Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Sarah and Doris ride to school on their bicycles because they live several kilometres away. Ghana’s education sector was one of the hardest affected by the pandemic and for many girls, particularly those in rural areas, the consequences of school closures means many will never return to their schooling. Credit: Jamila Akweley Okertchiri/IPS

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri
ACCRA/WA EAST DISTRICT, Ghana, May 27 2021 (IPS)

Seventeen-year-old Muniratu Adams, a form two student of the Jeyiri D/A Junior High School at Funsi in the Wa East District of the Upper West Region of Ghana, is fortunate to have returned to school this January after the long COVID-19 shutdown.

Ghana’s education sector was one of the hardest affected by the pandemic and for many girls, particularly those in rural areas, the consequences of school closures means many will never return to their schooling.

“It was difficult for me to come back to school,” she tells IPS. “When I was home, I did not think I will be able to return to school.”

Adams was like many girls here who had to take on more responsibilities at home during the lockdown.

“I had little time to study my books because I had more household chores to do and I also had to help my family farm for food which we survive on,” she explains. “When I get to learn, I don’t get the help I need,” she adds.

Last March, Ghana closed schools in the wake of rising COVID-19 infections across the country.

Approximately 9.2 million learners from Kindergarten to High School and about 500,000 tertiary learners were affected until schools opened in mid-January, according to a report by United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

However, the prolonged absence of teaching and learning activities in a structured setting disrupted the academic calendar affecting the gains made in education and negatively impacting low performing students.

For many children from vulnerable groups, including children with disabilities, the prolonged school closures have put a premature end to their education.

Prior to the pandemic, UNICEF data for Ghana showed that 16.9 percent of children aged 5 to 11 years, 50.9 percent of children aged 12 to 14 years, and 83.3 percent of children aged 15 to 17 years were either not attending school, two or more years behind in school, or have not achieved the correct level of schooling for their grade. 

The pandemic’s impacts on children’s access and quality of education were most severely felt through the tracking closure of schools without adequate alternative education services accessible by all children, nation-wide.

This exacerbated existing inequities in education in the short and long- terms and worsened existing barriers to access as urban/rural disparities are significant, with children in rural areas, as well as in the Northern and Upper West regions faring far worse.

Adams says initially she was unable to continue with her studies at home during the closure of schools as she did not have the tools to facilitate her studies.

“My parents did not have a television or a radio at home so I read only my notes ,which I had before our school was closed,” she says.  “But later I got a mobile device which helped me to learn through the remote learning system.”

Remote Learning Impact

Ghana’s government, with funding from the World Bank, introduced a $15 million, one-year remote learning system as part of the COVID-19 response for continued learning, recovery and resilience for basic education. 

It included developing accessible and inclusive learning modules through TV and radio, distributing printed teaching and learning materials, distributing pre-loaded content devices to vulnerable groups who lack access to technology, and in-service teacher training to ensure teachers can effectively deliver lessons through innovative platforms.

Despite the remote learning platforms, Adams says she and some students in her community still faced a lot of challenges in ensuring equitable access to these services, because “we do not have access to online learning devices or the internet at home”.

“A large number of us in my community lack technology such as TV sets, computers, smart phones and other online devices, as well as stable internet connectivity,” Adams says.

Chief Director of the Ministry of Education, Benjamin Kofi Gyasi, who is also the COVID-19 focal person for education, tells IPS that while remote learning strategies aim to ensure continual learning for all children, “we know that the most marginalised children, including those in the most rural, hard-to-reach and poorest communities and girls, may not be able to access these opportunities.”

He adds that the ministry is prioritising the learning of most vulnerable children through the provision of learning devices/equipment and connectivity, where possible, adding that the initiative has reached more than half of targeted learners.

Executive Director of the African Education Watch, Kofi Asare, tells IPS that more children have been left behind as a result of the pandemic. He believes the government can do more to ensure that vulnerable children especially those in the remote and poorest communities of the country have the tools needed to access quality education.

‘Now the children are back to the classrooms but I can confidently say that we have lost a significant number due to the long period schools were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” he asserts.

His statement is confirmed by Adams, who says some girls in her class are yet to return more than five months after schools reopened.

“I have not seen some of my friends since we started school in January, I do not know if they will be coming or not,” she tells IPS. “My friend, Hassana Yakubu who came to school here from another community has still not returned.”

 

This feature was made possible by a donation from Farida Sultana Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Farida Sultana passed away in December 2020 after battling COVID-19 for two weeks. 

 

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Migrants arrive daily at New Delhi railway stations from across India. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By External Source
MUMBAI, May 27 2021 (IPS)

“There’s no other option but to return,” said Chitrasen in January 2021, when asked if he would migrate back to the city. The previous year’s pandemic-induced lockdown had left migrant workers stranded in cities and stripped of all their savings. An entire year later, as the second wave of COVID-19 engulfs India, many migrant workers find themselves confronted by a similar situation.

Chitrasen Sethi lives in the village of Paramanandapur, Ganjam district, Odisha. Every year he spends more than six months outside his home state, working in Surat’s cotton mills. When the 2020 lockdown was announced, he had already returned home and was able to stay safe with his family.

Migration in itself is not the issue; the exploitation of workers in cities needs to be addressed instead. Welfare schemes need to remove domiciliary barriers and labour laws need to formalise rights to wages, healthcare, and even justice systems
Rajiv Khandelwal, Aajeevika Bureau

However, the respite that came with being in his village wore off soon due to limited livelihood opportunities in Paramanandapur. He emphasised that in order to provide for his family, he had no choice but to return to Surat as soon as COVID-19 restrictions eased. By February 2021, he was back in Surat, working in the mill with unchanged working conditions.

As lockdowns and restrictions are being rapidly imposed across states, Chitrasen has no plans to return to his village. With work still continuing and wages being paid every 15 days, he reasons that it will be more economical to stay on in Surat for at least six months to make up for the savings he lost during the past year.

 

History repeats itself

In April 2020, images of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres to return to their homes increased the pressure on the state to recognise the rights of migrant workers. However, in April 2021, familiar visuals of migrant workers crowding Anand Vihar station, New Delhi and train stations in Mumbai re-emerged. This raises the question of why, after a whole year, nothing appears to have changed.

To understand the drivers of migration and workers’ experiences of social policy responses after the 2020 lockdown, PRADAN conducted a study with 250 workers before the lockdown and 272 workers stranded during the lockdown.

Fifty percent of the workers interviewed pre-lockdown said that they migrated to cities due to the lack of well-paying opportunities locally. All workers interviewed post-lockdown said they would eventually return to cities once restrictions were eased.

The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) explains that the increase in agricultural jobs in 2021 was not due to an intentional urban to rural migration, but the result of migrant workers leaving cities due to the fear of new lockdowns.

Post-lockdown policymaking has especially been focused on improving access to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and introducing new rural employment schemes, particularly for migrant workers, such as Garib Kalyan Rozgar Yojana. However, the high numbers of enrolment in these programmes did not translate into jobs for many workers.

Only 20 percent of the workers surveyed by Gaon Connection found jobs under NREGA. While rural employment schemes, such as NREGA, are crucial as short-term poverty alleviation measures for workers, in their current form, they are inadequate long-term solutions for economic revival. Their primary drawbacks remain that once workers manage to enrol in the scheme, they are still unable to access fair wages or employment opportunities that match their skills.

In June 2020, Uttar Pradesh announced plans to record and map the skills of migrant workers re-entering the state in order to allocate employment. However, the large numbers of returning migrant workers once again raise questions about how effective these programmes were. Additionally, across states, one can only assume that dynamic records of migrant workers are not being maintained, with the central government finally revealing that there was no data on migrant workers as of September 14th, 2020.

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed that migrant workers rely on urban migration to access better opportunities and higher incomes, which is why they returned to cities shortly after the first lockdown ended. This highlights two key gaps in the existing economic and political framework: the lack of rural infrastructure to prevent distress migration; and the lack of social protection in urban areas that provides security for migrants in cities.

 

Claiming rights as citizens

Migration was traditionally undertaken with the hope of earning better wages. When agricultural work didn’t pay high enough wages, people started moving to the urban areas for their livelihoods.

In the case of Mumbai, for example, people were given the space and opportunity to settle, and lone migrants were able to get their families to the city after years of working. Post-lockdown last year, family migration was replaced by single male migration; they left their families behind due to the fear of uncertainty in cities.

Migration means different things for different people—a short-term income source, decades of movement to educate children, to earn enough to build a house back home, or aspirations for different livelihoods. However, now migrants have increasingly become ‘men with no land’, crushed between the village and city.

These men with no land were left especially vulnerable during the 2020 lockdown, as social policies of destination states became the key variable shaping experiences of work, being stranded, and returning home for migrant workers.

Unable to access basic entitlements such as state insurance schemes (which still have domiciliary requirements), migrant workers are forced to abandon essential rights as they cross state borders. With the new COVID-19 restrictions across states, issues of social security for migrant workers have been reduced to decisions by states in the form of short-term schemes, rather than uniform access to rights across cities.

Schemes that offer free foodgrains or cooked meals address the basic, immediate needs of stranded migrant workers. However, they are unable to offer a wider range of rights to them. The PRADAN study emphasises the need for ‘transformative’ social protection—schemes that provide workers with rights and guarantees such as decent wages and proper housing (rather than rations or ‘preventive’ social protection such as compensations for accidents).

The first step towards transformative social protection would be building a database of migrant workers. Sanjeev Routray, lecturer at the University of British Columbia and a scholar of urban studies, emphasises the importance of numerical citizenship for the urban poor to gain visibility.

Migrant workers still struggle to be recognised and counted before they can claim rights from the state. Accompanying the lack of data on migrant workers is the absence of their voices from policymaking. Schemes such as the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC)—which offers urban rental housing for workers—lack participation from communities themselves. Instead, they favour the interests of private actors like developers and contractors.

Rajiv Khandelwal, the co-founder of the labour rights organisation Aajeevika Bureau, explains that migration in itself is not the issue; the exploitation of workers in cities needs to be addressed instead. Welfare schemes need to remove domiciliary barriers and labour laws need to formalise rights to wages, healthcare, and even justice systems.

Having safety nets in both, origin and destination states empower migrant workers. Rather than being seen as handouts, they should be accessible as basic rights of employment and movement guaranteed in the Constitution.

Ishita Patil is a Mumbai-based researcher, with a keen interest in labour and migration studies. 

Ayesha Pattnaik is a research associate in the research wing of Professional Assistance for Development Action (PRADAN).

 

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

A woman is vaccinated against COVID-19 in the indigenous community of Concordia, Colombia. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres repeated his call for the G20 to establish a Task Force “able to deal with the pharmaceutical companies and other key stakeholders”, which would address equitable vaccine distribution through the COVAX global initiative. Credit: WHO/Nadege Mazars

By Winnie Byanyima
GENEVA, May 27 2021 (IPS)

In this time of intersecting crises – the Covid crisis, the HIV crisis, the inequality crisis, and more – progress on all these crises is being blocked by another crisis: finance.

Right now, most of the world’s countries are facing brutal financial constraints, during a raging pandemic, and during the biggest crisis since World War II. The majority of countries look set to slash investment in essential public services. Such austerity would be literally fatal.

As world leaders exchange proposals for joint financial action for recovery in the build-up to the series of G7 and G20 meetings fast approaching, they need to break free from the discredited and damaging financing model that is choking social and economic recovery.

It’s important to acknowledge, of course, the vital initial steps towards recovery that world leaders, including the G20 finance ministers, and the IMF council, have taken, including at the recent Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF. But the scale of the financial measures taken is dwarfed by the scale of need.

Put simply, if leaders do not go much further, fast, to find and allocate the finances required, the effects will include the return of levels of deprivation that we had thought we had defeated, and spiraling social and political catastrophe.

To be clear, this is not a counsel of despair, but a call to leaders to make a wiser choice, and to the public to press them to do so. The really good news is this: if the will is there, we can find the money.

On debt, leaders have agreed to extend the Debt Suspension Initiative; but they have done so only until the end of this year, and private creditors have again been merely invited to collaborate.

As a result, repayments over $30bn are set to flow from the poorest nations to banks, investments funds, Governments and multilateral banks in 2021. Only the IMF among those has announced debt relief to 28 countries.

Cancelling debt repayments of the poorest nations is essential, and vulnerable middle-income countries need approaches that allow for cancellation too.

No debt service payments should be made or asked for until the investments necessary for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal on health are secured.

Indebted poor countries must not be pushed into new debts to pay for vaccine imports, but should rather be allowed to produce their own at much lower cost.

The very welcome statements from key leaders on a patent waiver need to be turned into a formal decision urgently, reinforced by technology sharing by companies through the WHO.

Cervical cancer is the most common cancer among women living with HIV. The likelihood that a woman living with HIV will develop invasive cervical cancer is up to five times higher than for a woman who is not living with HIV. The overall risk of HIV acquisition among women is doubled when they have had a human papillomavirus (HPV) infection. Credit: UNAIDS

On aid by traditional donors, OECD figures report a small increase overall of barely $10 billion, a drop in the ocean compared to the $17 trillion that rich countries have used to support themselves.

No agreement has been reached on expanding ODA now when it is most needed. All developed countries should honour the pledge of at least 0.7%. A pandemic is the most damaging time to back away.

Emerging countries with a strong financial capacity must step up too with their own upgraded contributions.

On Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the IMF currency, a historical issuance of the equivalent of $650bn has been reached. But only 3.3% of those resources, $22bn, are set to flow to Sub Saharan Africa, the region most in need. Indeed, the amounts that low-income countries are set to receive through the SDR issuance are smaller than the unsuspended external debt repayments scheduled for 2021.

There is an active discussion about rich countries reallocating perhaps 10% or so of their own share of SDRs. But a strong case has been made that rich countries should reallocate the majority of their own SDRs to low and low middle-income countries.

That would indeed represent the largest ever financing for development operation; but that scale of action is what our current scale of crisis requires.

Of course, what countries most need is to grow their own domestic resourcing. Right now, we lose a nurse’s yearly salary to tax havens every second.

World leaders’ dialogue on tax evasion has been rightly acknowledged as historic, with proposals to establish a minimum global corporate tax, something that would enable billions in public investment across countries, seriously reducing extreme inequality.

An agreement will be under discussion soon at the G20 and with the OECD. Leaders need urgently to move from discussion to agreement and action.

We need a compact that includes taxation on excess profits, wealth, and negative climate impacts, invested to fund the scrapping of user fees and the expansion of health and education so that they are finally experienced as universal rights.

