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Global South-South Development Expo 2018. Credit: UNOSSC

By Branislav Gosovic
GENEVA, Dec 21 2018 (IPS)

The upcoming conference on the Buenos Aires Plan of Action (BAPA+40), scheduled to take place in the Argentine capital on 20-22 March 2019, ought to be more than just another UN conference where the developing countries assemble to present their demands and seek support from the North.

Also, it must not turn out to be a replay of the 2009 1st UN High-level Conference on South-South Cooperation*, i.e. an anodyne event in terms of impact and follow-up, though such a scenario may be preferred by some, risk of which exists since the 2019 gathering is also scheduled to last only three days, not enough time for genuine deliberations and negotiations.

Therefore, it is up to the developing countries to build up BAPA+40 into a major global event.

a. South-South cooperation and the United Nations system

One of the key objectives of the Global South at BAPA+40 should be to place South-South cooperation at the very centre of the UN system of multilateral cooperation.

The UN system needs to recognize the diversity and broad spectrum that SSC subsumes, to resist the limits being imposed on SSC and it being distanced and cut off from its original institutional and political roots and aspirations.

The United Nations ought to introduce clear and specific measures and programmes, necessary human and financial resources, and mandates by “mainstreaming” and “enhancing support” for SSC in every organization and agency of the UN system, to have them incorporate the needs and objectives of South-South cooperation.

It needs also to be reiterated that South-South cooperation is not a substitute for North-South development cooperation, but a parallel and new sphere of multilateral cooperation that opens new and promising opportunities, stimulates North-South cooperation, and provides alternative and innovative approaches in development cooperation.

In the fold of the UN, a significant, yet very limited step to mainstream South-South Cooperation has been taken by upgrading the UNDP Special Unit for TCDC first into a Special Unit for South-South Cooperation and then into the UN Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC).

This cannot and should not be the end-station, but needs to be followed up ambitiously and seriously at the global level, by appointment of a UN Secretary-General’s high level representative who would provide political vision for South-South cooperation and the establishment of a UN specialized entity within the UNDP platform or in the UN Development System (UNDS) in the making, whose mission would be to promote South-South cooperation, as recommended by the Group of 77 Ministerial Meeting.

Any such entity would need to have its own intergovernmental machinery, a major capital development fund for South-South projects, and fully staffed substantive secretariat equipped to perform a number of important functions, including initiating and funding projects, undertaking research, maintaining a data base on SSC and a directory of national actors involved in SSC, and publishing a regular, periodic UN report on South-South Cooperation called for by G77 Summits.

A suggestion has been floated to consider entrusting this task to UNCTAD, given that its mandate concerning North-South issues has been eroded and its role marginalized.

Such a central entity for SSC would need to be backed, at the regional level, by greatly strengthened and invigorated UN regional economic commissions in the South.

These Commissions are the principal UN bodies based in and with a full knowledge of their respective regions. Their key mission should be the promotion of South-South cooperation or “horizontal cooperation”, as traditionally referred to in Latin America.

The proposed structure, drawing also on UN specialized agencies in their areas of competence, would have as one of its tasks to support and energize sub-regional, regional and inter-regional South-South cooperation.

Regular, high-level UN conferences on South-South cooperation would need to be convened, and a consolidated and regular substantive, analytical and statistical UN report on the state of South-South cooperation will need to be prepared.

b. Global South and South-South cooperation

Given the overall global context, the developing countries cannot rely solely on the United Nations, even if and when the suggested institutional improvements are approved and become operational.

South-South cooperation is an opportunity for the Global South to contribute to achieving a number of outstanding goals and aspirations and be a vehicle for reshaping the global system.

For this to happen, however, what is needed on the part of the developing countries is hard work, mobilization of resources and of collective power, major and sustained efforts and commitment/obligation to pursue and attain a series of objectives that need to be identified and agreed on.

In their efforts to follow this advice, in addition to many practical obstacles and problems, the developing countries would also encounter opposition and doubts within their own ranks, not to mention a frontal or undercover resistance by actors of the North.

This resistance would especially come from those who would consider every major move in that direction as a potential threat to their own interests and global designs, and would, very likely, take steps, including within individual developing countries, often with local support and even via ”inconvenient” regime and leadership change, to influence and embroil the collective efforts.

What matters, however, is that today the Global South has the resources and collective power to move forward, and that this is not a “mission impossible”, as some who are familiar with problems and difficulties encountered in South-South cooperation efforts and undertakings and the building and management of joint institutions might point out. There is little that stands in the way of:

• Undertaking a critical, in-depth review and analysis of: South-South cooperation, important actions and proposals agreed on over the years and their implementation, experiences, public attitudes, performance of individual countries, functioning of joint institutions and mechanisms of cooperation and integration, main obstacles and shortcomings that call for action, including the all too frequent difficulties or failure to follow up on important decisions taken at the political level.

• Focussing on how to resolve the issue of lack of adequate financing for South-South cooperation, activities, projects and institutions, probably one of the most serious practical obstacles standing in the way of SSC being put into practice as desired and called for.

• Inspiring, informing about and involving in the South-South cooperation project the public and individuals; with this in mind, applying capacity-building and training to raise the awareness of the existing experiences and opportunities; using to this end also educational, marketing, media and public relations approaches, which are so common in contemporary society and are used not only to advertise and publicize goods and services, but also political and social goals and causes, in this case the common identity of the South as an entity.

• Setting up a South organization for South-South cooperation, and pooling together and networking intellectual and analytical resources available in the South and internationally to staff and support the work of that institution.

• Placing on the agenda the challenge of intellectual self-empowerment of the Global South and the harnessing of its intellectual resources and institutions into an interactive network for support of common goals and collective actions.

• Evolving, at the highest level, a representative system of political authority (e.g., heads of state or government, one delegated from each region) for regular and ad hoc communication, consultations and contacts, for meetings to assess progress in the implementation of agreed SSC goals, and for communication/interaction with all heads of state and/or government in the Global South.

• Based on the workings and experience of the South Commission, of the now defunct UN Committee on Development Planning and of the G77 High-Level Panel of Eminent Personalities of the South, to consider establishing a permanent South-South commission or committee to bring together, on a regular basis, high-stature personalities and thinkers from the South to reflect and deliberate on challenges faced by the developing countries and by the international community.

• Elaborating and agreeing on a blueprint for national self-empowerment for South-South cooperation, to guide and be used as a reference by the individual developing countries in line with their own characteristics and capacities, and transforming this blueprint into a legal instrument binding for all developing countries.

• Nurturing, training and educating future cadres and leaders for South-South cooperation, directly exposing them to and familiarizing them with different problems and different regions of the South, and, when they are ready, deploying them in national, sub-regional, regional and multilateral, including UN, settings.

• Focussing on the role of “digital South-South cooperation” in the promotion and energizing of all forms of South-South cooperation, including closer contacts, communication, information sharing and interaction, mutual understanding between and among the peoples and countries of the South, transfer of technology, and education and culture.

• Calling for closer cooperation between and joint initiatives of G77 and NAM, an important pending political and institutional topic on the agenda of the Global South.

There is little new in the above suggestions, which draw on practical experiences and have been articulated over the years and in different contexts. What they propose is within reach, is doable, and would represent a major “leap forward” for South-South cooperation.

What is needed today is firm political will, long-term vision and determined initiative for a group of the South’s countries and leaders to launch such a process on the desired track and, most importantly, sustain it with the necessary political commitment and financial and institutional support.

The 2019 Buenos Aires Conference in March next year is an opportunity for the South to stand up and raise its collective voice, as at the very beginnings of South-South cooperation in Bandung (1955), Belgrade (1961), Geneva (1964) and Algiers (1967).

* This article is a shortened version of the concluding pages of an extensive essay “On the eve of BAPA+40 – South-South Cooperation in today’s geopolitical context”, which was published in VESTNIK RUDN. International Relations, 2018, Volume 18, Issue 03, October 2018, pp. 459-478, the international journal of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN), formerly Patrice Lumumba University, in a special volume to mark the 40th anniversary of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action. (See http://journals.rudn.ru/international-relations/article/view/20098/16398 )

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Excerpt:

Branislav Gosovic, worked in UNCTAD, UNEP, UNECLAC, World Commission on Environment and Development, South Commission, and South Centre (1991-2005), and is the author of the recently-published book ‘The South Shaping the Global Future, 6 Decades of the South-North Development Struggle in the UN.’

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About 2.58 million metric tonnes of raw plastics are imported into Ghana annually of which about 73 percent of this effectively ends up as waste. Credit: Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By Albert Oppong-Ansah
ACCRA, Dec 21 2018 (IPS)

Twelve-year-old Naa Adjeley lives in Glefe, a waterlogged area that is one of the biggest slums along the west coast of Accra, Ghana. The sixth grade student, his parents and three siblings use 30 single-use plastic bags per day for breakfast.

When they finish eating the balls of ‘kenkey’, fried mackerel, and pepper sauce, the plastic bags that the food was individually wrapped in are dumped into the river that runs through the slum, eventually ending up in the ocean, which lies a mere 50 metres from their home.

In one month, this family alone contributes over 900 pieces of single-use plastics to the five trillion pieces of microplastic in the ocean. This is because their community of over 1,500 households, which sits on a wetlands, does not have a waste disposal system.

So assuming that their neighbours also dump their waste into the river and that they consume similar amounts of plastics per day, this means they add over 1.3 million pieces of single-use plastics to the sea each month.

The situation is the same in all the other settlements that are close to degraded lagoons around the ocean.

To date, Accra has some 265 informal settlementss, including Chorkor, James town, Osu, Labadi, Teshie, Korlegonor, Opetequaye, Agege and Old Fadama.

With all of these being in different stages of development, according to a recent study by the People’s Dialogue on Human Settlements (PD) Ghana, a non-governmental organisation. Professor Alfred Oteng-Yeboah, Chair of the Ghana National Biodiversity Committee, recalls that 10 years ago food was packaged with leaves and women went to the market with woven baskets or cotton bags.

“Now because of civilisation, every food item or prepared food bought in this country is first wrapped in a single-use plastic and then is kept in plastic carrier bags. If Accra has a population of over 2.6 million and everyone uses a single plastic every day, just calculate how much plastic waste is generated per day,” he told IPS.

About 2.58 million metric tonnes of raw plastics are imported into Ghana annually, of which 73 percent effectively ends up as waste, while only 19 percent is re-used, according to the country’s Environmental Protection Agency.

Sadly, less than 0.1 percent of the waste is recycled, meaning all the plastic waste generated ends up in the environment.

John Pwamang, Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, is worried about the discharge of plastics into the various lagoons, and ultimately in the sea. “The reckless manner in which we throw away waste has become the most insidious threat to the ocean today,” he told IPS.

“We have to keep reminding ourselves that we are fast reaching the point where there will literally be more plastics in the sea than fish. Our fishermen will agree with me as they already are experiencing it. They always have more plastics than fish in their trawls. I am inclined to believe that the situation in Ghana may be more dire than it would appear,” he said.

Dr Kofi Okyere, a Senior Lecturer at the Cape Coast University, says lagoons are home to diverse species. There are 90 lagoons and 10 estuaries with their associated marshes and mangrove swamps along Ghana’s 550-km coastline stretch.

“Although I cannot put precise statistical figures, most of the lagoons, especially those located in urban areas, have been heavily polluted within the last decade or two. The pollutants are largely domestic and industrial effluent discharge, sewage, plastics, aerosol cans and other solid wastes, and heavy metal contaminants (lead, mercury, arsenic, etc.) from industrial activities,” he told IPS.

Nelson Boateng, Chief Executive Director of Nelplast Ghana Limited, is one of a group of people and companies that are finding alternative uses for plastic waste. He is holding a paving brick made from recycled plastic. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

However, while a large number of Ghanaians are still using plastic, and discarding it, there are a few people and organisations that are putting the plastic to better use.

Nelson Boateng, Chief Executive Director of Nelplast Ghana limited, began moulding and creating pavement blocks from plastic in 2015.

The company uses 70 percent sand and 30 percent plastic to manufacture the pavement blocks, but the ratio of the two materials changes depending on the kind of pavement project.

Walking IPS through the process in an interview, he explains the plastic waste is mixed with sand and taken through a melting process, and then the pavement slab is ready.

