant today than ever. The estimated 75 million children and adolescents caught in emergencies and protracted crisis who suffer from disrupted education has now dramatically increased from 75 million to 128 million due to the pandemic. These vulnerable girls and boys are now the ones left furthest behind in some of the world’s toughest contexts, in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America.

The current education financing gap amounts to US$1.48 billion for low- and middle-income countries. A gap that is increasingly widening. In reviving the multilateralism that is so urgently needed, the UN Secretary-General will convene a crucial, timely summit on Transforming Education in 2022.

Despite all that we do, despite all our investments, we cannot win ‘the human race’ unless we invest in our fellow human beings, now. It is the children and young people impacted by armed conflicts, climate-crisis induced disasters, forced displacement and protracted crises who are in a sprint against time, with their lives and futures on the line.

We can no longer let “an entire generation facing irreversible losses be left behind in the ruins of armed conflicts, in protracted refuge, on a planet whose climate-change threatens us all,” as the UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Steering Group, The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown stated at the launch of Education Cannot Wait’s Annual Results Report: Winning the Human Race, on 5 October 2021.

Education is the foundation, the DNA and the absolute prerequisite for achieving all other Sustainable Human Development Goals and Universal Human Rights. Education means investments in the limitless possibilities of human potential: the workforce, governance, gender-equality, justice, peace and security.

“Access to quality education is key to addressing 21st century challenges, including accelerating the fight to end poverty and climate change,” says The LEGO Foundation’s new CEO, Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, in this month’s ECW Newsletter high-level interview.

The time has come to connect the dots between individual human beings and our collective humanity and life on this planet. We are now investing more and more in Mother Earth through significant climate change financing. We must now also invest in the human beings populating the planet. The correlation between the positive impact of education upon on all aspects of life on the planet is indispensable and inescapable.

• Higher education levels lead to higher concern for the environment, and adaptation to climate change. If education progress is stalled, it could lead to a 20% increase in disaster-related fatalities per decade.
• Education is the one unique investment that can prevent conflict and forced displacement. High levels of secondary school enrollment have been shown to be associated with an increase a country’s level of stability and peace and reduce crime and violence.
• Every additional year of schooling reduces an adolescent boy’s risk of becoming involved in conflict by 20 percent. This effect reflects both education’s economic benefits and its role in social cohesion and national identity.
• Conversely, lack of education often leads to political disempowerment and regression to group allegiances. Across 22 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, sub-national regions with very low average education had a 50 per cent probability of experiencing the onset of conflict within 21 years, while the corresponding interval for regions with very high average education was 346 years.
• Education is also the most secure means of ending extreme poverty. For nations, each additional year of schooling can add up to 18 per cent to GDP per capita. For individuals, one more year of education brings a 10 per cent increase in personal income. If all children were to learn basic reading skills, the impact would be 171 million fewer people living in extreme poverty. *Footnotes below.

Education Cannot Wait is a multilateral global UN fund. Our Annual Results Report of 2020, Winning the Human Race, launched at the UN in Geneva this month, testifies to what we can achieve when we think and act multilaterally: when we connect the dots, become one, and act for all.

Through multilateralism, we reached more than 29 million crisis-affected girls and boys in 2020 alone through ECW’s COVID-19 emergency response, working with our strategic partners, including host governments, our 21 donors, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNESCO, UNDP, WFP, our civil society partners, such as INEE, Jesuit Refugee Service, AVSI, Save the Children, Plan International, Norwegian Refugee Council, International Rescue Committee and numerous local civil society organizations across 34 countries. Through joint programming, we were also able to jointly deliver quality education to more than 4.6 million children and youth, of whom 51% were girls and adolescent girls, 38% were refugees – all while we increased ECW allocations to children and youth with disabilities.

This is made possible because ODA governments, private sector and philanthropic partners are scaling up their support for the catalytic ECW global fund whereby their investments are part of multilateral efforts that work as closely as possible to those we serve, establishing links conducive to numerous, diverse SDGs and human rights. The full list of our 21 generous donor partners can be found at the end of this Newsletter.

In connection with the UNGA week this year, ECW strategic donors advancing multilateralism, such as Germany, the United States, the European Union/European Commission, France, The LEGO Foundation and Porticus took giant steps and committed $138.1 million to ECW, bringing the total resources mobilized thus far in 2021 alone to $156.1 million and the total since ECW’s inception to $1.85 billion ($827 million mobilized for the Trust Fund; and, over $1 billion worth of programmes aligned with ECW MYRPs, as leveraged by ECW with partners).