Global pandemic preparedness, stability and prosperity all require us to fight inequality.

Gordon Brown´s proposal for G7 countries to immediately share the burden of the $60 billion needed in funding for vaccines and vital medical supplies, diagnostics and medical oxygen is both essential and achievable – now.

It would kickstart recovery for every country and could help set the world on a pathway to a new approach to global financing.

Now is the moment to consign to the dustbin old worn-out ideas that we can’t afford to overcome our crises. The reality is that we can’t afford not to.

The Covid-19 crisis has seen a transfer of wealth from workers to billionaires of almost $4 trillion. This moment could, like other crises before, become a moment for rebuilding a fairer world – but only if we seize it.

Achieving a more equal world is essential for our health. The financing solutions are there. The principal challenge is not technical, it is courage.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Executive Director of UNAIDS and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Social distancing in a Macau Hospital waiting room. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said censorship of the Chinese media made the COVID-19 situation worse. Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, May 26 2021 (IPS)

China is one of the worst places in the world for media freedom, according to the global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) which ranked the country 177 out of 180 in its latest World Press Freedom Index. In the report, the group warned that Beijing is taking “internet censorship,  surveillance and propaganda to unprecedented level,” and had “taken advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to enhance its control over online information even more”. China is also the world’s biggest jailers of journalists with more than 120 journalists and what the group calls “defenders of press freedom” currently detained.

IPS spoke to Cedric Alviani, East Asia Bureau Head at RSF, about what effect China’s media restrictions had in the early days of the country’s Covid-19 outbreak over a year ago, how foreign journalists are facing unprecedented pressures in the country, and what Beijing is doing to try and create a New World Media Order to spread its propaganda around the globe.

Interpress Service (IPS): Media freedom watchdogs, and many doctors, have pointed to how restrictions on media during the Covid-19 pandemic may have cost lives. Some members of RSF have even gone as far as to say that had China had a freer press, the Covid-19 pandemic may not have needed to happen. Would you agree with that?

Cedric Alviani (CA): What we are saying is that had there been a freer press in China, information about the first infections would have been made public much sooner, and authorities in China, and elsewhere, may have been able to better control the spread. The pandemic may not have been so severe. But we are not in any way blaming China for the pandemic as there are so many other factors involved in any pandemic.

However, censorship made the situation worse. Viruses do not recognise borders, nor censorship. Compare what happened in China with regard to open reporting on the virus, and Taiwan, where the authorities were very open right from the start with information about Covid and disseminating it to the public. That way the public were fully informed and could make decisions to protect themselves.

We still do not have the information to fully see the current situation with Covid in China because of censorship. Have there been any outbreaks? Would we know, be told about them? We cannot have a clear picture.

What this pandemic has shown is the very reason we need a free press and independent journalism so that the facts and full information can be got out. This is not just in the case of a pandemic, but in any situation in which getting full information out to people can help save lives.

In a world where media is completely controlled by the state, can you imagine how many epidemics there would be? You cannot censor, or hide, a virus. They could spread overnight. There would be no full information, doctors would be afraid to speak.

IPS: In RSF’s latest press freedom index, China is ranked the fourth worst country in the world for media freedom and the report accompanying the index said that China continues to take internet censorship, surveillance, and propaganda to “unprecedented levels”. What kind of media restrictions do Chinese journalists face and what happens to journalists who defy those restrictions and report freely, or critically of the government?

CA: China is the world’s worst enemy of free press. Our fear is that in 20 years there will be no journalism, only state propaganda. The censorship authorities in the country are providing lists to media of what they can and cannot talk about. The lists are getting longer all the time.

IPS: Is this the same in Hong Kong, where there have been increasing curbs on general freedoms in the last few years?

CA: In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has entered ownership of most Chinese language media and through economic pressure has also managed to deprive other media of funds. The situation is getting worse with direct attacks being used to impose Beijing’s media rules and censorship on local media.

IPS: Last year, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, news about the situation in China leaked out to the rest of the world through many so-called ‘citizen-journalists’. Some of these people later reportedly disappeared or there were claims they had been forced into silence by the authorities and were living in fear of arrest, or worse. Has the regime essentially shutdown any and all citizen journalism now, and what does this mean for freedom of information in the country?

CA: We use the term ‘non-professional journalist’ rather than citizen journalist as these are people who are imparting facts, as professional journalists do – to their readers or audience. What has happened to these non-professional journalists is that since Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power, professional journalists have been increasingly under pressure, and some people in society have stepped in to replace them and do the role professional journalists have found increasingly difficult to perform by getting information out there that is not being seen by people, for instance information about various social movements in China, which is not being disseminated. Obviously, non-professional journalists have also come under pressure in recent times – some bloggers have been jailed for years for writing about subjects such as corruption of officials – but there will always be people out there who will want to get hold of, and spread, information about what is going on.

IPS: What is the situation like for foreign journalists in China?

CA: Unlike local journalists, their families can’t be threatened so they can do freer reporting than domestic journalists. But now they are coming under pressure from the regime. A lot are moving to Taiwan, which is a safe haven for journalists, but it makes it more difficult to report on mainland China and get an accurate picture of events there. The world needs foreign correspondents in mainland China so we know what is happening there.

In the last year, the Chinese government has expelled 18 foreign correspondents. So many being expelled is unheard of here. Foreign journalists are starting to worry they may be taken hostage in political disputes between China and other countries. They have also complained of pressure being put on their sources, so they are left with no one to speak to for their stories as those sources are too scared to speak on record or too scared to speak at all.

IPS: Can you see a time in the future where foreign journalists will not be able to work at all in China, or not without their work being censored or approved in some way by authorities in Beijing?

CA: Unfortunately, it is looking more and more likely that this could happen. Twenty years ago, China needed foreign correspondents to promote the country and its story to the world. In recent years though it has developed a system of propaganda so the regime can reach the people it wants to directly, and therefore no longer needs foreign correspondents. There may come a time when foreign correspondents do not want to work in China.

IPS: RSF has previously spoken about what it claims is China’s pursuit of a New World Media Order to expand its ideological influence beyond its borders, which poses a threat to free journalism and democracy. Could you explain what this New World Media Order is and how exactly China is pursuing it?

CA: The New World Media Order is simple to explain – China’s aim is to make journalism a synonym for propaganda. It wants to remove any counterforce or opposition to the regime in power. Investigative journalism is necessary for democracy and accountability, and what China wants is to have ‘journalists’ who are patriotic people who present propaganda. The regime is trying to change and control the narrative of itself and China. It is using international TV broadcasting, as well as buying up advertising space in international media and even working its way into foreign media, as part of its aim to create this new order.

IPS: Do you think the countries in which China is trying to infiltrate foreign media and gain influence are aware that this is what Beijing is doing?

CA: Everyone is aware of what China is doing with this New World Media Order and trying to infiltrate media, but they have closed their eyes to it because countries want to do trade with China. There has been this engagement and stated aims of trying to change and improve the human rights situation in China, but it has been shown that nothing has changed. What is going to happen is that citizens in these other countries, in democracies, are going to soon realise that their governments have been selling their countries’ souls for decades.

IPS: Beijing could argue that by setting up Chinese language TV stations and media outlets in other countries it is doing nothing different to what the BBC, CNN, or other similar foreign broadcasters do, or have done, in China. What would your counter argument be for that?

CA: There is a huge difference between public media, i.e. media which is essentially owned by the public, and state media. It is important for any public to have access to information which is independent, and which acts as a reference media for the public. For example, the BBC is a public media, it is now owned or run by the state authorities, it has its own board, and is responsible for its own decisions, and it is impossible for the government to make it publish or broadcast something which it does not want to. It is independent. But something like China’s CCTV has to promote the Chinese communist party’s propaganda. The two entities are entirely different in their nature and it is incorrect to even compare them in any way.

IPS: Are other regimes copying China’s example of gaining influence and peddling propaganda in foreign media to pursue their own ideological and political aims?

CA: China’s model of media turning into state propaganda is being exported all over the world. Dictators now know that if they can control the media, they can keep getting re-elected because there is only one message getting to the people – that they have a glorious leader.

IPS: What can, or should, countries which claim to support freedom of information and free media, such as many Western democracies, be doing to counter China’s pursuit of a New World Media Order?

What they have to do is to remain democracies and open and not arbitrarily get rid or ban any media. But they also have to have a system in place which protects free, independent media and makes sure competition is fair, and that any media operating on that market do so by adhering to free and open journalism and not to propaganda.

IPS: What are the prospects for media freedom in China in the medium and long-term future?

CA: As long as Xi Jinping is in power it is hard to see any positive change in the state of media freedom in China any time soon, and in fact it is more likely to just get worse. The only hope is that political forces eventually emerge within China which will open up the possibility of a freer media and give the Chinese people what they want, which is freedom of information. We saw how angry Chinese people were online when they realised that the authorities had lied to them over Covid-19. The government has powerful technological tools at their disposal and have been successful in stopping people accessing information, but the demand from the people for real and accurate information will win out in the end, even though that does not appear to be something likely to happen any time very soon.

 

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By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, May 26 2021 (IPS)

On the occasion of World Environment Day, 5 June 2021, drawing from IPS’s bank of features and opinion editorials published this year, we are re-publishing one article a day, for the next two weeks.

The original article was published on April 7 2021

Ngadirejo residents have been converting their organic waste into compost and are selling this to inorganic waste to private companies. They are also planting vegetables in their backyards and on unused land as part of the community’s urban farming activity and climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.
Courtesy: Serono Arief Wijaya, ProKlim Ngadirejo

JAKARTA, Apr 7 2021 (IPS) – Residents of Ngadirejo village in Sukaharjo regency, Central Java province, had often found themselves helpless when their wells dried up or water flooded through their homes. But thanks to a national campaign called Program Kampung Iklim, known by its acronym ProKlim, they now have solutions to this flooding that generally occurs because of a lack of adequate water catchments.

“We started planting biopore holes and erecting infiltration wells in early 2016 to harvest rainwater and wastewater. The results have been almost instantaneous – our wells have never run out of water and floods never visited us again since 2017,” Serono Arief Wijaya told IPS from Ngadirejo, which lies around one-hour flight east of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta.

As climate change hits home, Indonesia has frequently experienced drought and heavy rainfall, with reports of water scarcity, floods, landslides, and crop failures becoming common. In 2012, the government introduced Program Kampung Iklim, which literally means Climate Village Programme, to raise public awareness towards global warming and to assist people at grassroots level to draw up adaptation and mitigation plans.

While attending a seminar organised by the local office of Environment and Forestry Department in December 2015, leaders of Ngadirejo, according to Wijaya, heard the word global warming and ProKlim for the first time. The following year community leaders decided to plant biopore holes along Ngadirejo’s drainage network and build infiltration wells throughout the neighbourhood in adaptation and mitigation efforts.

“We now have around 600 biopore holes, each measuring one meter deep and eight centimetres wide, and 50 infiltration wells measuring one meter deep and three meters wide each,” said Wijaya, who heads Ngadirejo’s ProKlim campaign.

“Many residents who had access to piped water previously now harvest groundwater instead for their daily needs,” he added.

Up until 2016, only between 10 to 15 percent of Ngadirejo residents had access to piped water, with the remainder reliant on artesian wells only. According to 2020 figures, the village has some 3,000 families – slightly over 10,000 people.

Aside from harvesting rainwater, Ngadirejo residents have also been converting their organic waste into compost and are selling this to private companies. They are also planting vegetables in their backyards and on unused land as part of the community’s urban farming activity.

They also use LED light bulbs and automatic sensors to switch lights on or off when needed and have planted trees with the slogan “one-house-one-big-tree”.

“We have also designated a section of our village as a tourist destination and training centre where we explain our ProKlim actions to visitors or conduct training on how to make biopore holes, infiltration wells, fertiliser, or anything related to adaptation and mitigation actions,” Wijaya said.

Residents sell their organic and inorganic waste at a waste bank in Ngadirejo village, Sukoharjo regency, Central Java province. Courtesy Serono Arief Wijaya, ProKlim Ngadirejo

Hardi Buhairat, a 50-year-old resident of Poleonro in Bone regency, South Sulawesi province — a three hour flight east of Jakarta — expressed a similar sentiment when talking about the ProKlim programme being implemented in his village.

“ProKlim has brought the Lita River back to life and we are very happy about that. The river is our only source of water for household consumption and farming but there were times it could no longer irrigate our field. Its water debit has returned and is stable throughout the year,” Buhairat, who is head of Poleonro’s ProKlim programme, told IPS.

The village started implementing ProKlim solutions in 2015, kicking it off with series of meetings with residents where they discussed climate change and the actions community members could take to avert its adverse impacts.

“The first things we did was issuing a village ordinance banning the residents from cutting trees and harvesting woods in and around Lita River’s spring. Soon after that, we planted thousands of trees in deforested areas around the spring,” said Buhairat, who is also Poleonro’s chief.

Poleonro’s village leaders also issued two other ordinances; one banning residents from burning rice straw and farms after harvest.

The 2019 Pollution and Health Metrics: Global, Regional and Country Analysis report from the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP) ranks Indonesia as 4th in the world in terms of annual premature pollution-related deaths, after the populous nations of India, China and Nigeria.

The second ordinance requires residents to replace any tree they cut down in customary forests.

“The latter ordinance allows them to harvest trees in their customary forests but also orders them to plant new trees to replace the ones they cut. To ensure that they comply the rule, we inspect their forests regularly,” Buhairat said.

The residents also planted biopore holes to store rainwater underground, built wells to filter household wastewater before it goes into the river, and treated waste, converting organic waste into compost.

“Since 2015, we encouraged the residents to have indoor toilets. We are glad all households now have their own toilets indoors,” Buhairat said.

Buhairat said Poleonro villagers have also begun to diversify their food crops as part of their food security action.

“Our farmers planted organic red rice for the first time in 2018. We are now looking for buyers before going on a large-scale production. We want organic red rice to be our specialty commodity,” he said.

Since ProKlim’s launch in 2012, over 2,700 villages in 33 provinces have been registered as climate villages, according to Sri Tantri Arundhati, Director of Climate Change Adaptation of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. In 2020, six of those villages, including Ngadirejo and Poleonro, received the ProKlim Lestari Trophy, the highest accolade for a climate village programme, from the ministry.

Arundhati said the government now aims to establish 20,000 climate villages, which constitute roughly 25 percent of the country’s 83,000 villages, by 2024.

