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A child receives treatment in the northeastern district of Mymensingh, Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By External Source
GENEVA, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

A staggering 2.2 billion people already suffer from eye conditions and visual impairment today, but the global need for eye care is set to increase “dramatically”, with lack of exercise a key factor, the UN health agency said on Tuesday, unveiling its first ever report on vision across the world.

While welcoming recent successes in eliminating common conditions such as trachoma in eight countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted evidence indicating that eye problems are increasingly linked to lifestyle choices, including screen time.

Youngsters are among those at risk, WHO’s Dr Alarcos Cieza told journalists in Geneva:

“It is unacceptable that 65 million people are blind or have impaired sight when their vision could have been corrected overnight with a cataract operation, or that over 800 million struggle in everyday activities because they lack access to a pair of glasses”

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General

“In children, one of the factors that may influence the increased number of children with myopia, is that children do not spend enough time outdoors. It is a trend that is already observed in some countries like in China”, he said. “But of course, it is a trend that we can predict in other countries if they are an everyday habit, especially with child populations.”

 

Eye ‘never relaxes’ indoors

The problem with staying inside, is that the lens in your eye rarely relaxes, WHO’s Dr Stuart Keel explained.

“When you’re indoors, the lens inside your eyes is in a complete flex state, or it’s flexed but when you’re outside, it’s nice and relaxed.”

Pointing to recent scientific data from China investigating the “clear link” between time spent outdoors and the delayed onset of later-stage short-sightedness, Dr Keel cautioned that studies on “near-task” activities such as watching video on a tablet computer, were “not as conclusive at this stage”.

According to the WHO’s World Report On Vision, the burden of impairment tends to be greater in low and middle-income countries.

Women also suffer disproportionately, along with migrants, indigenous peoples, and those with disabilities and rural communities.

“Eye conditions and vision impairment are widespread, and far too often they still go untreated,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “It is unacceptable that 65 million people are blind or have impaired sight when their vision could have been corrected overnight with a cataract operation, or that over 800 million struggle in everyday activities because they lack access to a pair of glasses.”

Population growth and ageing – along with lifestyle changes and urbanization –  will also “dramatically increase” the number of people with eye conditions, vision impairment and blindness in the coming decades, WHO’s report shows.

One of the study’s main findings is that prevention is key, since at least one billion people are living with sight problems that could have been avoided with timely treatment.

Addressing this backlog of vision impairment or blindness owing to short and far-sightedness, and cataracts, will require $14.3 billion, the agency notes.

It points out that prevention is particularly important in low-income regions including western and eastern sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where blindness rates are on average eight times higher than in high-income nations.

The combination of a growing and ageing population will also “significantly” increase the total number of people with eye conditions, but this too could be turned around with preventative measures.

Typical conditions that could be treated if diagnosed early, include diabetic eye disease, along with cataracts and glaucoma.

“Vision impairment should not be seen as part of the ageing process,” Dr Cieza insisted, “because if you receive the appropriate care, for example, in the case of glaucoma, you can prevent the vision impairment associated with glaucoma, or if you receive cataract surgery, you can avoid the visual impairment associated with cataracts.”

 

High-quality eye care for all

Another key thrust of WHO’s report is that high-quality eye care should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their income and location.

To do this, treatment should be included in countries’ national health plans as an essential part of the overall aim of achieving effective universal health coverage, it says.

For the most part, eye conditions that can cause vision impairment and blindness –cataracts, trachoma and refractive error – are the main focus of national prevention strategies.

Nevertheless, other eye conditions that do not typically cause vision impairment – including dry eye and conjunctivitis – should not be overlooked, WHO says, noting that they “are frequently among the leading reasons for presentation to eye health care services all countries”.

This story was originally published by UN News

 

The post One Billion People Have Preventable Eye Conditions, Increasingly Linked to Lifestyle Choices, According to WHO appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Wan Manan Muda and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Two decades into the 21st century, all too many people still associate being ‘overweight’ with prosperity, health and wellbeing, mainly because being thin has long been associated with being emaciated due to hunger, undernourishment and malnutrition.

Overweight and obesity can easily be assessed by anthropometric measures, including the body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference. But BMI thresholds for overweight and obesity may differ by ethnic group or country.

Wan Manan Muda

The standard World Health Organization (WHO) BMI cut-off for overweight is 25, while the threshold for obesity is 30, understood as an abnormally high percentage of fat, which can be either generalized or localized.

Obesity pandemic
In 2014, McKinsey Global Institute estimated 2.1 billion overweight people, including the obese, then almost 30% of the world’s population. The related economic burden was estimated to be over US$2 trillion, a close third to civil conflicts and smoking.

By 2016, an estimated 1.97 billion adults and over 338 million children and adolescents worldwide were categorized as overweight or obese, following the rapid increase in overweight, including obesity, in recent decades.

An estimated 6% of children under 5 years of age were overweight in 2016, up from 5.3% in 2005. Similarly, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults rose by 27% between 1980 and 2013.

The situation in many middle-income developing countries is especially dire as higher incomes and more food consumption have reduced hunger while worsening other forms of malnutrition, including ‘hidden hunger’ or micronutrient deficiencies. The resulting health condition of much of the population generally imposes heavy costs for themselves, their families and their nations, while reducing their incomes.

Role of the brain
Obesity is typically due to nutrient imbalances where food ingested is stored as fat, instead of being utilized for energy and metabolism. Epidemiological evidence suggests ‘high fat’ and carbohydrate diets contribute to obesity, and the relationship between dietary fat and the degree of obesity.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Although there is now a near consensus that unhealthy diets worsen obesity and health, less is known about neurological changes to the brain due to such diets. Recent research finds that high-fat diets — specifically those with considerable fats and carbohydrates — contribute to irregularities in parts of the brain regulating body weight.

A recent study found that high-fat diets stimulate inflammation in the brains of mice, triggering physical changes in such cells, and encouraging the mice to eat more and become obese. As this happens before the body displays signs of obesity and body weight changes, it implies that high-fat diets induce the brain to want to eat more.

Thus, it is possible that high-fat diets may not just affect humans physically, but also alter food intake neurologically. Hence, it is detrimental when food rich in fat and carbohydrates is easily available, encouraging even more eating.

Health threats
Many factors contribute to obesity, including lifestyle, diet, individual genetics and gut bacteria. Besides high fat and carbohydrate diets, immune system activity can also contribute to obesity, although details remain unclear.

The presence of large numbers of fat cells changes micro-biomes inside the body, causing the body to respond negatively. Worryingly, obesity has been closely linked to various chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other metabolic disorders.

Recent research also clarifies how they affect various diseases of the brain, including Alzheimer’s, a neurological disorder associated with changes in brain cells more prevalent among the obese.

Such evidence continues to grow. Therefore, high fat diets have not only contributed to the developing world’s overweight and obesity pandemic, but may also have caused damage to brains and brain functioning.

Prevention better than cure
Changing diets, food consumption and human behaviour have all contributed to the nutrition transition and obesity pandemic.

While the developing world makes slow progress in overcoming hunger, or dietary energy undernourishment, much more needs to be done to educate the public about problems of malnutrition besides macronutrient deficiencies.

Micronutrient deficiencies, or ‘hidden hunger’, as well as diet-related non-communicable diseases also need to be addressed.

Already, those associated with overweight and obesity have been growing rapidly to pandemic proportions in recent decades, mainly due to dietary and other behavioural changes.

The authors recently co-authored Addressing Malnutrition in Malaysia available at: www.krinstitute.org

The post Beware High-Fat Diets appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Circle of Women Ambassadors

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

New York’s diplomatic community has continued to be enriched by a record number of women Permanent Representatives (PRUNs)—50 in all, as of October 2 – compared with about 15 to 20 back in the 1980s and early 1990s.

But the history-making number is still short of gender parity, falling far behind the 140 men who are PRUNs in the 193-member General Assembly, the highest policy-making body at the United Nations.

The remaining three women are designated Charge d’Affaires ad interim or acting heads of their respective diplomatic missions – and don’t hold the rank of PRUN.

https://protocol.un.org/dgacm/pls/site.nsf/files/HoM/$FILE/HeadsofMissions.pdf

The 50 PRUNs, who are also designated as Ambassadors, are members of an exclusive association called the “Circle of Women Ambassadors”— even as the circle has steadily kept widening.

The only other glass-shattering UN event took place in September 2014 when six of the 15 members of the UN Security Council– long monopolized by men– were women.

“It’s a little strange that it’s taken us this long,” Ambassador Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg, was quoted as saying, more than five years ago.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told delegates last week that “no country in the world is on track to attain gender equality by 2030, and women continue to be hampered by discriminatory laws, unequal access to opportunities and protections, high levels of violence, and damaging norms and attitudes.”

So, gender parity among men and women ambassadors may be a long way off.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Permanent Representative of Bangladesh, and a one-time UN Under-Secretary-General told IPS: “To me any progress which manifests equality and representation of women’s recognized engagement is welcome.”

The fact that, at the moment, the number of women Permanent Representatives to the UN at its headquarters has reached the highest point ever is a development worthy of our attention, he said.

“However, we have a long way to go even to reach the numerical equality among 193 Member States”, said Ambassador Chowdhury, the initiator of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 as President of the Security Council in March 2000: a resolution that underlined the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, and on peace negotiations and peace-building.

“In this context, I recall the Call to Action by civil society (which I proudly co-signed) for the world leaders on 25 September 2013 as they converged in New York for the General Assembly’s high level meetings urging them to take action for equality of women’s participation at all decision-making levels in four areas”, he added.

• 1. Appointment of a woman as the next UN Secretary-General. [reality: none out of 9 Secretaries-General in 74 years of UN history]

 

• 2. Nomination of Women as future Presidents of the General Assembly by the Regional Groups. [reality: only 4 out of 74 Presidents]

 

• 3. Election of More Women as Heads of Various UN Governing Bodies, [reality: overwhelmingly underrepresented by women]

 

4. Appointment by Member-states of More Women as Ambassadors to the UN in New York and Geneva. [reality: overwhelmingly underrepresented by women]

On all four points, the UN community needs to do much more to call it history-making, said Ambassador Chowdhury.

Kshenuka Senewiratne, Sri Lanka’s trailblazing ambassador– her country’s first female permanent representative (PRUN) in over 63 years– told IPS that gender empowerment has continued to advance in her home country, even as women outnumber men in many walks of life, and particularly in higher education.

She said this is also reflected in the Sri Lankan foreign service where women have dominated over men in open competitive exams.

“And it is possible the same trends continue in many developing nations— even as the UN tries to advance its 2030 Development Agenda where gender empowerment remains one of the priorities.”