Furthermore, the Global Hub for Education in Emergencies celebrated its new collective space under the ECW umbrella in Geneva, thanks to Switzerland which is the second biggest UN capital for humanitarian and development actors after New York City. The Global Hub brings together NGOs, the UN, academia, foundations, and governments to inspire more commitment and resources to quality education for those left furthest behind in emergencies and protracted crisis.

Multilateralism through the United Nations works.

Still, this is just the start of a major global effort to work through the multilateral coordination system to reach those left furthest behind and bring education from the margins to the center. Based on empirical evidence, ECW calls for an additional $1 billion to contribute to an innovative model that has proven to work.

Political leaders, governments, private sector, UN and civil society – all part of ECW’s multilateral UN system – recognize that education is a precondition for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and Universal Human Rights. Together, we think long-term and act now. Together, we connect the dots and see things from afar and within. Together, we work on what the world needs most right now: A Common Agenda to Win the Human Race.

Yasmine Sherif is Director,
Education Cannot Wait
The UN Global Fund for Education in Emergencies and Protracted Crises

 

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Credit: World Bank

By Andre Hovaguimian
VIENNA, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

Will the World Bank walk away with $100 Billion IDA20 replenishment without “Walking the Talk” on disability?

The World Bank Group’s (WBG) International Development Association (IDA), the Bank’s low-income lending arm, aspires to raise $100 billion for its early 20th replenishment (IDA20). IDA20’s focus includes “reducing barriers preventing …persons with disabilities…from achieving their full potential”.

In 2019, the World Bank Group mobilised $82 billion under IDA19 to support its global development goals, with disability one of its four key cross-cutting themes.

The World Bank’s 2018 Disability Inclusion and Accountability Framework commits to, “non- discrimination and equality, accessibility, inclusion and participation, and partnership and collaboration.” However, behind this fundraising rhetoric lies another dark reality.

Dozens of staff disabled while employed by the WBG claim that abuse, retaliation, governance failures, lack of transparency, lack of accountability and denial of legitimate disability claims to cut costs are not the exception but the norm.

These issues were first publicly exposed during the 2021 World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings in April in an article by Inter-Press Service (IPS) news agency.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2021/04/disability-discrimination-world-bank-immunity-impunity/

Over the past four years, the number of disability-related internal complaints has risen alarmingly, with alerts to the President of the World Bank. However, the rights of disabled continue to be trampled, under the condoning gaze of the human resources team tasked with oversight.

How can the World Bank circumvent its responsibilities?

The World Bank has immunity under the International Organizations Immunities Act, which means that although headquartered in the US, a few blocks from the US Supreme court, it is not subject to any US laws, nor can it be sued in US courts.

Originally granted to facilitate operations, this immunity has had very serious repercussions for the Bank’s disabled staff, who cannot claim protection under any minimum national or international disability law – such as the American with Disabilities Act or the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It is time the WBG be held accountable under these standards.

WBG unclear rules facilitate discrimination

The World Bank sets its own standards in the form of its Disability and Workers’ Compensation Rules which lack the robustness befitting an international organisation because their vagueness facilitates discrimination, abuse, cronyism, arbitrary interpretation, unequal application and retaliation.

These rules do not require WBG to treat disabled staff fairly, or even equitably.

Under cover of immunity, the WBG can and has changed these rules with impunity. For example, the WBG has removed the pension protection for totally and permanently disabled staff. In response to questions about arbitrary and unfair decisions, the human resources team tasked with oversight refers to “proprietary procedures,” which are kept secret.

The World Bank is expanding operations and increasing staffing in fragile, conflict and violence settings. Unlike its sister UN organisations, the WBG does not provide critical Malicious Acts (MA) insurance to protect its staff.

As early as 2010, these shortcomings were exposed in a report by the US-based Government Accountability Project based on the information provided by a WBG whistle-blower.

Unfortunately, despite continued calls for reforms, this report’s findings about lax security arrangements and “a chronicle of changing policies on claims reimbursements, rotating claims adjustors, increasingly detailed and contradictory demands for information,” and the Bank’s “exceptionally parsimonious” workers compensation programme, remain the norm.

Intimidation and retaliation: Beyond the findings of the Doing Business Report

The recent scandal unleashed by the independent investigation of the irregularities in the Bank’s Doing Business Report (see Observer Autumn 2021) exposed an environment of “psychological terrorism”, bullying and intimidation.