“We will cooperate with other stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations and the private sector, and improve coordination with local governments and related departments. We will also work to improve the capacity of local governments and people at the grassroots level,” she told IPS.

Arundhati said her ministry has also asked registered climate villages to promote ProKlim and help other communities design their adaptation and mitigation actions.

Wijaya confirmed Ngadirejo village has been encouraged to help other communities implement ProKlim.

“We are now helping 44 villages in Central Java where we explain about global warming and help residents there identify adaptation and mitigation actions they could take to deal with climate change-related problems in their community,” Wijaya said.

Buhairat said Poleonro is now guiding 15 villages in South Sulawesi to become climate villages.

Rizaldi Boer of the state-owned Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) said ProKlim could help the government achieve the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDCs) agreed according to the Paris Agreement.

“The programme can help a lot in dealing with climate change as it encourages active participation of people at grassroots level,” said Boer, who is also director of the Centre for Climate Risk and Opportunity Management in Southeast Asia and Pacific.

“However, the government should establish a standardised report mechanism on ProKlim actions, particularly how to calculate its contribution to greenhouse gas emission reduction,” Boer told IPS.

Under the country’s NDCs, Indonesia has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent with its own initiatives and 41 percent with external financial and technical assistance by 2030.

Boer also praised the government’s ambitious target of establishing 20,000 climate villages by 2024.

“It’s a tall order but it is not impossible. However, it requires participation of governments at all levels and all stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations and the private sector,” he said.

 

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Credit: CIVICUS, global civil society alliance

By Mandeep Tiwana
NEW YORK, May 26 2021 (IPS)

It has been one year since the police murder of George Floyd, an outrage that resonated around the world. The killing forced people to the streets, in the USA and on every inhabited continent, to demand respect for Black lives and Black rights, proving that protest was essential even during the pandemic.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations are the latest in a great global wave of protests that started with the Arab Spring 10 years ago and continue today, seen in the brave civil disobedience people are mounting against Myanmar’s military coup and the protests against Israeli violence in Palestine, with people taking to the streets around the world to show solidarity and demand an end to the killing.

Millions of people are protesting because they can see that protests lead to change – the trial of the officer responsible for George Floyd’s killing was an incredibly rare event that would likely not have happened without protest pressure – and because mass mobilisations often offer the only means of resistance to repressive governments.

CIVICUS’s just-published 2021 State of Civil Society Report describes how decentralised movements for racial justice and gender equality are challenging exclusion and demanding a radical reckoning with systemic racism and patriarchy.

Threats posed by economic inequality and climate change are enabling people to connect across cultures, spurring mobilisations in many different countries. Today, not only in Myanmar and Palestine, but in Colombia, Lebanon and Thailand among many others, people are demanding economic opportunity, a real say in how they are governed, and an end to discrimination.

Much blood is being spilt in unwarranted violence against protesters by repressive security apparatuses acting on the behest of vested interests. Inarguably, the right to mobilise is being sharply contested because of its potential to redistribute power to the excluded.

Major political transformations in modern history have been catalysed through largely peaceful protests. Sustained mass mobilisations have resulted in significant rights victories including expansion of women’s right to vote, passing of essential civil rights laws, dismantling of military dictatorships, ending apartheid, and legalisation of same-sex marriage.

In the past year, despite the disruptions of COVID-19, populist demagogues have faced stiff resistance from people driven by a hunger for justice and democracy. In Brazil, thousands came out to the streets to protest against horrendous bungling by the Bolsonaro administration in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic which has resulted in a monumental loss of lives.

In India, thousands of farmers remain steadfastly defiant in camps outside Delhi to protest against hurriedly drawn-up laws designed to undermine their livelihoods and benefit big business supporters of Prime Minister Modi’s autocratic government.

In Russia, pro-democracy protests in several cities against the grand corruption of strongman President Putin have so alarmed him that he engineered the imprisonment of his most prominent political opponent. In Uganda, political opposition led protests have inspired people from all walks of life to stand up against President Museveni who’s been in power for 35 years.

In Belarus, protests by ordinary people displaying extraordinary courage helped bring international attention to an election stolen by Alexander Lukashenko, the first and only president the country has known since the present constitution was established in 1994.

Credit: CIVICUS

In the United States, the decentralised Black Lives Matter movement is spurring action on racial justice and the unprecedented prosecution of police officers engaged in racist acts of violence against Black people.

The movement not only helped dispatch a race-baiting disruptive president at the polls, it also had a deep impact beyond the United States by spotlighting racism in places as diverse as Colombia, the Netherlands, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Notably, women-led movements are challenging gender stereotypes, exposing patterns of exclusion, and forging breakthroughs to lay the groundwork for fairer societies. Concerted street protests by women in Chile helped win a historic commitment to develop a new justice-oriented constitution by a gender-balanced constitutional assembly that will also include Indigenous people’s representation.

In Argentina, legislation to legalise abortion and protect women’s sexual and reproductive rights followed years of public mobilisations by the feminist movement.

Our research finds that, in country after country, young people are at the forefront of protest. Young people have taken ownership of climate change to make it a decisive issue of our time. The Fridays for Future movement which began with a picket in front of the Swedish parliament on school days now has supporters organising regular events to demand urgent political action on the climate crisis on all continents.

Present day movements are deriving strength by taking the shape of networks rather than pyramids, with multiple locally active leaders. Hong Kong’s ‘Water Revolution’ may have been repressed by China’s authoritarian might, but the metaphor of behaving like water – shapeless, mobile, adaptable – holds true for many contemporary movements.

Unsurprisingly, powerful people’s mobilisations are inviting sharp backlash. Protest leaders and organisers are often the first to be vilified through official propaganda and subjected to politically motivated prosecutions.

Many of the rights violations that CIVICUS has documented in recent years are in relation to suppression of protests. Persecution of dissenters, censorship and surveillance to stymie public mobilisations remains rife.

They are all part of a tussle between people joining together in numbers to demand transformative change, and forces determined to stop them. Yet, the principled courage of protesters who mobilise undeterred by repression continues to inspire.

Protests are about challenging and renegotiating power. To succeed they need solidarity and allies across the board. The responsibility to safeguard the right to peaceful assembly enshrined in the constitutions of most countries and in the international human rights framework rests with all of us. History shows us that when people come together as civil society great things are possible.

Mandeep Tiwana is Chief Programmes Officer at global civil society alliance CIVICUS.
The State of Civil Society Report 2021 can be found online here.

 

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A tower block lies in ruins in Gaza city following an Israeli air strike. The humanitarian community has welcomed the ceasefire agreed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel but warned that the destruction in Gaza will take years, if not decades, to fix. Credit: UNRWA/Mohamed Hinnawi

By Joan Russow, and Dimitri Lascaris*
MONTREAL/VICTORIA, Canada, May 26 2021 (IPS)

Over the past 75 years, there have been many UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions acknowledging Israel’s violations of international law, including a Resolution under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, that could have addressed, if implemented, the plight of the Palestinians.

In addition, in 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a legal opinion unanimously declaring Israel’s settlements to be a violation of international law.

Despite these interventions, the Palestinian people seem further than ever from realizing their right to self-determination.

After the United States rejected several draft resolutions relating to the current round of violence, which Israel provoked by unlawful actions in Jerusalem, the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution 377 should have been invoked.

Instead, member states sought to appease the U.S. with a new, insufficient resolution from the Security Council.

Of course, a ceasefire is welcome news, but nothing will be solved without sanctions on the State of Israel. By pursuing a decades-long policy of settlement expansion and forcible dispossession of Palestinians, successive Israeli governments have revealed the peace process to be a sham, a tool to buy time for further land theft by the State of Israel.

Without sanctions, any demand that the Israelis and Palestinians return to the negotiating table will prove utterly ineffectual.

As Independent Jewish Voices Canada has stated: “A temporary absence of Israeli bombs is not justice.” Rabbi David Mivasair added “Jews in our communities in Canada are overcome with grief and anger… We say loud and clear, ‘not in our name.’ Israel can no longer continue to commit these atrocities in the name of the Jewish people.”

1. The structure of the UNSC violates, through the veto, the fundamental principle of the United Nations: The sovereign equality of states; the UN General Assembly, however, does embody this principle.

The 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution 377 was a precedent set by the United States for finding a way of preventing the Russian veto of the U.S. military actions in Korea.

That resolution is applicable to the plight of Palestinians because it stipulates that, in any cases where the Security Council, because of a lack of unanimity among its five permanent members, fails to act as required to maintain international peace and security, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately and may issue appropriate recommendations to UN members for collective measures, in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

The purpose of the Uniting for Peace resolution was to facilitate prompt action by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in the case of a deadlocked Security Council. The resolution created the mechanism of the “emergency special session”. Undoubtedly, the General Assembly could call for an emergency special session to consider drafting a resolution which could include solutions which have been proposed for years in Palestine, but continually vetoed by the U.S.

The May 16, 2016 Security Council resolution 2443 is reminiscent of the situation in 2003, when at least two permanent members opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As a result of failure of unanimity of the P5, many were calling for the invoking of 377 resolution to prevent the invasion of Iraq.

By invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution, the U.N. could have initiated an emergency meeting of the UNGA. This was in fact underway until the U.S. circulated an intimidating letter to all member states of the UNGA.

Why was Resolution 377 used against the Russian and not against the US veto?

2. The lack of action by the UNSC to implement the ICJ opinion on the proposed Israeli wall.

In 2004 the ICJ used the 1950 resolution 377 to legitimize the issuance of a legal opinion when the request came from the General Assembly rather than the Security Council: “Council is exercising its functions in respect of any dispute or situation the Assembly must not make any recommendation with regard thereto unless the Security Council so requests”.

“The Court further observed that the General Assembly had adopted resolution ES-10/14 during its Tenth Emergency Special Session, convened pursuant to resolution 377 A (V), whereby, in the event that the Security Council has failed to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, the General Assembly may consider the matter immediately with a view to making.”

The ICJ issued an advisory opinion to the General Assembly that Israel’s building of a barrier in occupied Palestinian territory is illegal and that its construction must stop immediately and Israel should make reparations for any damage caused.

The Court’s legal opinion concluded with the following statement: Https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/131

“Finally, in regard to the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly and the Security Council, the Court indicated that they should consider what further action was required to bring to an end the illegal situation in question, taking due account of the present Advisory Opinion.”

Why did the security council not consider what further action was required to bring to an end the illegal situation in question, taking due account of the present advisory opinion?

3. Security council resolution 2334 on Israeli settlements used chapter VI and never addressed enforcement to international law.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 was adopted on 23 December 2016. It concerns the Israeli settlements in “Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem”.

The resolution states that Israel’s settlement activity constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law and has “no legal validity”. It demands that Israel stop such activity and fulfill its obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Critically, the resolution did not include any sanction or coercive measures and was adopted under the non-binding Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter – the peaceful resolutions of disputes.

The resolution passed in a 14–0 vote by members of the UNSC. Four members with veto powers, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, voted for the resolution, and the United States abstained.

In response, the government of Israel retaliated with a series of “diplomatic actions” against some members of the Security Council.

Why did the UNSC not move this resolution beyond chapter VI so that there could be provisions for sanctions and coercive measures? Was the UNSC reticent because of the potential U.S. veto or U.S./Israeli retaliation?

4. The uniting for peace resolution must be invoked and the power moved to the General Assembly.

If only the 1950 RES 377 had been invoked after May 16 2001, then peace and security could have been achieved, and there could have been a potential emergency General Assembly resolution addressing the years of Security Council Resolutions that failed because of U.S. intransigence.

The time has come for the Uniting for Peace Resolution to be brought to bear on Israel’s persistent and “flagrant” violations of international law. Below we set forth the proposed text of such a resolution:

Recalling the 1950 Res 377 which bestows responsibility for peace and security on the General Assembly;

DEPLORING the years of Security Council Resolutions supporting Palestinian rights that failed because of the U.S. veto: The General Assembly Calls for the implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which stressed the “inalienable rights of the people of Palestine” which would include the following:

Abiding by the right to return; Ending Israeli settlements and evictions; Setting up United Nations sanctions against the State of Israel; Condemning Israel’s settlement activities in Occupied Palestinian Territory as violations of international humanitarian law; Making reparations for physical and mental harm caused by the construction of the wall on occupied territory; Urging the UN Secretary General to release the report of Professors Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley on Israeli Apartheid; and Invoking Article 22 of the Charter of the United Nations to set up an International Tribunal to investigate Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

*Joan Russow, is Co-Ordinator and Dimitri Lascaris is Legal Adviser, Global Compliance Research Project, based in Canada.

 

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Migrant labourers wait in queues in Kashmir in order to travel back to their homes. The second wave of COVID-19 in India has seen masses of people leave cities and towns to return to their rural homes. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
NEW DEHLI, May 25 2021 (IPS)

Last month, in the midst of New Delhi’s coronavirus lockdown, 37- year-old labourer Prakash Kumar wanted to return to his rural home in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. But instead of travelling the usual few hours by bus, Kumar had to journey for three days.

“The firm [where I worked] was closed down and there was no work left in the city. The government had kept the busses and trains operational and that is why we decided to leave,” Kumar told IPS.

But at the main bus terminal he saw a sea of migrant workers jostling in queues to board busses that could take them back home.

Kumar ended up having to wait 24 hours to purchase a ticket.  “Due to the huge rush, I had to go by some other route which was [costly] and lengthy. I had to walk also for many miles,” he said.

The second COVID-19 wave has hit India hard. On May 5, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that India accounted for 46 percent of all new COVID-19 cases recorded worldwide and one in four of deaths. The highest daily average was on May 9 when over 400,000 new cases were recorded. Currently India has recorded just over 245,000 daily infections.

On May 24, Delhi reported 1,900 new COVID-19 cases, a reduction from last week’s 3,846 cases. It’s the lowest reported rates of cases since Mar. 27.

The total number of cases in the Indian capital stands at 1,42 million along with just over 1,37 million total recoveries and over 23,000 deaths since the pandemic’s outbreak.

On Apr. 19, in order to prevent the spread of the disease, the government imposed a lockdown in the capital. Construction activities, private firms, schools, colleges, offices, cinemas, bars and restaurants were all shut. The shutdown continues to remain in force. But with the lockdown and high infection rates in the Indian capital, migrant workers have been leaving the city in droves.

Darshana Kumari is one of them. Kumari worked as a maid in the Indian capital for over a year. However, with the resurgence of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown, the mother of two decided to leave the city and return to her home in Uttar Pradesh.