“So far we have paved many important areas, including residential areas, the premises of the Action Chapel, the frontage of Ghana’s Ministry of Environment Science, Technology and Innovation and some walkways in the country.”

“The advantage of plastic pavement blocks compared to the conventional cement blocks is that it is 30 percent cheaper, it does not break, there is no green algae growth, it does not fade. A square metre of our plastic paves cost GHC 33 (6.9 dollars) while the concrete cost 98 (20.20 dollars) I am doing this because I love the environment and I did all this on my own to beat plastic,” he said.

Currently, Boateng is recycling 2,000 kilos of plastic waste, but his factory, which is situated on a one-acre piece of land at the Ashaiman Municipal Assembly, has the capacity to produce 200,000 plastic pavement blocks.

Of the over 500 waste pickers who sell plastics to Boateng, 60 percent are women who depend on this as their livelihood. With the price of a kilo being 10 US cents women make a minimum of 10.40 dollars per sale.

Ashietey Okaiko, 34, a single mother and plastic picker of Nelplast Ghana limited, confirmed to IPS that she earns 31 dollars on average per sale, and that is what she uses to take care of her family.

“Because people now know that plastic waste is valuable, many women who are now employed are picking plastics. The company needs support to be able to buy more because sometimes when we send it they do not buy,” she says.

Boateng stated that pickers could collect up to the tune of 10,000 kilograms a day, saying, “I feel bad telling them I cannot pay due to financial constraints.”

Similar to Boateng’s innovation is the efforts of the Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprises (GRIPE), an industry-led coalition under the auspices of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), a non-governmental organisation, that is manufacturing modified building blocks out of plastic.

The initiative, carried out in conjunction with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, is pending certification by the Ghana Standard Authority for commercial use.

Ama Amoah, Regional Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Manager at Nestle, a leading member of GRIPE, told IPS that the group has done community and schools education and awareness campaigns on proper waste management practices for plastics.

There are also other innovators such as Seth Quansah, who runs Alchemy Alternative Energy, which is converting plastic waste and tires through internationally approved and environmentally sound processes into hydrocarbon energy, mainly diesel-grade fuels.

Through the Ghana Climate Innovations Centre, and Denmark and the Netherlands through the World Bank, Quansah has received mentorship and is preparing to expand the company.

Ghana’s Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Ken Ofori Atta, says the Ministry of Environment, Science Technology and Innovation (MESTI) is in the process of finalising a new National Plastic Waste Policy, which will focus on strategies to promote reduction, reuse, and recycling.

But Helen La Trobe, an environmental volunteer in Ghana, tells IPS, “African industry should seek innovative approaches to reduce plastic use and plastic waste in all its forms by replacing plastic with other innovative products and reducing, reusing and recycling where replacing is not currently possible.”

She also wants the government to provide adequate public rubbish bins at trotro stops (bus stops) and markets to have these frequently emptied.

She says plastic is indestructible and breaks into smaller and smaller parts, called microplastics, but it takes more than 500 years to completely disappear. 

According to Trobe, microplastics and microbeads, tiny polyethylene plastic added to health and beauty products such as some skin cleansers and toothpaste, absorb toxins and industrial chemicals from the environment. As fish and other marine life ingest tiny pieces of plastic, the toxins and chemicals enter their tissue and then the food chain, which ultimately affect humans.  

While Boateng does not believe that production of plastic is a problem, but that authorities need to support innovators and there is a need for a behavioural change, he adds, “The more the support, the cleaner the environment. If we are serious of ridding the country and the sea of plastics this is the way forward. When people go to the beach to clean up, the waste ends ups in the land field site, which is still in the environment.”

Related Articles

• Restoring Ghana’s Mangroves and Depleted Fish Stock
• Marine Waste is Turning the Earth into a Plastic Planet
• Seychelles Issues World’s First Blue Bond to Fund Fisheries Projects

The post Ghana’s Contribution to Plastic Waste Can Be Reduced with the Right Investment appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 2018 (IPS)

The dangers of mercury contamination have escalated from the dental chair to the realm of outer space.

First, it was the hazardous use of mercury in dentistry, then in cosmetics, particularly skin-lightening creams, and now it is threatening to make its way into satellite propulsion systems.

A coalition of over 45 civil society organizations (CSOs) and environmental groups worldwide has warned against the use of mercury in satellite propulsion systems because it is “highly likely that most, if not all,” of the mercury emitted at the altitudes planned would find its way back– and eventually into the earth’s surface.

This has been demonstrated by many studies, including a UN report, on the long-range transport of mercury, says the coalition in a letter directed at Silicon Valley/satellite companies that are considering using mercury in thrusters to power satellites.

While details are hard to come by, it appears that because mercury is far less expensive than other propellants, there is considerable interest in its use in rocket thrusters for satellites, according to a recent article in Bloomberg.

“The bottom line is that if mercury is widely used to propel satellites, the resulting releases would significantly increase the global pool of mercury in the atmosphere and hydrosphere,” the coalition warns.

The letter, spelling out the dangers, has been addressed to Mike Cassidy, CEO and co-founder Ben Longmier, CTO and co-founder Apollo Fusion, Inc.; Greg Wyler, Founder and Executive Chairman, OneWeb; Will Marshall, CEO and Robbie Schingler, CSO, Planet Labs; and Gwynne Shotwell, President and CEO of Space X.

Michael Bender, International Coordinator of the Zero Mercury Working Group told IPS that while there maybe marketing ‘cost savings’ from mercury to propel satellites, Apollo fails to recognize the costs, risks and impacts of a new mercury source on human health and the environment.

“This flies in the face of not only U.S., but global efforts, to reduce mercury pollution,” he added.

The letter “strongly urges” the chief executive officers (CEOs) to publicly pledge to avoid mercury in satellite propulsion systems, as it poses a severe risk of contributing to a worsening global mercury crisis.

According to media reports, Apollo Fusion, Inc. is considering the use of mercury in its satellite propulsion systems and SpaceX, along with OneWeb and Planet Labs were mentioned as potential customers, although the latter two both deny it.

Over the past several decades, the U.S. and other governments around the world have spent billions to regulate and reduce mercury emissions from major sources and eliminate the use of mercury in products and processes where viable substitutes exist, says the letter.

“That’s because mercury circulates in the atmosphere and ultimately making its way into humans by moving up the aquatic food chain. Health agencies worldwide—including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and all 50 states (in the US) —warn pregnant women to avoid or limit consumption of certain fish primarily because of mercury exposure risks for the developing fetus.”

In a statement released December 20, Jane Williams, Executive Director of California Communities Against Toxics, said most of the mercury emitted from satellite propulsion systems will eventually find its way back to the earth’s surface according to numerous studies of the long-range transport of mercury.”

“If mercury is widely used to propel satellites, the resulting releases would significantly increase the global pool of mercury in the atmosphere and hydrosphere.”

“The Minamata Convention on Mercury seeks to reduce, and where feasible, eliminate all uses of mercury where technically-achievable mercury-free alternatives are available,” said Elena Lymberidi-Settimo, ZMWG International Co-coordinator at the European Environmental Bureau in Brussels.

“In the case of satellite propulsion systems, mercury-free alternatives have been available and almost universally used for decades.”

The second United Nations Conference of the Parties for the Minamata Convention on Mercury met in Geneva last month to further the Convention’s objective “to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds.”

So far, over 100 countries (with the U.S. being the first) have ratified the Convention, which entered into force in August 2017.

Yet much more mercury reduction work is needed, because according to an upcoming UN report, global mercury emissions rose by 20% between 2010 and 2015.

There is already a global campaign against the use of mercury in dentistry.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2016/07/global-coalition-seeks-ban-on-mercury-use/
http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/11/global-campaign-mercury-free-dentistry-targets-africa/

Among other provisions, the Minamata Convention seeks to reduce, and where feasible, eliminate all uses of mercury where cost-effective, technically-achievable mercury-free alternatives are available.

In the case of satellite propulsion systems, mercury-free alternatives have been available and almost universally used for decades.

In the 1970s, NASA recognized the risks related to mercury propulsion systems in satellites and chose other options – even though NASA recognized mercury was cheaper to use, says the coalition.

“The mercury-driven propulsion technology developed and marketed by Apollo for satellites will have dire implications if widely applied.”

The letter also cites a recent media report which says ‘the amount of propellant in each [satellite] would depend on various factors…A case study on Apollo’s website that the company calls a “representative configuration” ideal for a low-orbit satellite would carry 20 kilograms of an unnamed propellant.”

“Multiply that by 1,000, and the constellation of satellites could use 20,000kg, or 20 metric tons of mercury, which would be released over the satellites’ estimated five to seven years in orbit. By comparison, the U.S. emits about 50 metric tons of mercury each year…”

As part of the upcoming review of Annex A and B to the Minamata Convention on Mercury, the coalition plans to raise the use of mercury as a propulsion fuel for possible inclusion in Annex A, the list of prohibited mercury-added products under the Convention.

“Therefore, we join with others in strongly urging the above aforementioned companies to pledge to avoid using mercury as a propellant in satellites,” the letter adds.

Meanwhile, there has also been a global campaign warning about the dangers of mercury use in the cosmetics industry – particularly in skin-lightening products.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/11/e-commerce-giants-fire-retailing-hazardous-mercury-based-cosmetics/

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The 12th plenary meeting of the COP upon conclusion of the joint statements plenary. PHOTO: COP24

By Mizan Khan
Dec 20 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

The Conference of the Parties 24 (COP24) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has ended on December 15, with the usual extension of more than a day to complete the deliberations. Almost 25,000 delegates from the government, non-government, private sector and faith community attended the meeting, which was mandated to adopt the Rulebook for implementation of the Paris Agreement (PA). Analysis of the event is forthcoming yet, but based on my experience as a member of the Bangladesh delegation, I regard the ultimate outcome as not satisfactory, almost frustrating, but way better than the “Brokenhagen” of 2009.

The most rancorous elements that appeared at the meeting are: recognition of the science of climate change as presented by the IPCC 1.5C Special Report; urgency of ramping up the mitigation ambition to match the call of science; fixing the share/levy of emissions trading transferable to a yet-to-be structured mechanism, replacing the Clean Development Mechanism under the soon-to-die Kyoto Protocol; the issues of climate finance (CF); and the agenda of Loss & Damage (L&D). Some elements have been agreed upon: that all countries will have to report their emissions and show progress in cutting every two years from 2024, after the global stock-taking at COP29 in 2023.

The contestations cantered particularly on two issues: how to recognise the latest IPCC Report, which entails how clearly countries should signal the need for greater mitigation to stay below the temperature limit of 1.5 degrees, the aspirational goal set under the PA. The agreed text just hints, instead of using strong language, at the need for more ambitious emission reduction pledges before 2020, which frustrates the most vulnerable countries, UN organisations and NGO activists. With tensions mounting, the UN Secretary-General Guterres had to visit the meeting several times to plead for progress. Despite settling on some parts of the Paris Rulebook, countries failed to agree on substantive issues, such as defining the ex-ante and ex-post provision of information on CF.

Actually, CF continues to be one of the most rancorous issues in all COPs, since 2015 when developed countries pledged to deliver USD 100 billion a year from 2020. Even before COP24, the rules governing CF reporting under Article 9 of the PA were expected to be direly contentious. The rules cover Article 9.5 of the PA (reporting on the projected availability of CF in future), and Article 9.7 (reporting on money already delivered). The agreed text now says developed countries “shall” and developing countries “should” report on any CF they provide, but the sought-after criteria-based common reporting format could not be agreed.

But in absence of an agreed understanding of what CF is, countries have wiggle room for creative accounting. This was starkly evident again at COP24. The decision language under both parts of Article 9 is relatively permissive, which allows countries to report the full value of loans, rather than the “grant equivalent” share as CF. Another persistent issue is the “double/triple” counting of the same money, provided through all the Rio conventions or different delivery channels. The fixing of accounting methodologies subjectively by finance providers does not allow any comparability among them. An additional prick in CF is its extreme fragmentation in delivery, with channels both public and private ranging from 99 to over 500 including over 22 multilateral CF funds. There are too many overlaps involving huge transaction costs, generating frustrations both at delivery and receiving ends. This warrants a “thinning out” of weedy tendrils of CF bureaucracies, which often clog the money to reach the target communities. So, one good decision at COP24 was the organising of a workshop next year on “effectiveness” of CF to measure its impacts at the ground. The Bangladesh delegation strongly pushed for this.