But still, “I have yet to hear my colleagues here say that it was a concerted gesture of gender balance that they got posted to New York,” she declared.

Barbara Crossette, a former UN Bureau Chief for the New York Times, told IPS: “My initial thought is that this phenomenon of more powerful women in diplomacy is not unlike women rising on their own in politics and not just by inheriting leadership as widows, daughters or other kin of men, such as Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhutto, Chandrika Kumaratunga or Cristina Fernández de Kirchner”.

She pointed out there are now more Angela Merkels, Michelle Bachelets or Elizabeth Warrens, to name only a few.

“Women are also rising in international agencies and civil society organizations, gaining expertise in global affairs, geopolitics and armed conflict, often in uniform and wearing a peacekeeper’s beret”, said Crossette, the senior consulting editor and writer for PassBlue and the United Nations correspondent for The Nation.

Asked whether more female diplomats will aid the cause of greater gender equality, she said: “ I would say, not necessarily, unless the Secretariat and missions in the field come down harder on denigrators and abusers of women. And, as Louise Frechette (a former UN deputy Secretary-General) told me in an interview, only if member states chose the most competent, outstanding women when making nominations to fill appointments in the UN system. They should be the models”, she declared.

Reinforcing his arguments further, Ambassador Chowdhury said the political significance of this increase in the number of the women Ambassadors would be that their joint actions would draw more attention, bearing, of course, in mind that all Ambassadors to the UN act generally on the basis of instructions from their respective capitals.

“But, I believe, their coalition can join hands to focus on issues particularly those directly related to women’s empowerment and equality, like Goal 5 of SDG.”

They can also ask for greater engagement of Secretary-General’s leadership in the implementation of UNSCR 1325 on women and peace and security which has made the realization of women’s equal participation at all decision-making levels obligatory on all members of the United Nations and whose 20th anniversary is coming up in October 2020, he noted.

Realizing gender parity at the senior posts of the UN, both at headquarters and at field levels, could be another area for joint effort.

“Women Ambassadors could strategize to turn this newly gained numerical enhancement into an effective coalition to attain global objectives of women’s equality and empowerment,” he argued.

Apart from this increase in the number of women Ambassadors, another encouraging development had been that three consecutive women Ambassadors have been elected as President of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 2017 –from the Czech Republic, 2018, from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and 2019 from Norway.

This has improved somewhat ECOSOC’s dismal record of women Presidents, he said.

Since its beginning in 1946 and all the way upto 2003, ECOSOC’s practice of electing only men was challenged by Ambassador Marjatta Rassi of Finland as its first woman President, followed by second woman in 2009 before the successive three women Presidents – a total of 5 out of 74, said Ambassador Chowdhury.

“Given the unacceptably poor women’s representation as General Assembly and ECOSOC Presidents, women Ambassadors can continue their relentless efforts to improve gender parity in high offices,” he declared.

Meanwhile, addressing a working luncheon of the Circle of Women Ambassadors last April, the former President of the General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces said: “At the UN too – where we should be leading by example – only a quarter of Permanent Representatives are women. Only one of the General Assembly’s main committees is chaired by a woman. I hope that we, in this Circle, can encourage our colleagues to nominate more women to leadership positions in the General Assembly, and across the UN.”

In his annual report on “The Work of the Organization” released last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed the world body continues to make significant progress towards gender parity.

For the first time in the history of the United Nations, “we have achieved gender parity in the Senior Management Group and among Resident Coordinators, and are almost at parity among the senior leadership ranks across the Organization, well ahead of my target date of 2021.”

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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A farmer tends to vegetables in a greenhouse in Antigua, where a climate-smart agricultural initiative seeks to improve farm productivity. Participants at the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference heard that will climate change funding has increased, most of it is being spent on mutation and not adaptation projects like this. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Stella Paul
INCHEON, South Korea, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Good news: the graph depicting climate investments has been steadily increasing. Climbing from the 2012 figure of $360 billion in climate investments across the world to close to $600 billion currently.

But despite the upward trend, its not even halfway to the $3trillion needed each year till 2030 to meet the development goals for capping global warming to 1.5 ° Celcius.

This was the broad picture that emerged on the first of the three-day Green Climate Fund (GCF) Private Investment for Climate (GPIC) Conference, which began on Monday, Oct. 7, in Incheon, South Korea. Attended by 600 people, including private investors, government officials and international finance experts from a diverse sector, this is the 2nd edition of the conference.

Addressing the conference at the opening ceremony, executive director of the GCF Yannick Glemarec said that the world needed to dramatically scale up adaptation and mitigation efforts and both of these had enormous investment opportunities. The conference, he reminded the attendees, was designed to act as an ideas marketplace to explore how to redirect the huge amount of funds held by large banks and other institutional investors into driving climate action in developing countries.

“Opportunities for private sector investment in energy in developing countries alone are estimated  more than $23 trillion from now to 2030. Today, the private sector manages more than $210 trillion in assets but invests only a very limited amount in climate finance due to severe market barriers,” Glemarec said.

At the conference, he hoped, the participants would be able to “reflect on these barriers and provide some actionable solutions”.

 

Barbara Buchner, Executive Director of the widely renowned Climate Finance programme at the Climate Policy Initiative, says global investment is heavily tilted towards mitigation and is low on adaptation. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mitigation- Adaptation gap

Most of the current private investments are in climate mitigation sectors, such as e-transport and renewable energy. Adaptation projects around the world, including agriculture and land, still fail to attract private investments, they noticed.

“Globally, private investment is heavily tilted towards mitigation and is low on adaptation,” says Barbara Buchner, Executive Director of the widely renowned Climate Finance programme at the Climate Policy Initiative — a global policy think tank that works to improve energy and land use policies around the world.

• According to Buchner, CPI has been tracking private investment in climate change since 2011 and right from the beginning, private investors have shown their preference for projects that cap carbon emissions such as renewable energy and transport projects, instead of forests or agriculture.
• In 2016, the total climate finance in climate adaptation projects globally was $22 billion, while in mitigation projects it was $436 billion. Though investment has increased since then –the mitigation investments are now around $600 billion, Buchner reveals.

The reasons, she says, are many: lack of awareness and knowledge of climate risks, domestic policy and regulations that hinder mitigation, denied market access, social attitudes, multi-layer complexities of investing in adaptation projects on agriculture, water and land and a general lack of understanding in how such projects can result in profits.

“Mitigation projects, on the other hand, are more investment ready as the technology is already available and therefore one can just go and invest. The impact of the investments also are more direct and visible,” she said.

 

Yannick Glemarec (left), executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), and Andrew Holness (right), prime minister of Jamaica, talk at the 2nd Private Investment for Climate Conference. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Leadership matters

While risks and a lack of attraction and understanding were more common barriers for private investment, a lot was also dependent on political leadership, said some experts.

For example, Africa needs infrastructure funding worth $130-170 billion a year, but government and public funding will alone will not be enough to meet this goal.

So, the region needs to attract private investment. However, at present, there are few business opportunities for the private investment, said Koffi Klaousse, project development director at Africa 50 – an infrastructure fund.

“We have numerous projects, but very few of them offered an actual investment and business opportunity for the private sector,” Klausse said, before emphasising that political leadership at the country level could change the scenario by making it more possible for private investors to play a significant role.

Earlier on the day, an example of positive leadership was also shared by Andrew Holness – prime minister of Jamaica – a country that has attracted nearly $1 billion worth of private investment. The only head of the state at the conference, Holness described how his government has been trying to interpret the climate threats as a great opportunity for private investment

“For us, climate change is a disaster. But if we embrace the challenge, it could also mean an opportunity,” said Holness.

“If weather is going to be more severe, then we must build more resilient and climate smart infrastructure and mobile more public and private resources to support the effort,” he said before asserting to attendees that Jamaica would continue to be “fiscally responsible” and  continue to reduce its debt burden to make itself more investment friendly.

In past decade alone, the country had been able to reduce its debt burden to 60 percent from over a 100 percent. And it is on track to meeting the goal of 50 percent of energy being produced by renewable sources.

The conference, which ends on Oct. 9, will continue discussions on a number of issues, including exploring how to shift the trillions of dollars held by institutional investors, how to tap climate bonds to fund climate-focused action, and expanding the role of financial innovation to boost climate investments in infrastructure, energy and land use.

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Over a million Rohingya refugees are without a state as Myanmar refuses to recognise them as citizens. Pictured here is the refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Movie star Cate Blanchett and businessman Richard Branson spoke up this week for the millions of people around the world who cannot get passports and other papers because they lack an official nationality.

The United Nations says the problem — known as “statelessness” — is getting worse, as a worldwide trend towards nationalism means governments are increasingly loath to help people viewed as unwelcome outsiders.

From the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people across Myanmar and Bangladesh to the masses of stateless folks in Côte d’Ivoire, Thailand, Latvia, Syria and Kuwait, Blanchett, Branson and others urged governments to tackle the problem.

“Statelessness has a devastating impact on millions of people around the world,” Blanchett, an Australian double Oscar-winner, told journalists on Monday during a week of intergovernmental talks in Geneva.

“They experience marginalisation and exclusion from cradle to grave … It’s total invisibility.”

By one count from 2017, some 70 countries reported on 3.9 million stateless individuals, but the U.N. agency for refugees, UNHCR, says the real figure globally is likely three times higher with some 12 million people impacted.

The world’s biggest stateless population are the Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom have sought safety in Bangladesh after fleeing violence in Myanmar, which does not recognise them as citizens.

“No one should have to suffer the indignity and exclusion that comes with being stateless,” Branson, a British billionaire wrote on Monday.

“Fortunately, over a hundred states have come together in Geneva this week to commit to do more to put an end to statelessness once and for all.”

 

It’s difficult to imagine how any country can maximise its potential by ignoring significant populations of stateless people. My take on statelessness and how to solve it https://t.co/R5gRApf5pa #IBelong @Refugees pic.twitter.com/SoGgG1rJtb

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) 7 October 2019

 

The U.N. calls statelessness a “man-made problem” stemming from a “bewildering array of causes” — often legal directives and the re-drawing of national borders. Some 600,000 people remain stateless after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Stateless people are often denied certificates at birth and remain excluded for the rest of their lives, the U.N., says. They lack the papers for travel, marriage, work, schooling, healthcare, and opening bank accounts.

“Statelessness can deny people and communities their identity and sense of self, contributing to the breakdown of family and social relationships and creating legal problems for generations,” said U.N. deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed. 

“And stateless people are voiceless people. Prevented from voting or participating in public life, they are without representation anywhere.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the decade-long “#IBelong” campaign was making gains towards ending statelessness by 2024, with more than 220,000 stateless people acquiring a nationality since 2014.