The reported experience of the disabled at the World Bank certainly supports this description. Some of the disabled report psychological harm expressed in attempted suicide, mental breakdown, and hospitalisation due to harassment by the WBG and its handling of the disability programme.

The disabled report feeling powerless and that they have nowhere to turn for support. They have raised their concerns to the World Bank President, David Malpass, and to all 25 Executive Directors of the WBG Board, yet to no avail.

The disabled feel that the World Bank has a culture where those who expose abuses face retaliation. Those who commit the abuses do so with impunity. Whistle-blowers fear retaliation, as the Bank could end their disability coverage, endangering their health and survival.

Many disabled report they have experienced examples of adverse actions that they attribute to whistle-blower retaliation including intimidation by private investigators, arbitrary denial of medical treatments and slander.

The Doing Business external and independent investigation has revealed the internal accountability deficit at the World Bank. Similarly, only an external and independent investigation with full participation of the WBG disabled will reveal the magnitude of the disability issues at the World Bank.

What is required is a structural overhaul of World Bank’s workers compensation and disability schemes, transparency, governance and accountability mechanisms.

Prior to handing over additional taxpayer funds for IDA20, donors have an obligation to uphold human rights and ensure that the Bank can no longer get away with, “Do as I say, but not as I do.”

Andre Hovaguimian, is a former investment director for Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa at the International Financial Corporation (IFC), a sister organization of the World Bank and a member of the World Bank Group (WBG).

 

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A worker walks through the facilities of the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes thermoelectric plant in the central province of Cienfuegos. Most of Cuba's thermoelectric plants, almost all of which were built with technology from the now defunct Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist bloc, have a lifespan of 30 to 35 years, and it would take 40 to 80 million dollars to repair and upgrade each one, according to industry executives. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Oct 14 2021 (IPS)

With aging infrastructure and problems with fuel supplies, Cuba is facing a crisis in its electric power generation system, which could accelerate plans to increase the share of renewable sources in the energy mix.

In recent weeks, blackouts have been widespread in the 15 provinces of this Caribbean island nation.

Breakdowns in several of the eight thermoelectric plants and delayed maintenance in 18 of its 20 generating blocks are the cause of the generation deficits, according to the authorities.

In addition, there are malfunctions in the distribution systems – lines, substations, transformers – due to the lack of spare parts.

Cuba produces half of the fuel burned in several of its thermoelectric plants, but a significant portion depends on imports.

Under bilateral agreements, Cuba should receive some 53,000 barrels per day of oil and derivatives from Venezuela. But the collapse of that South American country under the weight of its lingering crisis means that shipments are irregular, according to media reports, although the local government does not provide precise figures."The operating reserves in the power system are low and at times have been below what is required to meet consumer energy demand, which means the power supply is necessarily and inevitably affected.” -- Liván Arronte

There is also a reported decrease in the volumes of natural gas associated with oil, used in facilities on the northwest coast, a deficit that can only be overcome by means of new oil wells, according to industry executives.

“The operating reserves in the power system are low and at times have been below what is required to meet consumer energy demand, which means the power supply is necessarily and inevitably affected,” Minister of Energy and Mines Liván Arronte said on television on Sept. 14.

For Cuban families, the current crisis is reminiscent of the prolonged power outages of the early 1990s, when after the collapse of the then Soviet Union, the island lost its main fuel supplier.

In September 2019, another energy crisis occurred when the administration of then President Donald Trump (2017-Jan 2021) took steps to prevent the arrival of tankers to the island, as part of measures to stiffen the economic and financial embargo that the United States has had in place against Cuba since 1962.

“The U.S. government has dedicated itself to threatening and blackmailing companies that supply fuel to Cuba, and this is a qualitative leap in the intensification and application of unconventional measures against those involved in international transportation, without any legal or moral authority,” stated the 2020 annual report on the embargo.

Authorities in Cuba argue that the sanctions hinder access to credit to purchase parts and other inputs, which delays the necessary maintenance of the thermal plants.

Cuba’s dwindling coffers are in no condition to take on extra expenses, given the effects of three decades of economic crisis and the impact of the covid-19 pandemic that has made it necessary to prioritise imports of medical supplies and food.

The power grid is in critical condition and the still high level of dependence on fuel imports is a factor of vulnerability and undermines the country’s projected energy sovereignty and independence, analysts warn.