Just weeks before the meeting in Katowice, the OECD published a report on CF, which shows that in 2017 their members have provided USD 56.7 billion as CF to developing countries, but it did not specify the methodologies of reaching this number. We may recall the episode of 2015 in Paris when an OECD representative in a session on long-term finance mentioned that in 2014 they provided USD 62 billion as CF, the Indian delegate, based on their analysis, responded that only USD 2.2 billion could be regarded as credible CF. This Himalayan gulf in numbers of claimed CF delivery and actual receipt shows no sign of bridging yet.

Another interesting facet is that though grants account for over a third of bilateral CF, it is a measly 10 percent of multilateral funding. But the most vulnerable countries’ persistent demand has been to have grants as CF mainly to enhance their adaptive capacity. Also the adaptation finance remains at one-fifth of total CF, though the pledge has been to maintain a balance in support between mitigation and adaptation. What is more frustrating is that the long-agreed principles of CF under the UNFCCC, such as “new and additional” CF has been totally diluted, with no signs of resuscitation.

However, amidst the clouds shrouding the canvas of CF, there is some money flowing in to the Adaptation Fund, to the tune of USD 129 million, and some new pledges of replenishment to the Green Climate Fund, where Germany pledged an amount of USD 1.5 billion, followed by countries like France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, UK and others. It is expected that the EU will lead to fill the gap left by the US-declared withdrawal from the PA.

Finally, the Bangladesh delegation, I must say, fared well in the negotiations in the streams of Adaptation, Mitigation, CF, and Loss and Damage. In the future, it has the potential of doing a lot better, given that more rigorous homework is done before the meetings. This warrants analytical deliberations well before each meeting to generate novel ideas for consensus-building among like-minded alliances. As climate negotiations now stand as the number one global public diplomacy issue involving all countries and thousands of diverse stakeholders, our government is expected to put greater efforts in capacity building of the negotiators, particularly young ones, to carry our flag aloft in the most visible and most widely-publicised diplomatic forum.

Mizan Khan is professor, Environmental Management, North South University, and currently, visiting professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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IPS Director General's Year end message

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 20 2018 (IPS)

The year now closing, 2018, culminates an extraordinary period in the quest for a world where sexual harassment and assault are, as the words indicate they should be, rare and punished.

Farhana Haque Rahman

The star of this phase was no doubt the #MeToo hashtag popularized by Alyssa Milano, an American actor, on Twitter in late 2017. Given the hundreds of high-profile cases – and a number of resignations – exposed since then, it’s worth remembering that Milano’s target area expressly included Ethiopia, and that her intention was to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem”.

Equally worthy of recollection is that the MeToo phrase began in 2006 – when Myspace was more important than Facebook – by Tarana Burke, a social activist who understood how widespread sexual harassment is beyond the world of celebrities.

We must not forget just how vast “the problem” is.

I’d like to iterate strong support for all women everywhere who push back against what sometimes is described as some ancient cultural prerogative, like it or not. And especially for people in the world where IPS Inter Press Service works, that of journalism. A recent survey revealed that nearly two-thirds of female journalists have been harassed – physically, in person and often in frightening digital modes – and half of these pondered changing their career path as a result.

Everyone can only find that both appalling and a waste of human talent. Me too.

http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2018/10/announcer-iwd-2019-theme

https://wd2019.org/global-development-trends/

The theme for International Women’s Day 2019, which will take place on 8 March, is “Think equal, build smart, innovate for change”. The theme will focus on innovative ways in which we can advance gender equality and the empowerment of women, particularly in the areas of social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure.

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Excerpt:

IPS Director General's Year end message

The post Stemming Waste of Human Talent appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Eva sitting near the Dandora dumpsite. Credit: Joy Obuya / Fight Inequality Alliance

By Jenny Ricks
JOHANNESBURG, Dec 20 2018 (IPS)

The world’s political and economic elites, that will once again gather at the Swiss mountain resort of Davos for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) 22-25 January, have become all too predictable. It’s not difficult to predict what they will say, because they always say what’s in their interests.

They will again say that they understand why people in so many parts of the world are angry about inequality and once again they will promise to fix the enormous gap between the elite few and the rest of us. But they will not fix the inequality crisis because inequality isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s in the design, and those at the top intend to keep it that way.

But what history has taught us is that all major equalising change, from fighting against slavery to fighting for women’s rights, comes about when people outside the elites organize and challenge those in power.

The solutions to tackling inequality therefore rests instead with a very different group of people from those in Davos, those who will be holding protests and events on mountains of a very different sort – the mountains of garbage and of open pit mines that millions of the world’s people call home.

And the number is growing. In cities from Manila to Guadalajara, ordinary people will mobilise and gather in their thousands to demand and present solutions to rising inequality. They are demanding an end to the age of greed that has seen extreme wealth and power skyrocket to epidemic proportions.

Tackling inequality will take a step forward during that week, but it will happen because people are not waiting for answers, they are organising for change – in spite of Davos, not because of it.

Their solutions will include jobs, minimum living wages, decent public services, fair taxes, land rights for women and much more.

The people leading the change are part of an emerging global grassroots movement, the Fight Inequality Alliance, that aims to counter the excessive concentration of power and wealth in the hands of elites, and advance a more just, equal and sustainable world.

Beth speaking with children on the streets of Dandora, Nairobi. Credit: Joy Obuya / Fight Inequality Alliance

The alliance unites social movements, environmental groups, women’s rights groups, trade unions and NGOs across the world.

In Mexico, the city of Guadalajara will host a walk called ‘From el Colli to Davos’. It starts from a hill where rural and indigenous migrants settle informally, expelled from the city and deprived of opportunities and services for a better life. It will culminate with a number of cultural activities, including a hip-hop and art contest and gathering people’s demands for change.

Speaking from Guadalajara, Fight Inequality campaigner Hector Castanon says: “Guadalajara has the second richest municipality in Mexico and is home to Central American migrants and displaced rural and indigenous communities that have left everything behind due to a lack of opportunities and organised crime.

Salaries are under the poverty line, there is limited access to basic resources, poor public services and high crime rates. All of this has moved people to organise to solve their needs and exercise their rights.”

In Zambia, there will be a festival in Shang’ombo, one of the poorest and most neglected districts of Zambia. The festival will highlight how politicians and elites make promises here during election campaigns and then forget the people, as well as people’s stories of inequality and their solutions.

It will feature music stars Petersen Zagaze, BFlow and Maiko Zulu. In explaining why she will be part of the event, Zambian youth activist, Mzezeti Mwanza, says that despite the country’s natural resources, the majority of Zambians live below the poverty line and that “none of us are equal until all of us are equal”.

In Kenya, Dandora slum in Nairobi will play host to the Usawa Festival (or Equality Festival), where hip hop star Juliani will perform, and alliance members will create a space for people to bring forward their solutions to inequality.

Njoki Njehu, Africa Co-ordinator for Fight Inequality said, “Kenyans living the realities of inequality are organising together – rural and urban, young and old, women and men. We understand the problems and have concrete proposals to end inequality. The solutions start with us. We have the answers.”

In the Philippines, there’ll be a festival between two adjoining communities, Baseco and Parola in Manila, that contrast starkly with the high-rise landscape of the city centre. Through music, cultural activities and discussion, people will raise their experiences of inequality and their demands for change.

The Fight Inequality Alliance’s third global week of action, takes place from 18-25 January 2019, with events like these in more than thirty countries across the globe. For solutions to inequality, adjust your gaze from Davos to the other mountains.

Follow the alliance on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FightInequalit1

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Excerpt:

Jenny Ricks is the global convenor of the Fight Inequality Alliance.

The post The Movement Fighting Inequality is Growing appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Photo courtesy: Charlotte Anderson

By Nalini Khurana and Ravi Verma
NEW DELHI, Dec 20 2018 (IPS)

Most initiatives around Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) are largely myopic in their approach. Failure to recognise the role of men and masculinities in this context can pose a significant barrier to both women and men’s economic well-being.

Everyone is on board—international agencies, governments, multinational corporations, foundations, nonprofits, and so on.

Following the publication of the 2012 World Development Report, the goal of WEE has been famously branded as ‘smart economics’—better not just for women themselves, but for economic growth and development at large.

According to a 2015 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, bridging the gender gap in the workplace could lead to an addition of 60 percent in annual GDP for India by 2025. Programming on WEE has also flourished across various sectors, with key linkages in the fields of education, health, violence, conflict, and so on. However, one critical set of stakeholders is largely absent in the buzz around WEE: men.

 

Men and gender equality

Failure to recognise the role of men and masculinities in women’s lives and integrate it within WEE programming reflects an incomplete understanding of gendered realities; and can pose a significant barrier to both women and men’s economic well-being. In simple terms, WEE without integrating men, is not-so-smart economics
Discourses around men’s role in generally supporting women’s advancement are not new. Chant and Gutmann were the first to use the term ‘men-streaming’, and argued that incorporating men into gender and development interventions is a critical and necessary part of gender mainstreaming.

Widespread recognition of the relationality of gender, along with criticisms of the ‘women-focused’ approach of gender and development has led ‘engaging men and boys’ to become a buzzword of its own. As power-holders in predominantly patriarchal societies, men are increasingly being pushed to use their positions of privilege to challenge deeply-held inequitable norms and structures.

In India, several platforms and programmes have emerged to foster men’s engagement, and the evidence is promising[i]. However, mirroring global trends, most initiatives in India that involve men are located primarily in the realms of violence against women and sexual and reproductive health.

WEE initiatives are largely myopic in their approach, and often fall short of situating women’s poor economic status within the context of their unequal power relations with men.

 

What do men have to do with WEE?

WEE interventions have principally focused on women—and rightly so, for women bear the brunt of gender-based socioeconomic inequities, and for long have been marginalised within the broader discourse on economic development. The flourishing of WEE globally has brought forth women’s voices and experiences and placed them at a centre stage, which is an achievement worth celebrating.

However, failure to recognise the role of men and masculinities in women’s lives and integrate it within WEE programming reflects an incomplete understanding of gendered realities; and can pose a significant barrier to both women and men’s economic well-being. In simple terms, WEE without integrating men, is not-so-smart economics.

 

Gender relations are complex and interconnected

The widespread, glaring absence of men within WEE discourse and programming is best reflected in popular interventions such as microcredit and conditional cash transfers (CCT). These interventions tend to focus solely on women, without meaningful engagement with male relatives to challenge their norms, behaviour, and attitudes. This raises several important questions.

• How do these initiatives interact with existing intra-household dynamics?
• Do women retain control over the resources mobilised through these initiatives?
• Who in the household decides how the additional resources are utilised? 

 

Hostilities between men and women need to be addressed

It is impossible to achieve real empowerment for women without first involving men as supportive allies. WEE approaches that target only women can lead to the emergence of tensions and hostilities between men and women.

Poor and marginalised men, in particular, are already struggling to maintain their breadwinner status within their families and may perceive WEE interventions as a direct threat to their positions within the status quo.

Studies from around the world—including India—have demonstrated that many women engaged in paid work, vocational training, and other economic activities are at heightened risk of experiencing domestic and other types of violence. These studies further underscore the importance of integrating men into WEE initiatives and challenging norms around masculinity for both men and women’s wellbeing.

 

Women’s workload needs to be accounted for

Men’s exclusion from WEE initiatives also has very real consequences on women’s workload. WEE initiatives often treat women as a ‘one-stop’ solution and ‘cushion’ for economic struggles, and further reinforce the gendered division of labour rather than challenge it. There is a growing body of literature suggesting that CCT interventions that target only women have serious ramifications on their time poverty and overall well-being.

Equally important is WEE programming on women’s unpaid care work, which is gradually engaging men in important conversations surrounding the value of care, the distribution of household work, and men’s own roles as husbands and fathers.

The 2017 State of the World’s Fathers report brings these issues to the forefront, and highlights evidence that parent training initiatives for men can reduce violence, increase fathers’ involvement in childcare, and expand overall gender equality in participating families. This is particularly important for WEE as women’s numerous domestic responsibilities can often constrain their options for productive work, as well as leisure and participation in civic and political life.

