Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Women farmers in rural Nepal. Credit: IFAD/Anwar Hossain

By Priti Shrestha and Navanita Sinha
KATHMANDU, Nepal, May 26 2020 (IPS)

In an interview*, Bina Pradhan, an independent researcher, focuses on gender, macroeconomics and emerging issues of inequality.

She is affiliated with the Federation of Business and Professional Women, Nepal (FBPWN), and has been working on the promotion and advancement of women in enterprise development and trade, post-earthquake community reconstruction, and rebuilding people’s lives and livelihoods with a focus on sustainability.

In this interview, Ms. Pradhan shares her views on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically on women and excluded groups in Nepal.

Q: As a feminist economist, what is your assessment of the COVID pandemic in Nepal?

A: COVID-19 is as much of a human and economic crisis as it a health crisis and we are beginning to see its socio- economic impacts in Nepal.

With the announcement of the lockdown and other restrictive measures, we see that both the demand and supply side have been affected; and sectors such as hospitality and tourism severely impacted. We are likely to see a significant rise in unemployment and poverty. Households that depend on remittances will be hit the hardest.

In Nepal, over the years, the primary and secondary sectors have not been contributing much to the economy as the tertiary sector. However, with the ongoing crisis, this sector is going to plummet resulting in serious setbacks to the progress that we have made in poverty reduction, income, health, education and living standards in the last 20-30 years.

Q: Do you think that women especially those from the excluded groups will be disproportionately affected by this pandemic? What is the emerging evidence pointing to?

A: Women are often an after-thought in a humanitarian crisis. In Nepal, we do not yet have data on how the pandemic is affecting women health-wise.

Our experience from the past humanitarian crisis – the 2015 earthquake in particular showed that whether the crisis is natural or manmade, women will be impacted more because of prevalent gender roles, their subordinate position in society and the patriarchal structure of our society.

Bina Pradhan

Women act as shock-absorbers of the household – when there is a shortage of food, women reduce their own consumption, so that there is more food for other household members, especially their children. In such situations, women’s unpaid work burden also goes up substantially, as women strategize their time to compensate for whatever is lost in the households.

When they are in paid employment, women are likely to be the first to be evicted during an economic crisis. We also need to recognize that due to prevalent occupational segregation, more than 70 per cent of health workers, social sector workers or care- givers are women. Therefore, on all fronts, women are much more vulnerable and are likely to be disproportionately affected.

Therefore, this crisis, whether in terms of health or violence or just the ability of households to sustain or recover their livelihoods will be substantially borne by women.

Q: What are your views on the Government of Nepal’s response to COVID thus far? What are some of the challenges that the Government is likely to face in rolling out these relief measures in the current federal context?

A: The relief package is announced but we are yet to see how it is rolled. There must be proper food aid and how it rolled out is important. There should be an orientation on the process to be followed in distribution or there will be no seriousness.

A message has to go to the most marginalized group of people, and it would be good to see a larger increase in relief for that group of women. There should be the implementing mechanism and the government’s commitment to take it seriously., but the delivery of this package will be a challenge.

Q: From a feminist lens, what should be the core elements of the policy response?

A: It is important to recognize that households are not just consumers but also as producers. In our analysis, we need to bring in a sharper focus on women’s work especially their unpaid and domestic work which includes their vital work in care and subsistence.

For this, we need a much more inclusive structure of development – which is not based on the dichotomy of paid and unpaid care work, but instead on a recognition of women’s unpaid work, and its contribution to the national economy.

Q: Given the far-reaching impact of COVID – what are the long-term measures that the Government needs to adopt?

A: I think the ongoing crisis is an opportunity for the Government to act considering the short and long-term impacts of these actions. The top priorities could be:

• The households as economic unit of production and consumption will be hit hardest by the ongoing crisis. Women were managing the remittance sent to households which resulted in improvements in development indicators like health and education. In this crisis too, they will continue to shoulder the burden of paid and unpaid work to recuperate households’ economy. So, it is important to consider household level cash transfer, especially to women.
• We need to focus on addressing the problem of unemployment, which has contributed to increased migration. With the ongoing crisis and its impact on the world economy, the Government should focus on sectors such as infrastructure to generate jobs that can absorb returnee migrants. Emphasis should be on tapping the different capacities and skills of the returnee migrants. This could also mean giving a financial stimulus through investment capital to migrant laborers; to help them establish start-up ventures in Nepal.
• Given the significant numbers of women in MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises, there is need for to financial packages to address the specific challenges of women in this sector. Further there should be continued focus on skill development and upgradation (including technical and managerial skills and non-traditional skills) to help them move their businesses from the micro-scale to small scale.
• The Government should engage with feminist economists or economists and ensure models of development are inclusive (of households); and create spaces for diverse voices and perspectives to be reflected in the planning and budgeting process.

*This was originally published in UN Women’s Weekly News Update

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, May 26 2020 (IPS)

With well over five million Covid-19 infections worldwide, and deaths exceeding 340,000, the race for an effective vaccine has accelerated since the SARS-Cov-2 virus was first identified as the culprit.

Expecting to score politically from being ‘first’ to have a vaccine, US President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed promises to get 300 million doses to Americans by January, after the November polls, following several failed attempts to monopolize vaccines being developed by European companies.

Anis Chowdhury

More than 115 vaccine development efforts are ongoing around the world. Eight human trials are underway, including five in China, with the most promising one government financed. Meanwhile, affordable access is the primary concern for most of the world.

Fighting epidemics together
Sixty-five years ago, Jonas Salk insisted that the polio vaccine he had developed remain patent free. Asked who owned the patent, he replied, “The people I would say. There is no patent. You might as well ask, could you patent the sun?”

Making vaccines and life-saving drugs available freely or affordably has been crucial for containing infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, polio and smallpox. Smallpox had a 30% mortality rate among those infected, and was responsible for 10% of the world’s blind.

In 1958, the Soviet Union urged the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox, offering funding for a plan. Surprising many, the US, already WHO’s major funder, agreed, resulting in the rivals’ most successful collaboration during the Cold War.

Smallpox was eradicated in 1977, following a WHO campaign seeking total eradication within a decade, launched in 1967, when there were over 2.5 million cases worldwide. However, the paltry budget approved by the WHA would not even have paid for the vaccines required.

The programme was launched in developing countries with vaccines donated by other countries including both Cold War rivals. Developing countries quickly developed vaccine producing and vaccination capabilities with generous technical assistance from abroad.

A people’s vaccine?
More than 140 world leaders and experts signed an open letter before the World Health Assembly (WHA) began on 18 May, calling on governments to commit to a ‘people’s vaccine’ against COVID-19, with all vaccines, treatments and tests patent-free, mass produced, fairly distributed and available to all, in every country, free of charge.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Leaders of Italy, France, Germany, Norway, the European Commission and Council urged that the vaccine be “produced by the world, for the whole world” as a “global public good of the 21st century”. President Xi promised that a China developed vaccine will be a “global public good”, with “accessibility and affordability in developing countries”, with President Macron pledging likewise.

The United Nations Secretary-General also emphasized that everybody must have access to the vaccine when available. The WHA unanimously acknowledged that vaccines, treatments and tests are global public goods, but was vague on implications.

Nevertheless, the US disassociated itself from over-riding patents in the interests of public health, objecting that it would send the “wrong message to innovators”. Both Johnson & Johnson and French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi have US government contracts to develop potential treatments, but the US Health and Human Services Secretary refuses to guarantee they will be affordable.

Earlier, the US did not join the 24 April world leaders’ pledge to increase cooperation against Covid-19, besides ignoring a 4 May pledge by international leaders and organizations to spend US$8 billion to make available a vaccine and treatments.

Contain China, not the pandemic
Unfortunately, three decades after the Cold War ended, the context is very different now, due to politics and profits. Trump’s ‘America first’ administration and some key allies seeking to check China fear that Beijing’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has boosted its already fast rising standing.

By April, the US and its allies were blaming China for the pandemic due to the “Chinese virus”. Trump upped the ante on 27 April by threatening retaliatory measures against China for billions of dollars of damages worldwide, claiming that China could have stopped the epidemic at source, but did not.

Offering no evidence, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also accused ‘China-affiliated’ hackers of trying to steal intellectual property (IP) for Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and testing. Meanwhile, some US states, politicians and companies have also filed lawsuits against China for damages.

All this has also undermined the WHO, now depicted as China’s puppet. POTUS’s tough letter to the Director-General demanded “substantive”, but unspecified “improvements” at the WHO within 30 days, threatening to permanently end already suspended US funding and to quit altogether.

‘America first’ vs global public interest
With elections less than half a year away, Trump’s recent rhetoric and policies appear preoccupied with boosting his re-election prospects, slipping due to his handling of the outbreak.

Unsurprisingly, international concerns over US control of an effective Covid-19 vaccine have grown. German weekly, Die Welt am Sonntag reported in March that POTUS had offered German biotech company, CureVac about US$1 billion for exclusive access to the vaccine it is developing.

Earlier this month, Sanofi hastily backed down after the French Prime Minister insisted that access for all was “non-negotiable” following the CEO’s 13 May announcement that the US government had “the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk” despite French government support for Sanofi worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Profits vs public interest
Only a few giant companies can develop and produce a vaccine from start to finish, due to the expense and range of expertise required. Historically, most vaccines have been developed in the North, often reaching the South much later.

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, some OECD governments contracted with pharmaceutical giants to monopolize the H1N1 swine flu vaccine. After developing a promising Zika vaccine in 2017, the US Army assigned production rights to Sanofi, but the deal fell through following profiteering charges by US watchdog organizations and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Despite enjoying the patent system’s extended monopolies, at the expense of public health, limited prospects for lucrative profits have generally discouraged investments to develop affordable medicines and vaccines for developing countries.

What can be done
Some pharmaceutical giants, e.g., Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Sanofi, claim they do not expect to profit from the Covid-19 vaccine. But such recent industry promises not to profiteer from making the vaccine globally available are hard to reconcile with the record that drug research and development has long been driven by the prospect of massive profits.

Such firms have been urged to make the Open Covid pledge to voluntarily relinquish their IP rights (IPRs), at least until the Covid-19 pandemic is over. But Oxfam fears this may not be enough. As Big Pharma has long enjoyed massive government subsidies, national authorities can enforce the pledge.

Governments can also use ‘compulsory licencing’, permitted by World Trade Organization rules, to enable companies that do not have the IPRs, to make, manufacture and sell generic versions of patented medicines only for national sale, as the Bush administration did with Tamiflu a decade and a half ago in the face of the Avian flu threat.

 

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At least 54 percent of sexually active adolescent women in Kenya who would like to postpone pregnancy have an unmet need for modern contraception. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, May 25 2020 (IPS)

It was only when 17-year-old Eva Muigai was in her final trimester that her family discovered she was pregnant. Muigai, a form three student who lives with her family in Gachie, Central Kenya, had spent her pregnancy wearing tight bodysuits and loose-fitting clothes that hid her growing baby bump.

“The plan was to have an abortion but I was too scared. My classmate had an abortion last year and she almost died, so I kept postponing the abortion.

“I gathered courage at five months and my cousin took me to a man who does abortions at the shopping centre. He refused to do the abortion because he preferred pregnancies that were not older than three months,” Muigai tells IPS.

Muigai says that one day, while seven months pregnant, she “just fainted and my mother tried to loosen my clothes so that I could get more air”.

“It then became clear that I was pregnant,” she recalls.

Last month, two weeks shy of her due date, Muigai was rushed to hospital with severe abdominal cramps. The attending doctor rushed Muigai into theatre for an emergency caesarian section.

Her newborn baby did not survive.

Last week, Muigai was re-admitted to hospital with further complications after first experiencing swelling in her stomach and then her entire body.

“Complications of pregnancy and child birth are a leading cause of preventable deaths and ill health among adolescent women, aged 15 to 19 years, in Kenya,” Angela Nguku, executive director of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, Kenya, tells IPS.

The alliance has been at the forefront of advocating for adolescent health and universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and is a Deliver For Good partner organisation in Kenya.

• Deliver For Good is a “global campaign that applies a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and promotes 12 critical investments in girls and women to power progress for all”. Powered by Women Deliver, a global advocacy organisation that champions gender equality and the health and rights of girls and women, more than 400 organisations have joined the Deliver for Good Campaign.