“My employer has asked me not to come to work anymore. Also I am worried about my children. My elder son is just 12 years old. I fear to even imagine that if anything happens to me here, what will happen to my kids,” Kumari told IPS.

She said heading back home was her only option to save herself and her children from the “dangerous disease.”

Hailing from country’s rural belt, migrant labourers amount to some 40 million people, according to government estimates. They come to the cities and towns to earn a livelihood by working in menial jobs in privately-owned firms and factories. But the various states of lockdown across the country has meant that many migrant workers have become unemployed.

According to India’s leading business think tank, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CIME), an estimated 122 million people became unemployed during India’s first lockdown, 75 percent of whom were daily wage earners.

In a recent report, CIME said that the unemployment rate increased from 6.5 percent in March to 7.97 percent in April.

“While this massive tragedy is comparable only to the mass migrations during the partition of the Indian sub-continent when British left India in 1947, the added element this time is also the plight of migrant workers, risking their lives along with livelihood,” Ram Punyani, an imminent Indian writer and civil society activist, wrote recently.

Migrant worker Siraj Alam waits to board a bus in India’s Srinagar City to return to his hometown in Bihar. The closure of factories due to COVID-19 has forced millions of labourers like him to leave the cities and return to their rural homes. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

Suresh Kumar Yadav, 29, who had worked as a daily wage labourer in a cement factory in Delhi was waiting for a bus to take him to his village in northern Uttar Pradesh. His two-year-old child and his wife sat near to the bus stop, anxiously waiting to get out of the city as soon as possible.

“Last year, it was March when the first lockdown due to COVID-19 was imposed and we were told to go home. We came back here in September, hoping that we may now be able to earn without any anxiety but the present situation looks more frightening than that of the last year,” Yadav told IPS.

When the lockdown in Delhi was imposed, he and of the other workers at the factory were paid off and told that their services will no longer be required. Yadav went to his rented apartment dismayed and dejected. He paid the rent and asked his wife to pack their bags once again.  “I used to earn 10,000 rupees ($150) a month here. As I am going back to the village, I don’t know what would I do, what would I earn?” Yadav said.

Reports show that after the Apr. 19 lockdown in Delhi, more than 80,000 migrant workers returned to their homes.

Geeta Aiyar, a social activist based in Delhi, said the displacement of migrant workers in India was wreaking havoc on their livelihoods.

“They had all hopes that they may get some respite this year but the pandemic is showing its disastrous side and its direct impact is being felt by the poor migrant labourers in the country. There are many who have become infected and died. The hospitals are already overburdened and the shortage of oxygen is actually killing more people than those [dying] due to the virus itself. Therefore, these poor souls have no option but to flee the city with whatever little resources they have,” Geeta told IPS.

Bijay Kumar, who works as an electrician in a private firm in Delhi, was walking with 10 other men towards the railway station where he hoped to catch a train to return to his rural home.

The 35-year-old had been working to repay the bank loan he had taken out last year to pay for his wedding. But the COVID-19 pandemic shattered all his dreams and hopes of becoming a debt-free man.

“The interest on the loan is only increasing every month. With the second wave of COVID-19, everything has been shut and from this month onwards, I wouldn’t get any salary as the factory has been closed. I really have no idea what will happen to my family,” Kumar, whose wife is seven months pregnant and suffering from various health issues, told IPS.

Dr Naveed Iqbal, a New Delhi-based virologist, told IPS that the government needed to streamline the exodus of migrant workers from cities and towns as they could be carriers of the deadly virus and could spread the disease in rural areas.

“As these workers board busses and trains to reach to their villages, they could be potential carriers of the virus. The government needs to order their quarantine for at least 14 days at the borders of their states and allow them to proceed only after completion of the quarantine period. This way we can help in stopping the flow of virus to the rural parts of the country where the health care system is much more dismal than of the main cities,” Iqbal said.

 

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By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, May 25 2021 (IPS)

On the occasion of World Environment Day, 5 June 2021, drawing from IPS’s bank of features and opinion editorials published this year, we are re-publishing one article a day, for the next two weeks.

The original article was published on April 1 2021

Two elephants cross a stream in Malai Mahadeshwara Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. Thanks to a number of conservation projects run by various government agencies, non-government organisations and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the wildlife population is thriving again. The forest is now home to an estimated 500 elephants and several other big game animals, including bison and tigers. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

HYDERABAD, India, Apr 1 2021 (IPS) – As the sun sets over the canopy of Albizia amara trees, a thin blanket of fog begins to descend over the forests of the Malai Mahadeshwara Hills Wildlife Sanctuary, which lies roughly 150 km south of the Indian city of Bangalore.

Not so long ago, plumes of smoke would rise from the hamlets dotting the forests as women busily cooked dinner for their families over wood stoves. But tonight, dinner will be a smokeless affair in dozens of villages as communities have opted for the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a clean burning fuel that has given a boost to the health and safety of both the forest and its people thanks to a unique conservation project.

Spread over an area of 906 sq. km – slightly bigger than the German capital Berlin — and nestled along the border of two states, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in southern India, Malai Mahadeshwara Hills (MM Hills) was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 2013.

An estimated 2,000 elephants and 150 people, mostly police and security officers, had been killed here in the past because of rampant poaching by an infamous bandit.

But thanks to a number of conservation projects run by various government agencies, non-government organisations and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the wildlife population is thriving again. The forest is now home to an estimated 500 elephants and several other big game animals, including bison and tigers.

Besides animals, the forest landscape also includes over 50 villages of indigenous peoples. And in a dramatic shift towards sustainability, thousands of forest dwellers have moved to a forest-friendly fuel to save the habitat of these wild animals thanks to a project spearheaded by Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), a local NGO, in partnership with IUCN.

Conserving the natural habitat of elephants

Funded under IUCN’s Integrated Tiger Habitat Conservation Programme (ITHCP), the project aims to minimise human-wildlife conflict and promote a sustainable living among the forest peoples.

Dr.Sanjay Gubbi, Senior Scientist at NCF, describes the early years when his team first began work in MM Hills.

Almost every village community in MM Hills practices farming, but they were also dependent on forest resources, including using firewood for fuel.

And the destruction of one particular tree, the Albizia amara — also called the Oilcake Tree in many parts of the world — was of significance to the wildlife population.

“We conducted a survey and found that 53 percent of the firewood used by the community came from the Albizia amara tree. Elephants feed on the barks of these trees, so because of the firewood consumption, elephants were directly affected. So, we decided to begin by addressing this firewood problem, especially along the elephant corridors (forest patches used by elephants to move from one part of the forest to another),” Gubbi tells IPS.

Forest women receive LPG stove and cylinder in the Malai Mahadeshwara Hills Wildlife Sanctuary. In a dramatic shift towards sustainability, thousands of forest dwellers have moved to a forest-friendly fuel to save the habitat of the sanctuary’s wild animals thanks to a project spearheaded by Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) and IUCN. Courtesy: Sanjay Gubbi/NCF

A solution with numerous benefits

The team focused on introducing an alternative fuel source that would be non-polluting, accessible and affordable to the community. Moreover, it had to be something that would help the forest dwellers adopt a more sustainable way of living — one of the core conservation principles practiced by IUCN.

NCF provided each family with a free LPG subscription, which came with a stove, a cylinder and accessories, and cost about 5,300 rupees ($71). In addition, they trained the community to use the stove and connected them with a nearby LPG distributor, so they could re-fill their gas supply independently.

Changing the community’s source of fuel wasn’t easy. The villagers, most of whom had never seen an LPG stove before, were scared of taking one home. Their worries ranged from beliefs that food cooked over a gas stove could cause gastric pain, to the fear that the cylinders would burst and kill them. Every day, NCF field workers travelled to the villages, facing volleys of questions from the community.

And so the team came up with a unique solution to tackle the twin challenges of breaking the taboo and convincing the villagers to embrace LPG: producing a short film in which all the actors were from the community itself.

The 16-minute film answers the questions of community members, allays their fear and informs them about the use of LPG. The film also explains the co-benefits of using LPG instead of firewood; women will spend less time searching for and collecting firewood, leaving them with more time to do other things, improved lung health and reducing their risks of facing elephants while collecting wood.

“The film was a big hit and a great communication tool,” Gubbi tells IPS.

One of the villages where a large number of people have switched to using LPG is Lokkanahalli. The village is of geographical significance as it is located along the Doddasampige-Yediyaralli corridor, one of the paths the elephants take to Biligirirangana Ranganathaswamy Hills, an adjacent wildlife sanctuary.

“I was scared (at first) of using LPG because it might be harmful for our health. I also thought that it would mean an extra cost for our family (to refill the LPG cylinder) and we might not be able to afford it,” 28-year-old Pushpa Vadanagahalli, one of the women from Lokanahalli village, tells IPS.

The refill costs about $8.

“But after I received the first cylinder and cooked with it, I realised there was nothing to be afraid of. Actually, I feel it’s much safer than going to the forest daily and collecting firewood, so we don’t mind spending on the refill,” Vadanagahalli says.

Forty-year-old Seethamma had been braving elephants and other animals in the forest for several years as she collected firewood.

“Cutting trees and carrying them home is not easy, I used to get back pain. We also must watch out for big animals, especially elephants. It would also take so much time every day. Now, I no longer have to do that, so I am very relieved,” she tells IPS of her choice to switch to LPG.

A case study for a global discussion on managing landscapes for nature and people

According to Gubbi, over the past four years nearly two thousand families from 44 villages in MM Hills and its adjoining forest Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary have given up using firewood as a source of fuel.

Consumption of firewood has reduced by 65 percent among these villagers.

However, the community still continues to use firewood to heat water, but for this they collect agricultural residue or dry, dead branches and twigs that have fallen onto the forest floor. We now need to address the issue of providing an alternative for heating water.

It is a harmonious managing of the landscape for both nature and the people who live there. This is in fact one of the themes of theIUCN World Conservation Congress, which will be held from Sept. 3 to 11 in Marseille. The Congress will be a milestone event for conservation, providing a platform for conservation experts and custodians, government and business, indigenous peoples, scientists, and other stakeholders.

The success of the MM Hills and Cauvery project proves that a balance between “ecological integrity for natural landscapes, a shared prosperity, and justice for custodians on working landscapes within the limits that nature can sustain” — one of the discussion points for the Congress — is possible.

Understanding how to “deliver climate-resilient and economically-viable development, while at the same time conserving nature and recognising its rights” is one of the questions around the theme ‘managing landscapes for nature and people’ that will be discussed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress.

From Poaching to Protection

Another question is how to heed the voices of environmental custodians, especially those that are often marginalised such as indigenous peoples and women.

Perhaps the MM Hills project provides an answer to this. NCF has found a unique way to include the indigenous people of the area in their conservation efforts. And they have found that women are overwhelmingly taking the lead in these efforts.

With each LPG subscription provided by NCF, a written commitment to agree not to cut or destroy wild trees and to not engage in illegal hunting activities is required. The signatories are part of the community committee – a community-based group focused on the conservation and protection of the forest. Currently, 27 villages have a forest protection group, comprising over 80 percent of women.

Towards a sustainable future

The conservation efforts in MM Hills and Cauvery continue. Seven years after it became a protected forest, MM Hills is now home to 12 to 15 tigers and will soon become a tiger reserve. Early this year, the government of Karnataka and the federal government gave their approval and a formal announcement is expected to be made soon.

The formal status of a tiger reserve is expected to bring more funding, which could further help mitigate the human-wildlife conflict and help convert communities there to a more sustainable way of life.

 

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By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, May 25 2021 (IPS)

In 2016, when Bosnian-American professional basketball player, Indira Kaljo got in touch with Asma Elbadawi because she had been forced to give up playing basketball after she started wearing the hijab, they decided to take it up with the International Federation of Basketball (FIBA), the sports governing body to change its rules on headgear.

Asma Elbadawi

Most sports federations around the world don’t specify or ban Hijab, but the usage of general language in which ‘headgear’ is banned, means women who wear Hijab, or men or women who wear turbans or other religious gears cannot participate in those sports. However the challenge was not just to overturn the rule, but also counter the belief what Muslim women can or can’t do, which includes playing ‘Basketball’.

Asma became one of the leading voices in the fight to get FIBA to permanently lift the ban on headgears to allow players in turbans, hijabs and other religious headwear to play basketball at all levels. It took four years to finally win the #FIBAAllowHijabCampaign and to overturn the rule.

“That moment when I realized we won the campaign, I was so excited about the girls who would now get that opportunity to play,” says Asma Elbadawi to me in an interview. “Sometimes I think about it and I can’t believe it happened, because in my mind I am a little person, one voice, but we all built our voices together and became so loud that we changed history.”

The impact of this campaign also helped normalize and, for many, introduced covered Muslim women into sports, challenging the stereotype narrative of ‘suppressed Muslim women in a hijab.’

“There were so many people from outside the community who did not understand what it meant for a Muslim woman to maintain her modesty, and if that meant choosing to wear the Hijab, they kept saying why don’t you take it off,” says Asma.

When it comes to sports, it took women a long battle to be able to participate in competitive events, and they still undergo the humiliating practice of sex-testing to make sure they are not men trying to cheat the system – biologically or literally. There was a time when women were not permitted to watch the Olympic games, which were founded in 1894, reserved just for male athletes. It was only in 1900, women were admitted as participants in sports, “that were considered to be compatible with their femininity and fragility, but excluded from the showpiece events of track and field”. It took another 28 years for women to compete for athletics medals, which included, the 100m, the 4x100m relay, the high jump, the discus and the 800m. The latter being an occasion marred by ‘fake news’.

It is not often we see women in male-dominated sports, and even less so for Muslim women, who already have to defy stereotypes, jump multiple social, religious and break personal barriers to be able to be where they are.

“When you deny a whole demographic of people the ability to join in, you are losing out on talent, and most of the time, that talent can add so much to the space and the environment,” says Asma.

It is important for sport federations as institutions to create a more inclusive environment with bigger female representations. How women are portrayed in the press matter, and the media must be held accountable for its unconscious biases and gender markings.

“She’s the female Usain Bolt,” such statements intend to flatter women, “but are actually another way that men’s sport is presented as the standard against which women’s sport should be judged”. Sexualization of female athletes, compulsory heterosexuality and appropriate femininity focused on the athletes bodies rather than athletic abilities are all barriers that are preventing women from performing at the highest level. “Many female athletes are only accepted by the society and receive coverage in the media, if they participate in traditionally feminine sports. If a woman dares to participate in a masculine sport, their sexuality is immediately questioned,” highlights this report.