So how can we ensure that our engagement with men and boys promotes WEE that is truly holistic in its character and comprehensive in its scope?

 

Engaging men across multiple levels

It is widely acknowledged that women’s economic well-being is determined by factors at various levels including the family or household, the larger community, and the legal and policy level.

The 2014 ILO-WED issue brief on engaging men in WEE interventions draws upon existing literature and intervention evaluations to highlight the importance of working across these various levels.

 

1. Within the family/household: WEE interventions can invite men to participate in trainings and capacity-building activities targeting women, as well as engage male household members specifically to challenge gender inequitable norms and practices..
2. At the community level: Awareness raising through campaigns, participatory sessions, and cultural activities can help transform harmful norms and stereotypes, Empowering and promoting context-specific male role models and champions can be an effective way to ‘use men to change other men’.
3. At the legal/policy level: Laws and policies promoting healthy masculinities can act as the backbone to interventions that encourage men to participate in childcare and challenge norms on gendered divisions of labour.

 

For example, India lacks national-level laws on paternity leave and benefits, and men are largely absent from policies on reproductive and child health.  Interventions that encourage men to spend more time on childcare and engage with their children will continue to be held back unless gaps in national laws and policies are addressed.

Given their control over social, political, and economic resources, men are gatekeepers for gender equality and are a necessary part of any strategy to advance women’s empowerment.

Engaging with men across multiple ecological levels is essential for advancing WEE. This is not an easy task, for any project that promotes gender equality requires men to yield the relative privileges that they possess and build more equitable relationships with women (and other men).

Engaging with men, or ‘men-streaming’, can thus reduce hostilities between men and women, and foster their positive involvement and contribution toward WEE and the larger goal of gender equality.

–

In India, the MenEngage-associated Forum to Engage Men (FEM) is actively involved in advocacy, policy debates, program development, and activism in this area. ICRW has also spearheaded several programs that engage men and boys, including Parivartan, Yaari-Dosti, GEMS, and PAnKH.

 

 Nalini Khurana is a Research Associate at the International Centre for Research on Women’s (ICRW) Asia Regional office.

Ravi Verma is Regional Director for the International Centre for Research on Women’s (ICRW) Asia Regional Office in New Delhi.

 

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

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A fish catch has come in. Since the community from the Sanwoma fishing village have begun restoring the mangroves, the lagoon has seen a marginal increase in fish stock. However, the stock in the ocean remains depleted. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IP

By Albert Oppong-Ansah
ACCRA, Dec 20 2018 (IPS)

It was just three and a half years ago that the Sanwoma fishing village, which sits between the sea and the mouth of the Ankobra River on the west coast of Ghana, experienced perpetual flooding that resulted in a loss of property and life.

This was because the local mangrove forests that play a key role in combating the effects of coastal erosion and rising sea levels had been wantonly and indiscriminately harvested. “Of a total 118-hectares mangrove, we had depleted 115 hectares,” Paul Nato Codjoe, a fisherman and a resident of the community explains.

The fisherfolk here depended heavily on the Ankobra wetland mangroves for cheap and available sources of fuel for fish processing. Wood from the mangroves was also used as material for construction, and sold to generate income.

But a video shown by officials of Hen Mpoano (HM), a local non-governmental organisation, helped the community understand the direct impact of their indiscriminate felling.

And it spurred the fishfolk into action. Led by Odikro Nkrumah, Chief of the Sanwoma, the community commenced a mangrove restoration plan, planting about 45,000 seeds over the last three years.

Rosemary Ackah, 38, one of the women leaders in the community, tells IPS that the vulnerability to the high tides and the resultant impact was one of the reasons for actively participating in the re-planting.

HM, with support from the United States Agency for International Development-Ghana Sustainable Fisheries Management Project (SFMP),provided periodic community education about the direct and indirect benefits of the mangrove forests.

In Ghana, there are about 90 lagoons and 10 estuaries with their associated marshes and mangrove swamps along the 550-km coastline stretch.

Dr Isaac Okyere, a lecturer at the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, University of Cape Coast, explains to IPS in an interview that the conservation of mangrove forests is essential for countries like Ghana, where the marine fishery is near collapse, with landings of important fish species at 14 percent of the record high of 140,000 metric tons 20 years ago.

The fisheries sector in Ghana supports the livelihoods of 2.2 million people — about 10 percent of the population.

Carl Fiati, Director of Natural Resource at the Environmental Protection Agency speaking in an interview with IPS, explains: “Ghana is in a precarious situation where many of the stocks are near collapse and species like the sardine and jack mackerel cannot be found again if we do not take steps to conserve, restock and protect them. A visit to the market shows that sardines, for instance, are no more.”

The Sanwoma community is not unique in the degradation of their mangroves. According to Okyere, the Butuah and Essei lagoons of Sekondi-Takoradi, the Fosu lagoon of Cape Coast, the Korle and Sakumo lagoons of Accra and the Chemu lagoon of Tema are typical examples of degraded major lagoons in the country.

“Most of the lagoons, especially those located in urban areas, have been heavily polluted within the last decade or two.” Domestic and industrial effluent discharge, sewage, plastics, and other solid waste and heavy metal contaminants (lead, mercury, arsenic, etc.) from industrial activities are blamed for this.

Rosemary Ackah is part of the women’s group that was assigned to collect seedlings used to grown a nursery of mangrove trees. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

According to Ackah, many of the women in the community also became involved in the mangrove regeneration because of the positive resultant effect of clean air that would reduce airborne diseases in the community.

“As women, we take care of our husbands and children when they are ill so we thought we should seize this opportunity to engage in this as health insurance for our families,” she added.

Ackah says the women’s group was assigned to collect seedlings used to grown a nursery. They also watered the seedlings.

“We also played a significant role during transplanting. When our husbands dig the ground we put in the seedlings and cover the side with sand. It is a joy to be part of such a great replanting project, that will help provide more fuelwood for our domestic use,” Ackah told IPS.

Codjoe says that thanks to the technical assistance from the project, the community developed an action plan for restoration and is also enforcing local laws to prevent excessive mangrove harvesting.

The community has taken control of its future, and particularly its natural resources, and has established the Ankobra Mangrove Restoration Committee to guide and oversee how the mangrove is used and maintained.

To ensure that the re-planting is sustainable, Codjoe explains that the community has, in agreement, instituted a by-law that all trees within 50 meters of the river must not be harvested. Anyone doing so will have to replant them.

It is uncertain if indiscriminate felling of the mangroves continues to happen as many in the community acknowledge the positive results of the re-planting.

“We have seen positive signs because of the re-generation, the flooding has been drastically reduced,” says Ackah.

She has witnessed another direct improvement: the high volume and large size of the shrimp, one of the delicacies in Ghana, that they local community harvests. “This has really boosted our local business and improved our diet,” she says.

Codjoe says the fish stock in the river increased and agreed that a high volume of shrimp was harvested.

Ackah adds that the project donors SFMP and local implementer HM also helped them reduce dependence on the mangroves for their livelihoods and created a resilience plan in the form of a Village Savings and Loan Scheme.

The scheme, she explains, has financially empowered members to address social and economic challenges they face, thus reducing dependence on fisheries and mangroves in terms of the need for income.

In West Africa, the economic value of nature’s contributions to people per km2 per year is valued at 4,500 dollars for mangrove coastal protection services, 40,000 dollars for water purification services, and 2,800 dollars for coastal carbon sequestration services.

This is according to an Assessment Report on the state of biodiversity in Africa, and on global land degradation and restoration, conducted under the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Fiati says that Ghana’s new draft Coastal and Marine Habitat Regulation policy, which encapsulates the protection, management and sustainable use of mangroves, will be ready and sent to the Attorney General’s Department this month to be signed into law.

And the local fisherfolk of Sanwoma are assisting in sharing their experiences and knowledge.

In the meantime, the Sanwoma are ensuring that the importance of the preservation of their mangrove forests is passed down to young people.

“Because of a lack of knowledge about the importance of such a rich resource we were destroying it. And it was at a fast rate. Now I know we have a treasure. As a leader, I will use it to sustainably and protect it for the next generation. Also, I will make sure I educate children about such a resource so they will keep it safe,” Nkrumah told IPS.

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Immigrants in Chile, which draws migrants from other countries in Latin America, celebrate the Fiesta of Cultures for a Dignified Migration waving flags from their countries at the emblematic Plaza de Armas in Santiago on Dec. 18, International Migrants Day. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Dec 20 2018 (IPS)

A landmark global migration pact provides dignity and rights to migrants in every situation and context, stressed representatives of non-governmental organisations in Latin America and the Caribbean, where some 30 million people live outside their countries, forced by economic, social, security, political and now also climatic reasons.

Experts and migrants from the region lamented that some countries are marginalising themselves from this multilateral and collaborative effort to solve a global problem by breaking with a pact that “establishes a minimum foundation for dialogue,” as Rodolfo Noriega of Peru, leader of the National Immigrant Coordinating committee in Chile that includes 72 organisations, told IPS.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration was approved at a Dec. 10-11 intergovernmental conference in Marrakech, Morocco by 164 countries, which on Dec. 19 endorsed it in a vote at the United Nations in New York."There are places where the most urgent thing is for the migrant not to lose his or her life, or not to be persecuted, or not to be kidnapped by a trafficking network. There are other contexts in which the problem has to do with discrimination, access to opportunities, access to rights, one's value as a person and not being seen as just a number." -- Juan Pablo Ramacciotti

The right-wing governments of Chile and the Dominican Republic abstained from voting on the agreement, arguing that it does not protect the interests of their countries. This South American country is currently a destination for migrants from neighboring countries, and the Dominican Republic receives a major influx of people from Haiti, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.

The non-binding agreement has 23 objectives and aims to “minimise the structural factors” that force mass exodus, while including measures against trafficking in persons and the separation of migrant families, and calling for international cooperation, as a first step towards establishing a common approach in a world in which one in 30 people is a migrant.

Juan Pablo Ramacciotti, an official with the Chilean Jesuit Migrant Service, told IPS that the agreement “recognises migrants as people who have dignity and rights in every situation and every context.”

The expert in Latin American migration recalled that currently in this region of 657 million inhabitants, the points of greatest need and crisis for migrants in the region are in the northern triangle of Central America and Venezuela.

In the first case, migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador cross Mexico in their attempt to reach the United States, and in the second, thousands of Venezuelans are fleeing a collapsing country and changing the situation in other South American countries.

“Today the caravan of 7,000 migrants (heading to the U.S. via Mexico) has made the headlines around the world, but it is a situation that is constantly repeated. There are caravans that may not be so massive, but they are permanently seeking to reach the United States. It’s a serious situation, a critical issue, where violations of rights and discrimination abound,” Ramacciotti said.

He added that the second problem arises from the economic and political crisis in Venezuela “because many people are leaving that country, presenting a humanitarian challenge, also because of the incorporation of Venezuelans in different countries, especially in South America.”

There are 258 million migrants around the world, and about 30 million of them are from Latin America and the Caribbean. The phenomenon of migration “has a diverse range of expressions that have placed the issue on the global agenda,” said Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Venezuelan immigrants, whose presence grew explosively in Chile as a result of the chaos in their country, successfully sell their products and typical foods in stalls in Vega Central, Santiago’s main food market, which has become a meeting point for Venezuelans. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

This U.N. agency was responsible for coordinating the Latin American position during the talks leading up to the pact. At its headquarters in Santiago, the first regional meeting to establish a common position was held in August 2017, which concluded with the demand that the agreement ratify the human right to free movement of persons.

In this region, migration increased mainly with the exodus from Central America to the United States. By 2015, 89 percent of Salvadoran migrants, 87 percent of Guatemalan migrants and 82 percent of Honduran migrants resided in the United States.

Bárcena has indicated that the pact “is a response by the international community to the challenges and opportunities posed by migration, in a global agenda. It is a historic instrument that constitutes an example of renewed multilateral interest.”

In the opinion of the senior U.N. official, the complexity of the phenomenon of migration in the region “has been growing, as revealed by the movements in Central America and the insufficient responses to the so-called mixed flows, including unaccompanied migrant children; emigration from Venezuela and the new realities faced by the receiving countries; and emigration from Haiti and the discrimination suffered by migrants from that country.”