Tamara Windau-Melmer, a senior manager for Youth Engagement at Women Deliver, says that adolescent girls are often left behind because the policies, programmes, and investments meant to serve them are not designed in an inclusive, gender-responsive way.

“Adolescent girls must be meaningfully and authentically engaged in decision-making about their own lives, especially as it pertains to information about and access to contraception,” she tells IPS.

• According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), adolescent mothers face higher risks of eclampsia, uterine infection and systemic infections than women aged 20 to 24 years.
• Babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions.

“Additionally, comprehensive sexuality education is critical as it offers the opportunity to reach adolescent girls with important information and skills to take control of their lives and pursue a brighter future for themselves, their families, and their communities,” Windau-Melmer says.

But the provision of comprehensive sex education in Kenya remains a hotly-contested issue by religious leaders, who hold great sway on such matters, and it is yet to be rolled out in line with National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health policy.

Nguku says that despite a 2012 government commitment to provide affordable and accessible high quality reproductive health services to adolescents, this promise remains on paper in the form of the National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health policy.

“The policy was updated in 2015 so that adolescents can have accurate, timely information and quality services but adolescent women still have many unmet needs,” she says.

• Adolescent women in Kenya account for an estimated one-fifth of the female population of over 26 million, and account for approximately 14 percent of all births, according to the most recent Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. 
• Statistics by the Guttmacher Institute, a leading global research organisation, show that 63 percent of pregnancies among adolescents in Kenya are unintended, as was the case with Muigai. 35 percent of these unintended pregnancies are aborted. 

But research by the Guttmacher Institute shows that at least 54 percent of sexually active adolescent women in this East African nation who would like to postpone pregnancy have an unmet need for modern contraception.

• The institute’s research further shows that satisfying the unmet need for modern contraceptives among adolescent women in Kenya would result in a 73 percent drop in unintended pregnancies. Currently, adolescent women account for an estimated 86 percent of all unintended pregnancies in the country. 
• Further, the Guttmacher Institute shows that a combination of modern contraceptives for all adolescents who need it, and adequate care for all pregnant adolescents and their newborns, would reduce adolescent maternal deaths by 76 percent. Currently maternal deaths stand at 450 per year.

Georgina Nyambura, the founder of Umoja Women Mobile Health Care, a registered, community-based organisation with over 6,000 members across the country, says that stigma and discrimination remain barriers to adolescent women seeking SRHR services. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

These grim statistics pale in comparison to the country’s impressive progress toward the increased uptake of modern contraceptives.

At the end of the 2012 Family Planning Summit in London, where governments and donors committed to ensure more women and girls could access modern family planning by 2020, Kenya committed to increasing the uptake of modern contraceptives by married women to 58 percent. 

By 2017, Kenya surpassed the set target, increasing the uptake of modern contraceptives for all women by a third. Statistics by the Ministry of Health show that contraceptive usage for all women now stands at 61 percent. But for adolescent women this usage stands at 40 percent.

As a result, nearly one in every five teenage girls has either had a live birth or is pregnant with their first child, according to the Ministry of Health.

“Our society is very religious and even where policies allow young girls to access all the sexual and reproductive health services all women are entitled to, the situation is very different on the ground,” says Georgina Nyambura, the founder of Umoja Women Mobile Health Care, a registered, community-based organisation with over 6,000 members across the country.

“It is a common saying that girls are more afraid of pregnancy and, therefore, evidence that they are having sex, than of HIV.”

• In Kenya, nearly half of new HIV infections occur among the country’s youth aged 15 to 24 years.

To address fears of stigma and discrimination towards adolescent women, Nyambura urges the government and actors in the health sector to re-evaluate the manner in which this cohort access services, including information on sexuality.

However, the current coronavirus pandemic is expected to reverse any gains that have already been made. Kenya has reported some 1,214 COVID-19 cases. The country has been in a nationwide lockdown since April, with a nighttime curfew still in place and schools and religious centres closed.

“A health pandemic such as COVID-19 will only widen the existing gap between adolescent women and all the SRHR services that they need. Human and financial resources have now been directed into fighting this health crisis.

“On the other hand, people themselves will only come to the hospital now if it is a matter of life and death. Pandemics affect our health service seeking behaviours and patterns,” Grace Kanini, a nurse at one of the country’s referral hospitals, tells IPS.

However, adolescent health challenges informed the government’s family planning commitments made in 2017 during the second Family Planning Summit in London.

Two of the three revised government commitments on family planning target adolescent women. 

• The first commitment is to scale up contraceptive uptake from 61 percent to 66 percent for all women by 2030.
• The second commitment is to increase contraceptive prevalence rate among adolescent women from 40 to 50 percent by 2020, and to 55 percent by 2025.
• And a further commitment to reduce teenage pregnancy among adolescent women from 18 to 12 percent by 2020, and to 10 percent by 2025.

For the first seven months of her pregnancy, while she was hiding it from her family, Muigai did not have a single antenatal care checkup. And she is not an anomaly.

According to the Ministry of Health, 51 percent of pregnant adolescents have fewer than the four essential antenatal care visits recommended by the WHO, and 33 percent do not give birth in a health facility. 

Nguku says that the government will need to invest more into family planning programmes that target this cohort.

Fully meeting contraception, maternal and newborn health care needs for adolescents across the country would cost an estimated 89 million dollars each year.

But not meeting these needs will cost an estimated 114 million dollars annually, of which 63 million dollars would go to care related to unintended pregnancies, says the Guttmacher Institute.

The scenario speaks true to Muigai’s situation.

An ‘A’ student with dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon, she now lays in a referral hospital receiving medical treatment. 

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The post Kenya’s Adolescent Women Left Behind As More Married Women Access Contraception appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Complications of pregnancy and child birth are a leading cause of preventable deaths and ill health among adolescent women in Kenya. But research shows a combination of modern contraceptives for all adolescents who need it, and adequate care for all pregnant adolescents and their newborns, would reduce adolescent maternal deaths by 76 percent. So what needs to be done to prevent this?

The post Kenya’s Adolescent Women Left Behind As More Married Women Access Contraception appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Students learn with tablets in a school in South Africa. Credit: AMO/Jackie Clausen

By External Source
May 25 2020 (IPS)

Many well meaning education benefactors and commentators in South Africa have expressed that in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic online self-guided learning could solve some of the current teaching problems and address the educational backlog. What learners need, the reasoning goes, is to get free internet access to educational support materials on offer online.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, self-guided online learning is doomed to fail. Research shows an exceptionally high drop-out rate – even in developed countries. Learners simply have no incentive to keep at their studies without peer pressure, a teacher at hand or a structured learning environment.

In South Africa in particular, with socio-economic disparities and related problems, the drop-out rate would be even higher. More so in key subjects like mathematics and physical science where prior knowledge, conceptual understanding and self-motivation to succeed are critical.

Self-guided online learning is doomed to fail. Research shows an exceptionally high drop-out rate – even in developed countries. Learners simply have no incentive to keep at their studies without peer pressure, a teacher at hand or a structured learning environment

The only answer, in the country’s unequal teaching environment, is a customised version of blended learning. Blended learning integrates computer-assisted online activities with traditional face-to-face teaching (chalk-and-talk).

When used by a trained teacher, this approach can add valuable new dimensions to the learning process. It can allow learners to work at their own pace and teachers to fill content gaps.

 

Blended learning in South Africa

In many developed countries, blended learning is a well-established practice. It has enabled these countries to adapt to the demands of the current pandemic. Digital remote learning and teaching is backed up by dependable infrastructure and skilled, motivated teachers.

By contrast, the differences between South African schools have been thrown into sharp relief. The binary system of a privileged minority of schools and the rest remains, despite the political changes more than 25 years ago.

More than 80% of public schools are under-resourced. They are ill-equipped to respond to the teaching and learning challenges of the 21st century – let alone the latest demands of the pandemic.

The current lockdown has suddenly compelled teachers to adopt predominantly online, blended learning teaching practices. But nearly 90% of all households in South Africa are still without access to the internet at home. Very few schools had adapted to blended learning before lockdown and few schools would be able to adopt it during the lockdown. Therefore the schools that had fewer resources and skills will fall even further behind.

This is especially disappointing since the current cohort of pupils (born after 2000) have long expressed their preference for a blended learning model. Even the recent recognition by the South African government that science, technology, engineering and mathematics are important in the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had little effect on the skills development of teachers, infrastructure or modernisation of resources in schools.

Therefore, in the South African context, mainstream blended learning is not the complete answer. We need to go beyond blended learning.

 

Customised blended learning model

Since 2002, the Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre in Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth has wrestled with these challenges.

The bad news is that there’s no way to make the teaching and learning of maths and science easy. But we’ve developed a number of interventions that have lifted the twin burdens of poor training and lack of infrastructure from the shoulders of teachers. Skills development linked to the use of user-friendly and interactive digital resources has allowed teachers to focus on attaining a high quality of teaching with subsequent learning successes.

Over the past decade, the centre has experimented with various combinations of online and offline self-directed teaching methods. It has worked specifically on blended learning for mathematics and physical sciences in secondary schools.

The greatest success has been a blended learning system that uses a combination of online and offline interactive resources with pre-installed apps that are aligned with the South African school curriculum. These can be used as a guide for teaching, home-schooling, after-school study and tutoring. We call it techno-blended learning: a structured approach, using mostly offline apps in an integrated way, with the full participation of a trained or experienced adult mentor or guide.
One of the centre’s more recent interventions is a mini personal computer called the GammaTutor™. This’s an offline device pre-loaded with interactive learning material. These resources have been specifically designed for South African school conditions.

 

The GammaTutor: a tutor in your pocket.

 

The GammaTutor™ software package is primarily intended for teachers: when plugged into any data projector, a TV or digital screen, it doubles as a flexible maths and science teaching assistant in the classroom and a learner support resource for after school hours. It fits in the palm of a hand, requires no data and is navigated by the click of a mouse. Its small size makes the device easy to keep safe and to take where it’s needed.

 

What needs to be done

It’s well known that major educational challenges exist in schools as a result of the country’s multi-language society – particularly in the teaching and learning of mathematics. The GammaTutor™ application offers mathematics concept explanations in eight indigenous languages.

The device covers the full curriculum for high school maths and physical sciences, presented in video, PDF or animated PowerPoint format – along with glossaries, exam revision support, translations from English into indigenous languages and many additional teaching support materials. It can be used for interactive teaching online and remotely.

The response from teachers, learners and stakeholders to this approach of teaching and learning has been overwhelmingly positive. Where these interventions have been applied, in pilot schools in the Eastern Cape province, the results have been gratifying. Marks have improved significantly and successful learners have been able to progress to university.

The new urgency for remote teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity for the country to adopt policies to accelerate blending learning practices among teachers and learners. The Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre offers lessons learned through more than a decade of research.

Werner Olivier, Professor in Mathematics and Director: Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre, Nelson Mandela University

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

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The image shows the countries from which remittance flows to Bangladesh, a service that is severely affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

By Star Online Report
May 25 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The UK and Switzerland are calling for greater global collaboration to ensure access to digital remittance services to support people during the coronavirus outbreak.

Such remittance accounts for more than five percent of the GDP in at least sixty developing countries. The World Bank predicts remittances to low- and middle-income countries will fall by 20 percent or $110 billion in 2020.

In a joint press statement, the two European countries said it is important to make sure diaspora communities around the world can continue to send financial support to their families.

The call is important for Bangladesh. A country that heavily depends on migrant remittance, which was $18 billion last year and is likely to decline by 22 percent this year. Also, several lakh Bangladeshi migrants may return home after facing job losses, while those aspiring to find jobs abroad may also not see the dream come true any time soon.

The joint statement issued on Friday highlighted the urgent need for people to be able to continue accessing money transfer services, and for governments to make sure those funds reach those relying on this support.

Both UK and Switzerland are also urging countries to support greater access to digital remittance services and to declare remittances an essential financial service. They are also encouraging remittance service providers to reduce costs and fees for people making payments.

Money sent by individuals to family and friends living in low- and middle-income countries totaled $554bn in 2019 and is a vital lifeline in many developing countries, boosting economic development and lifting people out of poverty.

But coronavirus is already having a big impact, with a drop in the wages of migrant workers and coronavirus restrictions making it more difficult for people to access money transfer services.

A drop in remittance would have a severe impact on countries where many people are already facing destitution and even starvation as a result of the huge economic impact of the pandemic.