“This is an area in which – for relatively little investment – wide-reaching impact is within our reach,” said Grandi.

In July, Kyrgyzstan became the first country to officially end statelessness. The U.N. says Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan could also meet the 2024 deadline; while Thailand is boosting efforts on its 479,000 ethnic hill tribespeople and other stateless individuals.

Madagascar and Sierra Leone have rewritten their laws so that mothers can confer citizenship to their children, as fathers have long been able to do. Still, 25 nations do not readily grant mothers this right – one of the leading causes of statelessness globally. 

But Grandi also highlighted the Rohingya, and the Indian state of Assam, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has vowed to disenfranchise millions of Muslim immigrants amid a polarising election campaign.

“The progress is far from assured: damaging forms of nationalism, and the manipulation of anti-refugee and migrant sentiment – these are powerful currents internationally that risk putting progress into reverse,” said Grandi.

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By Rothna Begum
GENEVA, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

After more than a decade of women’s rights activism, Iran’s Guardian Council has finally approved an amendment that would grant Iranian citizenship to the children of Iranian women married to foreign men.

The Guardian Council was the last body needed to approve this long overdue reform to Iran’s discriminatory citizenship law.

Previously, Iran’s civil code granted children and spouses of Iranian men citizenship automatically, while children born in Iran to Iranian women and foreign fathers must live in Iran at least until they are 19 before they can apply.

It is unclear how many children in Iran have Iranian mothers and foreign fathers. However, the issue has come to prominence in recent years because of tens of thousands of registered and unregistered marriages between Iranian women and Afghan men whose children are unable to obtain citizenship on an equal basis.

Rothna Begum

Research in other countries has shown that such discrimination can harm children’s access to education, health care, housing, and employment when they become adults.

The latest attempt to reform the law was inspired by Maryam Mirzakhani, a world-renowned Iranian mathematician and Fields Medal recipient who passed away from cancer in 2017. Because her husband is not Iranian, her daughter cannot obtain Iranian nationality.

In May, Iran’s Parliament finally adopted the proposed reform, but it went back and forth from the Guardian Council, a body of 12 Islamic jurists, to determine whether it is in accordance with Iran’s Constitution and Sharia (Islamic law). They approved the amendment last week.

While this is a long-awaited victory for Iranian women, the newly-amended law does not equalize access to citizenship completely. Iranian women must apply for nationality for their children, while children of Iranian men are granted nationality automatically.

Children who turn 18 can apply for nationality themselves. A security check is required in both cases.

Most concerning is that that the amended law requires the Intelligence Ministry or the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to certify that there is no “security problem” before approving citizenship in these specific applications.

This vaguely defined provision can be used to arbitrarily disqualify applicants if they or their parents are seen as critical of the government, particularly in eastern and western border areas where cross-border marriages are more common and where authorities keep a tight grip over peaceful activism.

In a matter of weeks, Iran’s newly-amended law will finally see children of Iranian women able to apply for the same benefits that children of Iranian men have.

But Iran should remove the remaining obstacles to ensure that children of Iranian citizens, whether men or women, are granted citizenship on an equal basis. They are all, after all, Iranian children.

The post Reforms Will Grant Nationality to Children of Iranian Women appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Rothna Begum is Senior Researcher, Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch

The post Reforms Will Grant Nationality to Children of Iranian Women appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Veena S. Kulkarni, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Sociology and Geography, Arkansas State University, USA; and Raghav Gaiha, (Hon.) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England.

By Veena S. Kulkarni and Raghav Gaiha
NEW DELHI, India and JONESBORO, US, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

China’s almost meteoric transition from a being a low income to a middle income country within a span of four decades is often perceived as a miracle analogous to the post Second World War Japanese economic development experience. China’s GDP rose from $200 current United States dollars (US$ henceforth) in 1978 to $9,470 current US$ in 2018 (World Development Indicators, The World Bank). Unsurprisingly, China’s rapid and near sustainable growth has attracted widespread interest among academics and policy makers alike.

Veena S. Kulkarni

China embarked on a set of systematic reforms of its centrally planned economy in the year 1978, which ignited this spark of economic growth. In nearly three decades after the reforms, China increased its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) eightfold with an average growth in GDP and GDP per capita of 9.5% and 8.1% percent (measured in constant US$), respectively (Hofman and Wu 2009). These figures appear more exceptional when seen relative to China’s performance: a) in the pre-reform period and b) by its contemporaries at that time. While China with an average GDP per capita rate of 2.1% was out ranked by several countries during a two-decade period before the reforms, its GDP per capita was the highest across a list of 105 countries for the years 1978-2005 (Hofman and Wu 2009). The extraordinary growth in income levels seem to have been replicated with respect to other economic indicators such as poverty rates and wealth per adult. The poverty head count ratio declined by more than one fifth in less than a decade from 17.2% in 2010 to 3.1% in 2017 (World Development Indicators, The World Bank). Additionally, there is a notable increase in the wealth per adult from US$4,292 in 2008 to US$47,810 in 2018 (Global Wealth Data Book 2018, Credit Suisse Research Institute). Further, convergence between the timings of the economic reforms with that of the demographic transition led to low dependency ratios (low share of non-working relative to working age population) creating a ‘perfect storm’ for bolstering economic growth. The more recent trends of the economy growing between 6-7% do admittedly indicate a downward trajectory but the prospects in absolute terms remain high.

However, this more seldom than not favorable scenario is projected to have an expected and significant impact on the age composition and epidemiological profile of China. All the standard health indicators show that China has completed what demographers would call mortality/epidemiological transition. Mortality/epidemiological transition is characterized by two interrelated components: a) a greater concentration of deaths at older ages, and b) a dominance of deaths by degenerative illnesses as compared to communicable diseases. Life expectancy at birth in China between 1990 and 2017 rose by nearly a decade for women (from 70.7 years to 79.9 years) and over third quarter of a decade for men (from 66.9 years to 74.5 years) (Global Burden of Disease). Such dramatic rises in life expectancy obviously translates into increasing share of the elderly total population. The percentage of population 65 years or older has more than doubled from 4.43% in 1950 to 9.33% in 2015 and is projected to increase to 11.97% in 2020. An examination of the trend indicates the rate of growth of the elderly unlike the period between 1950 and 1970 has not only been consistently on the rise, it has done so noticeably after 1990. The projected percentage of elderly population at 11.97% in 2020 is more than twice that in 1990 (5.63%) (World Population Prospects 2019, United Nations Population Division). The projection for year 2040 considering the age of 60 as the benchmark predict more than one in four persons to be elderly (World Health Organization).

On the second component of the epidemiological transition, Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) affect for more than 80% of the 10.3 million premature deaths and 77% of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), the statistic that is not that distant from other OECD countries. A review of the ranking of the top ten most causes of major deaths for the years 2007 and 2017 reflects the realization of the second part of the mortality/epidemiological transition. Except for the road injuries, the ten major causes of deaths fall in the category of degenerative illnesses. Further, both in 2007 and in 2017, the first four causes, stroke, ischemic heart disease, COPD and lung cancer are nearly unequivocally related to lifestyle factors. Stroke and ischemic heart diseases that are highly correlated with hypertension rose by 27% and 54% between 2007 and 2017. Additionally, there was 95.7% spike in percentage of most deaths caused by hypertensive heart disease between 2007 and 2017. Hypertensive heart disease moved from a rank of 11 to a rank of eight. In a similar vein, the ranking of the impact of diseases with respect to the number of years of life lost (YLLs) or causing premature deaths shows stroke and ischemic heart disease as topping the list both in 2007 and in 2017. Further, between 2007 and 2017 the increase in that ‘deadly’ impacts were 21.8% (stroke) and 43.9% (ischemic heart diseases). The corresponding rise for hypertensive heart disease was 79.8%. Yet another disconcerting evidence on the growing detrimental effect of hypertension can be gleaned from the climbing in the ranking of diseases causing disability. Stroke moved from being the thirteenth highest in 2007 to being fifth highest in 2017. The combined effects of causing most deaths and disability owing to stroke and ischemic heart disease is respectively more than 25% and 40%. Also, relative to ten countries in the comparison group delineated by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Project, based on GBD’s regional classification, trade partnerships and sociodemographic indicators, YLLs and DALYs due to stroke and ischemic heart diseases is the highest in China.

Raghav Gaiha

The above patterns and trends clearly evince a transition to a lifestyle that is more prone to incidence of cardiovascular diseases, a change that has been empirically observed to accompany usually interrelated reasons such as rising levels of income, urbanization, globalization and consumption of processed food as substitute to home made and fresh food. The latter appears to be a prominent contributor to China’s epidemiological profile tilting toward cardiovascular illnesses such as stroke, ischemic heart disease and hypertensive heart disease. Dietary risk has been found to be the most significant factor in explaining most of the deaths and disability in 2007 and in 2017. Additionally, there was a 29.6% increase in the risk caused by dietary patterns between 2007 and 2017 (Global Burden of Disease).

One of the integral ingredients for making food edible and/or enhance taste is salt. However, salt is the primary source of sodium and increased intake causes hypertension and consequently heightens the probabilities of stroke, heart attack and other related cardiovascular ailments. The average salt consumption for a healthy Chinese is 10.5 grams as opposed to the recommended 6 grams as per the Chinese Dietary Guidelines (World Health Organization). This higher than optimal quantity of salt utilization has been attributed in addition to putting salt in home cooked food and at the table (such as soy sauce, fish sauce and table salt), increasing eating of packaged food combined with lower consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables, dietary fiber like whole grains. The diet part is in particular significant given the high dietary risk. The Food Sustainability Index, a weighted average of indicators in the health and nutrition category, has been created by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN). China ranks 21 among the 38 countries for which the Nutritional Challenge Index has been created also by The Economist.

The enormity of role of salt in determining people’s healthy diet and consequently healthy years of life acquire prominence when coupled with the facts that China’s population is aging quite rapidly and elderly are more susceptible to hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, reduction of salt is considered as one of the most cost effective strategies to improve health outcomes and reduce number of deaths. World Health Organization estimates 2.5 million deaths globally could be prevented if salt consumption is reduced to the recommended level.

Expectedly, World Health Organization in collaboration with the local organizations and with the Chinese government has initiated public service campaigns to increase knowledge, awareness and support to homes, schools, work places and the food industry to reduce amount of salt. The State Council as part of the Healthy China 2030 Initiative has set a goal of reducing the salt intake by 20%. Also, at the forefront of recognizing the urgency of reforming the food industry to align with ensuring a sustainable production of healthy food is the Barilla Foundation as evidenced by its unveiling of the report, ‘Fixing the Business of Food, the Food Industry and the SDG Challenges’ on September 24, 2019.