Multiple athletics retailers have been pulled up for their treatment of women or people of colour in the workplace. Nike, a brand which identified women as one of “four epic growth opportunities” faced criticism for its treatment of female atheltes during pregnancy, in addition to a class action lawsuit alleging sex discremination. At Adidas, Black employees formed a coalition to pressure top management for change against systemic racism. Both the retailers released their list of company actions, acknowledging to put a stop to racism.

Sport is meant to be one of the most important socio-cultural learning experiences. Girls and women who play sports have higher levels of confidence and self-esteem, lower levels of depression, and more positive body image. Playing a sport is where you traditionally learn about teamwork, goal setting, pursuit of excellence in performance and other achievement-oriented behaviours – critical skills necessary for success in the workplace. However the written and unwritten rules in the sports industry such as ban on headgear, are arguably discriminating against female athletes, and that’s why voices like Asma are needed when women’s sports are de-emphasized.

“You do feel you are representing more than just yourself when you wear the hijab, especially when you are going into communities where they have never seen women wearing hijab. You want to show your best self because you want them to feel like these girls are doing something amazing, and everything we hear in the media is not true about their community,” says Asma.

The challenge is not just from the sport providers, the industry and its management, but also to change the attitude of women and girls towards sports and activities in order to increase participation. The barriers to participation faced by Muslim women are not different from those faced by women from other ethnicity and different cultural backgrounds. Safety and security are important to prevent racially or gender motivated incidents. Cultural sensitivity is definitely an enabling tact, but it is also important to promote positive images, have more diverse role models, stories of success and empowerment, along with simply letting a woman to just be an athlete, without stereotypes, without othering and patronization towards what she can or can’t do. As Asma says, “representation is important because it allows young girls to see women they can relate to in fields they aspire to be in. It gives them hope that they can also achieve those things.”

These would be key to developing long term attitudinal change and increasing participation levels of girls and women in sports – which no longer is or should be defined just by the ‘male gaze’.

The author is a journalist and filmmaker based out of New Delhi. She hosts a weekly online show called The Sania Farooqui Show where Muslim women from around the world are invited to share their views.

 

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Ntchisi District Hospital, Malawi, April 2021. Credit: WaterAid/Wimbledon Foundation/Dennis Lupenga

By Dennis Lupenga*
LILONGWE, Malawi, May 25 2021 (IPS)

Malawian healthcare workers are facing challenges from all sides. More than half of healthcare facilities in Malawi are without handwashing facilities, almost two thirds have no decent toilets and almost one fifth do not have clean water on site.

With cases of Covid-19 in the country continuing throughout the year, staff are working through the pandemic without a basic first line of defence against infection.

For midwives and those involved in maternity care, this absence is frightening. Without water, toilets and soap, health centres, the very places which are supposed to keep mums and babies well, become breeding grounds for the rapid spread of infectious diseases.

Globally, one million mothers and new-born babies die from infections soon after birth each year. This is a tragedy that could easily be prevented with something so simple – soap and water.

In the run up to this year’s three-day World Health Assembly, which is scheduled to end May 26 in Geneva, WaterAid spoke to health workers, patients and families in about the challenges of keeping mums and babies safe in this environment.

Ntchisi is a rural district in the central region of Malawi. There are four health care centres: Ntchisi District Hospital as well as Kangolwa, Mkunzi and Khuwi health centres.

None have adequate water, sanitation or hygiene facilities. Mothers and babies are at risk of catching and spreading infectious diseases – and staff are struggling to keep the environment clean.

WaterAid and the Wimbledon Foundation are working together to bring clean water, decent sanitation and good hygiene to these four healthcare facilities in the Ntchisi District – a change which will impact 300,000 people.

But there are almost 2 billion people being put at risk every day across the world, because they go to work or seek care at a hospital or clinic without these fundamental services.

Chrissy, a health attendant at Khuwi Health Centre, has to collect water four times a day from community boreholes, 300m away from the health centre. The boreholes are crowded, and she has to either spend time queueing, or fight her way to the front of the line, explaining that it is for the health centre.

She worries that when she leaves the hospital to do this, she is leaving her colleague (one nurse midwife) alone to look after a number of mothers and babies. This means that some are left on their own, and at times when both the baby and the mother require urgent care, one or the other loses out. On any maternity ward, any moment can be critical.

Chrissy, a health attendant at Khuwi Health Centre, Malawi, April 2021. Credit: WaterAid/Wimbledon Foundation/Dennis Lupenga

She said: “The time we leave the hospital to fetch water can literally mean the difference between life or death for women and babies.”

Even though the health centre staff know how important handwashing is as a first line of defence against Covid-19 and other infectious diseases, there simply isn’t enough water to make this happen, or to keep the surfaces clean in the hospital.

Chrissy said: “…during this time of COVID-19, we have been trying our best to make sure that water is available for people to wash their hands before getting any medical attention, but we just can’t keep up with the huge number of people. It is important to keep the surfaces of the hospital clean so that we don’t become a conduit of spreading the virus.”

Khuwi Health Centre attracts a lot of people due to its location, alongside the main tarmac road to Ntchisi District. But the centre bears the scars of somewhere that has, for a long time, struggled with water, hygiene and sanitation issues.

In the maternity ward, women who have no other way to clean themselves once they have delivered a baby have resorted to cutting away pieces of the mattresses (there are only two) and using these pieces as sanitary pads.

Kangolwa Health Centre’s busy labour ward, not far from Khuwi, delivers 40-60 babies every month. Unfortunately, there is only one working toilet for the entire labour ward and this is often blocked. Only one woman can wash in the bathroom each day as it fills up with water and blood.

Some mothers are asked to walk to the other side of the health centre to use a shared bathroom for relatives who are caring for patients at the hospital. This bathroom is often blocked too.

Steria, community midwife at Kangolwa Health Centre says: “Imagine asking a woman who has just given birth to walk all the way to the other side of this facility with blood dripping all the way. “It is heart-breaking, but we just don’t have any other options.”

Loveness’s one day old grandson was born at another healthcare centre in the region. To help her daughter recover, Loveness wants to prepare food and drinking water for her at the health centre’s kitchen but without clean water nearby, this is difficult.

She said: “For the past three days, we have had challenges accessing water. Especially here at the kitchen, there is no running water. “Imagine having to walk several times in a day to fetch water not just for drinking, cleaning plates, pots and others eating utensils not forgetting water for bathing and cooking for both myself and my daughter, but also fetching water for everyone who is here at the hospital.It is not easy.”

One in three healthcare facilities globally do not have readily available access to handwashing facilities and almost half of healthcare facilities in the world’s poorest countries have no clean water. Without these bare essentials, new-born babies are needlessly at risk from infections and diseases.

Community midwife technician Eunice is adamant that hospitals without running water and decent hygiene pose a threat to public health: “We need thorough handwashing in our line of duty. With no water, we can’t wash our hands. We are at great risk as health workers, not forgetting the patients we have to attend to. “Instead of patients getting help from this clinic, they are getting infections. Simply because we have no running water. “Water is life. Without it, we are doomed.”

Data shows that globally, a staggering 1.8 billion people are at greater risk of contracting COVID-19 and other diseases, simply because they use or work in a healthcare facility which lacks basic water services. In the twenty first century this simply shouldn’t be and needn’t be the case.

Last December the WHO estimated that to bring clean water, handwashing facilities and decent toilets to the health care centres in the poorest countries would cost just $3.6billion – which equates to around an hour and a half’s worth of what the whole world spent in a year on the Covid-19 response.

It’s time to make this investment.

*Dennis Lupenga is Voices from the Field Officer at WaterAid, based in Lilongwe, Malawi.

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, May 25 2021 (IPS)

Failure to sufficiently accelerate comprehensive efforts to contain COVID-19 contagion has greatly worsened the catastrophe in developing countries. Grossly inadequate financing of relief, recovery and reform efforts has also further set back progress, including sustainable development.

Anis Chowdhury

Uncertain and unequal recovery
After over a year, “Poor countries are facing severe setbacks on their development paths, encumbered by ballooning debts, high risks of default and limited ability to inject desperately needed liquidity”, observed participants at a recent UN Forum.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist, Gita Gopinath, estimates US$9 trillion in economic benefits from adequately accelerating affordable mass vaccination, testing, tracing and treatment at a cost of US$50bn.

Overall global projections obscure disparities among and within countries. With vaccine apartheid and developing countries’ constraints, uneven pandemic containment and recovery have been worsening prior inequalities, further setting back poor countries and people.

Global disparities
Government responses have been much constrained by macroeconomic policy space, especially access to finance. ‘Unconventional’ monetary policies since the 2008 global financial crisis, especially low interest rates, have helped.

Thus, high-income countries (HICs) have borrowed and spent much more on relief and recovery. While rich countries have been able to borrow and spend massively, developing countries have very limited fiscal space due to diminished borrowing capacity.

Often with poorer credit histories and ratings, developing countries generally face much higher interest rates on foreign borrowing. Their foreign debt burdens as shares of national income were already relatively higher before the pandemic. All these have constrained them from adopting bolder expansionary efforts.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Unsurprisingly, developed countries have accounted for nearly 80% of all fiscal efforts. Compared to 16% of their national incomes, least developed countries have only increased government expenditure by 2.6% on average. Facing financing constraints, many low-income countries (LICs) have even cut spending!

Insufficient international support
Total resource flows to developing countries have fallen as official development assistance (ODA) and foreign direct investment (FDI) have declined. FDI in developing economies fell by 12% in 2020: by 37% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 18% in Africa and 4% in Asia.

While donors cut bilateral aid commitments by 36% in 2020, net ODA from 13 OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) rich member countries declined by US$4.7bn – led by a 10% UK cut – as “DAC donors prioritized their national responses towards COVID at the expense of international aid”.

International support for developing countries at this time of great need has been woefully inadequate. Despite acknowledging that “Debt service suspension is a powerful, fast acting measure that can bring real benefits to people in poor countries”, the World Bank has refused debt service cancellations.

The Bank claims these would adversely impact its credit rating, reducing its ability to borrow at low preferential rates for lending to middle-income countries (MICs) and to LICs on concessional terms. Unsurprisingly, debt cancellation has not been envisaged by the Bank.

From April 2020, the IMF’s Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust has provided debt service relief of about US$500m, or 0.2% of GDP for 28 highly indebted LICs, its poorest and most vulnerable members. This relief has been extended twice – for half a year each time – to cover all eligible debt service payments due to the Fund estimated at US$238 million in the latest round.

The G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) is even worse, merely delaying repayments. Interest continues to accumulate to be repaid later. Despite two extensions, borrowing countries’ lack of enthusiasm for DSSI is hardly surprising. As private creditors have not joined, DSSI only covered 2% of total debt service payments due in 2020.

Leveraging the new SDRs
With Biden administration support, US$650bn in new IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) should be approved by August. But this is barely half of the trillion in SDRs (worth US$1.37tn) that The Financial Times deemed necessary.

SDR allocations are proportionate to countries’ shareholdings and voting rights, mainly benefiting developed, especially European countries. Allocations for the Group of Seven (G7) largest developed economies amount to US$272bn, with Africa getting only US$33.6bn! Nonetheless, the new SDRs should provide some welcome relief for many countries.

Developed countries which do not need to use their new SDRs should transfer their new allocations to the 15 ‘eligible’ multilateral financial institutions, including the IMF, World Bank and regional development banks. These should be used to expand their lending to developing countries on preferential terms.

Calling for massive multilateral development bank recapitalization for a ten-fold increase in official funding for poor countries, Jeffrey Sachs has called for much more official financing, by ‘recycling’ at least US$100bn of HIC SDRs.

Financing options for developing countries
Most developing country governments were already heavily indebted to varying degrees before the pandemic. Much greater debt forbearance is urgently needed as well as longer-term development financing are also needed.

While MICs may have more borrowing options, enabling them to minimise the burden of past government debt, domestic or foreign, is urgent. Already, the financial community and media frequently warn that their credit ratings will be adversely affected if they borrow more.

World Bank chief economist Carmen Reinhart – once reputed for her aversion to high indebtedness – now urges countries to borrow to fight the economic impact of the pandemic. She has rightly opposed putting “resources into zombie loans”.

Increasing non-performing loans and financial fragility to enable unviable firms to survive would slow recovery efforts. Instead, Reinhart has stressed the need to “expediently restructure and write down bad debts”.

However, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to financing needed measures to contain the pandemic and for macroeconomic expansion. Meanwhile, poor countries’ financing conditions are worsening as the pandemic drags on much longer than expected.

Facing economic slowdown, most governments need to spend much more domestically to prevent temporary recessions becoming depressions. Developing countries should not incur foreign debt except on preferential terms as necessary to import essentials such as medicines and food.

International cooperation must ensure significantly more official foreign exchange financing to supplement innovative domestic financing for urgently needed spending for relief, recovery and reform.

 

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Soybean field near Eldorado in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Credit: Gerson Sobreira

By External Source
QUITO, May 24 2021 (IPS)

Latin America has lots of natural advantages for the coming energy transition. It already has the greenest power matrix in the world. While having the planet’s largest reserves of copper make it a key provider for international electrification programmes.

Yet transport is its Achilles heel. Just 1% of Latin American transport is fuelled by clean energy. So, while more than half of its electricity comes for renewable sources, once you factor in the heavy dependence on oil and gas for moving people and goods around the region, then the renewable share of its primary energy is just 5%.

Latin America will only make significant progress in its energy transition when it manages to fuel more transport with renewable energy. One solution will be electric vehicles (EVs). However, as mining experts reveal elsewhere in this report, copper supply will be unable to replace every existing internal combustion engine with an EV by 2050.

The energy transition is such an ambitious target that countries will have to use all of the tools at their disposal. Latin America’s natural endowment mean that it can increase its biofuel production exponentially, without harming the environment or food supplies

That’s even more true for aviation, where electric planes are nowhere near ready for commercial passenger flights. That means biofuels will also play an important role. Latin America is already the world’s largest biofuel producer and, more importantly, it has ample room to increase production. A UN report found that thanks to abundant freshwater and vast stretches of unused farmland, Latin America’s has 42% of the world’s potential increase in agricultural production.

 

2nd Generation

When Brazil’s largest biofuel producer, ECB Group, starts operations in Paraguay it will cement Latin America’s leading position in the industry. That’s because the Paraguayan project, Omega Green, is Latin America’s first ever second-generation biorefinery.