“And as a corollary, the picture of contrasting realities expressed in the endless adversities faced by many migrants on their journeys,” Bárcena said.

Ramacciotti pointed out that migration is caused by situations of humanitarian crisis, political crisis, extreme poverty and war and that therefore it is very important “that we jointly take charge of a problem and a challenge that we all face.”

Juan Pablo Ramacciotti, an expert on migration in Latin America with the Chilean Catholic Jesuit Migrant Service, gives an interview to IPS in Santiago. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), whose regional headquarters are also in Santiago, added two other ingredients driving people out of Latin American countries: climate change and the lack of opportunities in the countryside.

In Central America, for example, “The massive irregular migration we have seen in recent months is a direct consequence of food insecurity, climate crises, the erosion of the social fabric and the lack of economic opportunities in the rural villages and areas of these countries,” said Kostas Stamoulis, deputy director-general of FAO’s Economic and Social Development Department, earlier this month.

Because of the complexity of the phenomenon, “that migration is an issue that each country sees according to its own criteria, from the borders inward, is not a path that allows us to approach the phenomenon with a vision of the future or understanding that it is a problem that involves everyone: countries of origin, transit and destination,” Ramacciotti said.

He added that the fact that “we reached a pact in which we agree on major issues and which helps us move forward together is very good news for all.”

Noriega, for his part, criticised the non-binding nature of the pact and said that, furthermore, “the power and authority of the State is overvalued without giving a more explicit and full guarantee to the right to migrate.”

The pact means “having a minimum level of dialogue,” he said, but he criticised the reaffirmation of “the power of the State to decide who enters and who does not enter their countries and to decide what treatment irregular or regular immigrants should receive.”

He added that “a rather positive aspect is that it reaffirms principles that international law has already been asserting, such as, for example, that deportation should be a last resort in exceptional circumstances.”

With regard to the biggest threats to migrants, Ramacciotti said that depends on the context and the area in question.

“There are places where the most urgent thing is for the migrant not to lose his or her life, or not to be persecuted, or not to be kidnapped by a trafficking network. There are other contexts in which the problem has to do with discrimination, access to opportunities, access to rights, one’s value as a person and not being seen as just a number,” he explained.

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Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg castigated world leaders at COP24, accusing them of stealing her and other children's futures by failing to adequately address climate change. PHOTO: CONNECT4CLIMATE/YOUTUBE

By Saleemul Huq
Dec 19 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

After a time extension of an extra day, the Rulebook for the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP24 in Katowice, Poland on December 15. It is a significant achievement as it will enable all countries to implement all the different elements of the Paris Agreement in a manner that can be measured, reported and verified in a uniform manner.

However, COP24 also represents a major failure to rise towards collective action to face the global challenge which has been highlighted by the scientific community in the IPCC’S special report on 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The most vulnerable developing countries, including Bangladesh and small island countries, made this a major issue for consideration in the COP. They were also strongly supported by the civil society and by children. In the end they could not succeed due to the intransigence of President Trump’s US delegation along with Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait. The battle revolved around a seemingly trivial word of whether the COP should “welcome” (which was supported by 193 out of 197 countries) or merely “note” the IPCC report (which only the four countries supported). In the end these four countries prevailed by simply welcoming the completion of the report but not its contents.

This was a major setback for both science and the most vulnerable developing countries for enhancing collective global action to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Nevertheless there were a number of good decisions on adaptation and inclusion of loss and damage in several tracks of the Paris Rulebook.

The Paris Agreement reached in 2015 has been a major game-changer in terms of enabling all stakeholders to independently implement the different elements of the Agreement without needing government endorsement anymore. This is best illustrated by the fact that despite President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the US is on track to fulfill the commitments in emission reduction promised by Barack Obama. Despite Trump’s attempts to promote coal, investors at the state and city level in the US are moving to renewables because they are cheaper.

Another example is the unofficial US pavilion at COP24, called “We are still in,” which was run by states, cities and companies from the US; it was one of the most popular pavilions at COP24.

An amazing moment at COP24 was the speech of 15-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg who started a school boycott to protest inaction to tackle climate change in Sweden, which has been emulated in many other countries around the world. She spoke with such clarity and maturity that she put all the world’s leaders who were there (mostly old men) to shame.

Finally, there was the personal intervention of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres who came to Katowice to inaugurate COP24 and then made an unscheduled reappearance at the end to try to break a deadlock. In the end, an agreement was indeed reached but that was a full day after the official end of COP24.

The Bangladesh delegation this year did not include any ministers as they are busy with the upcoming elections. The delegation was led by the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and there were representatives from the Ministry of Disaster Management, Foreign Affairs and Energy along with experts who have been negotiating on behalf of Bangladesh and, in some cases, also on behalf of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group to which we belong. The delegation would meet every evening and invite non-governmental delegates from Bangladesh to join in the discussion. Thus Bangladesh was able to present itself and its views effectively through both official negotiations and civil society channels. There was also a team from Channel i who were sending daily reports from COP24 back to Bangladesh.

Next year’s COP25 will be held in December 2019 in Santiago, Chile and one of the major items for decision-making will be on loss and damage. However, before COP25 begins, Mr Antonio Guterres will be convening a climate change summit in New York in September 2019 during the UN General Assembly which will be a major opportunity for Bangladesh to highlight its actions to tackle climate change and urge others to do so as well. At this summit, it will be possible to form coalitions of the willing and not wait to achieve consensus which is needed at the COPs.

There is much preparatory work to do before next September and December if we wish to get some good results from these two major global meetings. It is an opportunity for the government of Bangladesh to work with civil society to make sure we go in well prepared.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh. Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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William Mebane, former Director of Energy Efficiency Department, ENEA

By William Mebane
ROME, Dec 19 2018 (IPS)

An alternative framework of international development and new forms of consumption of good/services are implicit in achieving the goals of UN climate conference recently held in Poland.

With 4.3 billion persons living on $5 or less per day, we cannot expect these persons or their countries to initially participate in the cost of climate change improvement without more favorable development. The reduction of hunger and poverty are inherent in the fight for a better climate because the poor are exactly the most exposed and least protected to adverse climate change. Rather than favor the developing world, the advanced nations have encumbered them with debt and exportation of profits; the net financial flows for the developing world are negative by 26.5 trillion dollars between 1980 and 2012 (Hickel, 2017). A more radical and effective development framework is emerging as proposed by the same author in his book the Divide. Certainly it will be an uphill battle as it involves elimination of debt burdens of developing countries, more global democracy in international financial institutions, more just wages, tax justice and land security.

Obviously the current Western model of production and consumption is highly individualistic, targeting through advertising our desires, by following the trails of our digital lives through almost all of our Internet apps on cell phones and other digital devices. Even our political orientation can be influenced in this way. The consumption is short-term “sugar-high” satisfaction, to be repeated by purchase of another product shortly thereafter. This is extremely costly to the environment, overloading us with the production, consumption and transportation of products that serve secondary needs. The capitalization of companies selling consumer discretionary goods/services is 60 per cent of the capitalization of companies in the entire consumer sector of the S&P500 companies this year (Bespoke, 2018).

And this is in sharp contrast to what really makes us happy: strong social relationships. The famous Harvard Study of Adult Development has proved that embracing community helps us live longer, and be happier. Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. Importantly, international studies on happiness indicate that happy countries have high social capital and strong friendship networks. A cross-national study of 143 countries revealed that high levels of social trust and having someone to count on in case of need are associated with more positive feelings, better life evaluations, and the absence of negative feelings in most countries of the world. Also persons who participate in volunteering activities and with a high level of social trust are more likely than their peers to have better life evaluations and more positive feelings (Calvo et al. 2012).

A new model of consumption is emerging based on social experience and sharing. The experience of culture in a social setting in the form of a concert or intelligent tourism staying with local natives and guides are examples. In the future, services that enhance our sociality will grow. We also have come to realize that we can share under-utilized capacity of our basic properties such as homes and automobiles; and the sharing economy has been born. In the past everyone enjoyed owning a car or a record, instead now use is more important that ownership. This greatly reduces the number of goods that must be produced. Sociality and sharing have a much lighter
ecological footprint than the continuation of individualistic consumption of goods. The long-term gains of the sharing economy in terms of better utilization of capacity have been estimated at 570 billion euro for the EU28, according to the European Parliamentary Research Service (Goudin, 2016).

Developing nations should be aware of these alternatives; otherwise they will develop slowly and fall into the trap of consumerism that business is so anxious to sell, which may lock them into energy infrastructures and greenhouse gas production that they could have, at least in part, avoided. We are reminded that according the latest data 670,000 MW of coal power plant capacity is currently in planning or already under construction in 59 countries (Urgewald, 2018). We are individuals and will always require some satisfaction of individual needs beyond the basic requirements of food, shelter, health and education; but at our best we are social, and should recognize that we have let individualism go too far in consumption and international relations.

References
Bespoke (2018) https://www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/new-sp-500-sector-weightings-what-you-need-to-know/

Calvo R., Zheng Y., Kumar S., Olgiati, A., Berkman L., (2012), Well-Being and Social Capital on Planet Earth: Cross-National Evidence from 142 Countries, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042793

Goudin, P., European Parliamentary Research Service, European Added Value Unit PE 558.777- January 2016

Hickel, J. (2017), The Divide, Windmill Books, London.

Urgewald (2018), https://coalexit.org/report-investments

The post What the COP24 Needs: A New Emerging Mindset appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

William Mebane, former Director of Energy Efficiency Department, ENEA

The post What the COP24 Needs: A New Emerging Mindset appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By UNCCD Press Release
BONN, Germany, Dec 19 2018 (UNCCD)

The first global assessment of land degradation based on Earth observation data reported by governments will be presented and reviewed at the Seventeenth Session of the Committee for the Review of Implementation of the Convention (CRIC 17) to be held on 28-29 January 2019 in Georgetown, Guyana.

The assessment, conducted by reporting countries using a harmonized approach, shows trends in land degradation between 2000 to 2015. It is based on data gathered from 145 of the 197 countries that are party to the Convention. This is the most extensive compilation of official data on this subject since world governments agreed to tackle the problem of land degradation in 1994, and then adopted a binding agreement – the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification – in 1996.

The assessment is expected to provide the baseline for assessing progress in the reduction or reversal of land degradation globally, going forward. It will also contribute to country efforts to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN), which is Sustainable Development Goal target 15.3.

Journalists wishing to cover the Committee meeting in January are invited to register and obtain accreditation through this online portal: https://reg.unog.ch/event/27508/.

The secretariat of the UNCCD jointly with Guyana Land and Soils Commission will organize a media training for journalists on Sunday, 28 January 2019. A few Caribbean journalists who meet the required criteria will be sponsored for the training, and to cover the event. Interested journalists are reminded that the application deadline is this Friday, 21 December 2019. Detailed information is available here: https://www.unccd.int/news-events/deadline-extended-applications-cric17-media-training.

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A farmer waters her plot at the Tjankwa Irrigation Scheme, in Plumtree District, 100km west of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS.

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Dec 19 2018 (IPS)

The changing climate and extreme weather events are affecting agricultural productivity in Africa to such an extent that a panel of experts are urging governments to prioritise and invest in irrigation to ensure food security.

Increased heat spells, coupled with flash flooding and frequent droughts, are making farming impossible and unprofitable as many African smallholder farmers rely on rain-fed agriculture.

Irrigation development can increase food security while extending the growing season, securing more income and jobs, said the Malabo Montpellier Panel, a group of international experts guiding policy to boost food and nutrition security in Africa.

Irrigation the best investment

In a study launched this week, the Malabo Montpellier Panel said Africa has the potential to irrigate 47 million hectares. This can boost agricultural productivity, improve livelihoods and accelerate economic growth.

“A number of economies in Africa depend on agriculture,” said Ousmane Badiane, Malabo Montpellier Panel co-chair and Africa director for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). “That is why water control and irrigation are important to reduce poverty and to eradicate hunger across Africa.”

About 20 percent of cultivated land worldwide is irrigated and this contributes to about 40 percent of total food output, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Africa is one of the regions in the world with the highest number of people who are hungry. It also has the lowest crop yields in the world as only six percent of cultivated land is irrigated on the continent, compared to 14 percent in Latin America and 37 percent in Asia.