In addition to the advocacy and the activism aspects, an area that demands a careful assessment is governmental expenditure on health care. The slowing of economic growth coupled with the shifting demographics toward the elderly enhances the urgency of planning for the future. It is estimated that government expenditures on health would increase three times to about 10% of the GDP by 2060 (The World Bank and World Health Organization 2019). This is all the more critical considering illnesses such as hypertension that are usually a consequence of high salt consumption. As hypertension does not cause symptoms at the early stages, it can easily go undiagnosed. In China it is estimated that only 13.8% of the 270 million people who have hypertension have the disease managed (World Health Organization). Thus, it is pivotal to focus on both preventative and curative measures with respect to the occurrence of illnesses caused by unhealthy dietary lifestyle that include high salt consumption. Not doing so implies high cost to the society with respect to loss of productive years through death and/or disability. Based on China’s compliance with the mission of World Health Organization and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are founded on the ambition of ‘leaving no one behind’, it appears that China is committed to the goal of reducing the salt intake within the next decade as part of the larger initiative of providing a healthy productive life to all of its citizens.

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The post ‘Salty’ Concern: Tackling High Salt Consumption in China appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Veena S. Kulkarni, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Sociology and Geography, Arkansas State University, USA; and Raghav Gaiha, (Hon.) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England.

The post ‘Salty’ Concern: Tackling High Salt Consumption in China appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Ifeanyi Nsofor
ABUJA, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

As a Public Health Doctor, I often meet people who experience stigma simply because they live with HIV. One person who still haunts me is a woman who is HIV positive and when she was in labor, a midwife would not help her. Instead she shouted at her to just push out the baby and then she stood far away from the bedside, disgusted by the woman’s HIV status.  No one should go through such stigma at a vulnerable situation when they are about to birth life.

Another lady I met was denied university admission because she is HIV positive. She was screened for HIV without her consent, her HIV-positive status was disclosed publicly, and she was asked to leave the private university.

This is not okay. All forms of HIV-related stigma must stop. When people experience stigma and discrimination they may be afraid or ashamed to access HIV services. This fear of stigma has far-reaching implications – it could cause people to delay being tested and knowing their HIV status and getting help, before it’s too late.

Globally, there are approximately 37.9 million people living with HIV, with 770,000 deaths, based on 2018 data. In 2018, there were 1.7 new HIV infections. Seventy-five million people have been infected by HIV since the epidemic began and 32 million have died as a result. HIV-related stigma can have serious consequences.

These are ways to deal with it.

Americans wrongly believe that HIV can be transmitted through sharing glass (27%); touching toilet seat (17%); and swimming in a pool with someone who is HIV positive (11%)

First, government across the globe should increase investments in health education to improve people’s knowledge of HIV and its modes of transmission. It should not be taken for granted that people are aware.

For instance, according to a survey of Americans by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans wrongly believe that HIV can be transmitted through sharing glass (27%); touching toilet seat (17%); and swimming in a pool with someone who is HIV positive (11%). Instead, one can get HIV when there is contact with body fluids such as blood, semen, vaginal fluids and breast milk.

Targeted information should be deployed on platforms where people congregate and interact. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp serve this purpose and should be used. Globally, there about 3.5 billion social media users – an estimated than 2.7 billion of these are Facebook users.

In 2016 at peak of the Zika virus epidemic in Brazil, Facebook pulled anonymized posts about conversations on Zika virus. This was shared with UNICEF to design a campaign that provided the right information for individuals to protect themselves against Zika virus. Facebook can replicate the same to tackle misinformation about HIV and reduce stigma.

Second, enforce HIV antidiscrimination laws to deter offenders from discriminating against people living with HIV. For instance, In 2015, the Nigerian President Jonathan signed the HIV/AIDS Anti-Discrimination law.

One of the objectives of the law is to help more Nigerians to seek testing, treatment and care services without fear of facing stigma and discrimination. The law does not permit HIV screening as a prerequisite for employment and school admissions.

There are fines of $1400 for individuals and $5,700 for institutions who violate the law. The fines could come with prison term of up to one year in addition to these fines. Although not as robust as Nigeria’s HIV antidiscrimination law, Ghana’s patient’s charter protects individuals from discrimination based on type of illness.

Third, end the discrimination against key populations like men who have sex with men, sex workers and transgender people as this discourages them from accessing care, pushes them underground and increases their risk of transmitting HIV.

Globally, these populations account for 54% of new HIV infections – 88% in Western and central Europe and North America; 95% in Middle East and North Africa; and 64% in Western and central Africa.

Compared to non-key populations, the risk of acquiring HIV is 22 times higher among men who have sex with men and injection drugs users; 21 times higher among sex workers and 12 times higher for transgender people.

Specific changes include ending discriminatory laws. Countries including Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia and others criminalize LGBT folks and that needs to change. Further, transgender people are harmed and killed without consequences for the perpetrators.

For example,  recently, a black transgender woman was burned to death in Florida. Therefore, donors must keep working with governments to repeal these laws and punish those who perpetrate violence against key populations.

The Former Wales rugby captain, Gareth Thomas’ revelation this month that he is HIV positive because someone threatened to blackmail him, shows that no one is immune to stigma. As long as new HIV infections occur, governments, donors, private sector and communities must continue work to end HIV-related stigma and discrimination.

The post Three Ways to End HIV Stigma and Discrimination appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr. Ifeanyi Nsofor is a medical doctor, the CEO of EpiAFRIC, Director of Policy and Advocacy for Nigeria Health Watch

The post Three Ways to End HIV Stigma and Discrimination appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The extraction of natural resources across Africa, including minerals like gold, is being affected by a changing climate. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

As a result of climate change, resource extraction industries in Africa will be impacted by asset stranding, researchers say.

“Stranding implies that several natural assets are going to become commercially unviable around the world as a result of climate change and the inability of countries to exploit them,” said Vanessa Ushie, manager of the policy analysis division at the African Natural Resources Centre of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which supports African countries to leverage their natural resources for sustainable development.

Ushie told IPS stranding is an increasingly important policy issue that African countries should consider because they are highly dependent on natural resources, with an average 70 percent of their exports being minerals.

As the content struggles to reach its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of global goals identified by the United Nations to end poverty and inequality among member states, a wealth of natural resources that could be used for Africa’s development remain  largely untapped.

• Some 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves including platinum, gold, diamonds and coal are found in Africa, yet the continent still has high levels of poverty. 
• Africa also has 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves and 8 percent of natural gas, according to the African Development Bank.
• Climate change is threatening the exploitation of these resources and more importantly of the non-renewable energy sources; coal, oil and gas.

Keep them in the ground

As a result of the impact of climate change, Africa has difficult options when it comes to its mineral resources, researchers say. Can it keep the resources in the ground and risk economic stagnation or find profitability in clean energy sources?

“We are aware of the Paris Agreement and the commitment of African countries, just like their global counterparts, to reduce carbon emissions in order to meet the target of keeping global warming below 2°Celsius,” Ushie said. “With that warming target, it is clear that certain minerals will have to be left below the ground especially those that emit the highest carbon into the atmosphere.”

• The AfDB says “stranded assets” have in recent years attracted a lot of interest, as climate-driven changes justify a shift to low-carbon development in the natural resources sector. More than 185 countries have agreed to leave two-thirds of proven fossil fuels in the ground to meet the Paris Agreement climate target.
• In 2017, the International Energy Agency warned that oil and gas assets worth 1.3 trillion dollars could be left stranded by 2050, if the fossil fuel industry does not adapt to greener climate policies.

Speaking at the end of the U.N. Climate Action Summit recently, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, said world leaders should act on the outrage of millions of people around the world who marched against climate change and calling for and end to the use of fossil fuels.

“We urge all nations to commit to achieving carbon neutrality before 2050 to immediately end construction of, and investment in, coal power and to implement a green transition that is just and equitable,” Robinson said.

Stranded assets

But many African countries are extracting coal, gas and oil with new discoveries, signalling future fortunes that could be difficult to forfeit.

• In 2019, French oil firm Total made public its discovery of a large “gas condensate” in South Africa. The gas condensate – effectively a liquid form of natural gas – is a more prized than crude oil.
• In Kenya, British oil company Tullow Oil projected 2024 as the earliest likely date by which the country can expect gains from its Turkana oil. Vast oil reserves have also been discovered in Uganda.

For the African continent, a latecomer to the fossil fuel boom, arguments for asset stranding could influence development gains and also interrupt economic growth.

Ushie said some assets will be stranded due to changes in markets and investment flows, as global extractive companies and investors adjust their portfolios to meet new, low-carbon regulations. Other extractive assets are at risk due to changing consumer demand, such as the growing use of solar energy and electric vehicles in developed countries.

An opportunity or obstacle?

“With growing climate change and the ensuing low-carbon transition, Africa’s mining sector faces serious risks, and some opportunities,” Ushie told IPS, noting that African countries need to understand and respond to the new normal.

The AfDB is promoting a diversified approach to energy provision and integrated natural resource management.  The solution lies in investing in localised and resource-efficient energy options like decentralised, community-owned local solar, wind and biomass projects.

By 2020, the Bank will have contributed $17 billion to climate finance for African since it developed a funding mechanism through its Climate Change Action Plan. Besides, the Bank’s Africa NDC Hub has supported African countries to implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement and helping countries attract sustainable financing opportunities such as green bonds to support climate change adaptation in high risk countries.

Research evidence for low carbon policies

“We want to model scenarios under which stranding could occur for various minerals and fossil fuels, and provide policy advice to governments on how they could respond to this risk,” said Ushie. “There should be a robust public debate on stranded mineral assets and resources, and this is why the AfDB is engaged in policy platforms such as the Inter-Governmental Forum on Mining, Metals and Sustainable Development.”

The Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development to be held in Geneva, Oct. 7-11 , has the theme; “Mining in a changing climate’”, indicating that even at a global level, there is recognition that resource extraction is being impacted by climate change.

The forum is a good opportunity for the Centre and the Bank to be engaged in global policy dialogue on the future of mining, which is a critical industry in Africa, she said.

Fatima Denton, Director of the U.N. University’s Institute for Natural Resource, told IPS the global shift from fossil fuels and the drop-in technology costs of renewables are an opportunity for the African continent to increase investment in green energy sources.

With rapid urbanisation of most African economies, coupled with a rising demand for electricity, African nations have begun taking advantage of this opportunity to increase investment in renewables, Denton said.