UK’s International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said, “The coronavirus pandemic means we are all concerned about how our family and friends here and overseas are coping. That’s why we’re making it easier for diaspora communities in the UK and other countries to continue to transfer money to their relatives.”

“This will be lifesaving for some families in developing countries where coronavirus is making a lack of food and healthcare, and extreme poverty, even worse. We are helping to prevent fragile economies from facing potential collapse during the pandemic.”

Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, head of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs added.

“Remittances are important, but difficult because of COVID-19. So, let’s make sure those barriers are removed worldwide! New technologies can help us here.”

The joint call was backed by partners, including the World Bank, the UN Capital Development Fund, UN Development Programme and the International Organisation for Migration. A number of countries have already joined, including Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The UK government has made it clear that in the UK people can continue to visit remittance centres should they need to, while observing social distancing and staying safe. Digital money transfer services are also available.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Excerpt:

UK and Switzerland say in a joint statement

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Human development backslides, education at global levels ‘not seen since the 1980s’ Young girl in Uruguay uses her laptop to study at home. Credit: UNDP Uruguay/Pablo La Rosa

By Saida Ali
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 25 2020 (IPS)

When I was a little girl, my mother told us the story of a woman who escaped from a monster by cooking stones: when the monster fell asleep waiting for his dinner, the woman ran for her life.

I thought of this tale when I read last month about Peninah Bahati Kitsao, a Kenyan widow who boiled stones in the hope of lulling her eight children to sleep. In Peninah’s case, the monster was hunger and poverty.

Shocked and saddened, Kenyans took to social media to call for help for her, but just a week later, Peninah’s four-month-old baby died. Unlike my mother’s story, unfortunately, there will be no escape from the monster for Peninah and millions of people like her, unless the world agrees to take action – and quickly.

For widowed women such as Peninah, the convergence of gendered norms and social and economic inequalities has always determined what befalls them: in the past, during the coronavirus crisis, and doubtless after the pandemic ends.

The multiple inequalities that she and so many other marginalised people face are not new phenomena: COVID-19 has merely placed them in the spotlight. These are the inequalities that have been the targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for the past five years.

When governments around the world adopted the SDGs’ 17 global goals and 169 targets in September 2015, they pledged to end poverty and food insecurity, protect the planet and ensure that no one would be left behind in the enjoyment of peace and prosperity by 2030.

These 17 ambitious goals were to be at the heart of a revitalized global partnership built on the spirit of strengthened global solidarity, focused on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable. But as the COVID-19 pandemic grips the planet, the threat of a collapsing global economy has further slowed the limited progress that has been made on achieving these goals – to the point where the 2030 vision now looks more like a mirage than a roadmap.

In Niger, 1.6 million vulnerable children are affected by humanitarian crises, including border closures and COVID-19 containment measures.

As the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis continues to wreak havoc across the world – with the most vulnerable suffering the most – the UN chief said on last week that the task of eradicating poverty and achieving the development goals “has never been more challenging, more urgent and more necessary”. Credit: UNICEF/Juan Haro

Even long before the pandemic, it was clear that these goals would be challenging to achieve. Before the finalisation and adoption of the 2030 Agenda, feminists and civil society organisations participating in the negotiations were raising red flags when they realised that the implementation of the global goals would be undermined by the lack of will on the part of governments around the world to financing its development agenda and committing to the systemic, structural change essentials to tackling the roots of extreme poverty, economic inequality and the rising concentration of wealth.

COVID-19 crisis aside, what global inequality has shown us is that international economic governance is skewed in favour of developed countries. While we know that the populations and economies of many developed countries have been hard hit by the pandemic, we must not forget that even in the time of COVID-19, the extraction of financial and non-financial resources from the global South to the global North carries on unabated.

As inequalities scholar Branko Milanovic observes in his book The Haves and the Have Nots, wealth has been unevenly spread throughout the world for many centuries, and where you are born largely determines your wealth and opportunities in life.

These determinants are key factors in the financial commitments that have been made to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda by the world’s governments. And even the commitments made before the pandemic were not sufficient: the shortfall in the funding needed to achieve SDGs in developing countries is now estimated to be $2.5 to $3 trillion per year.

This comes on top of the shortfall in financing for development more generally, with many wealthy nations failing to meet their obligation of 0.7% of their gross national income to official development assistance (ODA).

We do not yet know the full toll that COVID-19 will take on humanity – but the signs are deeply troubling. Research by the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) warns of an increase in global poverty by as much as half a billion people, or 8% of the total human population.

This will not only set us back to the poverty levels of the early 1990s, but also means that our ability to achieve the SDGs is under immense threat. New analysis from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has also pointed to the consequences of the pandemic on women’s and girls’ health and exercise of rights.

The global projections shared by UNFPA are mind-blowing: for every three months that the COVID-19 continues, up to 2 million more women will go without access to modern contraceptives, there will be an additional 15 million cases of gender-based violence, and over the next decade, 2 million additional female genital mutilation cases and 13 million additional child marriages will occur – all of which could have been averted. We can already see the reversal of decades on gains in women’s rights.

COVID-19 is amplifying deep-seated gender inequalities, but we must remember that in pre-pandemic times we had barely shifted the needle on the status of millions of people in precarious, informal work.

Peninah Bahati Kitsao was a laundry lady before social distancing policies meant that she and millions more domestic workers lost their incomes, and those whose work was already undervalued and underpaid and for whom food insecurity was a daily reality were pushed even further away from the world envisioned by the 17 global goals.

In their worldwide pledge to “leave no one behind”, the global goals explicitly intended to address the rights and needs of people such as Peninah: the people least often heard and already furthest behind.

Achieving the SDGs always required explicit, concrete steps to end extreme poverty, curb inequalities, confront discrimination and fast-track progress for the hundreds of millions who need it most – and COVID-19 has not changed this requirement. Around the world, the calls for concerted action are increasing.

As part of its Economic Rescue Plan for All, Oxfam is urging both immediate debt cancellation for poor countries, and direct help via cash grants to people such as Peninah. Feminists led by AWID (the Association for Women’s Rights in Development) are rallying behind a campaign for bailouts for people such as Peninah, including domestic workers, sex workers, undocumented workers, underpaid and unpaid care workers, migrant workers, seasonal agricultural workers, and all those whose work is essential to our societies.

Feminist economists remind us that contradictions and crises are a constant feature of financialised capitalism and the system rides on the backs of the poor.

One of the most important lessons from Peninah Bahati Kitsao’s terrible, preventable anguish is that without addressing gender inequality, the SDGs’ promise of equitable social development will not be fulfilled.

Her story underscores the fact that women and girls comprise the majority of those living in poverty, experience persistent and multi-dimensional inequalities, and bear the brunt of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

Discrimination, place of residence, socio-economic status, governance and vulnerability – all factors identified by the United Nations Development Program – are why Peninah and her countless sisters around the world in precarious jobs, with no access to family planning or education, have always been left behind.

We will never build a better world until we all step up to do battle with the monster of hunger and inequality that took Peninah’s child.

 

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The post Are the SDGs in Reverse Gear? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Saida Ali is an intersectional feminist and international policy analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya, and an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. She tweets at @SaidaAaliyah

The post Are the SDGs in Reverse Gear? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
May 24 2020 (IPS-Partners)

In the context of COVID-19 crisis, what are the risks for climate action?

Climate change still continues and climate impacts are still very visible in the Pacific. A few weeks ago, we had major forest fires in Australia and in other countries. Now we’re battling tropical cyclone Harold which is a result of climate change. This week a new study was released, pointing out that the great barrier reef in Australia suffered one of its most severe bleaching in 5 years. Climate change is still happening, so climate actions have to be pursued. People might have different priorities these days, with funding being reoriented to other activities, but the action definitely needs to be continued to strengthen the resilience of our systems to global changes.

How is the crisis changing the way CCES works?

First, we had to revisit all of our projects and programs and develop contingency plans. For a lot of our activities, that means postponing, delaying, suspending some of the missions and travels. Workshops have to be reprogrammed. There’s a lot of anticipation and planning work going on. We are also anticipating: developing terms of reference, tender documents – In fact, getting ready for when activities pick up again. We are also keeping everybody informed, with the Pacific Territories Regional Project for Sustainable Ecosystem Management (PROTEGE) for example. We’re sending newsletters, reaching out all the partners via Skype and videoconferencing. We will have a regional steering committee next week by videoconference. Things are happening, a bit differently, but they’re happening: contingency planning, anticipating and still going on, and we are working hard to meet the needs of our members.

How do you manage to keep the work going?

Like all of the divisions and teams at SPC, we’ve been relying a lot more on IT solutions. I would like to acknowledge the work of the IT team at SPC. They’ve been outstanding in getting us ready for that. When the confinement started, we were all ready. [We’ve faced] minimum problems as far as I can tell in terms of reaching out and working together. We’re also paying a lot more attention to people, making sure that no one is left behind – These are the values of SPC and of the Pacific as well. We’re making sure everybody is ok, we try to reach out to everyone, both as a team, and as an organization.

How will global climate action look like in 2020?

It will look different for sure. The climate change year is punctuated with a lot of international events, conferences, and that helps advance the negotiations and the decision-making processes. All of these conferences have been postponed: the One Planet Summit, the Ocean Conference, the IUCN congress and now the COP26 postponed to 2021. The first thing that is happening is a lot of logistics, with the need for reorganizing and reprogramming all of these big events and conferences.

Secondly, a lot of things are still happening. We are currently submitting all of the contributions for the ocean and climate call for submission. A lot of things are happening online as well. And a major virtual ocean and climate conference is being organized for early June.

What will happen after the crisis ends?

With that crisis, there are a lot of things that are going to be changing as well at the international level. There’s a greater understanding now that things are global, and that climate change is a global issue, just as COVID-19. We have to address it together. We have this communality, this multilateralism that I hope will be stronger. We’re also looking now at a more systemic type of approach. Climate change, like COVID-19, has to be treated in a systemic way, looking at job uncertainties as well as financial risk and food security. Climate change will have to have a more systemic approach looking at all these issues.

My final point is the capacity to adapt, which is proper to climate change: we’re talking about climate change adaptation and mitigation. We have to make sure that we build the systems and the infrastructures to adapt to shocks and crisis. This is the case now with COVID-19, and it’s going to be the case tomorrow with climate change. We have to strengthen the resilience of our systems, including ecosystems, and of our infrastructure to build a more resilient system for the Pacific, and the rest of the world.

Division
Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability (CCES)

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Mexico's state-run oil giant Pemex faces a difficult outlook due to the fall in international oil prices and the crisis resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, which threatens its production and finances, in a situation analysed during the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised online by the Institute of the Americas. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 22 2020 (IPS)

While it attempts to cushion the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Latin American and Caribbean region also faces concerns about the future of the energy transition and state-owned oil companies.

These questions were discussed at the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised by the Institute of the Americas. It was held online May 18-22, rather than bringing together more than 50 speakers at the institute’s headquarters in the coastal district of San Diego, in the U.S. state of California, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alfonso Blanco of Uruguay, executive secretary of the Latin American Energy Organisation (OLADE), said during a session on global trends and the regional energy industry that the changes seen during the pandemic will spread after the crisis and will be long-lasting.

“There will be structural transformations and we are convinced that most consumer behaviors will change after the pandemic. Demand will vary due to changes in the main areas of transportation and other energy areas. The effects on fossil fuel consumption will be strong and there will be a greater impact on renewable energies,” he said.

OLADE, a 27-member regional intergovernmental organisation for energy coordination, estimates that electricity demand has fallen by 29 percent in Bolivia compared to 2019, as a result of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, and by 26 percent in Argentina, 22 percent in Brazil and 11 percent in Chile."There will be structural transformations and we are convinced that most consumer behaviors will change after the pandemic. Demand will vary due to changes in the main areas of transportation and other energy areas. The effects on fossil fuel consumption will be strong and there will be a greater impact on renewable energies." -- Alfonso Blanco

Likewise, final energy demand plummeted 14 percent in Brazil compared to 2019, 11 percent in both the Andean and Southern Cone regions, nine percent in Mexico, seven percent in Central America and five percent in the Caribbean.

As countries went into lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19, electricity consumption by businesses and factories declined, due to the suspension of activities.

Leonardo Sempertegui, legal advisor to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), said the pandemic may be a wake-up call for countries lagging behind in the energy transition.