“Irrigation must be made a priority in Africa because it works,” Badiane told IPS. “Once you commit to irrigation as a high-level priority, you put into place the institution mechanisms to deliver that effectively within government but in partnership with private sector and local communities.”

In 2014, 54 African governments signed the Malabo Declaration committing to halve the number of people in poverty by 2025. They sought to do this through agriculture growth that creates job opportunities for young people and women.

A study, Water-Wise: Smart Irrigation Strategies for Africa found that irrigated crops can double yields compared to rain-fed yields on the continent.

Furthermore, the economic benefits of expanding areas under irrigation would be double the costs of rain-fed agriculture under climate change.

Greater levels of irrigation have led to better and longer harvests, higher incomes and better prospects for farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Niger and South Africa.

These six countries are success models for either having the largest irrigated areas or for achieving the fastest growth in expanding irrigation agriculture. For example, Ethiopia increased the area under irrigation by almost 52 percent between 2002 and 2014, achieving the fastest growth in irrigation in Africa. Morocco has nearly 20 percent of its arable land currently equipped for irrigation.

A member of the 8-hectare Tjankwa Irrigation Scheme, in Plumtree District, 100km west of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS.

Success in the crop yields

In Zimbabwe, FAO has implemented a 6.8 million dollar Smallholder Irrigation Programme (SIP) programme in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development (MAMID) funded by European Union (EU) to improve income, food and nutrition security of communal farmers involved in small-scale irrigation. The programme has seen the rehabilitation of 40 irrigation schemes has benefitted 2,000 households in Manicaland and Matabeleland South Province.

Smallholder farmers in Matabeleland South Province are benefitting from irrigation schemes, which have allowed them to increase productivity even during droughts.

Landelani Ndlovu, a member of the 8-hectare Tjankwa Irrigation Scheme, says she earns 400 dollars from growing vegetables under a community irrigation project that started in 2012.

“Irrigation has helped us produce more vegetables and crops and to increase our income which we would not do if we relied on the seasonal farming when we have rain,” Ndlovu said.

In West Africa, Patience Koku, who farms with a pivot irrigation system, tells IPS, “the importance of irrigation in increasing grain yields cannot be over emphasised.”

“We are currently able to grow two crop cycles a year, meaning we double our output annually. In addition to this our grain yields are always higher in our irrigated crop. Corn cobs fill up completely to the tip, translating in higher yields,” Koku said.

Filling the funding gaps

“The profitability of irrigation is proven and in most cases there are high rates of return,” said Badiane. “A commitment was made by African leaders in Maputo in 2003 for countries to allocate 10 percent of their national budgets for agriculture. If they did so, a fraction of that could fund the 47 million hectares of irrigation. The funding gap for irrigation is huge because the potential is large.”

Badiane said by making irrigation a high-level priority, African governments can attract private sector investment and innovation and facilitate the uptake of technologies in growing agriculture to drive economic growth. Improved regulations for safe and sustainable use of water are also a driving factor in promoting irrigation development.

Irrigation allows farmers to produce crops over extended periods, particularly in areas where there is one rainy, Badiane said, noting that there was a business case for investing in irrigation as a way to pull farmers out of poverty while securing food and income.

Expanding what works

Badiane said irrigation development will help deliver on the food security and nutrition targets under the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the Malabo Declaration. A critical factor was getting the buy-in of decision makers at the highest level of government who need proof that irrigation works.

Decision makers do not take innovation lightly because they know the cost of failure is extremely high, said Badiane, adding that scaling up irrigation development will aid agricultural transformation.

“Africa, in particular, will require nothing short of a complete water transformation,” says Nathanial Matthews, Programme Director at the Global Resilience Partnership a partnership of public and private organisations that work together to build a resilient, “sustainable and prosperous future for vulnerable people and places”.

He urged Africa to transform its water use by scaling up traditional practices, deploying new technologies and improving governance.

“Taking action is urgent, with 95 pe cent of the continent relying on rain-fed agriculture and 25 countries already experiencing widespread hunger, poverty and under nutrition,” Matthews told IPS.

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The post As Climate Change Pummels Agriculture, Irrigation Offers the Best Protection appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Dec 19 2018 (IPS)

Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian Nobel laureate honoured for her work in neurobiology, once gave a splendid conference with the title “The imperfect brain”. There she explained that man has a brain that is not used completely, while the reverse is true for the cockroach.

In the growing fog that envelops the planet and its inhabitants, looking at things from the point of view of a cockroach would probably give us a new perspective. Also because the cockroach survived the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, it is 300 million years old, and it is distributed around the planet in over 4,000 species. All things that give it a great advantage over man.

Roberto Savio

Obviously, both are part of the animal kingdom. But man does things that other animals do not. For example, torture. Man has a level of consciousness and intelligence that no other animal possesses. But he does not, for example, learn from mistakes, which all other animals do.

Today, 70 years after its adoption, we are celebrating the Declaration of Human Rights, but we are recreating all the conditions that led to the Second World War, so much so that we talk about the “New Thirties”.

We have returned to waving the well-known flags of “In the name of God” and “In the name of the nation”, flags under which millions of people died.

We have been questioning ourselves about the climate since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Rio de Janeiro gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol for the control of climate change which, despite its good intentions, has had negligible results. Finally, after years of negotiations, we managed to convene the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris in 2015, with the participation of all the world’s countries.

For it to happen, every country was left free to set its own goals for reducing carbon monoxide emissions and responsible for monitoring their application. (Just think what would happen if we left citizens the same rules for their taxes). We now know that the result of the commitments made in Paris is leading to a 3.6°C increase in the planet’s temperature. Since 1992, the work of climate scientists has been to calculate how far the temperature can rise from the days of the Industrial Revolution without causing too much damage.

The consensus is 1.5°C, and that at more than two degrees the consequences of heating become irreversible and escape man’s control. For example, the permafrost of Siberia would melt, releasing a quantity of methane, an element 25 times more harmful than carbon monoxide. And the Paris agreement does not include methane, which is already massively produced by livestock farms, planes, ships and much more.

This month will go down in history as the date on which the international system formally entered into crisis and the revolt of the excluded can no longer be ignored, with Trump as a central protagonist.

Long before the Rio Conference, in 1988, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) had created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which brought together the climate scientists of 90 countries to present reports on the state of the climate. These reports have progressively identified human activity as responsible for the increase in temperature, obviously with the opposition of the fossil, oil and coal sectors.

But the figures speak clearly. CO2 emissions have continued to increase, even after the Paris Conference. And the latest report of the 2018 “emissions gap report” sounds a brutal alarm: at the current rate, we need to triple efforts to stay within the famous 1.5 degree mark, because we will get there within the next 12 years. Only 57 countries are on the correct path.

Now we have entered into the realm of myth. That of indefinite development, in which science and the market will be the saviours of the planet. The Trump administration has even presented a report to the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) defending fossil fuels, with the support of producer countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.).

As for science, there is no doubt that it is playing a positive role. But science has become a market variable. If its findings are not used, they count for little. And history shows us that the free market uses them only if they can give immediate profits and do not create conflict with the sources of profit already in use. An easy example is that of the automotive industry.

Without the progressively introduced regulations, we would have cars that are much inferior to those of today if we were to increase their safety and efficiency, and reduce their pollution. And the myth of the efficiency of the free market, which has been left without checks and controls since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has created some winners, but many losers, who wear yellow jackets and bring revolt to Paris.

To keep to the theme, total subsidies to the fossil industries currently amount to 250 billion dollars a year, while those in the renewables sector now stand at 120 billion… and the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, has calculated that inaction on climate change will cost Europe 240 billion euro a year, with southern Europe as the major victim.

Then the worst that could happen to the climate happened: it became no longer a problem of survival of the planet, but a political confrontation.

Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement for three reasons: i) to undo what his predecessor Barack Obama had done, which is one of Trump’s automatic reflexes; ii) to satisfy the North American fossil world, which runs from unemployed miners to the billionaires of the fossil sector like the Koch brothers, who invested (their declaration) 900 million dollars in the last US presidential elections – a good example of democracy in a country where corporations have the same rights as citizens); and iii) to oppose any international agreement because America must play its role of great power without being harnessed into any multilateral agreement.

And his world echoes him: the new Brazilian foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, has declared that “climate change has been used to increase the regulatory power of states over the economy, and the power of international institutions over nations and their population, as well as slowing economic growth in democratic capitalist countries, and promoting the growth of China.”

And here, by mechanical logic, the battle against climate change has become a thing of the left (as have peace, solidarity and social justice). It is the thesis by which Trump withdraws from the Paris agreements and has declared that he does not believe the three reports of his administration on climate change, including one of 1,700 pages.

And since he has become a specialist in putting Draculas to administer the various blood banks that for him represent the various administrations inherited from Obama, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is opening national parks and protected areas to the exploitation of fossil companies, just like newly-elected Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declares he wants to open the Amazon to deforestation and the production of soy.

Moreover, this is the common thread that connects us with two other major events of December 2018 – the United Nations conferences in Katowice, Poland (on climate change), and Marrakech, Morocco (on migration). These, along with the revolt of the “yellow jackets” in France, mean that this month will go down in history as the date on which the international system formally entered into crisis and the revolt of the excluded can no longer be ignored, with Trump as a central protagonist.

 

UNFCCC Secretariat | COP24 opening plenary

 

The Marrakech conference was about adopting a document of principles on migration, for coordinated action, with respect for the human rights of migrants. It ended up leaving every state to establish its own policy. It was a non-binding document, which was not even signed.

In Marrakech, the United States revolted, issuing a statement which, among others, stated: “We believe the Compact [Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration] and the process that led to its adoption, including the New York Declaration [for Refugees and Migrants], represent an effort by the United Nations to advance global governance at the expense of the sovereign right of States to manage their immigration systems in accordance with their national laws, policies, and interests.”

This was enough for the quick formation of a coalition of sovereignists, xenophobes and populists who boycotted the agreement. After Austria, here come Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Switzerland and Trump’s allies, such as Israel, Australia and Chile. And it is here that migration, like the climate, becomes something that is of the left… and the Belgian government loses the far-right party of Flemish autonomy and is forced to redo its coalition, because it decides to participate in the Marrakech conference. And Germany and Italy pass the buck to their parliaments. All this over a non-binding document of principles!

What is apparently incomprehensible is that a serious debate about migration continues to be avoided. The great phenomena of migration, like that of Syria, were caused by international intervention to change the regime, without even thinking about the aftermath of invading.

Obviously there are those who flee from poverty, and not only from conflicts. But this distinction is becoming increasingly blurred. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), every two seconds one person is expelled from their territory due to conflict and persecution: the result is an unprecedented total of 68.5 million migrants in the world. Of these, 24.5 million are refugees, and more than half are under the age of 18.

The number of authoritarian states has been on the increase over the last 10 years, and those fleeing from them has also been increasing, also for political reasons. But those who flee for ethnic, religious or political reasons are refugees (and not economic migrants, who have no rights). And there are 10 million people (like the Rohingya in Myanmar) who are denied nationality, and do not have access to basic rights, such as education, health and freedom of movement: they do not legally exist.

And now comes a new category that does not exist legally: that of environmental refugees who, according to the European Union number 258 million people, forced to leave their homes for climatic reasons. But this is a whole new and difficult discussion. While it is clear who are the victims of a hurricane or an earthquake, it is more difficult in the case of desertification.

Let’s think about the case of island countries like the Maldives where an increase of just one metre in sea level would be enough for them to disappear physically. You can send an immigrant who comes to another country to escape hunger back to Senegal for example, but where do you send back people who no longer have their country?

One of the laws of physics is that of communicating vessels. Africa will double its population in a few decades. Nigeria alone will grow to 400 million inhabitants. Sixty percent of Africans are under 25, compared with 32 percent for North Americans, and 27 percent for Europeans.

According to the United Nations, Europe will need at least twenty million immigrants to maintain its pension system and its competitiveness. Even Japan, which has always struggled to keep its identity and ethnic and cultural purity intact, is opening its doors without fanfare in the face of the aging of its citizens.

European statistics are public, but ignored. In Italy, immigrants totalling five million out of a population of 60.6 million have produced 130 billion euro, 8.9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, an amount larger than the GDPs of Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia. And Italy now has seven births against 11 deaths. In the last five years, 570,000 new businesses out of six million have been created by immigrants in Italy, and the complaint of entrepreneurs, especially in agriculture, is that an Italian workforce cannot be found.