A 2018 study by Bloomberg Finance indicates that developing countries are beginning to lead the global clean power transition. A total 114GW zero-carbon power capacity was added in developing countries in 2017 compared to 63GW added in wealthier nations.

With the drop in global gas prices, more African nations were focusing on growing their gas economies. Renewables have greater need for metals and materials, creating opportunities for African countries with reserves of these resources essential to the construction of wind, solar, electricity transmission.

“Despite the opportunities mentioned above there is the challenge of when African economies will actually strand their fossil fuel assets and the lack of funding to invest in green growth opportunities as stated in their NDC’s,” Denton said.

Energy security in a low carbon future entails transition towards clean renewable sources, not as an end in itself, but as a means to achieving sustainable development in critical sectors such as agriculture, mining, health and education, said Denton.

Related Articles

• Investments to Cushion African Countries against Climate Shocks Not Enough
• African Development Bank Plans for a Self-sufficient, Integrated and Industrialised Continent
• AfDB ‘s Solar Project Aims at Making Africa a Renewable Power House

The post Africa’s Mineral Wealth May Just have to Stay in the Ground to Protect a Changing Climate appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Maged Srour
ROME, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

Human rights movement Amnesty International has accused South Sudanese authorities for lack of independence as they have allowed allowing human rights abuses, war crimes and crimes against humanity to go unpunished.

In a report released today, Oct. 7, Amnesty noted that despite investigation committees and various reports that are compiled on the violence that resulted from the internal war that broke out in December 2013, authorities continue to “deny credible reports implicating the armed forces in serious human rights violations. When the President does respond by setting up investigation committees, they lack independence and impartiality and, with the one exception, do not result in criminal trials”.

 

The post South Sudan’s Authorities Allow Serious Human Rights Abuses to Flourish and go Unpunished – Report appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Donald Trump addresses the UN's General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

It is very likely that the idea of impeaching Donald Trump will be a boomerang. Trump fans are listening to a furious campaign which smacks of coup d’etat and call his accusers traitors who deserve to go to jail.

In the first three hours after the announcement of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, that an impeachment process would be launched, Trump received a million dollars, five million in 24 hours, and 8.5 million in two days. His campaign received 50,000 new donors.

Trump won the election by just under 80,000 votes. It should be borne in mind that the US electoral system does not elect the president by the majority of the votes of its citizens, but by delegates that each State elects to vote the president. For historical reasons related to how the Union was created, the less populated and less developed states have proportionately more delegates than the large and wealthy states.

Roberto Savio

Trump ran his campaign in the less developed and less populous states, and in practice ignored the big cities and the most populous states, like California. In the popular vote, that is of citizens, Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton won by three million votes.

I think the Democrats have done Trump a great favour. In any case, even if the impeachment passes in the House of Representatives (where the Democrats have a majority), it has very little chance that it will pass in the Senate where, again for historical reasons linked to the creation of the United States of America, each state has two senators, regardless of its population.  Wyoming, with 578,000 inhabitants, has two senators, as does California, the most populous state in the country, with 37.2 million people.

And it is precisely the less developed states and those with smaller populations that allow Republicans to have the majority in the Senate. For the impeachment to be successful, a two-thirds majority of senators would be needed, which is highly unlikely.

I think the Democrats have done Trump a great favour. In any case, even if the impeachment passes in the House of Representatives (where the Democrats have a majority), it has very little chance that it will pass in the Senate

The only possibility is to increase the number of voters, who do not exceed 50% of those who have the right to vote. But will the impeachment have this impact? Are the citizens of the less developed states going to increase their electoral participation in protest at Trump’s actions? There is no evidence of this, and much will depend on who the Democratic candidate is going to be.

The camapign of demonising Joe Biden is going to have some impact. And the progressive candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are the kind of politicians who seem too elitist in the states that vote for Trump. They are very conservative regions, and Trump has the unconditional support of the Evangelical Church, which is estimated at 40 million parishioners, while the Catholic Church is very conservative.

Obviously, if there is an economic crisis, this could have a transverse impact since Americans traditionally vote with their pockets. But, for the moment, 90% of Republican voters – as well as his parliamentarians – remain loyal to Trump.

Herein lies the fragility of democracy, when it is based on non-democratic rules. Boris Johnson was elected prime minister, not by the British people, but by around 160,000 members of the Conservative Party. The difference is that Johnson has had to expel 21 members of his party, all high-profile parliamentarians.

He has been blocked on his personalist and authoritarian path by the Supreme Court, which has annulled his decision to prorogate Parliament. In the United States, no like-minded parliamentarian has criticised Trump, and the Supreme Court has a Republican majority, which will change the American legal system considerably.

The lesson that comes out of all this is that democracy works if it has laws that guarantee the balance of powers and there is a conscious and interested citizenship in the common good, not divided in a partisan way, where the other is considered an enemy and not one that has different ideas.

The case of Brexit and Trump are good examples. But let’s not forget the case of Hungary, where Viktor Orban, after being democratically elected, developed a xenophobic policy against migrants, carried out tight control of the press, the National Election Commission and the judiciary, enriched his faithful with funds from the EU, changed the entire electoral system accommodating it to his party and then declared himself follower of an illiberal democracy.

Given the possibility that the united opposition will win the municipal elections in Budapest on October 13, Minister Gergely Gulyas, chief of staff of Orban, has warned that in this case, the government would cut funding to the capital city.

The style has been similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini, who came to power in a democratic way and then eliminated democracy by identifying an enemy of the people, in whose name they said they spoke: Jewish power.

Today the main targets of the populist and xenophobic right for raising its electoral quotas are immigrants.

Brexit was largely due to the announced arrival of millions of Turks, who were not even in the European Union. Trump made the Mexican and Central American “invasion” the strong point of his defence of the American people, along with the Chinese threat. If the voter swallows these mythologies, democracy is certainly in danger.  Trump and Johnson are just the tip of the iceberg.

 

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

The post Brief Reflection on Trump’s Impeachment appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Protesters gathered in Cairo shouting anti-government slogans on September 21. PHOTO: MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY/REUTERS

By Tasneem Tayeb
Oct 6 2019 (IPS-Partners)

The recent protests in Egypt, sparked by the allegation of financial misappropriations by a government contractor against the country’s current president and former army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, have died down almost as soon as they came to life. The Sisi administration resorted to its usual tactic of using brutal muscle power to clamp down on the protesters and the media. While the national media outlets—very much under the control of Sisi—did not dare breach “professional codes”, the Egyptian State Information Service (SIS), which is responsible for accrediting foreign journalists, warned the media that it has “carefully monitored” the protest coverage.

The SIS also called on the reporters to “strictly abide by professional codes of conduct.” This coming from a suppressive regime, with a track record of detaining journalists and feeding fabricated content to the local media outlets, it would not be hard to read between the lines when it comes to the SIS guidance.

The country’s autocratic regime has also detained Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein in solitary confinement for the last 1,017 days, with charges and accusations that till date remain uncorroborated. The detention is in breach of the law of the land, which sets a maximum of 620 days of pretrial detention for people under investigation for felony. To make matters even muddier, there had been reports that the journalist was refused even passable medical attention after he suffered a broken hand, in an episode that carries reverberations from the imprisonment of the country’s first democratically elected president, who died while held in solitary confinement, with inadequate treatment and medicines.

In the 2019 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Egypt stood at 163rd out of 180 countries. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) annual report, Egypt held 25 journalists in 2018, and along with Turkey and China, accounted for half of all the journalists detained in 2018.

The situation in Turkey presents a grimmer picture, where 68 journalists had been incarcerated in 2018—all of them facing anti-state charges. Turkey’s uproar over the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, while fully warranted, comes with a slight hint of irony. At a discussion organised by the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF) in Stockholm earlier this year, journalists who have had to flee Turkey in recent times claimed that journalists are being systematically targeted by the Erdogan regime and being brutally punished on the flimsiest of charges. Levent Kenez, former editor-in-chief of Turkey’s Meydan daily newspaper, which the Turkish government had pulled the plug on in 2016, said, “Defendants are not selected randomly, but systematically. When analysing cases, one can easily notice that those who were critical of the government, reported on corruption or exposed Erdogan’s support for jihadist elements at home or abroad, were blacklisted long before.”

Closer to home, in India, media outlets in Kashmir are struggling to cover events after the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A in August this year. A recent report by two rights networks—Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) and the Free Speech Collective (FSC)—presents a despairing picture of the condition of journalists and media in Kashmir. The report reveals a “high degree of surveillance, informal ‘investigations’ and even arrest of journalists who publish reports considered adverse to the government or security forces; controls on the facilities available for print publication; government advertising to select publications; restrictions on mobility in select areas including hospitals and the most crippling communications shutdown of all time. Significantly, there is no official curfew, no official notification for the shutdown.”

The arrest of journalists has become a common scenario in the enchanting valley, which is also one of the most militarised zones in the world with the presence of around 900,000 troops. According to CPJ, as of September 24, at least four journalists have been detained since July 25 this year. While one was released later, the whereabouts of Qazi Shibli, editor of news website The Kashmiriyat, remain unknown, and two others—MT Rasool of Rising Kashmir and Sheikh Saleem of Kashmir Convener—have been kept in detention in a government-owned guest house in the valley’s Bandipora town, without any reason behind their arrest being forthcoming.

Apart from the fear of arbitrary detention, according to Kunal Majumder of CPJ, “communication blackout, the internet shutdown, limited access to government officials and politicians, strict controls on the flow of information, restrictions on travel, direct and indirect intimidation of journalists, and the long-running problem of dwindling government advertising revenue” have muzzled the media in Kashmir.

Often governments also resort to the use of soft power coercion to control and suppress the media; this is usually done through curtailing commercial revenues of media houses. In most of these cases, the governments not only cut down their own advertisement to these news outlets, but also discourage big corporations from giving advertisements to these media platforms. By doing this, the government tries to cripple the media outlets so that they go out of operation due to shortage of fund. A classic example of this is our own country, where the government had in 2015 asked the largest telecoms and consumer goods companies in Bangladesh to “restrict” their advertising in two of the mainstream newspapers.

Francis Fukuyama, in his book “Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy,” suggested that three elements are essential for a well-ordered society and good governance: a strong state, the rule of law and democratic accountability. However, rule of law and democratic accountability run contrary to the idea of a strong state, because when a state becomes strong, it becomes prone to discouraging accountability and rule of law. So how does one strike a balance between the three? Through a set of democratic institutions that enable a stable equilibrium.

Free press, by design, is one such institution. If there are dissenting voices within these ranks, they can easily be quashed. Alternatively, they can also spark constructive debates—debates that are the lifeblood of vibrant democracies.