“This may be the new normal. The structure and governance of the energy architecture to cope with the next phase are changing dramatically. Energy poverty and the energy transition cannot be solved regardless of who controls a resource; these challenges cannot wait,” he said in the same session.

In Latin America, nations like Argentina, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras and Uruguay have made progress in the energy transition since 2015, while Brazil has slid backwards and countries like Mexico are stuck in the same place, according to the World Economic Forum’s Energy Transition Index, released May 13.

As the region heads into the fourth month of the pandemic, countries are assessing their electricity markets, which have been shaken by the crisis.

Nations like Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru have resorted to long-term electricity auctions, which have generated low prices for renewables, while Mexico suspended such schemes in 2019.

In Argentina, as Andrés Chambouleyron, a non-resident fellow at the Institute of the Americas, explained, industrial consumption fell by 50 percent and electricity distributors have not been able to obtain sufficient revenues to cover fixed costs or electricity purchases.

The government has thus provided financing to Cammesa – the electricity wholesale market administration company – to pay the generators, since it is bound by contracts to buy the energy.

“There will be a permanent change in electricity consumption in Argentina. We have cheaper gas than before; the models say that you have to use more gas because it is cheaper than other sources. We won’t see much change in Argentina’s energy mix, and that could extend to all of Latin America,” said Chambouleyron, who warned of breach of and renegotiation of contracts for energy purchases.

Low oil prices threaten to slow down the energy transition in Latin America, although renewable energies already compete with the costs of fossil fuels, agreed experts at the 29th La Jolla Energy Conference, organised online by the Institute of the Americas. The photo shows solar panels on a house in Ajijic, in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

While renewables are already competing in price with conventional sources, low oil and gas prices undermine their expansion, a predicament that alternative energy sources have been facing in recent years.

In addition, the rise in the cost of international credit and the fluctuations of the dollar against local currencies may make generation more expensive.

In another session on the outlook for state-owned oil companies, Marta Jara, former president of Uruguay’s public oil company ANCAP, said the current crisis could accelerate the transition, but called it a “major challenge”.

“The temptation is to be opportunistic and forget the roadmap of the energy transition. We must invest in sustainable energy systems, decarbonise transport. It is important to secure funding and create jobs. I hope the crisis opens the door to be more innovative,” she said.

Viable or not?

The plunge in fossil fuel prices is damaging the finances of the region’s oil producing countries, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, and state companies in the sector are facing problems with regard to planning and operations.

But it benefits net importers, like the countries of Central America or Chile, whose oil bills have shrunk, while for consumers in both oil producing and importing countries the cost of electricity could go down.

“The most competitive will be the countries with lower oil extraction costs. Some projects will not be economically viable. We will see greater economic problems than in 2019,” predicted Lisa Viscidi, director of the Energy, Climate Change and Extractive Industries Programme at the non-governmental Inter-American Dialogue, during a panel on the situation in several Caribbean nations.

The pandemic and a rise in Saudi production announced on Mar. 10 led to a collapse in oil prices and the consequent risk of bankruptcies in the industry. State-owned oil companies have fared better than others so far in the crisis.

In another session on the outlook for state-owned oil companies, John Padilla, managing director of the private consulting firm IPD Latin America, stated that “it will take time to get out of this situation, with effects for the region, and the need for great efficiency.

“Most nations have been exporters, efficiency will be the key. What has not been done is to cultivate domestic and regional markets, state enterprises are not going to play the same role as they always have,” he said.

Public companies such as Brazil’s Petrobras and Colombia’s Ecopetrol entered the crisis in a better position than Mexico’s Pemex, Venezuela’s PDVSA and Argentina’s YPF, according to experts.

“These are difficult times, even for the best prepared. We can hope that if the country and its company are in trouble, if governments need money, they can get more out of the companies,” said Francisco Monaldi, interim director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Latin America Initiative at the private Rice University in the U.S. state of Texas.

In his view, “Mexico is in better fiscal conditions, it should not be a problem. But Pemex can drag Mexico down. If the government doesn’t change direction, it could become a serious problem,” he said as an example.

Although Pemex will increase its investment in 2020, the oil company reported losses of 20 billion dollars in the first quarter of this year. Due to the crisis, Petrobras limited its investment to 3.5 billion dollars and its daily production to 200,000 barrels, and postponed the sale of eight refineries.

For Lucas Aristizábal, a senior director in Fitch Ratings’ Latin American corporates group, some state-owned oil companies are viable and others are not.

“In 2021, the financial contribution of oil will be lower for governments. If they want the companies to play a key role, they will put more pressure on their financial structure. The current situation illustrates the economics of these corporations,” he said during the forum.

Pemex and YPF were already losing money per barrel in 2019, while Petrobras has more balanced production costs.

On the oil horizon, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Guyana has become the rising star, although there is still political uncertainty, as the result of the Mar. 2 presidential elections is still unclear.

“It’s hard to predict what will happen. There is a risk of U.S. sanctions that would not affect investment in the sector, but would pose a political risk to the country,” said Thomas Singh, in the Department of Economics at the public University of Guyana.

The country expects to extract 600,000 barrels per day by 2024 and take in revenues of five billion dollars, with reserves exceeding five billion barrels.

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Credit: Remi Yuan / Unsplash

By Ana María Hernández Salgar
BONN, May 22 2020 (IPS)

Restoring damaged ecosystems is vital to avoid the collapse of nature’s most valuable contributions to people, but International Day for Biological Diversity 2020 should also be a wake-up call about the importance of addressing our social, economic and systemic values, because it is these that are driving the destruction of nature.

We are part of nature, but our choices and behaviours have pushed the rest of the natural world to the brink of disaster. Hunger, disease, loss of livelihoods and rising levels of risk and insecurity are the direct result of our own actions. To shift to a more sustainable future, the best-available expert evidence tells us that we need transformative change to reset our fundamental relationship with our environment.

This will require us to tackle the nature and climate emergencies directly and simultaneously, uniting behind both climate and biodiversity science. We have already hit ‘snooze’ for too many decades on the warnings of experts from every discipline and every region – further delays are entirely at our own peril.

Transformative change means a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors. It means addressing not just the direct and most visible threats to biodiversity – such as land-use change, overfishing, pollution, climate change and invasive alien species – but also tackling the values and behaviours that find expression through indirect drivers such as population trends, production and consumption patterns, weak governance and conflicts.

The way we lead our lives and do business has effectively been freeloading on the bounty that nature contributes to people, taking for granted the natural processes that revitalize our environment. Instead of living within our means, we’ve been using up more and more ‘natural capital’ – well beyond what nature can replenish – and it’s a debt that is now past due. This is one of the reasons that the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks Report recognized that the top five risks to business around the world are all environmental.

Ana María Hernández Salgar

With the publication last year of the IPBES Global Assessment Report, science has spoken: the damage we do to nature can no longer ever be justified as an externality. When we harm nature, we directly hurt ourselves as well. When we fail to act as responsible stewards of the environment, it is our future that we jeopardise.

The good news, however, is that many sustainable solutions to these problems can also be found in nature – and are, therefore, still within reach. The efforts that many countries, organizations, communities and institutions have already put into recovering biodiversity are beginning to bear fruit.

It is important for us to learn from these good examples, and from our mistakes, to chart a realistic and rigorous path, with concrete actions, but based on our different national and regional circumstances.

Investing in nature holds great promise. Nature-based solutions to climate change, for instance, such as restoring degraded lands, can provide more than a third of the mitigation needed by 2030 to keep climate warming well below 2°C.

Implementing both existing and new policy instruments through interventions that are integrative, informed, inclusive and adaptive will enable the global transformation that we need.

Coordinated action at local, national, regional, and international levels is needed to safeguard remaining habitats, undertake large-scale restoration of degraded habitats, and more broadly to place nature at the heart of decision-making and sustainable development.

Importantly, this will also entail a change in our understanding of what constitutes a good quality of life – decoupling the idea of a good and meaningful life from ever-increasing material consumption and forging individual, collective and organizational actions towards sustainability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unavoidable delay in the planned global negotiations on the post-2020 framework for biodiversity, but 2020 is still a “Super Year for Nature”. The world has had the chance this year to see very directly the importance of changing values, approaches and behaviours, and to better understand the vital connection between people and nature.

After this crisis we will confront a ‘new normal’ – hopefully this will also be a watershed moment with values, approaches and behaviours – the indirect drivers of change in nature – at the forefront of policy and action.

The available evidence makes it clear that going back to ‘business as usual’ – ignoring our collective impacts on nature – would be a grave mistake.

The burning question on this day to commemorate the importance of nature is if and when we will change and seriously face the emergencies unfolding around us.

Enquiries: media@ipbes.net

Ana Maria Hernandez is the Chair of IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which, much like the IPCC does for climate change, provides objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people, as well as options and actions to protect and sustainably use these vital natural assets.

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Hawaii is home to many of the world's rarest plants and animals, recognised globally as a 'biodiversity hotspot.' “We have seen a lot of positive actions being taken around the world, especially new green initiatives, in response to the pandemic,” Mrema of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said. Credit: Jon Letman/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 22 2020 (IPS)

This year’s International Day of Biological Diversity falls amid the coronavirus pandemic and the slow easing, in some nations, of a global lockdown. While the lockdown has forced most people to stay at home, there have been reports of more wildlife being spotted – even in once-busy city centres. 

This change is fitting for this year’s theme: “Our solutions are in nature.” Experts say that this is an opportunity for humans to see the footprint they are leaving behind on earth, and time to reflect on how to work towards a better future for the sustainability of the environment and for wildlife in the future. 

“We know that humanity stands at a crossroad with regard to the legacy we wish to leave to future generations,” Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Acting Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, told IPS. “As noted by the recent IPBES [Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services ] Global Assessment report, the current global response has been insufficient, given that nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history, and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world. Transformative change is necessary in order to restore and protect nature.”

‘Pandemic of complacency’

“I’m hoping what this pandemic does for us is draws attention to the pandemic of complacency that we were in before and [how that] contributed to the higher carbon [footprint], to greater human footprint, [and] plastic pollution in the ocean,” Roderic Mast, Co-Chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, told IPS. “Hopefully it’ll make people realise they were having an impact.”

Mast added that one issue that has come up during this lockdown is a rise in illegal poaching in places such as Indonesia and French Guiana. Although this information is yet to be verified, Mast said he has unofficial accounts from community members on the ground that a lack of enforcers on the job means there more illegal poaching is taking place. 

Meanwhile, Mrema of the Convention on Biological Diversity said conservation efforts have actually strengthened under the pandemic.

“The present COVID-19 crisis has provided us with a reset button – as well as confirming what we already know, that biodiversity is fundamental to human health – and has given new urgency to the need to protect it,” Mrema said. 

However, both experts echoed each others’ sentiments that now is not the time to become complacent seeing the changes the lockdowns have brought to wildlife. For example, just because more sea-turtles are seen out in the open does not mean the crisis has been resolved, Mast said. 

“This temporary reduction of stress is not sufficient and we need greater changes in the way we treat our environment,” Mrema said.

“The only thing wrong with the ocean is all the stuff that we humans put in it and all the stuff we humans take out,” Mast added. “So if we can limit what we put in the ocean in terms of pollution, boat traffic, and sounds, and if we can limit what we take out in terms of fisheries — that’s when we’re going to start seeing healthier oceans.”

According to the IUCN’s Red List, 31,030 species of the 116,177 that have been assessed are threatened with extinction. Here are glimpses of conservation efforts and endangered species around the world:

 

Biological Diversity by Inter Press Service

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The post Biological Diversity is Fundamental to Human Health appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Today, May 22, marks the International Day of Biological Diversity. Experts say that conservation efforts have actually strengthened under the COVID-19 pandemic.

The post Biological Diversity is Fundamental to Human Health appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, May 22 2020 (IPS)

It is easy to generalize about migration. Populist politicians often portray migrants as strangers and ”our” homeland as a stable entity, rooted in an old agricultural society. When they do so they tend to forget that most of us are in fact migrants who have left that traditional farming community far behind and if it was not we who did so, it was our ancestors.

Another form of generalization is to mirror the general in the personal, something that is done in novels and films. I believe that virtually every country on earth can present moving descriptions of people leaving the countryside for the city. Reading a novel or watching movie describing this process may help us to realize that behind every migrant, international as well as internal, there is a unique human destiny.