At global level, according to William Swing, former director-general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), although immigrants account for only 3.5 percent of the world’s population, they produce nine percent of the world’s GDP. But this is not what people believe.

According to a survey by the European Union on the myths and reality of immigration, Italians believe that immigrants account for 20 percent of the population while the figure is actually 10 percent. They believe that 50 percent are Muslims while they are really 30 percent, and that 30 percent are Christians while they are 60 percent. They also believe that 30 percent of them are unemployed while the figure is 10 percent, not far from the national average.

These Italian myths are actually shared by the whole of Europe, and with Trump by the United States. Fox News, Trump’s television arm, now refers to immigrants as “invaders”, and Trump wants to erect the most expensive wall in history, after the Great Wall of Chinese, to keep out criminals and drug traffickers.

And here comes the central theme of this article, which is too short to deal with issues that are apparently unrelated to each other in an effective way. Who elected the Trumps, the Salvinis, the Orbans, the Bolsonaros, and who sees peace and the fight against climate change as leftist positions, international cooperation as a plot in favour of the Chinese and immigrants as invaders? Well, the Catalan nations where a far-right party, born from nothing, won 400,000 votes can be very useful for understanding the revolt of the “yellow jackets” in France.

In Andalusia, the arrival of Vox has messed up all the cards. It took votes from the electorate of the right-wing parties, the Popular Party and Ciudadanos. After 23 years of governing the region, the PSOE, the Social Democrats, has lost control. How did it happen? In order of importance, the arguments of the voters were: 1) Vox fights against immigrants, who are an invasion;2) the party fights corruption, which is instead widespread in traditional parties; 3) it wants a strong government, because with the struggle for the independence of Catalonia Spain is becoming dismembered; and 4) why should a Spaniard go hungry, or be evicted for not paying rent, when food and a roof are being given to arriving immigrants? There was a heavy female vote, despite the anti-gay statements and anti-feminist slogans such as WOMEN IN THE HOME.

Now the place where Vox took more votes than any other party is the town of El Ejido, in the province of Almeria, which has become the nursery of Spain. It has a population of 86,000, of whom one-third are foreigners and one in five is Moroccan. These work in the nurseries surrounding the town, in precarious conditions and exploited. Unemployment is lower than the Spanish average. The town has no library, and a total of 600 newspapers a day are sold. It is evident that immigrants, many of them not registered, do a job that Spaniards do not want to do. If one-third of the population was to leave, that would be the end of prosperity. And who employs immigrants, at 41 euro for eight hours of work (35 for those who are not registered)? They are Spanish citizens. The situation is identical for immigrants in the south of Italy, exploited by local farmers who say that they manage to survive with cheap labour. Otherwise, they would have to shut down.

In other words, immigration has become a myth. America first has become Spain First, Italy First, and so on. The mayor of Almeria sums the situation up: Vox is the voice of anger.

How was this anger reached? It was not born today, but has been created over three decades. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of communism has disappeared, social concerns have fallen, and the market has replaced man as the central element of society. Spending that is not immediately productive (health, education, assistance for the elderly) has been progressively decreased. The rich, because they are productive, receive a progressive reduction in taxation, unlike the poor.

Globalisation has led the rich to become richer, and the poor poorer; it has delocalised businesses and reduced the purchasing power of the middle class, while finance has grown in a world of its own, free from business. The class of craftsmen/women and small traders is disappearing, if it has not already disappeared, devoured by the likes of IKEA and supermarkets.

Cities become increasingly important, and the countryside increasingly empty and poor. A farmer’s product is sold to intermediaries for one-quarter of the final price. Where voters once identified themselves with a factory, with a trade union, with a community of peers, today they are atomised in a vacuum without incentives. And because, after the end of the Soviet Union, the new ethics is to become as rich as possible (today 80 people possess the same wealth as 2.3 million people) and the value of individual competition is increasing the frustration of the losers. Finally, the financial crisis of 2008.

The arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with technological development, which is eliminating technology that has not been updated from the market, creates a situation of fear and insecurity; the losers no longer feel represented in politics, which seen at the service of the elites and in the hands of a self-referential, corrupt political class, which is directed to satisfying above all the world of the city, the elites, the system. Institutions are perceived as serving the system, and the same fate awaits international institutions, the European Union and the United Nations. Anti-politics is born, and the wave is ridden by parties born largely after the 2008 financial crisis. The struggle of anti-politics against politics becomes stronger than the division between right and left.

This struggle leads, for example, to Brexit, where cities vote to remain in the European Union and the countryside to leave, something that was repeated recently in the Polish elections. It is the same policy of fear and redemption of the losers that led to the power of Trump, who lost in the cities, in the rich states, and won among the poor, in the rural world, in the world of closed factories and abandoned mines, among voters motivated by rancour, anger and fear.

In all small cities, the phenomenon is the same. An investigation in Montauban, one of the most active towns in the “yellow jackets” revolt with less than 60,000 inhabitants, found that there were 27 butchers before the arrival of Carrefour. There are four left. The same happened with greengrocers, with many clothing stores and craft workshops after the arrival of supermarkets. In all, around 900 shops had closed down. Respected citizens considered middle-class suddenly found themselves marginalised and ignored.

Through television, they basically see programmes from cities and a world that is changing in which they have no future. Is it any wonder that this turns into resentment towards the system and those who belong to it? Le Monde has published a table on salaries, which shows that those in a higher intellectual profession earn an average of 2,732 euro a month, which falls to 1,672 for farmers, artisans and traders, but plunges to 1,203 for those in precarious activities. And the “yellow jackets” revolt was triggered by a 10 euro cent increase in the tax on diesel fuel. One of the demonstrators’ slogans was: ‘Macron fears the end of the world, we fear the end of the month’.

Now, to remain in France, Macron has failed to understand that for the losers rational analysis of efficiency increases their estrangement. Life is above all a human fact, and no one is concerned with this aspect any longer. Schumpeter’s model – that the efficiency of the market creates a process of economy that grows thanks to the market’s capacity for creative destruction – is for the losers proof that the system is made only for the winners, and that neither they nor their children will ever have the ability to escape the situation in which they have come to find themselves through no fault of their own.

The ‘Yellow Jackets’ movement has been very successful, because many categories feel ignored. When frustration increases with the passing of the years, of governments, and is reduced only to an economic problem of subsidies, the passage to violence, from dignity that is awakened, is unstoppable. And those who present themselves as “the man of providence”, capable of listening and understanding, opening fights against corruption, for the restoration of law, for traditional society, for the world in which everything went well – from the old independent Britain to the great factories and steel mills of the United States – will have unshakable support.

In reality, there was once a social contract, also regulated by intermediary forces such as trade unions, by a sense of hope and collective identity, such as being a worker or a railwayman. This sense of community has disappeared, almost all places of aggregation have disappeared, such as clubs or dance halls, replaced today by the halls of supermarkets and discos, to which only young people have access.

It would also be necessary to open a chapter on the impact of technology, with internet and social media, which instead of leading to greater communication, have led to a self-referential and narcissistic world, where each one organises their own virtual world, escapes from real society, creating aggregations among peers and no longer dialogue with others. Another instrument that is felt as exclusion for generational reasons.

Even though the revolt of the ‘Yellow Jackets’ was made possible by Facebook, which brought together hundreds of thousands of people aggregated against the common enemy: the system, which ignored and marginalised them. However, it should be clear that robotisation and artificial intelligence will put more people on the margins of society than immigration ever will, with new priests of the system, technicians who will manage the world of artificial intelligence.

It is thus now clear that without social justice, we will not go far. Macron who lifts taxes from the rich to attract investments to France lives in a world that is different from that of most of its citizens. And above all, in a world of numbers and Excel tables. A world in which “men of providence” will lead us inexorably towards a war.

Exploiting fear and injustice works politically for obtaining votes. The battles of the losers of globalisation have been opened by social movements, by the World Social Forum. But who uses them is not the left, which with Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ thought it could ride the wave of globalisation, when it only managed to lose its base: the battle of the losers is used by right that is not ideological but of the gut.

Creating a new social pact as existed before the fall of the Berlin Wall is not easy. Money – which is no longer there – is necessary. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) tells us that world debt exceeds 182 trillion dollars. In just one year, it has increased by 18 trillion dollars. Since the 2007 crisis, it has increased by 60 percent. We are all living on credit, and Macron, who now would like to use social justice to restore peace, has no funds to do so.

Moreover, as always in a world that has lost its compass, the money would be there. Every year, countries’ tax authorities collect 150 billion dollars less than they could because of tax havens that could easily be outlawed in a very short time. It is always the same: if we could introduce social justice as the first objective, it would be easy, even on a global scale.

The United States, for example, spent the absurd sum of 5.9 trillion dollars in military operations and armaments after the attack on the Twin Towers. In 2017, 1.719 billion dollars were spent on armaments worldwide, a figure never before reached in history. And if military expenses could be considered necessary by some, I do not see who defends the spending for corruption: in the last year, according to the United Nations, this amounted to one trillion dollars, and the money stolen in governments another 2.6 trillion. Another proof of the efficiency of the free market!

And now let’s go back to our cockroach. According to scientists, we are heading towards the sixth crisis of extinction of the animal and plant kingdom. Extinction is a natural phenomenon, affecting one to five species each year. But scientists estimate that the current rate is at least a thousand times higher, with dozens of species every day. It is believed that by the middle of the century at least 30 percent of existing species will have disappeared.

Obviously, the cockroach is not one of these. It is estimated that a building in New York has at least 36,000 cockroaches.

But men have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to find a way to give animal proteins in a different, more sustainable way, and that the path to follow is to eat insects. There are cultural resistances (not in China and other countries), but they can be overcome with an appealing presentation …

And our cockroach can only desire that the bunglers of the animal kingdom, called men, get out of the way as soon as possible. The entire animal and plant kingdoms, and probably also the mineral one, are asking for this.

Certainly, without man, in the space of twenty years the planet would become ideal for nature…

The post Of Cockroaches and Humans appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 19 2018 (IPS)

The UN’s major donors – led by the United States – have long been accused of influence-peddling and misusing their financial clout not only to grab some of the high ranking jobs in the world body but also threaten funding cuts to push their own domestic agendas.

The Trump administration’s plan to reduce its 22% assessed contributions to the world body –- mandatory payments to the UN’s regular budget– has helped resurrect a 1985 suggestion by the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who proposed a new system of financing the UN.

The Palme proposal did not renounce the existing “capacity to pay” formula, but suggested there should be a cap of 10 percent maximum for any one country.

This cap is intended to reduce the UN’s excessive dependence on funding by the US and a fistful of big donors. The spirit of the Palme proposal is to protect the UN from being unduly influenced by these donors.

According to the current formula, besides the 22% by the US, the percentage for the other major contributors include: Japan pays 9.7 %, China 7.9%, Germany 6.4%, France 4.9 %, UK 4.5%, Italy 3.7% and Russia 3.1%.

The poorest countries of the world pay 0.001% of the UN budget, whereas the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the poor, have a cap of 0.01% each

Kul Gautam, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the UN children’s agency UNICEF, is a strong advocate of the Palme proposal and argues that if UN decision-making is to be freed from excessive vulnerability to, and even being blackmailed by the big donors, it is important for UN not to be too dependent on any single donor for its overall budget or important projects.

In an interview with IPS, he pointed out that former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was compelled to change his report on Saudi Arabia’s blatant targeting of children and civilians in its attacks in Yemen a few years ago, because of the Saudi threat of withholding its funding for the UN.

Similarly, in 2005, former Secretary-General Kofi Annan was compelled by then US President George W Bush to appoint an American Executive Director of UNICEF within 72 hours —without any serious vetting by the UNICEF Executive Board.

A clear case of influence-peddling, and “cheque book diplomacy,” said Gautam, author of the recently-released book titled “Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations”.

James Paul, who served as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum (1993-2012), told IPS that on 21 October 1985, in a speech to a General Assembly commemoration of the UN’s 40th anniversary, Olof Palme proposed that the cap on maximum assessment by any one country to the UN’s regular budget be reduced from 25% to 10%.