Which path should we take? That is entirely up to us.

Tasneem Tayeb is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star. Her Twitter handle is @TayebTasneem.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Credit: Bigstock.

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 5 2019 (IPS)

European and North American countries will take a major stride in cleaning up the atmosphere next Monday, 7 October, through the implementation of an amended legally binding treaty to limit the amount of emissions polluting the air.

With 18 countries and the European Union now having ratified the amended treaty, from a total of 51 who have signed, including many of the countries which are part of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the official entry into force marks an important step to curb pollutants closely-linked to climate change, ecosystem degeneration, and potentially life-threatening human health.

The Gothenburg Protocol, established back in 1999, sets forth legally-binding emissions reduction commitments for 2020 and beyond, for major air pollutants, and is rooted in the UNECE’s 1979 Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), originally intended to stop the occurrence of acid rain.

Beyond targeting well-known air pollutants, the Protocol was updated in 2012 to include reduction of fine particulate matter, pollutants shown to cause devastating climate change effects over short periods of time.

 

7 million premature deaths per year

UN experts have deemed air pollution a human rights violation – a deadly, man-made problem responsible for some seven million premature deaths, every year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

UN experts have deemed air pollution a human rights violation - a deadly, man-made problem responsible for some seven million premature deaths, every year, according to the World Health Organization


The agency has said toxic air is “the world’s largest single environmental health risk” and a leading cause of death by cancer.

The Protocol sets emission ceilings for major polluters: sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), ammonia (NH3), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5), shown to damage human health.

The compounds are released from various household and ambient sources; from motor fuel combustion, to heat and power generation, to cooking and heating fuels; having lasting health effects even with only mild exposure.

Of the pollutants the Protocol aims to target, Particulate Matter, NOx and (SO2), show the strongest evidence of causing harm, WHO found.

Smoke poses the most serious threat to humans, as a pollutant composed of fine particles that can enter the lungs, travel through the bloodstream and penetrate vital organs.

Approximately 3 billion people cook and heat their homes using polluting fuels, and around 3.8 million die each year from exposure to air pollution., WHO says.

Slashing levels of particulate matter, specifically a component known as black carbon, could also help in the fight against climate change. Scientists have found that black carbon, which has light-absorbing properties, remains in the atmosphere for little time, yet has drastically darkened snow and ice in the Artic region, thereby contributing to regional warming.

 

40 years – clean air

As parties break new ground in clean air policy, additional UNECE Member States are expected to ratify the Protocol in coming months.

The 1979 LRTAP Convention will see 40 years since its inception in December, growing from 32 countries to now 51 Parties, and giving birth to eight protocols which have set emission reduction commitments through the decades, including Gothenburg.

UNECE has recognized that the LRTAP and its protocols have reached achievements that are “unparalleled”, from decoupling emissions and economic growth, cutting back certain air pollutants by 40 to 80 per cent, recovering forest soils from acidification, and avoiding some 600,000 premature deaths per year.

In another bid to protect human health and the environment this week, a group of more than 100 scientific experts have advised the elimination of a new group of hazardous chemicals, during the 15th meeting of the Stockholm Pollutant Review Committee (POPRC-15).

The compounds Perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS) and its salts, which are widely used in a number of consumer goods from carpets to clothing and leather, have shown to be detrimental to the human nervous system, brain development and endocrine system and thyroid hormone.

A follow-up 2020 meeting will further review impacts of two additional hazardous chemicals, Dechlorane Plus and Methoxychlor, taking into account the substances’ toxic impact on humans and wildlife, which would lead action toward their elimination, or reduction in production and use.

 

This story was originally published by UN News

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The UNCCD says land degradation costs the global economy over 15 trillion dollars annually. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Oct 4 2019 (IPS)

Desertification is not cheap. It has social, cultural, environmental and of course economic costs to reverse what it destroys.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) the scourge of desertification is costing the global economy up to 15 trillion dollars annually, making it urgent to restore degraded land to mitigate climate change. In August 2019, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s report  said better management of land can curb greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. IPCC scientists said tackling land degradation can help keep temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, a goal global governments are dithering to meet.

Holistic management, pioneered 50 years ago by acclaimed Zimbabwean ecologist, Allan Savory, is proving effective in the restoration of degraded land in many parts of the world where it is being applied.

The United States-based Savory is co-founder of the Savory Institute, a movement with a mission to regenerate the world’s grasslands through holistic management in order to address the global issues of desertification, climate change, and food and water insecurity. The Savory Institute is working along with its partner organisation, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM), located 36km from the resort town of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to regenerate deteriorating land in this southern African nation.

“It is all about the decisions we make,” says Sarah Savory, who works with the ACHM Education and training team. “Every decision we make always affect something else, because everything is connected – all people, plants, land, waters and animals. Trying to separate any of them like we do and manage successfully is no different to trying to successfully separate and manage the hydrogen in water.”

Savory talked to IPS about the management framework. Excerpts from the interview:

Inter Press Service (IPS): What is holistic management all about?

Sarah Savory (SS): Holistic management is not a practise at all. It is a management framework and anybody in the world can use it. From an individual making a decision and wanting to improve things in their daily lives or governments or organisations can use it to form a policy. All human actions are based on needs, desires and wants to address problems. What the framework does is it asks you to change the reason you make decisions. 
Did you know that we could change our world by just changing the context, or reason, we make our decisions? And we can make the change as individuals wanting a better world, or as any organisation wanting to develop better policies.

IPS: What is the context and where do we start?

SS: First of all, we have to STOP blaming coal, oil and livestock for causing global desertification and climate change. Those are all natural resources so how can they possibly be to blame? Only our management of those things can be causing problems. 

It is our management that places millions of animals in barbaric, inhumane, force-fed factories at great cost to our health, economy and environment and it is our management that calls fossil resources fossil fuels and burns them at a destructive rate. We could turn everything around today. Context is the foundation of holistic management. It is a statement about your most deeply held values, it is how you want your life to be, and the behaviours that will bring that about.

IPS: How does holistic management work?

SS: Within the holistic management framework, once you have formed your context and the reason you are going to make your decisions, you then get on with deciding what actions to take, what practices to use. Many practices are good but holistic management helps people know which and where any practice or action is appropriate.  For example, while a practice might be appropriate for one farmer in his unique holistic context, it might be completely wrong for his neighbour who will be dealing with his own completely different and unique complexity. 
Anyone can use this framework but people who manage land are truly dealing with all social, cultural and environmental complexity, so in those situations, they get to learn about animal impact and the holistic grazing process, which is a new, biological tool that can be used, in the right situation, to regenerate land.

IPS: Your institute has devised the holistic planned grazing process, what is this about?

SS: All the world’s grasslands developed together with many millions of large herding animals that remained concentrated and moving in the presence of the pack-hunting predators that evolved with them. These grazing herds and their predators were vital to maintaining the health of the grasslands. The herds churn up and aerate the soil with their hooves while simultaneously grazing, trampling and fertilising the grass, forming protective mulch over the soil, preparing it for the next growing season. This mulched soil will hold our rain which will filter down into the soil, instead of running off, taking our precious top soil and silting up our rivers. 

The holistic planned grazing of livestock is a new, biological tool available within the Holistic Management Framework, which is used to help regenerate land, in certain situations. This process ensures that the livestock are mimicking nature, as closely as possible, in order to consistently regenerate land, reverse desertification and restore biodiversity for wildlife and the people who live amongst them. 

Holistic planned grazing is not a “grazing plan” because herds of wildlife would never follow a grazing plan – they would naturally and constantly shift and change their movements according to all the variables going on around them: we are always dealing with ever-changing social, cultural, economic and environmental complexity.

IPS: Why is this framework not being adopted widely by governments and organisations?

SS: History and research shows that people struggle to accept or adapt new thinking and counter intuitive insights and this the huge problem we face, as well as the fact that no organisation will ever lead a change – historically, it is only when enough of the public opinion shifts that an organisation will make a shift and start changing policies.

For the first time in history, we are successfully addressing the knock-on effects and damage of centuries of reductionist management, which now threatens humanity as a whole. Where holistic management has been properly practiced, there isn’t a single case of it not leading to improvement. 

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A new United Nations report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan found that 12,599 youngsters had been confirmed killed or injured by fighting between 2015-2018 — 82 percent more than between 2011-2014. A mother and her children who live amid bomb rubble on Kabul's outskirts in this picture dated 2008. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 4 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations has warned that the past four years were among the deadliest for children in Afghanistan since the United States-led invasion of 2001, with nearly 13,000 youngsters killed and injured in that period.

U.N. secretary-general António Guterres’ new report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan found that 12,599 youngsters had been confirmed killed or injured by fighting between 2015-2018 — 82 percent more than between 2011-2014.

The report serves as a potent reminder that while peace talks between the U.S and the Taliban, a hardline Afghan militant group, have made fitful progress, life for ordinary Afghans remains blighted by violence and hardship.

Speaking with reporters on Thursday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Guterres was “deeply disturbed by the scale, severity and recurrence of grave violations endured by boys and girls” in Afghanistan over recent years.  

“The recruitment of children, mostly by armed groups, including the Taliban and Daesh, continued to be documented, as were over 800 attacks on schools and hospitals,” added Dujarric, using an alternate name for the Islamic State (IS) group. 

The 17-page study, which bore Guterres’ name but was compiled by his special envoy on children in wartime, Virginia Gamba, said that youngsters made up almost a third of all civilian casualties in Afghanistan. 

They were mostly killed or maimed by fighting on the ground, improvised explosive devices, airstrikes, suicide bomb blasts, and from unexploded weapons that detonated unexpectedly after they were deployed. 

“Children in Afghanistan have known nothing but heartbreaking realities as a result of violence and war,” Gamba said in a statement accompanying her report.

“The number of child casualties is appalling, and I urge all parties to immediately put an end to the suffering of children.” 

The U.N. blamed the Taliban, Afghanistan’s branch of IS, and other armed groups for most (43 percent) of the 3,450 children who were killed and 9,149 others who were maimed in the 18-year-old war.

Still, 30 percent of child casualties were blamed on Afghan security forces, pro-government forces, the U.S. and other international partners — a large increase on the previous four-year period.

Gamba noted the growing civilian death toll since the Afghan Air Force became capable of launching aerial attacks in 2015. Since the beginning of that year, some 1,049 children were killed or injured in attacks from the skies.

In one extreme case, Afghan Air Force helicopters in April 2018 fired rockets and heavy machine guns at an open-air graduation ceremony at a madrasa in Dasht-e Archi district of Kunduz Province, killing at least 30 children and injuring 51 others, the report said.