A wind farm located near the city of Gibara, in the eastern province of Holguín. Cuba has set a goal of steadily reducing the use of fossil fuels and increasing the use of renewable sources in electricity generation to 24 percent, by 2030. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Aging infrastructure

Cuba has an installed potential of more than 6500 MW/h, but the real generation capacity is only half of that, and when several generator units are disconnected from the National Electric System (SEN), it is impossible to meet peak demand of 3300 to 3500 MW/h.

The country has eight thermal power plants with 20 generation blocks and a total capacity of some 2600 MW/h, equivalent to 40 percent of the electricity that can potentially be generated in this island nation of 11.2 million people.

Several of them are able to handle Cuba’s extra-heavy crude (between seven and 18 degrees API), whose sulphur content of seven to eight percent increases corrosion in the boilers, making it necessary to reduce the time between routine maintenance, to 50 to 70 days a year.

Cuba has an oil and accompanying gas production equivalent to 3.5 million tons per year (22 million barrels), from which 2.6 million tons (16.3 million barrels) of crude oil and approximately one billion cubic meters of natural gas are obtained, according to 2020 data released by the official media.

The network of power plants forms the backbone of a system that is complemented in the 15 provinces with fuel oil engines and diesel generators, which have also been hit by the shortage in spare parts and which use part of the 150 to 200 million dollars a month in fuel imports, according to official reports.

The rest of Cuba’s electricity comes from local liquefied petroleum gas (nearly eight percent), renewable sources (five percent) and three percent from floating units (patanas), which also use fossil fuels, in Mariel Bay, 45 km west of Havana.

With one exception, the thermoelectric plants, mainly built with technology from the defunct Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist bloc, have passed their 30 to 35 year lifespan, and 40 to 80 million dollars are needed to repair each plant, according to industry leaders.

To alleviate the current crisis, the government announced an investment scheme aimed at reactivating currently unused generation potential and prioritising the staggered maintenance programme.

“The strategy’s projects include four thermal generation blocks of 200 MW/h each, which will use national crude oil and … today there are projects in different stages to produce 3500 MW/h from renewable sources, which have been affected by the current crisis,” said Arronte.

The Belgian company BDC-Log Servicios Logísticos y Transporte is optimising its operation through the use of solar panels installed on the roofs of its warehouses in the Mariel Special Development Zone, in the western province of Artemisa. The policy for the development of renewable sources in Cuba, approved in 2014, aims to encourage foreign investment in large and small projects, in order to boost energy efficiency and self-sufficiency. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Renewable energies: ups and downs

In 2014, the Cuban government approved a “Policy for the development of renewable energy sources and efficient energy use by 2030”, which aims to gradually reduce the use of fossil fuels and sets a target for 24 percent of energy to come from clean sources by that year.

The policy is also geared towards fomenting foreign investment, in both large and small local projects, with the objective of improving energy efficiency and self-sufficiency, with installations mainly connected to the national grid.

According to some estimates, more than three billion dollars in financing will be needed in order to develop more than 2000 MW/h of new capacity in renewable sources over the next nine years.

Decree-Law No. 345 passed in 2019 on the development of renewable sources contains incentives to promote self-supply from clean energy, the sale of surplus energy to the national grid, as well as tariff and tax benefits for individuals and legal entities that use these sources.

The law also proposes the installation of the most efficient LED bulbs in public streetlights, the sale of solar water heaters and efficient appliances, as well as public education campaigns on the need to save energy.

Cuba ended 2020 with an installed capacity of almost 300 MW/h from renewable sources, some of whose installations were supported by international projects and institutions.

Studies indicate that the expansion of renewable sources could reduce the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation by 2.3 million tons a year and could cut carbon dioxide emissions by eight million tons.

However, these projections clash with the high cost of technologies to obtain energy from sunlight, wind, water and biomass.

In Cuba, which aims to develop all of these sources, the solar energy programme is the most advanced, in a country with average solar radiation of more than five kilowatts per square meter per day, which is considered high.

In late July, resolutions were published allowing people to import solar power systems, free of customs duties and without commercial purposes, as well as equipment, parts and components that generate or operate as renewable energy sources.

Some chain stores also sell solar panels for more than 1,500 dollars per unit, compared to the monthly salaries of Cubans that range from 87 to 400 dollars.

Although the state can buy surplus energy from private consumers, people consulted by IPS said it was not worth the cost of purchasing and setting up a photovoltaic system and the several years needed to recover the initial investment.

Another pending issue is the technology to accumulate solar energy for use at night.

Tuvalu’s farmers have watched their crops destroyed by extreme tropical weather. They are now using Funafala 'food cubes' to have greater control over their harvests.