Omega Green, which opens in 2024, will produce HVO, a type of biodiesel, and SPK, a bio aviation fuel. European oil majors, Shell and BP, have already signed offtake contracts for 90% of production, underscoring the demand for low carbon solutions to the transport problem.

BP has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050 and recognises that biofuels can help it get there. Countries with ambitious environmental targets, such as the UK, will eventually make the same decision. And it’s the technological advantages of second-generation biofuel – from its feedstock to its uses – that will help convince them.

By using an energy-intensive process of applying hydrogen to organic matter, second-generation biofuels can produce a wider range of fuels. For example, aviation fuel that allows biofuels cut emissions that electrification simply can’t reach.

Second-generation biodiesel also has more uses than its predecessor, as it is a ‘drop in’ fuel that can be placed in existing internal combustion engines and work without any modifications. Indeed, you could power your car will 100% HVO or mix any percentage with your usual diesel.

That flexibility – in both feedstock and use – makes biofuel an essential part of the fight against climate change, says Erasmo Battistella, CEO of ECB Group. “Biofuel has many advantages over electric vehicles. Take London for example, with HVO you could replace the dirty diesel fuel, with its polluting emissions, overnight. You don’t need to build new infrastructure, or buy costly new busses, you just put our fuel straight in.”

You would expect a biofuel producer to talk up the benefits of his product, but his assessment is confirmed by the experiences of one of Latin America’s leading proponents of electrification, Irene Cañas, President of the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity.

Cañas, who oversees the most renewable electricity system in the world, plans to replace Costa Rica’s existing fleet of diesel buses with electric buses. “It will begin with a pilot scheme, using three electric buses donated by Germany. That will begin this year, as we test the buses on different routes to evaluate their performance.

The scheme has been delayed by the pandemic because the health restrictions mean that buses can only carry half the passengers, which has cut the revenues for bus companies and made them less willing to invest in electric vehicles.” With proven biodiesel there is no need for performance tests. But more importantly, it doesn’t require costly equipment swaps.

Second-generation biofuel’s feedstock flexibility is another big plus. One of the biggest biofuel criticisms is that it reduces farming for food production. Yet with these new biofuels it’s not true, says Battistella. “The beauty of second-generation biofuels is that they can use such a wide range of feedstocks.

We are keen to develop a diverse supply of different crops. And that’s why biofuels will be a success around the world. Whether it is palm in Indonesia or canola in Canada – biofuels can always be made with local plants.

And by planting more crops we actually increase the food supply. Because the best parts can be used for food and whatever is left as feedstock for biofuel […] it can also come from animal waste, rubbish or agricultural by-products.”

 

Environmental impact

Another supposed flaw with Latin American biofuel is that it will deforest parts of the Amazon. Yet Alfredo Mordezki, manager of the Santander Latin America Investment Grade ESG Bond Fund, says the Amazon is so sensitive that firms who damage it will have restricted access to international capital markets.

“Some may think of Brazil as this terrible polluter that is deforesting the Amazon, but within the country there are many companies with great environmental practises. Take Brazil’s pulp and paper companies. People assume that they are linked to deforestation but actually they are keen to distance themselves from the Amazon because they know how damaging that can be to their reputation.

As a result, most of these companies are making efforts to be more transparent, disclose more information and have ambitious plans to become greener. A lot of the worst environmental damage is committed by illegal groups in Latin America, for example with informal mining. But if we can funnel money to the best listed companies then it should drive change.

A Brazilian soy producer that recently issued bonds has independently certified that all of its land, and that of any suppliers, is not coming from a deforested part of the Amazon. That has raised the bar for any further soy companies looking for investment.”

That assessment is backed up by Battistella. “For us to sign the agreements with BP and Shell we had to certify the environmental impact of everything from planting the raw material to how the final product would be consumed.” That’s why “our pongamia is being produced in the vast, barren Chaco region of Paraguay. This is not land that has been deforested for our production, but farming land that we are reforesting for our project.”

Indeed, Omega Green has already announced that one-third of its feedstock will be coming from Pongamia, a tree that doesn’t require fertilizer, lives for 100 years and has a low carbon density. “The fuel you produce actually has a negative carbon density score. Imagine that – you are supplying airlines with a fuel that actually sequesters more CO2 than it produces.”

Indeed, Battistella feels that biofuel is subject to far more environmental scrutiny than EVs. “The supply chains for a lot of the metals used in electric cars are not very clean, with child labour involved in mining some of the metals. The process for making batteries can also have a harmful environmental impact.”

 

Market niche

The final criticism of biofuel is that it doesn’t produce enough output to make a significant impact on climate change. Battistella says the numbers from Omega Green prove otherwise. “Pongamia is so productive that just 120,000 hectares will produce enough feedstock for 1/3rd of our needs.

With 400,000 hectares it could cover our entire production. That might sound like a lot of land to someone in London but the Chaco region has 24 million hectares.” Again, his words are backed up by the fact that BP and Shell are using biofuel to reach their ambitious carbon neutral targets. Moreover, the success of Omega Green can be replicated throughout the region, says Battistella.

“Even though Brazil is the leader in Latin American biofuels, we also see widespread consumption and production elsewhere in the region. Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Peru are all using and making biodiesel and ethanol. Latin America could increase biofuel production tenfold just by applying new technology and planting more feedstock.”

However, it is true that biofuel won’t be able to replace oil on its own. Current global oil demand is around 100 million barrels per day, while Omega Green’s total production will be 20,000 bpd. Even if you build 1,000 Omega Greens, you would only cover a fifth of oil demand. So, the transition will require a combination of EVs and biofuel. Many investors think of them as mutually exclusive, when in fact they are complementary.

“Look back around 150 years to the last energy transition, when oil began to replace coal. Even though oil became dominant coal is still being used today. We will see something similar with this energy transition – oil will still be used for the next 70 or 100 years. And that’s OK because to limit the impact of climate change, we don’t need to replace 100% of oil, we just need to reduce CO2 to historical levels.

Oil is built-in to a lot of the technology we use so it’s impossible for us to ignore it completely. Moreover, rising energy demand means that we will need it. For example, cargo volumes are expected to triple between now and 2050.

But we need to be intelligent and use biofuels to the best effect. One example is aviation, where electric planes are not viable at the moment and hydrogen is too dangerous to carry people. Another is the city centres where people are forced to breathe in poor quality air, that is like smoking a cigarette each day.”

Biofuel’s advantages in cities make it a perfect solution for Latin America, which is the most urbanised region in the planet. Moreover, biofuel doesn’t just replace oil in the petrol stations. By-products, such as bio naphtha, can be used as feedstocks to make green plastic.

Ultimately the energy transition is such an ambitious target that countries will have to use all of the tools at their disposal. Latin America’s natural endowment mean that it can increase its biofuel production exponentially, without harming the environment or food supplies.

Meanwhile, biofuel’s competitive advantages are well-suited to the region’s needs. Omega Green may be the first second-generation biofuels plant in Latin America but it won’t be the last. It is paving the way for a biofuel boom that will help clean the region’s transport sector.

This story was originally published by LatAm INVESTOR

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 24 2021 (IPS)

On the occasion of World Environment Day, 5 June 2021, drawing from IPS’s bank of features and opinion editorials published this year, we are re-publishing one article a day, for the next two weeks.

The original article was published on February 25 2021

Forest women in Anantagiri forest in the south-east of India check out their solar dryer. (file photo) There is a growing shift and awareness in mainstream political, corporate and public debate about the need for climate action. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 25 2021 (IPS) – A keen awareness about the intersection of our ecosystem and the “accelerating destabilisation of the climate” is helping shift the narrative for climate action and can help us transition from being polluters to becoming protectors of the climate, said Marco Lambertini, Director General at the World Wide Fund for Nature.

“Science has never been clearer. We are currently witnessing a catastrophic decline in our planet’s ecosystems and biodiversity, and an accelerating destabilisation of the climate. And today we also understand that the two are interconnected,” Lambertini told IPS. “This isn’t in fact new.”

Lambertini spoke to IPS following the Fifth Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) which took place this week, with the launch of the “Medium-Term Strategy” by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Over two days, world leaders gathered virtually to discuss climate sustainability and how deeply the coronavirus pandemic worsened the current climate crisis.

“Humanity continues to misappropriate nature, commoditise it, destroy it,” Keriako Tobiko, the Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Kenya, said on Monday. “The consequences of our actions are obvious – we’re paying a heavy price for that.”

Indian environmental activist Afroz Shah, a UNEP Champion of the Earth, said during UNEA-5 that leaders must go beyond talk and ensure implementation of measures to protect the environment.

“There must be a paradigm shift in the narrative, to go from being a polluter to a protector,” he said, urging leaders to make sure this message was given to every citizen.

Lambertini told IPS this “shift” in the narrative was already happening.

“What is new is that this awareness is beginning to reach mainstream political, corporate and public debate,” Lambertini added. “The narrative is also shifting. Conserving nature is not only being seen as an ecological and moral issue, but also an economic, development, health and equity issue. This is a true cultural revolution in our civilisation.”

Lambertini’s insight complemented what was said during UNEA-5.

Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, said during the assembly that a “green recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic would be a step in the right direction of implementing changes to protect the environment.

Tackling environmental sustainability was, after all, another means to ending poverty, she said.

“We need to start putting words into action after UNEA-5 and that means backing a green recovery from the pandemic, stronger and national determined contributions to the Paris Agreement, more funding for adaptation, agreeing on an ambitious and implementable post-2020 biodiversity framework, and a new progress on plastic pollution,” Andersen said.

Meelis Münt, Estonia’s Secretary General of the Ministry of the Environment, echoed Andersen’s point.

“We are confident that a green and digital transition will support our post-pandemic recovery,” he said, adding Estonia aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, with their government’s plans to “lead the production of solid coastal fuel based electricity by 2035”.

Other speakers at UNEA-5 included ministers from Kenya, Brazil, Jamaica and Malawi, among others, many of whom shared the initiatives their countries were implementing to protect the environment.

Marcus Henrique Morais Paranaguá, Brazil’s Deputy Minister for Climate and International Relations, pointed out that for Brazilians it was a unique situation where development and preservation of the Amazon forest had to be balanced.

“The Amazon forest alone occupies 49 percent of our territory and over 60 percent of our territory is covered today with natural vegetation,” he said. “Brazil must implement innovative public policy to balance nature conservation and the promotion of sustainable development.”

Pearnel Charles Jr., Jamaica’s Minister of Housing, Urban Renewal, Environment and Climate Change, shared that his country’s government was in the process of updating their climate change policy so that it complemented the Paris Agreement. He added that Jamaica’s administration also increased its “emissions reduction ambition,” and was implementing a tree planting initiative to reduce biodiversity loss.

Tobiko of Kenya said a big milestone for the country was banning single-use plastic in public conservation areas. Kenya has recently been acknowledged and applauded for its successful fight against single use plastic.

“We cannot afford another lost decade for biodiversity,” Lambertini told IPS. “Many ecosystems like coral reefs and tropical forests are heading towards tipping points and one million species are now threatened with extinction.”

“If we are to collectively survive and thrive, particularly in this COVID-19 pandemic, we must take the opportunity to review, reevaluate and possibly reinvent in charting the most sustainable way forward,” Charles Jr. said.

Overall, Lambertini was hopeful, citing a heightened awareness of climate justice among activists, and the fact that nature conservation was now seen as an economic, health and equity issue.

“We need clarity and alignment, to create a level playing field, and a north star/southern cross able to unite governments, businesses, investors and consumers around the ambition science demands,” he told IPS. “Only in this way we will meet the challenge to transition to an equitable, nature-positive and net-zero carbon world and forums like UNEA-5 must pave the way for these commitments and more importantly, concrete actions.”

 

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• Q&A: UN Environment Assembly Kicks Off With a Call to Make Peace with Nature

Scientists in Thailand work to combat zoonotic diseases at their source. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates “intimate” linkages between the health of humans, animals and ecosystems, as zoonotic diseases spread between animals and people, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief said February 21. Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) via UN News

By Andy Peters
EDINBURGH, Scotland, May 24 2021 (IPS)

Although the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mission to discover its origins has proven inconclusive, the Covid-19 pandemic has nonetheless clearly highlighted the need for better care, attention, and investment in animal health systems.

Without a decisive change of course to prevent other diseases from jumping the species barrier, we will likely be unable to avoid the pandemics of the future, which could prove even more severe and destructive.

Some 75 per cent of emerging human infections are shared with animals, according to a UN report, and these emerging zoonoses could just as easily spread or mutate to unleash the next pandemic.

Investing in a stronger and more resilient global animal health system is a clear win-win: it protects all people through the prevention, surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment of otherwise dangerous animal diseases – before they cross species and borders.

However, investment alone will not overcome the fact that our current animal health systems are hamstrung by shortcomings in a crucial area: data.

Poor, disparate, under-researched, and inaccurate data on animal health issues prevent officials and authorities in many parts of the world from taking effective interventions against emerging animal diseases. Such limitations endanger both human and animal health, and leave us all vulnerable to the threat of future pandemics.

To improve our current defences against emerging animal diseases, the world needs more focused and directed investment into the systematic collection, organisation, and use of existing animal health data.

Firstly, we need more and better data on animal health. This includes greater surveillance of animal disease on farms, at border crossings and at wet markets, which are all important interfaces through which animal diseases can spread to humans.

Secondly, we must also ensure we make better use of our existing data. For instance, SEBI-Livestock is using advanced informatics to unlock insights from hard-to-reach data about disease prevalence and mortality, and making it more readily available to decision-makers and scientists in the Global South.

Furthermore, a better standard of data-sharing is also necessary in the fight against the future global health threats. Mechanisms and platforms through which doctors and veterinarians, governments and health authorities can share knowledge on emerging diseases and treatments are vital.

One visual tool developed by the Safe Medicines for Animals through regulatory training (SMArt) project helps animal health companies navigate complex regulatory processes, opening the door to improved animal health, and consequently, human health, around the world.

Finally, more investment in helping decision-makers harness this wide range of data for the livestock sector in low-income countries is essential. Low-income countries are disproportionately affected by neglected zoonoses, and the impact of epidemics and pandemics in these regions is exacerbated as a result, as demonstrated by Covid-19.

Providing training sessions in data literacy and data analysis skills, and raising awareness of global animal health resources will be crucial in helping low-income countries leverage valuable data for greater resilience.

Although data by itself is not enough, with more investment we can build up the knowledge and resources we need to reduce the threat of emerging infectious diseases.