The Taliban, IS and Afghan security forces continue enlisting children as soldiers, the report said. Once they are released from service in militant groups, youngsters frequently end up in jail on national security charges.

“While the protection and well-being of children can only be reached through long-term peace, we must seize all available opportunities to improve right now the protection of boys and girls in Afghanistan,” added Gamba.

The report comes after U.S. and Taliban negotiators struck a draft peace deal last month aimed at leading to drawdowns of the 14,000 U.S. troops and thousands of NATO troops in the landlocked, South Asian country.

U.S. President Donald Trump broke off talks after Taliban militants carried out a Sept. 5 bomb attack in the capital Kabul that killed 12 people, including a U.S. soldier. Pakistan and the Taliban have since called for a fresh round of negotiations.

The Taliban currently controls more territory than it has since 2001, when the U.S invaded following the 9/11 attacks. The war has become deadlocked, with casualties rising among civilians and combatants despite fitful progress at peace talks in Qatar.

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By Ambassador Jan Eliasson
STOCKHOLM, Oct 4 2019 (IPS)

We will look at how modern conflicts will be affected by the recent unprecedented technological and societal developments. The nature of conflict is also changing. It is becoming more protracted, complex and unpredictable.

And let us not forget the wider picture – that modern conflicts are occuring against the backdrop of climate change, inequalities between and inside countries, injustice and human rights violations.

All this is already altering the way we live, work and relate to one another. It also profoundly impacts national and international security.

Artificial intelligence is all around us. From smartphones to smart cars, from drones to social media feeds, from streaming services to google translate software. In many ways, it does under the circumstances make our lives more comfortable.

Yet, the downside of advancing technology is the growing potential for harm. The same technology used in remote controls of home appliances may be used to “switch off” a power grid, a city or even a whole country.

“Cyber warfare”, “lethal autonomous weapons systems” – these expressions have already firmly entered our vocabulary. Even “space wars” might soon be more than just a product of once wild imagination.

Ambassador Jan Eliasson

In a way, this is not new. The history of warfare and international security is the history of technological innovation. From spear to rifle, from rifle to machine gun and from machine gun to drones. From conventional to nuclear. New technologies and new weapons have changed the conditions of warfare since prehistorical times.

As new technologies such as autonomous weapons become easier to use, small groups or even individuals may gain access to such weapons, using them to cause harm on a massive scale. This new vulnerability leads to new levels of risks and to new fears.

At the same time, advances in technology have the potential to reduce the scale or impact of violence through the development of new modes of protection. For example, greater precision in targeting should lead to less loss of civilian lives. Regretfully this is often not the case.

Digital connectivity, big data, high tech facial recognition technology – all these technologies are already used by humanitarian actors to provide a more efficient humanitarian response. Families separated by war have a chance to get reunited much faster thanks to new technologies.

So, is it a perfect storm or a window of opportunity?

Can the technological revolution bring us to catastrophes or will it offer innovative solutions? Will we lose human control over technology or will it become a tool of peace?

What if, one day human and artificial intelligence together could design formulas for prevention and conflict resolution?
Albert Einstein once said: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”. As an optimist – even though, lately, a worried optimist – I hope that we, together, can prove this to be wrong. It is our humanity that must prevail.

In the end, it all comes down to people and to values. To the fundamental principle of humanity. To “We, the peoples, …”. The first three words of the UN Charter.

Before I pass the floor to our distinguished key-note speaker and a dear friend of mine, UN USG Izumi Nakamitsu, I would like to say a few words of gratitude.

I would like to say Thank You to our partners and co-organisers of today´s event – Munich Security Conference, Crisis Management Initiative, MSB – The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and Mercy Corps.

A special thanks also to the Swedish Parliament that founded SIPRI as an international, independent organization in 1966 and to the speaker Norlén for being present here today.

Finally, I would also like to thank a special friend of SIPRI, Baron Per Taube, for his generous support of this conference and many other SIPRI initiatives and dialogues.

The post Modern Conflicts Against the Backdrop of Climate Change, Inequalities, Injustice & Human Rights Violations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ambassador Jan Eliasson, in an address to the fourth Stockholm Security Conference.

 

Ambassador Jan Eliasson is a Swedish diplomat and Chair of the Governing Board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). He was Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations from July 2012 to December 2016 and Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs in 2006

The post Modern Conflicts Against the Backdrop of Climate Change, Inequalities, Injustice & Human Rights Violations appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS.

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 4 2019 (IPS)

Enough food is produced today to feed everyone on the planet, but hunger is on the rise in some parts of the world, and some 821 million people are considered to be “chronically undernourished”. What steps are being taken to ensure that everyone, worldwide, receives sufficient food?

Thanks to rapid economic growth, and increased agricultural productivity over the last two decades, the number of people in the world who aren’t getting enough to eat has dropped by almost a half, with regions such as Central and East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean making great strides in eradicating extreme hunger. However, that’s against a background of the global population rising by nearly two billion.

And now recent trends suggest that the hunger problem persists: particularly in Africa and South America, where there are new indications that undernourishment and severe food insecurity are on the rise.

In Sub-Saharan Africa the number of undernourished people has increased, from some 195 million in 2014, to 237 million in 2017. Poor nutrition causes nearly half of deaths in children under five in the region, some 3.1 million children per year.

Five solutions to Zero Hunger

Whilst there is no silver bullet to solving hunger, the World Food Programme has outlined a vision that breaks the issue down into five steps.

- More protection for the most vulnerable. Expanding social protection for the poorest would raise the purchasing power of the poorest two billion, kickstarting local economies

- Improve infrastructure. Ensure consumers and suppliers can more easily buy and sell, by building better roads, storage facilities and extending electrification

- Reduce food waste. Around one third of the food produced each year is loss or wasted, costing the global economy some $1 trillion per year

- Grow a wider variety of crops. Around 60 per cent of all calories consumed come from just four crops: rice, wheat corn and soy. Ensuring food access and availability in the face of climate change will require the production of a wider range of foods.

- Focus on child nutrition. Good health and nutrition in a child’s first 1,000 days is essential to prevent stunting and promote healthy development.
Achieving the 2030 goal of Zero Hunger, in other words ensuring that nobody goes hungry wherever they are in the world, remains a major challenge.

According to a recent World Food Programme (WFP) the causes of increased hunger include environmental degradation and drought – both of which are impacted by climate change – as well as conflict.

The lack of biodiversity in agriculture is also a cause for concern, and is held responsible for homogenous diets which limit access to food, leading to persistent malnutrition and poverty: current agricultural production revolves around just 12 crops, and around 60 per cent of all calories consumed come from just four crops: rice, wheat corn and soy, despite the wealth of potential foodstuffs around the world.

The good news is that, around the world, innovation and technology are being used to improve a wide range of food production challenges. Here are some examples:

 

Papuan Pigs in the cloud

In Papua New Guinea, where pigs play an important role in the country’s culture and economy, no celebration is complete without a pork roast. The rising global demand for the meat means that farmers now have the opportunity to sell to overseas, as well as local, markets.

However, to do so they need to prove that their livestock meets internationally recognised standards, and this is where the latest digital technology can help.

A digital tracking system has been deployed which for the first time, verifies important information about the pigs. It includes their pedigree, what they were fed and, if they feel sick, what medicines they were prescribed, giving importers and consumers confidence in the quality of the meat they buy.

The system, designed with the help of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and International Telecommunications Unit (ITU), is being piloted in the Jiwaka region.The broadband network there is being improved, so that farmers can more easily use subsidised smartphones to update livestock records, which is stored online, in the cloud.

 

Women farmers in India have made the shift to organic farming., by UNDP India.

 

Weeding out the chemicals in India

Although initially credited with boosting crop yields and saving millions from famine, fertilizers and other chemicals are now under scrutiny in India. Fertilizers are blamed with soil degradation, and resulting stagnant productivity; health issues; and high costs that push farmers into debt. A tragic consequence is the thousands of reported suicides each year in the farming community.

However, in Andhra Pradesh, the UN Environment Programme is supporting an initiative designed to remove chemicals from the farm, using a technique called “Zero Budget Natural Farming” (ZBNF) which it hopes will transform and protect local food systems, and the long-term well-being of farmers.

This form of agriculture takes advantage of the latest scientific knowledgeand eliminates the need for chemicals. The core principles of ZBNF involve coating seeds with formulas made from cow urine and dung; applying these ingredients to the soil; covering the ground with crops and crop residues; and ensuring the soil is aerated.

This reliance on home-grown and readily available resources, allows the farmers involved in the programme  to increase biodiversity and rejuvenate their soils, thus cutting costs and increasing incomes. The regional government of Andhra Pradesh plans to scale up the scheme to some six million farmers by 2024, which would make it India’s first “natural farming” state.

 

Waste not, want not in Egypt

Around one-third of all food produced globally is either lost or wasted, a staggeringly profligate situation that is estimated to cost the global economy some $1 trillion per year. WFP is trying to stem losses through initiatives such as its #StopTheWaste awareness campaign, launched in early October. The campaign aims to build a global movement and highlight simple solutions that we can all take to fight food waste.

In Egypt, where about half of tomatoes and a third of grapes are lost through inefficient practices before they reach the consumer, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has partnered with the Egyptian government and cooperatives to find ways to limit food losses caused by production surpluses and inefficient practices. This video outlines some of the pragmatic solutions that have resulted from this collaboration.

 

 

This story was originally published by UN News

The post Can We Feed the World and Ensure No One Goes Hungry? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jannick Damgaard, Thomas Elkjaer and Niels Johannesen
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 3 2019 (IPS)

According to official statistics, Luxembourg, a country of 600,000 people, hosts as much foreign direct investment (FDI) as the United States and much more than China. Luxembourg’s $4 trillion in FDI comes out to $6.6 million a person.

FDI of this size hardly reflects brick-and-mortar investments in the minuscule Luxembourg economy. So, is something amiss with official statistics or is something else at play?

FDI is often an important driver for genuine international economic integration, stimulating growth and job creation and boosting productivity through transfers of capital, skills, and technology.

Therefore, many countries have policies to attract more of it. However, not all FDI brings capital in service of productivity gains. In practice, FDI is defined as cross-border financial investments between firms belonging to the same multinational group, and much of it is phantom in nature—investments that pass through empty corporate shells.

These shells, also called special purpose entities, have no real business activities. Rather, they carry out holding activities, conduct intrafirm financing, or manage intangible assets—often to minimize multinationals’ global tax bill.

Such financial and tax engineering blurs traditional FDI statistics and makes it difficult to understand genuine economic integration.