I came to think about this when I several years ago was working with The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), which at that time had its offices by Sveavägen in the centre of Stockholm. From my window I could look down on Malmskillnadsgatan, which was Stockholm´s most prominent prostitution street and a little further away I could see the twin towers by Kungsgatan. For me, who came from a small rural town, it was a powerful feeling to sit by my desk with a view of Stockholm’s metropolitan heart.

By the beginning of the 20th century the Brunkeberg ridge had been dug and blasted through to make way for a prestigous avenue which was going to be named Kungsgatan, The Royal Street. Derelict houses were demolished and the rubble cleared away while Stockholm was transformed into a metropolis.

Along the 1.5 kilometre long Kungsgatan, impressive buildings were erected and eventually dwarfed by the stately Royal Towers, joined with the Malmskillnadgatan through a bridge spanning across the wide parade street. The 60-metre-high towers were inaugurated in 1925 and were at that time Sweden’s tallest skyscrapers. They became a symbol of modern Stockholm, somewhat excessively advertised as an equal to Berlin, Paris, and New York.

Kungsgatan was lined with luxury department stores, fancy nightclubs and extravagant movie palaces. I mentioned that Malmskillnadsgatan was a prosititution street since I associated that street with Kungsgatan, a novel I read the same year as I ended up at Sida’s offices. It was written in 1935 by Ivar Lo-Johansson, member of what came to be known as the Proletarian Authors. In Lo-Johansson’s novel, Kungsgatan, with its big city pulse, glittering neon lights, cars and well-dressed revellers, becomes a bait attracting rural youth to the growing metropolis.

The peasant boy Adrian and day labourer Marta experience a brief and tumultuous love affair in one of Sweden’s many poor, rural villages, where life had been largely unchanged, generation after generation. Marta’s and Adrian’s delicate relationship is broken when Marta’s dreams urge her to the big city. She does not want to waste her life in the poverty of a dying countryside, subjected to the ever-present interest from people she is forced to share her humdrum existence with. Her dirt poor parents trudge along the same trampled paths, day after day, from cradle to tomb. No, Marta wants to get ahead with her life and spend it in accordance with her own wishes and goals. She wants to make money and hopefully help her parents and siblings to escape their bondage and misery. She wants to come back to her village as a ”successful” person, someone who has become wealthy, urbane and sophisticated.

Marta arrives in Stockholm and gets a job in a café, though her meager salary is not sufficient for her to acquire any of the alluring goods exposed in the storefronts of luxury boutiques. Nevertheless, Marta discovers that her good looks attract the city dwellers. Together with a friend she plans to establish a perfume shop, but lack of capital and the realization that her appearance can become an asset, make Marta join the ”joy girls”, i.e. the prostitutes who haunt the Kungsgatan. She is enabled to send a fair amount of money to her poor parents back home and thus increases their prestige in the eyes of the neighbours. However, Marta becomes increasingly bold and careless. The lurking catastrophe becomes a fact when Marta’s pious mother visits her elegant daughter. During a restaurant visit the truth dawns upon the mother, who in the midst of the dining guests breaks down in tears. Shame and despair befall an increasingly desperate Marta. In the past, she managed to choose her clients with some distinction, but she now loses control over her existence, suffers from a severe sexually transmitted disease and eventually succumbs to her misery and dies.

Adrian had arrived in Stockholm somewhat later than Marta. More reserved and thoughtful than his former fiancée he suffers from alienation and initially lacks the sense of belonging he had experienced in his home village. Neverthelss, Adrian also experience a sense of freedom and the thrill of challenging opportunities. He gets a job at a construction site where he is badly treated by bosses and fellow workers, but he successively adapts to the new living conditions. Despite being disillusioned, defenceless and marginalized Adrian realizes that he has become an adult and can actually stand on his own feet, without the support of a socially enclosed peasant community. He discovers socialism and consorts with bohemians and writers.

Adrian sometimes bumps into Marta, though these are difficult encounters. They live in different worlds and to cover up their uncut rural background both have changed their speech and behaviour. They have become helplessly stuck in their respective roles. Despite their ambivalence Marta and Adrian try to restore some of their lost love, through Adrian becomes infected by Marta’s dangerous STD. Both are hospitalized and their respective convalescence becomes long and painful. Adrian escapes this purgatory, strengthened by his experiences: ”All what I perceive is not without meaning, on the contrary, it is the only capital of a poor man like me.” Both Adrian and Marta get lost, though Adrian finds a meaning with his existence, while Marta becomes a bitter loser who cannot go on living.

Adrian’s pursuit of self-insight, his observations and disappointments are central to the novel, while Marta is gradually transformed into a secondary protagonist. It was Ivar Lo-Johansson´s intention to present a woman’s voice against the backdrop of Sweden´s transformation from a mainly rural society into a modern welfare state. Even if Lo-Johansson had experienced what he wrote about, his story is lost in a common template, in particular through his depiction of the plight of Marta. Most of the famous male members of the Swedish Proletarian ”school” failed to identify with the problems of poor women and only a few female Proletarian women authors gained access to a wide readership.

Almost every country may have authors like Ivar Lo-Johansson, describing the fatal allure of growing cities and the stagnant life in poor, rural communities. We have been confronted with hundreds of films and TV series about innocent rural girls lured into prostitution – like the Canadian-British hard-boiled and disconsolate film Eastern Promises from 2007 and equivalent films made in development countries, like the Mexican Las Poquianchis and Lo mejor de Teresa, both from 1976. Proletarian authors from all over the world have also described a development like the one experienced by Adrian, often influenced by internal migration that at this very moment is taking place in countries like China, India or Brazil.

Two examples, among many others, of the importance migration from rural to urbanized areas has had on a country’s culture are The U.S. Great Migration and the Italian Push to the North. Between 1916 and 1970, six million African-Americans migrated out of the rural Southern states to urbanized areas of the North and West. The exodus was primarily caused by poor economic conditions, as well as racial segregation and discrimination. Prior to 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the South, by the end of The Great Migration, less than 50 percent of them remained in the South, while more than 80 percent of African-Americans nationwide lived in cities. Like the Swedish migratory movement mentioned above, The Great Migration resulted in increased cultural activities, particularly within Afro-American communities. In the field of literature it gave rise to the so-called Harlem Renaissance and the American music scene was radically changed by the influx of Afro-American musicians from the South, who brought with them blues and jazz.

Italy experienced a similar movement from south to north when the Economic Boom of northern Italy attracted large numbers of southerners to the so-called Industrial Triangle between Turin, Milan and Genoa. During a great part of the 20th century, southern Italy suffered from a high rate of poverty, mainly due to the poor fertility of agricultural areas, which due to the fragmentation of land properties no longer could meet the needs of farming families, who additionally often suffered from insecurity caused by organized crime. Millions of Italians were pushed to emigrate both abroad, and to the northern part of Italy. Internal migration reached its peak between 1958 and 1963, when one million three hundred thousand southerners moved north.

Migration from southern Italy to the north still continues, though to a lesser degree than before. The last peak was reached between 1968 and 1970. Only in 1969, 60,000 migrants from the south arrived in Turin. Like in the U.S. it has in Italy been common to accentuate a cultural divide between ”north” and ”south”, a notion internal migration has diminished by fostering cultural exchange in both directions, thus contributing to unifying the nation and invigorating the arts.

Migration is an ongoing process that will never cease, we are all shaped by it, something that is mirrored by individual experiences described in tales told all over the world. Culture is based on shared experiences and openness, meaning that it prospers if human mobility is embraced instead of being considered as a threat.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

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Workers at a ready-made garment factory wash hands having learned about importance of handwashing through hygiene behaviour training. Narayanganj, Bangladesh, 2020. Credit: WaterAid/Drik/Parvez Ahmad

By Ruth Romer
LONDON, May 22 2020 (IPS)

As COVID-19 lockdown restrictions across the globe start to be relaxed, the collective conversation has shifted towards plans for a ‘new normal.’

With the IMF predicting a three percent dive to global GDP in 2020, the biggest economic downturn in almost a century, global corporations are considering what this means for them, and how they can safely re-establish their suspended operations.

Regular handwashing with soap and physical distancing are vital to prevent the spread of infection and should form the foundation of any plan to resume work.

Yet in the world’s poorest countries, which are home to millions of workers employed in apparel and agricultural supply chains, implementing these measures will be a huge challenge.

Unavoidable physical proximity coupled with a lack of soap and water for workers to wash their hands – and even a lack of knowledge about when they should be doing so – mean that the threat posed to business by the pandemic is far from over.

Many of these countries have fragile economies, which make implementing COVID-19 resilient water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) solutions even more challenging.

The ILO has called for employment policies to predominantly focus on important employment and income protection mechanisms in an attempt to prevent vulnerability to poverty.

An improvement to labour standards must also include progressive and equally prioritised action with regards to the health and hygiene of workers. If access to clean water and good hygiene facilities are not considered, not only will millions of lives be at risk, but businesses will face significant challenges in re-establishing operations.

Global supply chains will only survive if businesses take action when it comes to hygiene – the health of tea pickers, farmers, artisans, and textile producers and other supply chain workers in the global south, underpin the success of businesses in a post COVID-19 world.

With one in ten people globally lacking clean water at home and one in four having no decent toilets, it’s vital not only to consider not only the factory and field, but beyond the operational fence line, to the communities where workers live, to reinforce workplace resilience.

Workers at a ready-made garment factory wash hands having learned about importance of handwashing through hygiene behaviour training. Narayanganj, Bangladesh, 2020. Credit: WaterAid/Drik/Parvez Ahmad

WaterAid has longstanding relationships with a number of apparel factories in Bangladesh, where we have worked with partners to provide water, sanitation and hygiene access to workers, and on intensive hygiene behaviour change campaigns for both those employed in the factories, and the surrounding communities.

Since the pandemic outbreak, we installed additional handwashing facilities and delivered a COVID-19 specific hygiene campaign reaching more than 20,000 workers within one week. We continue to work closely with factory management to enable their safe return to operation post lockdown.

Action on water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to safeguard companies against operational, reputational, regulatory and financial risk in the short-term response to COVID-19 and build the foundation for vital long-term resilience against future shocks.

For companies with global supply chains who have experienced immense logistical and financial disruption, the intersection between workforce health and economic prosperity has been made abundantly clear.

Globally, it is estimated that every dollar invested in clean water, good hygiene and decent toilets returns $5.50 in increased productivity.

As a partner of global governments in their fight against COVID-19, WaterAid has a global footprint and four decades of expertise within the sector and is offering to develop bespoke guidance, tailored to businesses who approach them.

WaterAid has launched its guidance Prioritising hygiene for workforce health and business resilience and is inviting companies to work with them to bring sustainable changes within their supply chains that will improve resilience and productivity.

To discuss water, sanitation and hygiene management strategy and bespoke materials tailored to your company, contact corporate@wateraid.org.

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Excerpt:

Ruth Romer is Senior Private Sector Advisor, WaterAid

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By External Source
May 21 2020 (IPS)

Fake and bogus cure claims are a longstanding, but neglected public health problem. Throughout recorded history, plagues have inspired anxiety and desperation. Time and again, this public nervousness has proved a fertile ground for false cures and claimants to thrive. In this sense, recent claims of COVID-19 cures and antidotes are no exception.

During the Spanish flu, cure claims generated a false sense of safety that drove hundreds to defy closures and isolation. In the US, scores of bogus remedies alleging to cure the flu were sold under upbeat labels that undermined preventive action. One ad boasted:

When Vick’s VapoRub is applied over the throat and chest, the medicated vapors loosen the phlegm, open the air passages and stimulate the mucus membrane to throw off the germs.

Fake and bogus cures caused the death of many as HIV swept around the world. In Nigeria, for instance, as early as the 1990s, Jeremiah Abalaka, a surgeon with fringe training in immunology, startled the world with his HIV cure claim. Many of the HIV patients who flocked to his private clinic reportedly died, including dozens of soldiers referred for treatment by the Nigerian government.

Online and traditional media offer immense potential to intensify public health education. They must maintain vigilance on COVID-19 cure scams and claimants as they emerge in diverse forms and places. However, merely identifying bogus COVID-19 cure claims or alerting the public about them is no longer enough

More recently, during both the Ebola and SARS epidemics, fake cure claims also circulated freely, with lethal consequences. For example, salt solution, snake venom, vitamin C, Nano Silver and some herbs were all touted as cures for Ebola. At least two people died in Nigeria and about 20 more were hospitalised after drinking excessive amounts of salt solution to prevent Ebola infection.