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia , Oct 13 2021 (IPS)

Tuvalu, a small atoll island nation in the Central Pacific Ocean, is one of few countries in the world to have so far evaded the pandemic. But, while it has achieved a milestone with no recorded cases of COVID-19, its population of about 11,931 continues to battle food uncertainties and poor nutrition. These challenges, present long before the pandemic emerged, have been exacerbated by lockdown restrictions and economic hardships during the past year and a half.

In the low-lying island country, people have strived to grow food with “lack of access to land, lack of compost for growing food and, more so, with high tides and cyclones flooding the land with seawater,” Teuleala Manuella-Morris, Country Manager for the environmental and development organization, Live & Learn, in the capital, Funafuti, told IPS.

For years the islanders have watched their food gardens destroyed by extreme tropical weather and disasters, such as cyclones and tidal surges. These factors have contributed to their increasing consumption of imported foods.  But now, the future is looking more certain with the introduction of an innovative farming system on Funafala, an islet situated close to the main Funafuti Island.

The new farming method is based on a modular structure of specially designed boxes, known as ‘food cubes’, which give local food growers greater control over their harvests.

“Tuvalu, as an atoll nation, has a range of agricultural production challenges and also relies on imported food. The pandemic has also affected food supply chains. So, considering such challenges, there was a shift in policy in trying to strengthen food security programs. In the meantime, we were already piloting the food cube system in Tuvalu. It fits perfectly well with the shift in policy focus for food security for the country,” Gibson Susumu, Head of Sustainable Agriculture in the Land Resources Division of the regional development organization, Pacific Community, which is guiding the project’s implementation, told IPS.

Issues of declining agricultural production and persistent malnutrition have existed across the Pacific Islands for decades. Before the pandemic in 2019, 49.6 percent of Oceania’s population of an estimated 11.9 million endured moderate to severe food insecurity, reports the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).  Although stunting afflicts 10 percent of children under five years in Tuvalu, which is well below the regional average, the country carries a heavy burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs). Eighty percent of men and 83.8 percent of women were classified as overweight in Tuvalu in 2016, cites the Global Nutrition Report, while diabetes afflicts 23.1 percent of adults, according to the World Health Organization.

It is anticipated that the use of food cubes will assist with food security on the atoll island of Tuvalu.

On Funafala, a vast interlocking array of boxes, raised above the ground, creates a patchwork field of green abundance. The ‘field’ contains 80-100 cubes spread over an area of 1.2 acres in which fruit and vegetables are being grown for more than 16 local households. Each ‘food cube’, which is one-metre square and 30 centimetres deep, is manufactured from 80 percent recycled food-grade plastic and designed with features that expose the plants grown within to oxygen and controlled irrigation.

“The Funafala garden has showcased the growing of local foods, like pulaka (giant swamp taro), taro, local figs, cassava, dwarf bananas and dwarf pawpaw trees…It is not only providing more food for the community but has also proven that the food cubes are another way of growing food in areas being flooded with seawater while maintaining soil fertility for more planting. At the same time, it saves water,” Manuella-Morris told IPS.

The ‘food cube’ was designed and produced by Biofilta, an Australian company developing modular urban farming systems six years ago. In 2017, the business won a worldwide competition called LAUNCH Food, commissioned by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to reward new solutions to the global issue of poor nutrition.

“To put it into a food security context, I think those food cubes will be able to produce up to 150 kilograms of vegetables and greens for a year, and that is sufficient to meet the green vegetable requirements for the member households,” Susumu said.

Biofilta claims that the system is “raised, so there is no risk of saltwater inundation, and our wicking technology is extremely water-efficient, using only a fraction of the water needed in conventional agriculture.” These are important features, as Tuvalu possesses no renewable water resources and its point of highest elevation above sea level is only 5 metres. Further, the farm uses compost, specifically tailored to the country’s soil needs by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), which also draws on ingredients from the island’s green waste treatment facility.

Another key partner, Live & Learn, has expanded trials of the farming system on other islands in Tuvalu. The long-term goal is better health outcomes and longer productive lives for islanders. “Because of agricultural challenges, the diet diversity is very low…So, with the diversification of the production systems, it means that the households have more access to healthy diets, and if the surpluses can be marketed, it also supports the income side of the households,” Susumu explained.

The Pacific Community also plans to consult with the government, local communities, and farmers to determine appropriate prices for the commercial sale of surplus fresh produce from the farms so that healthy food remains affordable to everyone.