Better data are needed to understand where, by whom, and why $40 trillion in FDI is being channeled around the world. Combining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) detailed FDI data with the global coverage of the IMF’s Coordinated Direct Investment Survey, a new study (Damgaard, Elkjaer, and Johannesen) creates a global network that maps all bilateral investment relationships—disentangling phantom FDI from genuine FDI.

Interestingly, a few well-known tax havens host the vast majority of the world’s phantom FDI. Luxembourg and the Netherlands host nearly half. And when you add Hong Kong SAR, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Singapore, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Ireland, and Mauritius to the list, these 10 economies host more than 85 percent of all phantom investments.

Why and how does this handful of tax havens attract so much phantom FDI?

In some cases, it is a deliberate policy strategy to lure as much foreign investment as possible by offering lucrative benefits—such as very low or zero effective corporate tax rates.

Even if the empty corporate shells have no or few employees in the host economy and do not pay corporate taxes, they still contribute to the local economy by buying tax advisory, accounting, and other financial services, as well as by paying registration and incorporation fees. For the tax havens in the Caribbean, these services account for the main share of GDP, alongside tourism.

In Ireland, the corporate tax rate has been lowered substantially from 50 percent in the 1980s to 12.5 percent today. In addition, some multinationals take advantage of loopholes in Irish law by using innovative tax engineering techniques with creative nicknames like “double Irish with a Dutch sandwich,” which involves transfers of profits between subsidiaries in Ireland and the Netherlands with tax havens in the Caribbean as the typical final destination.

These tactics achieve even lower tax rates or avoid taxes altogether. Despite the tax cuts, Ireland’s revenues from corporate taxes have gone up as a share of GDP because the tax base has grown significantly, in large part from massive inflows of foreign investment.

This strategy may be helpful to Ireland, but it erodes the tax bases in other economies. The global average corporate tax rate was cut from 40 percent in 1990 to about 25 percent in 2017, indicating a race to the bottom and pointing to a need for international coordination.

Globally, phantom investments amount to an astonishing $15 trillion, or the combined annual GDP of economic powerhouses China and Germany.

And despite targeted international attempts to curb tax avoidance—most notably the G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative and the automatic exchange of bank account information within the Common Reporting Standard (CRS)—phantom FDI keeps soaring, outpacing the growth of genuine FDI.

In less than a decade, phantom FDI has climbed from about 30 percent to almost 40 percent of global FDI (see chart). This growth is unique to FDI. According to Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (2018), FDI positions have grown faster than world GDP since the global financial crisis, whereas cross-border positions in portfolio instruments and other investments have not.

While phantom FDI is largely hosted by a few tax havens, virtually all economies—advanced, emerging market, and low-income and developing—are exposed to the phenomenon.

Most economies invest heavily in empty corporate shells abroad and receive substantial investments from such entities, with averages across all income groups exceeding 25 percent of total FDI.

Investments in foreign empty shells could indicate that domestically controlled multinationals engage in tax avoidance. Similarly, investments received from foreign empty shells suggest that foreign-controlled multinationals try to avoid paying taxes in the host economy. Unsurprisingly, an economy’s exposure to phantom FDI increases with the corporate tax rate.

Globalization creates new challenges for macroeconomic statistics. Today, a multinational company can use financial engineering to shift large sums of money across the globe, easily relocate highly profitable intangible assets, or sell digital services from tax havens without having a physical presence.

These phenomena can hugely impact traditional macroeconomic statistics—for example, inflating GDP and FDI figures in tax havens. Prominent cases include Irish GDP growth of 26 percent in 2015, following some multinationals’ relocation of intellectual property rights to Ireland, and Luxembourg’s status as one of the world’s largest FDI hosts. To get better data on a globalized world, economic statistics also need to adapt.

The new global FDI network is useful to identify which economies host phantom investments and their counterparts, and it gives a clearer understanding of globalization patterns. Such data offer greater insight to analysts and can guide policymakers in their attempt to address international tax competition.

The taxation agenda has gained traction among the G20 economies in recent years. The BEPS and CRS initiatives are examples of the international community’s efforts to tackle weaknesses in the century-old tax design, but the issues of tax competition and taxing rights remain largely unaddressed.

However, this seems to be changing with emerging widespread agreement on the need for significant reforms. Indeed, this year the IMF put forward various alternatives for a revised international tax architecture, ranging from minimum taxes to allocation of taxing rights to destination economies.

No matter which road policymakers choose, one fact remains clear: international cooperation is the key to dealing with taxation in today’s globalized economic environment.

*The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions with which they are affiliated.

The post The Rise of Phantom Investments appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Jannick Damgaard is currently advisor to the executive director in the IMF’s Office of the Nordic-Baltic Executive Director. Most of this research was carried out in his previous role as senior economist at the National Bank of Denmark. Thomas Elkjaer is a senior economist in the IMF’s Statistics Department, and Niels Johannesen is a professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Economic Behaviour and Inequality.

The post The Rise of Phantom Investments appeared first on Inter Press Service.

When she was 20 Mary Njambi was trafficked to Saudi Arabia where she thought she would obtain work as a well-paid domestic worker. Instead, she was treated as a slave and was sexually abused. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Oct 3 2019 (IPS)

Six years ago Mary Njambi* received news of a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity far away from her poverty-stricken village situated in the heart of Kiambu County, Central Kenya. She was 20 years old, a single mother and out of work.

“My best friend told me that rich families in Saudia (Saudi Arabia) were in need of house maids. My salary would be 1,000 dollars per month and overtime,” Njambi tells IPS.

Her friend took her to a recruiting agency in downtown Nairobi where all travel arrangements were made at no cost to her.

Three months later, Njambi and 15 other girls made that fateful journey to Saudi Arabia.

“We all separated at the airport and I was taken to my employer’s home. The moment I walked in, a woman started barking orders at me in Arabic even though I did not speak the language,” she says. At this point, Njambi had no way of knowing that she had been trafficked.

Kenya a transit point for trafficking

The 2019 Global Report Trafficking in Persons report released in June by the United States Department of State profiles Kenya as a source, transit point and destination for people subjected to sex trafficking and forced labour.

Released every year, the report classifies countries into four tiers based on their government’s demonstrated commitment to eliminate human trafficking.

• Tier 1 ranking is the highest and indicates that a government meets the minimum standards of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.
• A country such as Kenya, with a Tier 2 rating, has not met these standards but has made significant efforts to do so.
• The Tier 2 Watch List, on which Kenya was placed until 2015, is similar to Tier 2 with the exception that the number of human trafficking victims is significantly high or significantly increasing.
• Tier 3, which is the worst ranking, indicates that a country such as Saudi Arabia has not met minimum standards to eliminate human trafficking, and is not making significant efforts to do so.

“These efforts include criminalising human trafficking and providing care for survivors,” Victor Amugo, a prosecutor at Kilifi Law Courts, Coastal region which is a hub for human trafficking to Somalia, tells IPS.

According to Wilkister Vera, Kakamega’s County Police Commander in Western Kenya, law enforcers are diligently fighting human trafficking.

“We are targeting the entire network of recruiters, places where victims are held before they are moved, transportation and following the paper trail including work permits and passports,” she tells IPS.

“Systems are also in place to take care of victims through the National Referral Mechanism,” she adds.

Young women and girls the most vulnerable

The Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative, a data hub on human trafficking, affirms that like Njambi, children and youth are more vulnerable to human trafficking for primarily sexual exploitation and forced labour.

• One in every six victims trafficked is a child,
• Two-thirds are aged 18 through 29,
• 17 percent are aged between 30 and 47, and
• Less than one percent are over 47 years.

“Poverty and gender inequalities are some of the factors that make women and girls vulnerable to human trafficking,” Zuleikha Hassan, Kwale County Member of Parliament, and founder of Tawfiq Muslim Association, tells IPS. “We have to aggressively educate communities to identify human trafficking situations that come disguised as the job of a lifetime.”

Njambi says that back-breaking house work, working for at least 18 hours a day and sleeping on the floor characterised the first few days of employment. It quickly escalated to physical and sexual violence.

Days spiralled into months without a single day off and with no pay. “One day I went to the rooftop and threatened to jump off if they did not take me back home and it worked,” she narrates.

This was in 2013, at that time, news that hundreds of Kenyan girls were distressed and stranded in the Middle East was spreading across the country.

“The lucky ones made it home bruised and battered. Others came back in coffins. In 2014, the government banned Kenyans from travelling to the Middle East for work,” says Dinah Mbula*, who runs a recruiting agency in downtown Nairobi.

“There was a crackdown by the government targeting recruiting agencies but horror stories did not scare desperate unemployed people from going to the Middle East,” Mbula tells IPS.

Victims of trafficking treated like criminals 

In 2000, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (the Palermo Protocol), marked an important transition into the modern movement against human trafficking.

Kenya is signatory to the Palermo Protocol, which led to the domestication of the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2010, which came into effect in 2012.

“Section 1 of the Counter-Trafficking in Persons Act criminalises sex and labour trafficking,” says Amugo.

Although the Trafficking in Persons report affirms that there are now more prosecutions and convictions of traffickers in Kenya, Amugo says that the numbers could rise if all prosecutions were made under the anti-trafficking laws rather than the more lenient immigration or labour violations laws.

Those convicted under anti-trafficking laws serve 15 years to life imprisonment, a fine of not less than 50,000 dollars, or both.

“Victims of human trafficking are treated like criminals. That is why recruiters continue doing their job because they know chances that a victim will report to the police are next to zero,” Mbula expounds.

Kenya bans and then lifts ban on citizens working the Middle East

Also, this East African nation has lifted the ban on its citizens travelling to the Gulf for work.

The Kenyan government signed bi-lateral agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates and lifted the ban in 2017.

The government insisted on re-vetting recruitment agencies after lifting the ban. But Mbula says that more than 1,000 agencies were vetted and only 100 were cleared but because of corruption “we are still in business with or without a license.”

From early 2019, Kenya allowed Saudi Arabia to recruit domestic workers again.  

According to the Ministry of Labour, at least 130,000 Kenyans work as domestic workers in the Arabian Gulf.

Njambi confirms that it is easier to just disappear in the village than speak out because “people tell you to be grateful you came back alive. There is no support of any kind or counselling.”

She now runs a grocery store at her local shopping centre. 

She says that victims are often compared to others who went to the Middle East and succeeded: “People say your experience was just bad luck and advise you to try other countries like Lebanon. My story is repeating itself everyday because people are desperate.”

*Names changed to protect identity of source

—————————————–The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

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The post Human Trafficking – It Came Disguised as the Opportunity of a Lifetime appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Riana Group.

The post Human Trafficking – It Came Disguised as the Opportunity of a Lifetime appeared first on Inter Press Service.