Sadly, history is repeating itself in the context of COVID-19. False claims range from US president Donald Trump’s touting of anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure to Madagascar’s herbal “cure” promoted by President Andry Rajoelina.

In Ghana, a Pentecostal pastor launched and sold “Coronavirus Oil”, telling a packed church that it was effective against COVID-19. An American pastor also recently directed viewers to buy Optivida Silver Solution to prevent COVID-19. Its promoter had falsely claimed that the product was government-approved and has the ability to kill every pathogen it has ever been tested on, including SARS and HIV.

With growing global anxiety, many people are easy targets for cure scams and hucksters. Victims of fake cure claims are often among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable. Fighting these cure claims is integral to containing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authorities across the world are working hard to ensure that correct information and messages on the pandemic reach everybody. But there is room to do more.

 

Why we must act now

Cure claims are dangerous. They delay treatment-seeking and promote reckless behaviour that may result in deaths. At least 300 Iranians have died from methanol poisoning after consuming alcohol to prevent COVID-19. Hours after Trump declared hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID-19, people overdosed on it in Africa and Asia. In Arizona, a man died after reportedly treating himself with a COVID-19 home therapy derived from the same anti-malarial drug that the US president touted as a wonder drug.

Health literacy – the ability of patients to read, comprehend and act on
medical instructions – remains weak in many contexts. Several millions of health-seekers around the world rely on informal or inexpert sources for their health information needs. Hard-to-reach and vulnerable groups and communities must be targeted through bespoke health promotion strategies.

Online and traditional media offer immense potential to intensify public health education. They must maintain vigilance on COVID-19 cure scams and claimants as they emerge in diverse forms and places. However, merely identifying bogus COVID-19 cure claims or alerting the public about them is no longer enough.

Targeted seizure and destruction of unproven cures can deliver important results. In 2015, a global crackdown by Interpol seized nearly 21 million fake and illegal drugs, including fake cancer “cures”.

Governments must also implement community health outreach programmes that communicate clearly and accurately. Such programmes should have fit-for-purpose feedback systems to enable lay persons in multiple contexts to raise concerns, ask questions and swiftly receive answers. One size will not fit all at this time. Part of the success recorded in Nigeria during the Ebola outbreak has been attributed to the use of different media, including government-sponsored TV and radio messages, town-criers, social media campaigns, and experts to communicate health information to its citizens.

Countries and national health bodies must integrate traditional healers, faith leaders and community principals in their COVID-19 response strategies. Several studies have documented proven strategies for effectively engaging lay and faith healers to offer correct support and information on epidemics. This is the time to bring these strategies to scale.

Robust mechanisms for holding scam COVID-19 cure claimants and hucksters accountable are also urgently needed. Currently, few countries have such mechanisms. But a good precedent exists in Australia, where a “healing church” that touted a bleach-based solution as a COVID-19 cure has been fined more than $150,000. Politicians and other thought leaders must also realise that their utterances and actions during this pandemic will have far-reaching health, social and economic consequences.

Chimaraoke Izugbara, Director, Global Health, Youth and Development, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), USA & Visiting Professor, University of the Witwatersrand and Mary O. Obiyan, Senior Lecturer, Department of Demography and Social Statistics, Obafemi Awolowo University

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

The post Why More Must be Done to Fight Bogus COVID-19 Cure Claims appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Raghbendra Jha is Professor of Economics and Executive Director, Australian National University

By Raghbendra Jha
CANBERRA, Australia, May 21 2020 (IPS)

As of 11 AM (AEST) on 20th May 2020 the incidence of COVID-19 virus (henceforth virus) on the Pacific Islands was limited. Active cases (deaths) in some of the Pacific Islands were Australia 7,072 (100), New Zealand 1,503 (21), PNG 8(0), Guam 154 (5), Fiji 18 (0), Timor-Leste 24 (0), French Polynesia 60(0), and New Caledonia 18(0).1 Standards of comparison are not uniform across the region since testing capacities of the various countries differ widely. The low number of cases in the smaller Pacific Islands compared to their larger neighbours, i.e., Australia and New Zealand, reflect both variations in testing standards as well as their smaller population size. The smaller Pacific Islands were also not subject to some of the aberrations experienced by the larger countries, e.g., large number of arrivals from foreign countries in planes and cruise ships.

Raghbendra Jha

Hence, the immediate impact of the virus on the smaller Pacific Islands has been muted. Given strong quarantine regulations and travel bans the impact is likely to remain manageable unless, of course, there is a bad second wave of the virus The likelihood of this depends partly on whether social distancing norms are violated and on the date by which international flights resume.

The pandemic has led to concurrent health and economic crises, the latter because economic activity has come to a halt for long periods in many of these countries. The solution to the economic crisis is to restart economic activity which would necessarily involve the interaction of large numbers of people, which could then aggravate the health crisis. As the wait grows longer the capacity of the state even in large affluent countries to address the crises is reduced. Large budget deficits abound all around and many countries could experience a paucity of medical staff and equipment.

This dilemma is particularly acute for the smaller Pacific island nations. Given their small populations and widely dispersed island structures these countries require considerable economic assistance in the best of times. These take the form of international aid and humanitarian assistance at time of natural disasters like cyclones, not to speak of the existential threat that some of these countries are facing from rising sea levels. The capacity of Australia and New Zealand to deliver aid will be curtailed as a result of the steep rise in their budget deficits. Furthermore, many of the small Pacific islands are dependent on tourism dollars to supplement their resources. With international travel ruled out for the foreseeable future this paucity of resources will only get aggravated. So, the small Pacific islands face a severe and persistent resource crunch as a result of the systemic impact of the virus, even though the immediate impact on the health of their citizens is relatively mild.

The above analysis is cast in gender neutral terms, as if both males and females are equally affected by the health and economic crises. But this is far from the case. In an important article2 Sharon Lewin and Thomas Rasmussen show that although the incidence of the virus is the same across both genders. Although more men are dying from the virus as compared to women (because of inherent immunological differences) women are more vulnerable because they constitute a larger share of health workers who are more exposed to the virus.

Furthermore, the economic crisis that the virus has engendered a severe employment crunch for women. In most of the Pacific countries sectors like hospitality, tourism and transport have been decimated by the virus. Women constituted a large proportion of workers in these sectors. Many of them are now unemployed. Many casual workers (again mostly women) have also lost their jobs. It is too early to anticipate what shape or form these sectors will return to in a post COVID world. Hence, not only are women disproportionately unemployed as a result of the virus, but also their employment and income prospects are uncertain at best.

Moreover, during the virus inspired lockdown and unemployment many women are facing a sharp increase in household duties.3 There is also the fear of increase in domestic violence during the lockdown.4 One media report has characterised this rise in domestic violence as “shocking”.

In conclusion, the impact of the twin health and economic crises has been manifold all over the world and the Pacific Islands are no exceptions to this rule. However, there are some particular characteristics of the Pacific Islands that make these impacts even more challenging. These relate to the dependence of these islands on external resources and the logistical and infrastructural challenges of managing so many widely dispersed islands that are subject to a high incidence of natural disasters even in the best of times. The burdens of coping with the crises and the resultant adjustment are also likely to fall asymmetrically on women. At the same time, although macroeconomic stabilisation and debt control have vocal political advocates, the same is not true for the new issues that women are facing. Policy should take cognizance of this.

1 See https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html (Accessed 20 May 2020)
2 See https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930526-2 (Accessed 20 May 2020).
3 See https://www.wgea.gov.au/topics/gendered-impact-of-covid-19 (Accessed 20 May 2020)
4 See https://7news.com.au/sunrise/on-the-show/coronavirus-australia-the-shocking-rise-in-domestic-violence-reports-during-lockdown-c-1013619 (Accessed 20 May 2020).

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Excerpt:

Raghbendra Jha is Professor of Economics and Executive Director, Australian National University

The post COVID-19 Pandemic and the Pacific Islands appeared first on Inter Press Service.

WFP-chartered planes bring in supplies and equipment to help the humanitarian community respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh. ©WFP Bangladesh/Gemma Snowdon

By John Aylieff
BANGKOK, May 21 2020 (IPS)

While most of the world self-isolates at home and skies are emptier than they have been for decades, humanitarian flights transporting life-saving aid are revving up around Asia and the Pacific.

Reaching people in war zones or natural disasters is never easy. With most flights grounded, borders closed and workers in quarantine, delivering supplies to families and communities in need in the COVID-19 era has become the greatest challenge the World Food Programme (WFP) has faced in its nearly 60-year history.

COVID-19 may be our biggest test yet. But this is when WFP steps up.

 

Connecting crisis response to logistics lifeline

Globally, since January, WFP, on behalf of the World Health Organization and the entire humanitarian community, has dispatched supplies to 94 countries to help governments and health partners respond to COVID-19

On 10 May, a WFP-chartered plane carrying COVID-19 medical supplies and aid workers left Kuala Lumpur. The destination: Yangon, Myanmar, where commercial international flights have been suspended since March. The connection was made possible with the funding provided by the European Union and the Government of Switzerland. The weekly air service will be utilized by the entire humanitarian and development community.

Also from Kuala Lumpur, one of the few places in the region where international connections are still possible, WFP’s humanitarian flights are coming to Bangladesh. Two deliveries, made earlier this month, included equipment and materials for COVID-19 prevention and management in the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar.

Humanitarian community in Afghanistan can now rotate their personnel in and out of the country with flights connecting Kabul and Doha. Similar operations are planned for the Pacific Island countries, which are even more reliant on air transport for basic goods and services.

Through a hubs-and-spokes system, medical cargo is transported from our logistics hubs in China and Malaysia to the COVID-19 frontlines in the region and also the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

In the coming days, we plan to connect more operations in other parts of the region to the logistics backbone.

Globally, since January, WFP, on behalf of the World Health Organization and the entire humanitarian community, has dispatched supplies to 94 countries to help governments and health partners respond to COVID-19. These shipments include personal protective equipment, such as masks, gloves and gowns, ventilators, as well as logistics equipment.

 

On 10 May, the first of a series of WFP-chartered planes arrived in Yangon, Myanmar from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, carrying COVID-19 medical supplies and aid workers. ©WFP Myanmar/Hkun Lat

 

Governments key to lifesaving work

“We are only as strong as the weakest,” the United Nations Secretary-General once said. Mr Guterres has asked all governments to grant permission for humanitarian flights to land until regular commercial flight services are restored.

With each flight, WFP and our partners will take all necessary precautions to avoid transmitting the virus. But without access, it will be a struggle to ensure that people everywhere have the medical supplies and equipment they need to face this pandemic.

Many of the countries in the region lack adequate healthcare facilities for their own people. To keep humanitarian workers safe and healthy – without burdening over-stretched medical services – we are asking some governments whose health care systems have the capacity to allow aid personnel access to life-saving medical assistance if required.

In just a few months, COVID-19 has sent shockwaves through societies and upended the livelihoods of people everywhere. Governments around the world are struggling to flatten the curve of the pandemic, racing against time to save the lives and livelihoods of their citizens.

At a time like this, it’s natural to focus on issues closer to home. But as long as COVID-19 is ravaging any country, it is a threat to us all.

We stand a far better chance to defeat the virus and restore livelihoods sooner rather than later by entrusting and leveraging each other’s strengths.

Protecting the humanitarian supply chain and humanitarian workers is a prerequisite to this success; especially if we are to prevent the health crisis from becoming a humanitarian catastrophe.

The post Logistics: The Backbone of Humanitarian Efforts Fighting COVID-19 in Asia and the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

John Aylieff is World Food Programme Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific

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Jessore district in Bangladesh was one of the coastal districts evacuated of nearly 2.4 million people and over half a million livestock ahead of Cyclone Amphan making landfall. Credit: Stella Paul

By Stella Paul
HYDERBAD, India, May 21 2020 (IPS)

Amid the social distancing measures posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, coastal communities in Bangladesh and India face a double threat as the record-breaking Cyclone Amphan made landfall yesterday (May 20).

With sustained wind speeds of 270km/h, intensified by record water temperatures in May, the storm is now stronger than the 1999 super cyclone Fani and the joint-strongest on record in the North Indian Ocean.  