More widely, the initiative is responding to calls from organizations, such as the FAO, to rethink food systems around the world so that smarter production leads to increased supplies of quality food, reduced pressures on finite natural resources, such as land and water, and the lower impact of agricultural practices on global warming.

The success of the ‘food cubes’ in Tuvalu has sparked enthusiasm by other Pacific Island countries, such as the Cook Islands and Fiji, where it’s also being trialled.

 

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By External Source
Oct 13 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen is the CEO of The LEGO Foundation. Ms. Albrectsen has spent almost 30 years in fields of international development, human rights and diplomacy, most recently holding the position of Global CEO at Plan International since September 2015.

At Plan International, Ms. Albrectsen helped transform the organization by working together with children, young people, supporters and partners to deliver positive impact. Prior to Plan International, Ms. Albrectsen was United Nations Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director for Management at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). She is also co-chair of the Board of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and a member of the United Nations Every Woman Every Child High Level Steering Group, the Generation Unlimited Global Board and she is the chair of the International Civil Society Centre Board.

ECW: Congratulations on your new appointment as CEO of The LEGO Foundation, a strategic and valued partner of Education Cannot Wait (ECW). Could you outline for us your vision for The LEGO Foundation as we work together to achieve SDG4 through The LEGO Foundation’s focus on early childhood education and Learning Through Play, particularly for children and youth impacted by crises and emergencies?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: Thank you, I am delighted to be heading up such an incredible organisation and it is wonderful to continue our longstanding partnership with Education Cannot Wait.

At The LEGO Foundation we promote the development of all children everywhere through playful learning, including children impacted by humanitarian crises and emergencies. We know that play reduces stress, builds resilience, while fostering imagination and hope. We are on a journey to transform the lives of at least 75 million children each year by 2032.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exasperated existing problems faced by children all over the world. Put simply, we are facing a child rights crisis. And it’s only through collaboration that we can achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 to ensure inclusive, equitable, quality education for all children – even in these unprecedented times.

This is why we hope to continue working with our partners, to change systems, attitudes and norms standing in the way of all children reaching their full potential. Because when we team up, great things happen.

ECW: The LEGO Foundation is the leading philanthropic donor to ECW, working closely with us since 2019 to deliver inclusive quality education for crisis-affected children and youth. What message do you have to encourage other private sector donors to support our collective efforts for girls and boys impacted by armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-change induced disasters and COVID-19?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: Listen to the children. Children are our role models, we listen to them and so should others.

Education is a top priority for children affected by crisis. When we address learning loss caused by crisis, families and entire communities benefit. Education boosts growth and reduces inequality. It ultimately promotes sustainable development. We simply cannot afford not to invest in children affected by crisis.

As we navigate COVID-19 recovery, we are at a pivotal moment in time to transform where, what, and how we learn. We have seen super smart solutions to education access. Now we must revolutionise education quality. Access to quality education is key to addressing 21st century challenges, including accelerating the fight to end poverty and climate-change.

Working in coalition with other donors is crucial to reaching the most vulnerable and in need children – especially in crisis and emergency situations. This is why we call on the private sector, philanthropic organisations, governments, and others to act now and donate generously to the global efforts for children impacted by conflicts, crises, climate-change induced disasters and the COVID-19 response and recovery.

ECW: The LEGO Foundation generously provided ECW with US$5.6 million in September 2021 in support of ECW’s work in Afghanistan and Haiti, bringing The LEGO Foundation’s total contributions to ECW to $33 million. What returns on investment for girls and boys, and for The LEGO Foundation, are you hoping to see as a result of these contributions to the work in Afghanistan and Haiti?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: We know that by partnering with ECW attention is focused on both the immediate and long-term impacts of crisis situations and that two key elements always in focus are access to and quality of education.

The LEGO Foundation believes deeply in the power of Learning Through Play for children affected by conflicts and crises, as is the current situation in Afghanistan and Haiti.

Research proves that play provides comfort, helps children to overcome traumatic experiences, builds resilience and allows a return to the routine and normalcy of being a child. Play can also relieve excess energy, provide emotional catharsis, and express emotions in a non-threatening way, encouraging children to respond to challenges with creative problem-solving.

Our investment in ECW will protect children and promote their learning and wellbeing by providing safe, equitable, locally relevant, and age-appropriate learning through play opportunities. This partnership will also support the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of all children.