This is why the Action for Animal Health coalition has united groups such as the World Veterinary Association, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Brooke, along with SEBI-Livestock, to call for more support for better, and safer, animal health systems worldwide.

With the knowledge and lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic fresh in our minds, we now stand at an important crossroads.

We can choose to ignore animal health, and continue to endanger human health as a result, or we can begin to properly focus and invest in better animal health systems, using data to guide our interventions.

If we follow this path, we can begin to beat the pandemics of the future before they have even begun.

* Prof. Andy Peters is Program Director, the Centre for Supporting Evidence Based Interventions in Livestock (SEBI-Livestock), at the University of Edinburgh

 

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Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By External Source
JOHANNESBURG, May 24 2021 (IPS)

Social issues and crises tend to affect women more severely than men. This is why terms like “gender mainstreaming policies”, “gender-responsive interventions” and “gender-based budgeting” have become more popular in public policy discussions in recent years.

The case has been made for the need to include gender in every analysis of social policy. But many of the toolkits which have been designed to do so have come up short. This is for a variety of reasons. Some of these shortcomings include a singular focus on women rather than relations between men and women; a focus on policy outcomes without a change in policy processes; and the inclusion of aspirational gender equality goals rather than goals for practical implementation.

The slowdown in economic activity and the restrictions on movement made women particularly vulnerable to physical abuse, a loss of income, and a decline in mental and emotional well-being, among others

But a framework developed by retired economics professor Marilyn Power offers a practical solution. Her framework can be used to evaluate the effects an event is likely to have on women. It can be applied to policies too. It draws together common aspects applied in gender studies and includes accounting for caring and domestic labour, considering human well-being, human agency, making ethical judgements, and undertaking an intersectional analysis.

I have used Power’s framework to examine the impact of COVID-19 on South African women. My research found that many of the challenges women experienced had been made worse by the pandemic. This was mainly as a result of the slowdown in economic activity and the restrictions on movement. These made women particularly vulnerable to physical abuse, a loss of income, and a decline in mental and emotional well-being, among others.

 

How women were affected

Household circumstances: The framework states that household circumstances should be considered in addition to individual circumstances. Household circumstances are vital when studying women because they tend to be the primary caregivers in the home, the number of female-headed households has grown, and they perform the bulk of domestic or household labour.

The importance of looking at both household and individual circumstances becomes clear when one looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The closure of schools and early childhood development centres meant that women experienced an increase in their domestic responsibilities. Evidence shows that far more women than men reported increased time spent on childcare during the first few months of the hard lockdown.

Human well-being and agency: The pandemic affected both the well-being and agency of women.

Human well-being has been defined as “what people are able to be and do”. Amartya Sen, an award-winning economist, has recommended the use of five instrumental freedoms to measure well-being. These list aspects which define an individual’s relationship to their communities or the state. They include political freedoms, economic freedoms, social freedoms, transparency guarantees and protective security.

These freedoms include, for instance, having enough assets, the right to live a life of dignity, and the peace of mind which goes with feeling safe in one’s community.

Agency, on the other hand, has been defined by political analyst and feminist Lois McNay as “the capacity of a person (or other living and material entities) to intervene in the world in a manner that is deemed … to be independent or relatively autonomous”. Thus, the more freedoms individuals are guaranteed in society, the more their human agency will be enhanced.

During the pandemic women were more likely to lose their jobs than men. This loss had a major impact on women’s economic freedoms as well as their social freedoms.

Making ethical judgements: Ethical judgements in the framework relate to traditional economic assumptions which predicate that economic analyses or policies are value and judgement free. Others have argued, however, that policies and interventions which do not explicitly deal with value judgements only serve to mask “implicit assumptions about race, class and gender”, even if unintentionally.

It is thus important to engage with value judgements to make clear what implicit assumptions underlie public policy decision making.

One example of this was the South African government’s social security response to the pandemic, which included the Social Relief of Distress grant. This grant was only made available to unemployed individuals who didn’t get any other grant or qualify for Unemployment Insurance Fund benefits. The conditions under which the unemployed could apply for this grant were stringent – and still emphasised the need to work.

The stringent conditions meant that many vulnerable individuals were excluded. These included those who might already be receiving existing grants or received remittances from family members, but who might still be living in poverty. A large percentage of these would be women.

Intersectional analysis: This requires thinking about other social identities which define women beyond just their gender, such as race, sexual orientation and class, among others. These additional social identities privilege and disadvantage women in varying ways.

Black women, for instance, would be more severely affected by the social ills which have accompanied this pandemic than any other group of women in South Africa. Separating women by race in policy analysis would thus provide useful information which would not be otherwise observed had women been studied as a homogeneous group. Similar arguments could be made for further segmenting groups according to their social identities.

 

Next steps

Women make up half of the South African population. It’s therefore important to consider how decisions and policies affect them. Failing to undertake a gendered analysis doesn’t equate to men and women being treated equally. Rather that women are likely to be implicitly negatively biased.

Odile Mackett, Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand

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

Laila Shawa (Palestine), The Hands of Fatima, 1989.

By Vijay Prashad
May 21 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Israel’s massive war machine attacks the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) with total disregard for international law. Since the OPT is an occupied territory, the United Nations does not permit the occupier – Israel – from altering the character of the land under occupation. However, this has not impeded Israel, whose attempt to evict families in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood resulted in the entry of Israeli border troops inside the al-Aqsa mosque, followed by waves of aerial bombardment that has resulted in daily death and injury toll that will be known only when the dust settles.

Importantly, the Palestinians did not surrender to this violation of international law. They fought back in Jerusalem and across the West Bank, in Gaza and the lands surrounding Israel. Thousands of people marched to the Jordan-Palestine border and the Lebanon-Palestine border, disregarding Israel’s threat to fire at them. From Gaza, different factions fired rockets to pressure Israel to desist from its violence in Jerusalem. The rockets from Gaza followed the violent and illegal provocations by Israel in the OPT; these rockets were not the first mover in the events of May 2021.

For the past fifteen years, Israel has punctually bombed Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2018, and 2019. Apart from this hot violence, Israel has persecuted a policy of strangulation against not only Gaza but all of the OPT, a policy of cold violence that seeks to get Palestinians so demoralised that they leave the OPT. If Israel refuses the one-state solution (a democratic state of Palestinians and Jews) and the two-state solution (Israel and Palestine), it seeks instead a three-state solution (sending the Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon). This is by definition ethnic cleansing. The bombings of 2021 have been particularly harsh, the targets including buildings that house the press and refugee camps. In Shateh (Gaza), a bombing raid on 15 May left scores of people dead. The Abu Hatab family lost ten members, eight of them children. Grotesque violence of this kind defines the Israeli apartheid project to annihilate the Palestinians; Rogers Waters calls this violence ‘primal disdain’.

Juhaina Habibi Kandalaft (Palestine), Jaffa, 2015

Given the clear violations of international law and the asymmetrical violence of the Israeli bombings, it was widely expected that the UN Security Council would call for a ceasefire. But the US government of President Joe Biden informed the other members of the Council that it would not vote for any resolution of that kind. The US alone blocked the release of a council statement on the worsening situation last week. The US also initially opposed holding an open session on Friday – as proposed by Norway, Tunisia, and China – which was eventually held on Sunday. For these reasons, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the United States and twenty-four other countries for standing with Israel. Amongst these countries is Brazil, whose president, Jair Bolsonaro, backed Israel’s right to use terrible force against the Palestinians. This statement from Bolsonaro came just a few days after the police operation against the people of Jacarezinho in Rio de Janeiro, which resulted in the massacre of twenty-five people. The gap between Jacarezinho and Gaza is only one of scale, the brutality equivalent.

On 15 May, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and No Cold War held a seminar, ‘China, USA, and Brazil’s quest for an independent foreign policy’. Former President Dilma Rousseff spoke about how, during her presidency (2011-2016) – and during the administration of her predecessor Lula da Silva (2003-2011) – the Workers’ Party led a process to establish institutions of multipolarity such as the expanded G20 (2008) and the BRICS project (2009). These are not perfect systems, certainly, but they were intended to produce platforms that were not fully subordinated to the United States. Neither have been able to live up to their potential; ‘asymmetrical relationships’, she said, ‘are not equal to multipolarity’. The G20 continues to take its lead from the Western powers and BRICS has been weakened by the rightward shift in Brazil and India. ‘The B and the I of BRICS suffered problems’, she said. ‘The B because of Bolsonaro’. Regarding the strategic necessity of returning to the project of multipolarity for economic recovery, Rousseff explained, ‘Our recovery would have to be necessarily political’.

Gabriela Tornai (@gabrielatornai_) / Design Ativista, Comida, direito do povo! (‘The people’s right to food’), 2021.

Brazil, being the largest economy in Latin America, would need to play a key role in the construction of multipolar institutions and in opening up the possibility for international law to set aside the imperial vicissitudes of the United States and its allies. For Brazil to play this role, the political bloc that stands against Bolsonaro and the right has to strengthen, and it has to be converted into a winning electoral coalition for the presidential election in 2022. Only if the left returns to power in Palácio do Planalto can Brazil once more play a role in building a multipolar world order.

Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (Brazil) delves deeply into just this subject. To better understand the problems and possibilities for the Brazilian Left, the team in São Paulo interviewed five leaders amongst the range of Brazil’s left: Gleisi Hoffmann, a chair of the Workers’ Party; Kelli Mafort of national board of the Landless Workers’ Movement or the MST; Élida Elena, vice president of the National Union of Students and a member of the Popular Youth Uprising (Levante Popular da Juventude); Jandyra Uehara of the National Executive Board of the Unified Workers’ Central; Juliano Medeiros, national chair of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL); and Valério Arcary, a member of PSOL’s national board. Through conversations with these leaders, the dossier traces the path followed by the Brazilian Left, examining the instruments used to foster unity of the organised sections of the Left and of the people behind these sections. It also explores the debate over whether to build a wider anti-Bolsonaro broad front or a narrower left front, as well as the impact of Lula’s recent pardoning from false corruption charges and his newly renewed eligibility to run for office in the next presidential election.

Cristiano Siqueira (@crisvector) / Design Ativista, Atenção, novo sentido (‘Attention: new direction’), 2019

Polls released recently show Lula ahead of Bolsonaro in the first round by 41% to 23%; in every second round scenario, Lula defeats his opponents (55% to Bolsonaro’s 32%, for instance). MST leader Kelli Mafort says that ‘The Lula factor exercises tremendous influence over the Brazilian left. The urgency of the current situation calls for him to continue to be a leader in solving Brazil’s problems, but it also helps urge activists to carry out base building work, expand solidarity actions, and confront the fascist Bolsonarism [that permeates] the working class’. To root out Bolsonarism would require that Brazil settle accounts with Bolsonaro’s criminal behaviour during the pandemic, which has already set in motion a charge of crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Evidence of Bolsonaro’s genocidal policies was made clear in June 2020 by Chief Raoni Metuktire of the Kayapó, who said, ‘President Bolsonaro wants to take advantage of the virus; he is saying that the Indian has to die’.

Mafort’s point about the need to build the bases of the key classes is echoed by the others interviewed for the dossier. They assert that winning the election is fundamentally important but that, in order to secure not only the presidency but a new project for Brazil, building the strength of the working class and the peasantry is essential. The contours of this new project will contain a programme for the post-pandemic scenario for Brazil and the importance of an independent, internationalist foreign policy for Brazil.

Letícia Ribeiro (@telurica.x), photography by Giovanni Marrozzini / Design Ativista, Guardiãs (‘Guardians’), 2019.

Since last year, the United States has used its position of political pre-eminence to get several Arab monarchies (Morocco and the United Arab Emirates) to recognise Israel, which means to set aside the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. This process of undermining Palestinian rights will continue if the US is left unchallenged on the world stage. Genuine multipolarity would prevent the US from using its force against the Palestinians, the Yemenis, the Sahrawis, and others. The defeat of the ruling classes in countries such as Brazil and India – subordinate to US interests – is essential for advancing the interests of the people of the world, from Palestine to Colombia.

In 2014, the last time Israel bombed Gaza with this level of extreme ferocity, the Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon watched as families fled from their bombed homes for UN schools, which were also bombed. He imagined the danger through a conversation between a child and a grandfather (sidu). They are talking about Jaffa (now inside Israel) and wondering about the Palestinian’s right to return, guaranteed by UN Security Council resolution 194 (1948).

Are we going back to Jaffa, sidu?
We can’t
Why?
We are dead
So are we in heaven, sidu?
We are in Palestine, habibi
and Palestine is heaven
and hell.
What will we do now?
We will wait
Wait for what?
For the others
….
to return

This story was originally published by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, May 21 2021 (IPS)

On the occasion of World Environment Day, 5 June 2021, drawing from IPS’s bank of features and opinion editorials published this year, we are re-publishing one article a day, for the next two weeks.

The original article was published on February 24 2021

Sudanese youth live with continuous insecurity due to climate change vulnerability, including droughts, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity. Courtesy: Albert Gonzalez Farran/ UNAMID/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

BONN, Germany, Feb 24 2021 (IPS) – For Sudanese youth, climate change is synonymous with insecurity.

“We are living in a continuous insecurity due to many factors that puts Sudan on top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability,” said Nisreen Elsaim, Sudanese climate activist and chair of United Nations Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.

She said this was directly linked to insecurity within Sudan. She noted that even a Security Council resolution from 2018 which acknowledged “the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural disasters, among other factors,”, including droughts, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity influenced the situation in Dafur, Sudan.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ranks Sudan as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change. Increased frequency of droughts and high rainfall variability over decades has stressed Sudan’s rainfed agriculture and pastoralist livelihoods, which are the dominant means of living in rural areas like north Dafur.

“In a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration will [mean] conflict is an inevitable result,” Elsaim said, adding that climate-related emergencies resulted in major disruptions to healthcare and livelihoods and that climate-related migration increased the risk of gender-based violence.

She also pointed out that women, youth and children where the groups most adversely affected by climate insecurity.

In January, inter-communal violence in Darfur displaced over 180,000 people — 60 percent of whom are under the age of 18. “Displacement has declined in recent years in Sudan, but many of its triggers remain unaddressed. Ethnic disputes between herders and farmers over scarce resources overlap with disasters such as flooding and political instability,” the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said in a statement. There are currently 2.1 million internally displaced persons in Sudan.