At least 12 people have died in West Bengal, India and 10 deaths have been reported in Bangladesh so far.

• With over 2 million people in shelters and relief camps, Bangladesh waited with baited breath for Cyclone Amphan.
• Large scale damage of properties have been reported all over West Bengal, including Kolkata (Calcutta) city. 
• In an online press briefing, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, said it would take 10-12 days to assess the real loss and damage. 
• On Thursday afternoon, Cyclone Amphan weakened significantly.  

Disastrous effect at a very large scale

Cyclone Amphan made its landfall on Wednesday afternoon at Digha – a coastal town 187 km south of Kolkata city. During the four-hour long landfall, it created a long trail of devastation, including uprooting trees, destroying mud houses and electricity wires. 

Damages have also occurred in Odisha – another Indian coastal state where hundreds of mud houses have caved in due to the wind and heavy rainfall. Cities like the Odisha capital, Bhubaneshwar, are waterlogged with power outages all over Odisha and West Bengal, including Kolkata.  

 The devastation comes as India is still struggling to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

• The state of West Bengal, which has been in the direct pathway of the cyclone labelled by the meteorological department as “extremely severe”, has had 2,961 positive cases and 250 deaths.
• In addition, the state is also grappling with hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who have been returning home to escape the difficulties of a 55-day lockdown.    

“We are fighting 3 challenges: 1) coronavirus , 2) arrival of lakhs (hundred thousands) of migrants and the cyclone Amphan,” Banerjee said at a May 20 press briefing.  

According to Banerjee, the overall impact on the state has been disastrous. “It might take us 10-12 days to assess it all, but there are damages worth millions. Houses, roads, river embankment – everything has been hit,” she said, before adding her own office building – “Nabanna” has been partially damaged by the wind. 

 “We are shocked. We didn’t expect devastation of such a scale,” she said.     

 According to the meteorological office in Kolkata, the highest speed of Amphan in Kolkata has been 133 km/ph and though the wind speed has declined below 100 by Wednesday night, it subsided on Thursday afternoon after moving to Bangladesh.  

Bangladesh launched massive evacuation

In the middle of its intense fight against the coronavirus pandemic, Bangladesh launched a massive evacuation operation to safeguard its citizens and livestock in coastal districts.   

By Wednesday evening, the country evacuated nearly 2.4 million people and over half a million livestock in the coastal districts of Khulna, Satkheera, Jessore, Rajbadi and Sirajganj – the districts that will be on the crossway of Amphan.

Local schools have been set up as temporary shelters/relief camps for the evacuees, local media quoted Bangladesh’s Disaster Management and Relief Minister Enamur Rahman as saying.

 But with the number of COVID-19 cases on the rise with 27,000 already confirmed cases and over 350 dead, the cyclone has only increased the country’s uphill battle for safety.  

“Cyclone Amphan, which is about to hit Bangladesh, will worsen the situation of our population, which is struggling to control the COVID-19 pandemic and is already trapped due to measures of isolation and social distancing. While Bangladesh has an efficient system of cyclone shelters, most of the coastal communities that will be impacted are scared to move to those shelters, as it will be almost impossible to practice social distancing norms there,” Sohanur Rahman from YouthNet for Climate Justice in Bangladesh, told IPS before Cyclone Amphan made landfall. 

Climate change is increasing the damage that cyclones like Amphan cause in several ways, including increasing sea surface temperatures and rising sea levels, increasing rainfalls during the storm, and causing storms to gain strength more quickly.   

Stronger cyclones have become more common across the world due to climate change, and the strength of cyclones affecting countries bordering the North Indian Ocean has been increasing as the planet has warmed.     

Also, sea levels in the North Indian Ocean have risen more quickly than other places in recent years. According to a study, India and Bangladesh could experience dramatic annual coastal flooding by 2050, affecting 36 million people in India and 42 million in Bangladesh.  

  

Related Articles

• COVID-19 – China Tells World Health Assembly They Did their Best
• EXCLUSIVE: In the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic We Are Only as Strong as the Weakest of Us

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By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, May 21 2020 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the spectre of food insecurity as countries and citizens fear a return to the conditions that roiled the international food markets during the 2008 economic crisis.

Though food markets have withstood the shock caused by COVID-19, the Caribbean is being forced to take stock of its vulnerability. The region spends $5 billion annually on food imports from outside the region to feed its 44 million inhabitants and regional governments agree there is need for innovation to reduce this dependency on foreign food supplies. Governments have been talking for years about using e-commerce to support the region’s agricultural sector.

According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “governments also need to do more collaborating among themselves” to avoid a repeat of the food crisis during the 2008 economic crisis.

In this Voices from the Global South podcast, IPS Caribbean correspondent Jewel Fraser learns from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations how the global pandemic may yet shift the region’s focus in how it tackles food insecurity, while an e-commerce food retailer tells her how the Caribbean can make better use of technology to feed itself.

Related Articles

• India’s Orange Farmers Search for Sustainable Agriculture
• Fisherfolk Fix Both Food and Climate by Closing Fishing Grounds

The post Food Markets in the Caribbean Take Stock of Vulnerability during COVID-19 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The global coronavirus pandemic has made the Caribbean keenly aware of its need for greater food security.

The post Food Markets in the Caribbean Take Stock of Vulnerability during COVID-19 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Abdullah Shibli
May 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Once the Covid-19 pandemic is under control, and the world economy is back on its tracks, the status and fate of the 2030 Agenda, also known as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), needs to be reassessed. The year 2020 was supposed to kick-off the Decade of Action. With just 10 years to go, plans were made to undertake “ambitious global efforts” to deliver the 2030 promise—by mobilising more governments, civil society, businesses, and calling on all people to make the Global Goals their own.

Before the worldwide lockdown began in March, various stakeholders of the SDG movement were planning to undertake a full-scale five-year evaluation. Fifty-one countries had signed up to conduct voluntary national reviews (VNR) by May 2020, a process through which countries assess and present progress made in achieving the 17 goals. The process came to a complete halt with the current pandemic crisis.

The “pandemic pause” is a blessing in disguise. It gives all the stakeholders a chance to undertake a thorough review of where we stand as well as what needs to change. Are all the 17 goals equally important? A partial answer was provided by Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee. “Think of the bureaucratic capacity it takes to achieve these things. How are countries going to keep track? We need to go back to the drawing board,” he said.

The next question is, how do we reprioritise and revamp the SDGs? While advances made in some SDG indicators have been eroded, this should not deflate our energy. However, a few SDG targets now assume greater priority. The health aspect of SDGs is more important and can be used as an entry point. Experts suggest that the experience of Covid-19 can be used to redesign the food supply chain. Furthermore, there is an urgent need for engagement with the private sector and civil society to chart the path that lies ahead and to cope with future pandemics.

Even before Covid-19 hit us, concerns were voiced in SDG progress review meetings as evidence mounted about the slow progress and lack of scale required to reach the targets before the decade ends. Earlier this year, the UN reacted by sending out a clarion call for action. “Today, progress is being made in many places, but, overall, action to meet the Goals is not yet advancing at the speed or scale required. 2020 needs to usher in a decade of ambitious action to deliver the Goals by 2030,” it cautioned. According to one estimate, more than five billion people will lack access to essential health services by 2030. Those services include the ability to see a health worker, access to essential medicines, and running water in hospitals.

Covid-19 thus poses a real challenge, to put it mildly, and some have gone as far as to warn the developing countries that the looming crisis threatens to devastate employment gains, food security and equity in education. The World Bank also raised a low-level alarm when it declared that the coronavirus is a serious obstacle for 240 million Asians trudging along on the road to poverty elimination.

If things had gone as planned, by end-May, each of the 51 countries was expected to submit its SDG voluntary national review report describing its experiences, including successes, challenges and lessons learned during the five years of implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Bangladesh had signed up for its second VNR. All this will now cease.

Concurrently, on pause is the next meeting of the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), the central global platform for follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) was scheduled to convene the 2020 session of HLPF in New York from July 7-16, and receive a progress report in the completion of the 2020 targets: responsible consumption and production (SDG12), biodiversity (SDG15) and some selected indicators of SDG13 and SDG14.

Turning to Bangladesh, after the hiatus period forced by Covid-19 ends, the Prime Minister’s SDG Directorate needs to evaluate two key metrics: the impact of the pandemic on the poor and the status of SDGs. All economic crises adversely affect the poor and the present crisis is no exception. From all accounts, the short-run impact of the pandemic and the lockdown is being felt very strongly by low-income people. In line with its SDG commitment, the government’s immediate goal ought to be to facilitate the re-employment of workers (SDG8), feed those who lost their sources of income (SDG2) and strengthen healthcare and provide medical support (SDG3).

Apart from lost jobs, hungry mouths and deteriorating health conditions, other collateral damages will emerge due to the interlinkages between the SDGs. Poverty (SDG1) will take a hit and so will the quality of education (SDG4). Other goals to asses are water and sanitation (SDG6), reduced inequalities (SDG10) and peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG16). One should not be too surprised if our post-pandemic review shows that it has not only devastated the economy, but also wiped out many of the SDG gains.

According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ provisional estimates, GDP growth this year will be 5.5 percent, in contrast to the 8.2 percent projected earlier. This is higher than the 3.8 percent and 2-3 percent forecast by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, respectively. On the positive side, we have already seen an increase in the budget allocation on health and an improvement in the environment.

Recovery is a complex and non-linear process. The pandemic has exposed fundamental weaknesses in our global system. It has shown how the prevalence of poverty, weak health systems, subpar education, and a lack of global cooperation exacerbate a health crisis. In our effort to return to normalcy, we must not lose sight of the lessons gained from the pandemic.

Globally, the pandemic has exposed the widening SDG needs gap. The world currently (pre-pandemic) spends approximately USD 7.5 trillion on health each year or 10 percent of global GDP. While spending has increased steadily, dangerous public health gaps exist, especially in rural or conflict-ridden areas where access is difficult and infrastructure is lacking.

This access is complicated by a shortage of trained healthcare workers. The 2020 State of the World’s Nursing report found that the world would need six million more nurses by 2030 to reach global health targets. Shortages of healthcare workers are felt most acutely in low- and middle-income countries.

As cities and societies start emerging from the crisis, governments should focus on key factors that contribute to the spread of epidemics and other public health risks: inadequate infrastructure, lack of services, and substandard housing.

In a sense, the process of recovery might strengthen our SDG efforts if the government of Bangladesh, in collaboration with civil society, NGOs, and the private sector, look afresh at the 17 goals and focuses its attention and resources on those that need reinforcement.

Dr Abdullah Shibli is an economist and works in information technology. He is Senior Research Fellow, International Sustainable Development Institute (ISDI), a think-tank in Boston, USA.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Images taken when Amnesty's South Sudan researcher and Crisis Response team's arms and military operations investigator visited 12 military training sites in South Sudan in early 2020 to document violations of the UN arms embargo. They also witnessed evidence of child soldiers being used and diversion of arms.
 
This image shows a Mi-24 attack helicopter, one of four that South Sudan purchased from Ukraine in 2015. When the arms embargo was instituted in July 2018, these helicopters were in disrepair and unserviceable, unable to fly. However, during the embargo the helicopters underwent maintenance and repairs, using components imported in violation of the embargo. This one is pictured at Juba International Airport (JIA) in early 2020. Credit: Amnesty International

By Brian Castner
JUBA, South Sudan, May 21 2020 (IPS)

Earlier this year, just before the coronavirus virtually shut down international travel, I sat under a mesquite tree and listened to a rambling speech by a South Sudanese general at a military base outside of the capital, Juba.

I was in that war-weary country to investigate violations of the arms embargo, which is up for renewal by the United Nations Security Council this month. The embargo is about two years old, and though it hasn’t solved every problem, violence and human rights abuses have significantly decreased in the country since the main torrent of guns and ammunition was choked off.

That day, I had come to see the commander of the dusty improvised camp at Gorom brief a party of diplomats and international ceasefire monitors on his progress training South Sudan’s newly established VIP Protection Force.

But instead, the general rattled off a litany of complaints – not enough supplies, not even bedding to sleep on. He said this while seated in front of a wall of unopened cardboard boxes, ten feet tall and forty feet long, all stuffed with sleeping mats donated by Japan.

There was a certain “which do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” quality to the presentation.