ECW: Play is often underestimated in learning, despite being the most natural way of acquiring essential life skills in early childhood. In emergencies and crisis this is further compounded by lack of resources and stress experienced by children and caregivers. By the end of 2020 ECW had allocated 11.5% of resources to early childhood interventions, exceeding the 10% target. What do you think should be done to raise the profile of the importance of early childhood programmes and learning through play in emergencies?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: The investment in the early years of the child’s life is absolutely crucial because the early playful experiences will have benefits that last well beyond the early years. We know that children learn best through play. Play is the most natural way for children to learn to read, write and do math, while also developing physically, socially, and emotionally to think creatively, and to collaborate to solve problems. This becomes even more important for the youngest children in emergencies. Playful learning can help them overcome the stressors caused by traumatic experiences.

Significant, coordinated investment in access to Learning Through Play in the early years is urgently needed to make a greater difference in the lives of children who find themselves in humanitarian crises and emergency situations. But it isn’t all about money. It’s also about using the power of brands like ours to influence others to invest in children’s learning, the development of holistic skills, and working in partnership with like-minded organisations like ECW.

We need policymakers, key decision makers and international leaders to pay attention to the early learning crisis, lending their support and voices to prioritising early childhood programmes. Children are not the future. They are the present!

And together we must ensure the importance of early childhood programmes and Learning Through Play in emergencies is amplified onto the public agenda. It’s only with awareness of the problem that we can work together to transform the education in emergencies ecosystem for the better.

ECW: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a global impact on all areas of virtually everyone’s life, and in many countries affected by emergencies and crises, vaccinations are still out of grasp. How does The LEGO Foundation see the long-term effect of the pandemic on education, particularly for crisis-affected children and youth already impacted by armed conflicts, forced displacement and climate-induced disasters prior to COVID-19?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: To put it very simply, the COVID-19 pandemic has made already dire situations worse. Overlapping crises of conflict, natural disaster and COVID-19 exacerbate the burdens that children face.

At the peak of the pandemic, 90 per cent of the world’s students were out of school – that’s 1.6 billion children. The impact of school closures and the subsequent learning loss is devastating for children. When children drop out of school, the impacts can last a lifetime. These children may not develop the skills they need to reach their true potential.

We do not yet know the full impact on children after they were deprived of the chance to develop socially and emotionally together. But we do know that the pandemic has widened existing inequalities and increased the insecurity of the most vulnerable, particularly those children impacted by crises and emergencies.

We may see the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for years to come, but it is our joint responsibility to act now, stepping in as soon as possible to prevent further loss of quality education.

We have a unique and unprecedented opportunity to transform education systems, driving Learning Through Play to the forefront of the education agenda and equipping children with the skills they will need to navigate an ever-changing world.

ECW: The LEGO Foundation continues to be an innovative leader in early childhood education and learning through play. What are the three most important achievements you feel have been made in this area as a result of The LEGO Foundation’s work and advocacy on the importance of early childhood education and learning through play in emergency and crisis settings, and what are the most pressing things still to be done?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: Firstly, I hope we have helped raise and amplify the voices of children affected by crisis. Lifelong learning through play starts at birth and, can and should take place anywhere. No one should be left behind.

The second contribution is towards generating greater evidence on the importance of early childhood education and Learning Through Play in emergency and crisis settings. Education being an underfunded area also makes it difficult to push for more investment in early education, yet evidence shows that early learning sets children up for success. Our two large investments in promoting and supporting playful learning experiences for children in humanitarian settings are creating, testing, and scaling up new playful early learning interventions, and part of this work is also giving us more evidence on what works and why.

The third, and probably the most important for us, is the impact we have on the lives of children. We are excited about the increase in the number of children reached with Early Childhood Education (ECE) interventions and increase in overall investments in ECE through ECW. We understand that many more Multi-Year Resilience Programmes (MYRPs) developed by governments with support from ECW include ECE or pre-primary education. This is a very positive shift. We want to see how playful learning is used in these programmes and what this does for holistic learning outcomes for children.

ECW: Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better on a personal level and reading is a key component of education. Could you please share with us two or three books that have influenced you the most personally and/or professionally, and why you’d recommend them to other people to read?

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen: What a wonderful question: There are obviously great lessons for all of us in ‘Pippi Longstocking’ by Astrid Lindgren about children’s, especially girl’s, agency and ingenuity. More recent books which have shaped my thinking a lot include ‘New Power,’ by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms which helped inform my ideas about movements. I finally need to mention ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about what it means to be a feminist, and how gender roles and norms are detrimental to both men and women.