Elsaim was speaking yesterday, Feb. 23, during a high-level United Nations Security Council debate focusing on international peace and security and climate change, led by United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The UK currently holds the Security Council presidency and will also be host to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will take place in November in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Land and resources in Africa and in many other parts of the world, because of climate change, can no longer maintain young people,” Elsaim cautioned.

She said in the youth’s search for decent lives, jobs and proper access to services, the new challenge of COVID-19 meant the only solution for many was in country, cross-border or international migration.

The issue is a global one.

Natural historian Sir David Attenborough addressed the council in a video message also giving a stark warning that the “stability of the entire world” could be altered by climate threats.

“Today there are threats to security of a new and unprecedented kind,” Attenborough said.

“They are rising global temperatures, the despoiling of the ocean — that vast universal larder which people everywhere depend for their food. Change in the pattern of weather worldwide that pay no regard to national boundaries but that can turn forests into deserts, drown great cities and lead to the extermination of huge numbers of the other creatures with which we share this planet.”

He cautioned that no matter what the world did now, some of these threats could become a reality, destroying cities and societies.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature, and ocean food chains,” Attenborough cautioned.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the last decade was the hottest in human history and that wildfires, cyclones and floods were the new normal which also affected political, economic and social stability.

“Climate disruption is a crisis amplifier and multiplier,” Guterres told the Security Council. “While climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it [also] exacerbates the risks of instability and conflict.”

He referred to a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which noted that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 where in areas highly exposed to climate change.

“The impacts of these crises are greatest where fragility and conflicts have weakened coping mechanisms,” Guterres said.

The UN has already stated that 2021 will a be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge. Guterres has already stated that he plans to focus this year on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by 2050.

Alongside the Security Council debate, the Fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly wrapped up yesterday. The assembly, world’s top environmental decision-making body attended by government leaders, businesses, civil society and environmental activists, met virtually on Feb. 22 to 23 under the theme “Strengthening Actions for Nature to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”.

The assembly concluded with member states releasing a statement acknowledging “the urgency to continue our efforts to protect our planet also in this time of crisis”, and calling for multilateral cooperation as they “remain convinced that collective action is essential to successfully address global challenges”.

Joyce Msuya, the Deputy Executive Director for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), noted that 87 ministers and high-level representatives participated during the two days. She shared some of the points of the dialogue noting that the health of nature and human health were inextricably linked.

“For our own well-being we must make our peace with nature in a way that demonstrates solidarity,” Msuya said, making reference to a recent UNEP report.

The report serves a blueprint on how to tackle the triple emergencies of climate, biodiversity loss and pollution and provides detailed solutions by drawing on global assessments.

Msuya added that the nature crisis was linked with the climate and pollution crisis and that the world now had the chance to put in place a green recovery “that will transform our relations with nature and heal our planet”.

She said the green recovery should put the world on a path to a low-carbon, resilient, post-pandemic world.

Meanwhile, Elsaim said that as a young person, she was “sure that young people are the solution”. She urged world leaders to engage with the youth and listen to them.

“Stop conflict by stopping climate change. Give us security and secure the future,” she said in conclusion.

 

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Under the UN-backed COVAX initiative, UNICEF ships COVID-19 vaccine syringes from a warehouse in Dubai Logistics City, United Arab Emirates. And as the world continues to grapple with the health and economic crisis sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN and Islamic Development Bank have teamed up to help the most vulnerable. May 2021. Credit: UNICEF/Ruel Pableo

By Chady El Khoury, Jiro Honda, Johan Mathisen, and Etienne Yehoue*
WASHINGTON DC, May 21 2021 (IPS)

Governments around the world are playing a crucial role in providing lifelines to people and firms to help combat the pandemic and its economic fallout. To support the effectiveness of these efforts, it is important that such spending be subject to adequate transparency and accountability.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) presses for better governance through greater transparency, and has sought specific governance measures for countries receiving IMF financing during the crisis.

These include commitments to publish pandemic-related procurement contracts and the beneficial ownership of companies awarded these contracts, as well as COVID-19 spending reports and audit results.

The measures are tailored to country circumstances and the severity of corruption risks. In addition, all recipient countries commit to undertake a Safeguards Assessment—a due diligence exercise that is aimed at ensuring that a country’s central bank is able to provide reliable information and transparently manage the funds that it receives from the IMF.

Addressing corruption is a long game. These emergency spending measures are not silver bullets and will only go so far in addressing deeper challenges. Longer-term governance and corruption vulnerabilities will continue to be addressed under the IMF’s broader 2018 Framework for Enhanced Fund Engagement on Governance, with a focus on multi-year IMF lending arrangements, annual health checks of IMF member countries, and capacity development.

Are the receipts coming in?

A year into the emergency response, information is becoming available on the progress in implementing these governance measures in pandemic-related spending.

• • On

publication of contract

• information, most of the commitments have or are in the process of being met, including, for example, in the Dominican Republic, Guinea, Nepal, and Ukraine. In some countries, capacity constraints contribute to limited progress. In these cases, the IMF is providing capacity development to support implementation.

 

• • Collecting and publishing the

beneficial ownership

of contracting companies is a measure that aims to deter corruption, including by facilitating the detection of potential conflicts-of-interest involving public officials. It requires bidding companies to provide the names of the people with effective control over a company, that is the “beneficial owners”. This information is provided to the procurement agency, which must publish it.

Implementation of this innovative practice has proven challenging in some cases, with only half of the countries (including Benin, Ecuador, Jordan, Malawi, and Moldova) having implemented this commitment or made substantial progress toward it.

However, such commitments made in the context of IMF financing during the pandemic have helped spur some countries, such as Kenya and the Kyrgyz Republic, to adopt this reform on a permanent basis. That is, beyond just pandemic-related spending.

• • On

audits of emergency spending

, the deadline for conducting ex-post audits is typically set at 3-12 months after the end of the fiscal year. Accordingly, it is too early to assess implementation—most audits are in preparation based on existing systems.

However, some countries, such as Jamaica, Honduras, Maldives, and Sierra Leone have already taken early action by conducting risk-based, real-time audits. Where needed, the IMF is also stepping up its capacity development to help supreme audit institutions fulfill their responsibility, while also supporting efforts to ensure that such information is easily retrievable.

• • On

reporting of pandemic-related spending

• , most countries are, or will shortly begin, publicly reporting on execution of this spending.

 

• •

Safeguard assessments

are being undertaken rapidly, with the pace of these assessments doubling after the pandemic’s onset.

Tackling deeper challenges

Beyond these measures focused on accountability and transparency in the crisis response, broader governance and anti-corruption reforms are also progressing in the context of multi-year IMF financing arrangements.

Such reforms cover multiple areas, including fiscal governance in countries such as Ecuador, The Gambia, Jordan, Liberia, Rwanda, and Senegal; anti-corruption and anti-money laundering frameworks in Angola, Armenia, Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Tunisia; and financial sector oversight and central bank governance in Liberia and Ukraine, among others.

Beyond IMF financing

Transparency and accountability in the crisis response are important for all countries, regardless of their income level, and such measures are of course commonplace in many countries beyond those receiving IMF financing.

These efforts vary. For example, some countries publish comprehensive spending information on dedicated transparency portals as in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, and Peru. Others, such as South Korea, conduct frequent external audits to verify pandemic-related spending.

Some develop clear guidelines for emergency procurement, as in Spain, and/or detect conflicts-of-interest by analyzing beneficial ownership data and financial disclosures of senior public officials, as in Romania.

Through the IMF’s regular “Article IV” health check of the economies of its members, and through regular policy dialogue, IMF staff continue to discuss transparency and accountability in pandemic-related spending, such as in Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and, more generally, in fiscal, monetary, and financial sector measures.

Building on progress

Sustained country engagement on governance and anti-corruption will be necessary to support effective implementation of reforms undertaken during the pandemic and beyond. A key component is implementing the IMF’s 2018 Framework—which remains a priority for the IMF and goes beyond anti-corruption to address fiscal governance, financial sector oversight, central bank governance, market regulation, rule of law, and anti-money laundering frameworks.

As the critical capacity to implement governance measures varies across countries and by type of measure, IMF staff will also continue to provide tailored capacity development on these issues through channels such as technical assistance, training, and webinars.

The IMF will take stock of progress in implementing the 2018 framework in mid-2022, with a view to assessing how it can continue to support member countries in strengthening governance.

Efforts to enhance governance will depend even more crucially on high-level political ownership of reforms, international cooperation, and a joint effort with civil society and the private sector, among other stakeholders.

Progress also requires sustained implementation of reforms over an extended period. Such progress is not easy, but it is nonetheless achievable—and it is essential for fostering stronger and more inclusive economic growth.

*Chady El-Khoury is deputy unit chief of the Financial Integrity Group in the IMF’s Legal Department.; Jiro Honda is a deputy division chief in the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department; Johan Mathisen is a deputy division chief in the IMF’s Strategy, Policy and Review Department; and Etienne B. Yehoue is an economist at the International Monetary Fund.

 

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Ameenah Gurib-Fakim is the first woman president of Mauritius and a renowned biodiversity scientist. Courtesy: International Labour Organisation/Crozet / Pouteau

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, May 20 2021 (IPS)

If we want to address the great challenges this world is facing, we have to factor in science into all our narratives, according to Dr. Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, the first woman president of Mauritius and renowned biodiversity scientist.

In an interview conducted over Zoom, Gurib-Fakim tells IPS the real cost of biodiversity loss.

“You know, human beings owe their existence to the byproducts of nature’s activities like oxygen, right? And we don’t value it. We depend on nature and unfortunately, for too long, humans have considered themselves to be outside of the ecosystem.

“We are very much part of this ecosystem, so let us stop destroying it because we’re not preserving nature, we are preserving our own livelihoods,” Gurib-Fakim, who is also a successful entrepreneur, says.

She also tells IPS about the importance of using science diplomacy to better international relations and the importance of investing in the youth. Excerpts follow:

IPS: World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2020 has just identified the loss of biodiversity as one of the two greatest risks to global economy. As a biodiversity scientist, what’s your take on this?

Ameenah Gurib-Fakim (AGF): You have raised a very important question. Nature gives us every year over a hundred trillion US dollars. If you can measure that, that is the input of nature to our livelihoods.

We have read the Word Economic Forum’s Global Risk report and I think by 2025, over 60 percent of the big, big animals, the mammals are really threatened with extinction.

Now, if you look at a country like India, if you look at a continent like Africa, just think of a big animal, like the elephant, how much does the elephant contribute to sustaining the ecosystem, which we thrive on?

A wild elephant takes bath in Moei River near the Myanmar-Thailand border. Elephants contribute to sustaining ecosystems. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

 IPS: We have often heard you speak about science diplomacy. How could science diplomacy help build better relations at an international level?

AGF: Science diplomacy for me is the soft power. For the past few years, there has been an anti-science sentiment voiced by major leaders on this planet. And this undesigned sentiment has weighed very heavily again when it comes to addressing issues like climate science, for example, climate change, biodiversity. They have weighed in as well in terms of handling of this pandemic that we are currently living in. So, I think if you want to address the great challenge that this world is facing, we have to factor in science into all our narratives.

We have also seen, at least in the beginning of this year, how we’re trying to revive the multilateral system. And that’s why we need to bring in science diplomacy because we have to rethink our multilateral system and we have to make it fit for purpose to address major challenges.

IPS:  How can the world help create wealth and jobs for youth across the world and how can tapping into youth power and youth talent help build a more sustainable Africa?

AGF:  If you look at the statistics, 60 percent of the jobs that young people will work in have not yet been created. How do we empower the youth, it’s investment in education, right? And, you know, the education that I received as a child is not fit for purpose for my daughter … So what are we doing in terms of investment in the education system for these kids to be ready for that job that has not yet been created?

If you look at Africa, by 2050 it will be the major provider of labour to the world. And the youth of Africa is considered to be a boon. But I worry because that boon can very quickly become a bane. Why are we seeing young Africans dying in the Mediterranean? Partly because they are climate refugees. Don’t forget that climate change has impacted a lot of the regions in Africa. It has impacted agriculture, for example, and this is a huge sector where the youth have been working in and climate change has impacted crops.

These are things that we have to really consider very, very quickly if we are going to consider the youth as being a boon, otherwise we are going to be in a similar situation as Tunisia 10 years ago, when one person, by setting himself aflame, actually brought the country down.

The Kakum National Park in Ghana is a semi-deciduous rainforest. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

IPS: Can you identify a few sectors where investing in youth is needed right now?

AGF:  The health sector needs capitalisation very, very fast, but I’m thinking of another sector, especially for Africa, the agricultural sector. In Africa, agriculture is estimated to be a $1 trillion business. Now every time there is a messaging on Africa, we see a woman working with a baby on her back with a hoe in her hand, digging a very arid land. And this is not what agriculture is. So, just think what drone technology has been able to do, just think what smart technologies have been able to do to empower youth and investment,…[and] how many jobs can be created.  But again, it calls for smart investment in the youth, in the ecosystem and in infrastructure.

IPS: Many women and young people are trying very hard to become successful entrepreneurs, but they don’t really have a lot of support to guide them or resources. What would be your advice to them?

AGF: To become an entrepreneur, you have to have the appetite to take risks. And it is perhaps easier for a man to take risks, because he would have been told from a very young age that he’s a breadwinner of the family.  In Africa, for example, you see that 12 million graduates are landing on the job market every year. I don’t think any country is going to be able to produce that many jobs. So you need to actually need them to become job creators as to being job seekers. But when it comes to a woman, again, all the odds are stacked against her. For a woman to start taking risks is already a big issue because we tend to be very conservative in our approach.

So this is where we need government to weigh in, to provide the ecosystem so that they become job creators and not just job seekers. So the responsibility comes back to us again, but we have to move fast because the world is changing. And over and above these pandemics, there are so many other factors which are going to deter young people. But one thing that we must not do is allow them to dream big and enact whatever ideas and be confident job creators and not just job seekers.

IPS: Finally, what would be your three key messages today?

AGF: I will summarise it in three words: dream, dare and do. Dream big, your dreams must frighten you. If it doesn’t frighten you, it’s not big. Take risk, go out there and do it yourself. There is no cutting corners when it comes to hard work, because everything that you actually will engage in will demand a huge investment on your side. And one thing that I’m happy to have been able to do is that I have been able to show girls growing up in my village, that it is possible to reach the highest position in the country through hard work and also by taking risks.

 

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Excerpt:

May 22 is the International Day for Biological Diversity. IPS senior correspondent Stella Paul interviews AMEENAH GURIB-FAKIM, the first woman president of Mauritius and renowned biodiversity scientist.