I wasn’t there for logistical gripes, though. I was there to find out if their weapons were newly shipped in, and thus broke the embargo, and so when the general said he had four shipping containers full of small arms that he had collected from his soldiers as part of the disarmament process, I was interested.

I made it to twelve military and training camps in South Sudan, and this was the only one with a nominally established armory. This was my best chance yet.

But when one of the general’s officers opened the four containers for me, they weren’t filled with guns. Instead they were stacked to the ceiling with bags of rice and durra, a kind of grain. These units weren’t disarming. They were hedging their bets against a return to war.

The general was unapologetic. “These are the forces that will impose the peace in Juba,” he said. “These soldiers are the backbone of this peace.”

He said out loud what many fear: that even after so much bloodshed in South Sudan’s civil war, when given the chance at a negotiated settlement, the generals will still search for peace at the end of a rifle.

Images taken when Amnesty’s South Sudan researcher and Crisis Response team’s arms and military operations investigator visited 12 military training sites in South Sudan in early 2020 to document violations of the UN arms embargo. They also witnessed evidence of child soldiers being used and diversion of arms.
 
Amnesty’s investigators observed that several South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) soldiers were armed with Mpi-KMS-72 rifles manufactured in the former East Germany. Credi: Amnesty International

On March 23rd, in the face of a mounting global health crisis, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire. Suffice it to say it was not heeded.

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, South Sudan is not the only place where a pandemic disease is poised to run rampant through a state of endemic conflict. Officially, South Sudan has only a few dozen cases. So too places like Syria, though as we have come to know, this is mostly a function of testing.

Meanwhile, in Yemen the number of cases is skyrocketing, and in Somalia, gravediggers in the capital can’t keep up with the surge in demand and the number of cases in Shabab-controlled territory is unknown.

Adding the coronavirus to these ongoing conflicts will only increase human suffering, and yet, at a time when the world could join together to confront COVID-19, so many wars continue to take their toll on civilians.

The Syrian government and Russian air force have in recent months continued to bomb schools and hospitals around Idlib. In the civil war in Libya, outside powers from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates have pumped in enough mercenaries and materiel that civilian casualties, from artillery and airstrikes, have actually increased since the start of 2020.

Across the Sahel, from Mali to northern Nigeria and Cameroon, and elsewhere in Africa, as far south as Mozambique, armed groups who have pledged allegiance to the group calling itself Islamic State are burning villages and beheading civilians.

And in western Myanmar, where the government’s crimes against humanity forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, the military and Rakhine rebels continue to fight; in April, a World Health Organization worker driving coronavirus samples was killed in the crossfire.

And violence continues in South Sudan as well, as a fringe rebel group continues their fight against the government and longstanding inter-communal rivalries breed abductions and gunfights. Meanwhile, victims and survivors of mass atrocities during the conflict continue to be denied justice.

Fueling this instability and impunity are continued violations of the UN arms embargo. During our investigation, we found recently manufactured Chinese ammunition in the hands of the feared National Security Service.

We found the government’s fleet of heavily armed Mi-24 attack helicopters, broken before the embargo was established, newly fixed and flying, ready to be used again to attack civilians as they had during the civil war. We found Kalashnikovs from Eastern Europe, some even made in the old East Germany, newly imported and in the hands of government forces and opposition alike.

The civil war in South Sudan was decidedly low-tech, and featured horrific atrocities, including hundreds of people gathered up and gunned down in mass executions, often along ethnic lines.

But while the arms embargo has proven no panacea, since its adoption in July of 2018 there has not been a single documented large-scale massacre of civilians, certainly not of the scale seen in the early days of the conflict.

Some fighting and human rights violations continue, but nothing compared to what we saw before the embargo in 2014, back when tens of millions of rounds of ammunition where being shipped in at a time.

The fight against COVID-19 has been described as a war. I don’t think that framing is accurate or helpful at all; I bet most of us who have experienced the chaotic messy violence of human beings killing each other would agree.

Wars destroy, but the response to a pandemic requires the opposite; an act of building, creating a resilient society where we take care of each other. And we have a common inhuman foe outside ourselves to mobilize against: a grotesque ball of goo covered in spikes.

Unfortunately, at the UN, the old divisions threaten this unifying opportunity. The rift between China and the United States has stalled a resolution on a 90-day humanitarian ceasefire that would allow for COVID medical aid to reach civilians.

And the question of arms embargoes gets wrapped up in discussions of dropping sanctions generally. Though they are considered by the same council, the arms embargo should not be seen as punitive in nature.

It is not a targeted sanction, it is a necessary tool for curbing human rights violations by all parties, and could not possibly be misconstrued as impeding a country’s ability to treat COVID-19.

We face an uphill battle to get the South Sudan arms embargo, but there is still space for hope. The UN Security Council can move with purpose and good will and see the obvious truth: guns don’t vanquish a disease.

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, South Sudan was a place that had more attack helicopters than ventilators. It makes no sense to lift an arms embargo on a fragile country with a legacy of impunity for war crimes and a looming public health challenge.

The UN Security Council should vote to renew the embargo and give the South Sudanese the space and chance to build a peace founded on justice and respect for human rights.

 

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Excerpt:

Brian Castner is the weapons expert on Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Team.

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Demonstrators demand clarification of the murder of land rights activist Samir Flores and the shutdown of a thermoelectric plant in the state of Morelos, in central Mexico, in a February 2019 protest on Mexico City's emblematic Paseo Reforma. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 20 2020 (IPS)

Since 2012, Teresa Castellanos has fought the construction of a gas-fired power plant in Huexca, in the central Mexican state of Morelos, adjacent to the country’s capital.

“We don’t want the power plant to operate, because it will cause irreparable damage, polluting the water and air. This project was imposed on us; we have to defend the water and the land. This is not an industrial zone,” the activist, coordinator of the Huexca Resistance Committee, told IPS.

During the tests, the constant noise of the turbines also altered the life of this small community of just over 1,000 people, mostly farmers, near the Cuautla River, within the rural municipality of Yecapixtla."Development banks must have safeguards and principles for sustainable investment. National regulations are needed, which define climate finance and green finance, what principles govern them, what are the climate risks. The trend should be to increasingly finance green projects and less and less hydrocarbons." -- Liliana Estrada

The Central Combined Cycle Plant, located in Huexca and with a capacity of 620 megawatts based on gas and steam, is part of the Morelos Integral Project (PIM), developed by the state Federal Electricity Commission (CFE). It also consists of an aqueduct and a gas pipeline that crosses the states of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala.

The People’s Front in Defence of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala and its ally, the Permanent Assembly of the People of Morelos, have managed to get several court orders that have blocked the operation of the plant, the 12-km aqueduct and the 171-km gas pipeline since 2015.

Castellanos, who has won an international and a national award for her activism, has been involved in the battle against the plant from the very start, which has earned her persecution and threats.

The opposition to the power plant by local communities that depend on planting corn, beans, squash and tomatoes and raising cattle and pigs, focuses on the lack of consultation, the threat to their agricultural activity, due to the extraction of water from the rivers, and the discharge of liquid waste.

In February 2019, a public consultation that did not meet international standards supported the completion of the project.

A few days earlier, activist Samir Flores had been murdered, a crime that remains unsolved – just one more instance of violence against environmentalists in Mexico. Despite Flores’ murder, the government of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador went ahead with the referendum and upheld the result.

Public funds have fuelled the conflict, as the state-owned National Bank of Public Works and Services (Banobras) lent some 55 million dollars for the pipeline.

As in the case of other projects, development banks have become a financial pillar for the oil industry in Latin America’s second-largest nation, population 130 million.

The National Bank of Foreign Trade (Bancomext), Banobras and Nacional Financiera (Nafin) have funneled millions of dollars into building pipelines and oil and gas facilities in recent years, even though the climate change crisis makes it necessary to abandon such investments.

They have also financed renewable energy projects, but in much smaller amounts than fossil fuels.

The construction and operation of the Central Combined Cycle Plant, of the state Federal Electricity Commission, financed with public funds, unleashed a conflict with residents of Huexca, a small community in the central Mexican state of Morelos, which has brought the operation of the thermoelectric plant to a halt. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Energy reform pillar

The energy reform that then conservative president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) enacted in 2013 opened the sector to private capital, broke the monopoly of the state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil giant and CFE, and made Mexico an attractive market for international investment in the sector.

To support this transformation, the state development banks also opened their coffers.´

Since 2012, Banobras, which finances infrastructure and public works and services, has lent at least 721 million dollars for the construction of gas pipelines, 10.2 billion dollars for oil and gas projects, 251 million dollars for electrical cogeneration, from steam generated in hydrocarbon plants, and eight million dollars for the construction of a thermoelectric plant that will burn fuel oil in the northwestern state of Baja California Sur.

Bancomext, which provides financing to exporters, importers and nine strategic sectors, has delivered some 500,000 dollars to oil companies in the eastern state of Tamaulipas and another 446 million dollars in Mexico City. It has also provided 65.4 million dollars to gas initiatives in the northern state of Nuevo Leon and 626.7 million dollars in Mexico City.

In addition, it has contributed 1.5 billion dollars for the supply of gas through pipelines to the final consumer; 324 million dollars for the extraction of oil and gas; 216 million dollars for the construction of public works for oil and gas; 126 million dollars for the manufacture of products derived from oil and coal; nearly seven million dollars for oil refining; 0.65 million dollars for the commercialisation of fuels; 0.25 million dollars for the drilling and maintenance of hydrocarbon wells; as well as 0.25 million dollars for oil platform maintenance and services.

In February, Bancomext granted a loan of 7.1 million dollars to Grupo Diarqco, in what it presented as the first credit to a private Mexican company in the industry, to exploit an oil field in the southeastern state of Tabasco.

Nafin, which grants credits and guarantees to public and private projects, created in 2014 the Energy Impulse Programme for these initiatives, endowed with more than a billion dollars.

It also manages, along with the economy ministry, the Public Trust to Promote the Development of Energy Industry National Suppliers and Contractors, designed for the industrial promotion of local production chains and direct investment in the energy industry, which this year has a fund of some 41 million dollars.

Missing: social and environmental safeguards

As in the case of the Morelos Integral Project, the gas pipelines have been a source of conflict with local communities, arising from the lack of socio-environmental safeguards and standards to guarantee that a project and its financing will respect the human rights of potentially affected communities.

Nafin and Banobras lack such safeguards, while Bacomext has had an “Environmental and Social Risk Management System Guide” since 2017, with no evidence of whether and how it has been applied to energy projects financed since then.

Since 2003, three platforms of international standards have emerged, to which Mexico’s development banks have not adhered, on human rights; social and environmental assessments and impacts; the application of safeguards; stakeholder participation; complaint resolution; and transparency.

The planet needs 80 percent of the global hydrocarbon reserves to stay underground in order for the temperature increase to remain at 1.5 degrees Celsius, as set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The treaty, signed by 196 countries and territories in 2015, will enter into force at year-end and is considered indispensable to avoid irreversible climate disasters and human catastrophes.

Liliana Estrada, a researcher with the Climate Finance Group of Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS that most investment in energy still goes to fossil fuels.

“After the reform, they have to enter into strategic projects and follow the guidelines of the government; they cannot go against these strategic lines. The gas and gas pipelines became strategic,” with the boost to the megaprojects of the López Obrador administration, said the representative of this coalition of non-governmental organisations and academics.

These credits are part of the fossil fuel subsidies that Mexico has pledged, to several international bodies, to eliminate.

The Mexican energy industry has also attracted international private banks, which have lent 55.95 billion dollars to 12 corporations, according to “Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2020”, released in March by six international environmental organisations.

The CFE received some 5.4 billion dollars from 12 banks between 2016 and 2019, and Pemex received 48.3 billion dollars from 20 foreign banks.

Based on Huexca’s experience, Castellanos demanded that these investments be stopped.

“If it’s our company, as the government says, then we can close it down. We have to defend the space in which we live, because we only have one planet and it belongs to all of us, it belongs to every living being, and it is our obligation to contribute something to this planet, because we are only here for a short while, we are guests of the earth”, she said.

Estrada called for sustainable financing regulations and questioned the lack of government leadership in this regard.

“Development banks must have safeguards and principles for sustainable investment,” she said. “National regulations are needed, which define climate finance and green finance, what principles govern them, what are the climate risks. The trend should be to increasingly finance green projects and less and less hydrocarbons.”

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