 

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Excerpt:

ECW’s largest private sector donor highlights the value of investing in early childhood programming and learning through play to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

Women sell fruit and vegetables on a sidewalk in the Philippines, where workers in the informal economy are in danger of having their livelihoods destroyed by the impacts of COVID-19. The UN will be commemorating World Food Day on October 16. Credit: ILO/Minette Rimando

By Farah Hegazi and Caroline Delgado
STOCKHOLM, Oct 13 2021 (IPS)

Hunger, violent conflict and the visible impacts of climate change are all on the rise. World Food Day, October 16, is a reminder that we need to talk about the intricate ways that these challenges are connected—and how to tackle them together.

Despite steadily increasing global harvests, more than 150 million people were acutely food-insecure in 2020, and 41 million people were reportedly on the edge of famine this summer. The main drivers of this food insecurity were violent conflict and extreme weather events.

With the number of active armed conflicts at an historic high, the impacts of climate change intensifying rapidly, and the world economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to find sustainable solutions to the dangerous interactions between hunger, conflict and climate change impacts could not be more pressing.

Hunger, conflict and climate change: a lethal cocktail

Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Zimbabwe together accounted for the 10 worst hunger crises in 2020. In the preceding decade, they accounted for over 72 per cent of all conflict deaths globally. Most of these countries are also highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

This is no mere coincidence. Both conflict and climate change impact people’s ability to produce, trade and access food, often through complex interactions.

Attacks on food production are a regular feature of war, whether it is placing landmines in fields, burning crops, looting or killing livestock, or forcing farmers to switch away from food crops to more lucrative illicit crops such as coca leaves.

Disruption of transport routes makes it harder to distribute and store food, especially more perishable types. And when food is short and formal markets fail to deliver, black markets can thrive, with profits often going to one conflict party or another and thus helping to prolong the fighting. Not surprisingly, lasting food insecurity is among the principal legacies of war.

Climate change can also disrupt food production—from the immediate damage from floods and droughts, to slower impacts such changing rainfall patterns and rising temperatures that make it harder to grow current crop varieties.

These impacts can devastate the livelihoods of farmers and herders. The risk of conflict breaking out increases as they compete over viable land and water resources or migrate. They may also be courted by armed groups promising security and brighter prospects.

In Mali, for example, nearly a fifth of the population is food-insecure because of greater variability in rainfall and more frequent and severe droughts linked to climate change. Extremist groups have been quick to use this to their advantage, providing people with food in exchange for support and thereby further fueling conflict.

South Sudan is facing a similar situation. In flood-affected pastoral regions such as Jonglei, cattle raiding has become more frequent and more violent.

Combined solutions

On the positive side, these links between hunger, climate and conflict provide entry points for action that addresses all three—and does so more effectively than programmes trying to tackle them separately.

As an example, in a region of East Africa known as the Greater Karamoja Cluster—spanning parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda—there have been violent clashes between groups of migratory herders during protracted drought.

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization have managed to reduce these conflicts, and boost the herders’ livelihoods and food security, by helping them negotiate deals on the use of pasture and water resources.

Even small-scale, highly localized programmes can catalyse wider change. In Colombia, a country highly vulnerable to climate change and scarred by the legacy of a long-running armed conflict, the revival of traditional indigenous knowledge is gaining momentum.

This includes using natural early warning signs like the appearance of certain migratory birds, which can help locals to prepare themselves for climate impacts, as well as reviving sustainable farming, fishing and hunting practices. In the process, it brings together communities fragmented by the fighting.

The rise of hunger and conflict—reversing decades of progress—along with intensifying impacts of climate change all call for urgent action, from the United Nations down. But they are connected issues, compounding each other at dire cost to people and nature.

Although it recognized that conflict and climate are linked to food insecurity, the recent UN Food Systems Summit missed the chance to discuss in depth how these connections work or how to address them.

Another chance for real progress is coming with the imminent UN climate summit in Glasgow, COP26. It is to be hoped that the discussions on climate change adaptation and loss and damage will explicitly look at how to decouple hunger, conflict and climate change.

Dr Farah Hegazi is a Researcher on the Climate Change and Risk programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), where she specializes on environmental peacebuilding. She is part of the research team for the SIPRI initiative Environment of Peace (https://www.sipri.org/research/peace-and-development/environment-peace).

Dr Caroline Delgado is a Senior Researcher and Director of the Food, Peace and Security Programme at SIPRI. Her areas of expertise include conflict, human security and peacebuilding. She is one of the focal points for the Global Registry of Violent Deaths (GReVD).

 

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