Palme said: “A more even distribution of the assessed contributions would better reflect the fact that this Organization is the instrument of all nations.”

The UN at that time was facing a growing financial crisis, due in large part to a growing debt by the United States; Palme was proposing an unconventional solution.

A number of countries agreed with Palme and a high-level UN reform paper took up the idea. The German government argued with Washington that the United States should pay up– or accept a lower assessment.

But US Secretary of State George Schultz rejected the idea out of hand, said Paul, author of the newly-released book titled “Of Foxes and Chickens: Oligarchy & Global Power in the UN Security Council.”

“Washington wanted to keep its financial strangle-hold. Unfortunately, many other member states preferred to maintain their own dues at a low level. Some were thought to pay less in dues to the world body than the operating cost of their delegation in New York,” he added.

In 2001, the US altered course and agreed to pay the UN most of the outstanding US debt if its regular budget dues rate was lowered to 22%, from 25%. That shift was, of course, far from the Palme idea. Outsize US financial influence continued.

“The 2001 changes are very relevant today, as yet another UN financial crisis is upon us and Washington is yet again the main culprit, said Paul”, who for many years was also an editor of the ‘Oxford Companion to Politics of the World’.

Could the distribution of dues be changed further in the direction that Palme suggested?

The process leading to the 2001 change proved that under the right circumstances other member states could be persuaded to come up with an additional share of the dues, he noted.

Martin Edwards, an Associate Professor and Director of the UN Studies Program at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, told IPS: “Given that the White House is heading us back toward arrears with its desire to ratchet US contributions down, this is an auspicious moment to propose this.”

He said the challenge would be to sell it, though, since the intent on the UN side is to diversify the portfolio and limit the influence of donors, they might not jump on it since it means foregoing future influence. (In the P-5, what other countries would be interested? Certainly not Russia and China.—the other three being the US, UK and France.)

“But, we have a relatively unexperienced US Ambassador arriving in the form of Heather Nauert, and she’s going to face competition from seasoned veteran counterparts. It would be smart to offer it to Nauert and see if she jumps on it to bring a quick win for her boss,” Edwards declared.

Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, a former UN Under-Secretary-General, told IPS:

“For the Olof Palme proposal, I would say with pride that as the Deputy Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to UN, I had advocated publicly in 1985 and thereafter that no one Member State should be paying more than 10 percent of the UN budget.”

Even at that time, he said, the US was very strongly opposed to the idea.

“I continue to believe very earnestly in the wide-ranging positive impact of the 10 percent ceiling proposal,” declared Chowdhury.

Gautam said: “I am not in favour of the argument that because the US economy is strong right now that it should be asked or expected to pay more to the UN”.

That, he pointed out, would be contrary to the spirit of the Palme proposal.

Any shortfall caused by capping the US contribution to the UN can be easily made up by other OECD countries (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) and the large number of middle-income emerging economies, without putting undue burden on the worlds low-income countries and LDCs.

“Please remember that in the larger scheme of international finance, in a world economy of $77 trillion and global military budgets of $1.7 trillion per year, the totality of the UN system’s budget and expenditure for humanitarian assistance, development cooperation, peace-keeping operations, technical assistance and other essential normative functions, amount to about $48 billion per year,” he pointed out.

This is a modest amount to respond to the huge challenges that the UN is asked and expected to help tackle.

He said the total UN system-wide spending annually is less than the defense budget of India or France, and less than one month’s US spending on defense.

With similar investment, bilateral aid and national budgets of much bigger proportions could hardly achieve results comparable to what the UN and international financial institutions achieve.

Today financing for development landscape is changing rapidly. Many UN activities benefit from private sector financing and philanthropic foundations.

Many NGOs rely increasingly in cloud-sourcing and crowd-funding as well as different modalities of public-private partnerships.

Harnessing such possibilities and exploring the utilization of schemes like the Tobin Tax and resources generated from the global commons that are supposed to be the common heritage of humanity should be seriously explored to liberate the UN from the perpetual threats of arbitrary cuts by its current major donors, declared Gautam.

Paul told IPS: “Obviously, the Swedish prime minister was generally inclined towards a fiscal system that required the richest participants to pay on a progressive basis.”

That’s why his voice on this issue was so influential, because he was balancing that principle against others he considered more important – the viability of the United Nations and the protection of the UN from pressure from the largest payer.

Can the Palme concept be applied today when yet another UN financial crisis has arisen and a US administration of unprecedented hostility to global cooperation is in power?

It would be worth trying, said Paul.

And it may be an urgently-needed revision to the post-1945 arrangements and the world order that lay behind them. Other member states would have to agree to accept a larger share of the UN dues to make up for a reduction by Washington, said Paul.

“That would be most likely if the shift took place over an extended period – say over ten years. Getting a fairer share of top executive posts might be an incentive to the other UN members, as would a greater democratization of UN policy-making.”

He said complaints that national budgets are over-stretched cannot be taken seriously, since UN dues are a very small number in all national budgets from the poorest to the very richest countries. Affordability is simply not the main issue.

Washington might oppose such a change, so as to keep its financial influence intact, but the time has come for the rest of the world to stand up and defend a necessary change to strengthen an institution that they need and want.

The world has changed since 1945 and the United States can no longer pretend to be the world’s “leader.”

Adoption of the Palme proposal might be the first step towards other much-needed changes to make the UN stronger and more effective in the years to come, declared Paul.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

The post Is it Time to End Cheque Book Diplomacy at the UN? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Water hyacinth is a weed and if not controlled on Lake Victoria, experts are concerned that the lake’s water levels might drop by 60 percent. Courtesy: CC by 2.0/Madeira Botanic Garden

By Benson Rioba
KISUMU, Kenya, Dec 19 2018 (IPS)

Currently 30 square kilometres of Lake Victoria, which stretches to approximately 375 kilometres and links Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, is covered with the evasive water hyacinth that has paralysed transport in the area.

But scientists are harvesting and fermenting the weed, and one intrepid chemistry teacher has built a business out of it.

The presence of water hyacinth on the lake is concerning. Late last year, Margaret Kidany, one of the people involved in conserving Lake Victoria’s beaches, said the lake’s water levels might drop by 60 percent if the weed is not controlled. If it is not eliminated, it will kill the livelihoods of thousands of households that rely on the lake for an income.

However, the Centre for Innovation Science and Technology in Africa, founded by former chemistry teacher Richard Arwa, is making the best out of the invasive water hyacinth.

Funded in its start-up stages by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the innovation company, which employs six people and serves 560 households, manufactures ethanol from the weed. This is proving a cheaper source of clean fuel for many of the locals while at the same time preserving the lake.

The process they use is a simple one.

The centre hires locals to harvest the hyacinth from Lake Victoria before transporting it to their workshop for processing. Once at the workshop, the hyacinth is pretreated to remove microorganisms that might compete with the enzymes during processing.

The hyacinth is then dried and chopped into smaller pieces to reduce the surface area for efficient processing. The dried hyacinth is then mixed with water, acids and enzymes in tight closed tanks for fermentation.

After fermentation the mixture is subjected to high temperatures (80 degrees Celsius), producing ethanol and carbon dioxide and methane as final products.

“This was part of a science congress project for secondary schools and it won accolades throughout the country and we, together with my students, decided to actualise the project,” says Arwa.

Arwa is still a chemistry teacher even though he started the institution in 2016.

He adds that they initially tried to produce beverage alcohol from the hyacinth but the project was not viable. According to Arwa, alcohol requires numerous purification processes to make it consumable. In addition the taxes on the product are high.

So it is less costly to make ethanol. Arwa says the company produces 100 litres daily.

The amount is considerable for their factory, and it is sold to 560 households in Yala in Kisumu city. Arwa tells IPS that they always run out of stock.

Lyne Ondula, a mother from Yala, in Kisumu county, is a happy customer.

“Hyacinth fuel burns slower than the usual kerosene I use and doesn’t produce smoke and soot while cooking like firewood or kerosene. To me it’s much cheaper and cleaner to use, no more coughing in my kitchen when preparing food,” she tells IPS.

Ondula says a litre of ethanol retails at 70 Kenyan shillings and lasts four days. That is in marked contrast to the higher cost of kerosene, which currently retails at a national average of 100 Kenyan shillings, and lasts only two days. She says she also used to buy charcoal which was quite expensive, retailing at 100 Kenyan shilling per a 15-kilogram tin, which only lasted hours. So now she only uses ethanol, which she pre-orders.

It is a cleaner option for this East African nation that is still heavily reliant on charcoal, kerosene and firewood as a source of energy. According to a market and policy analysis by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, while “LPG has penetrated Nairobi and higher-income households; bio-ethanol can be an attractive clean fuel for lower income households.”

Ondula’s sentiments were echoed by Sylvester Oduor, another resident from Yala in Kisumu County. He adds that ethanol fuel also produces more heat compared to charcoal when cooking.

Philip Odhiambo, energy and climate change coordinator at the WWF, says such innovations are key in harnessing the untapped opportunities of water bodies.

“There is a need to turn environmental challenges to create wealth and opportunities especially in creating jobs for our many unemployed youth,” says Odhiambo. He adds that the ethanol processing project is a viable way of managing green waste that has been a challenge in the country for a long time.

Odhiambo adds that the world is shifting towards clean, cheap energy and says there is a need to embrace creativity and tap into the energy potential of water bodies, besides the traditional sources of energy.

In addition, unlike other clean fuels, bio-ethanol can be produced domestically over time and could spur industrial growth in the sector “while delivering positive social and economic benefits,” says the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety report.

However, Arwa says accessing the initial capital of 50,000 dollars was a challenge as many financial institutions turned him away for lack of collateral. In the end he had to rely on donors like WWF to finance the project. The chemistry teacher adds that financial institutions did not have faith in the venture and were not ready to invest in the idea.

The immediate goal for the company is to expand production to 600 litres per day.

But Arwa has a five-year expansion plan that includes moving the small factory, which is about 40 kilometres away from Lake Victoria, closer to the lake to reduce costs. He hopes that once relocated, and with the support of partners, they will eventually be able to produce 10,000- 25,000 litres per day.

Arwa adds that he is looking for strategic investment partners to help in scaling up the ethanol project, reiterating that there is a huge untapped market for the product. “I usually feel bad when customers come to purchase ethanol but we turn them away. At the moment we cannot satisfy the demand,” he says.

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The post Investors Turn Kenya’s Troublesome Invasive Water Hyacinth into Cheap Fuel appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Frank Ching
Dec 18 2018 (Manila Times)

Henry Kissinger, in his book On China, wrote that Chinese strategists think differently than their Western counterparts because they are used to playing a different board game, weiqi, where the player patiently gains relative advantage through strategic encirclement rather than seek total victory through checkmating the opponent.

Frank Ching

In the current impasse between Canada and China, it seems that one side is adopting a rule of law approach to the detention and possible extradition of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese electronics firm Huawei and daughter of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, while the other sees the issue as one where political power will be decisive.

In the background, of course, is the US-China trade war and, behind that, the longer-term struggle between the United States and China for global pre-eminence.

While initially there were fears that Meng’s detention could derail the trade talks agreed to by the US and China at their summit meeting in Buenos Aires on November 1, it now seems clear that those talks are still firmly on track. This is likely because they were agreed to personally by the US president, Donald Trump, and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

So, despite Chinese officials castigating American as well as Canadian officials over the arrest of Meng at the Vancouver airport, the trade talks themselves have evidently survived unscathed, though temporarily overshadowed by the crisis of the Meng arrest. Ironically, this occurred on the same day, albeit 11,300 kilometers away, as the Buenos Aires dinner.

Meng, a 46-year-old mother of four, had flown from Hong Kong to Vancouver where she planned to change planes for a flight to Mexico. Little did Canada realize when placing her under arrest that it was also placing itself in the middle of a tug of war between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers.

A December 5 statement by the Chinese embassy in Ottawa on the arrest took an aggressive stance, saying, “At the request of the US side, the Canadian side arrested a Chinese citizen not violating any American or Canadian law.” It called on the US and Canada to “immediately correct the wrongdoing and restore the personal freedom of Ms. Meng Wanzhou.” In reality, of course, an extradition request is premised on the allegation of a criminal offense, but one that hasn’t yet been proved in a court of law.

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The following day, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing demanded that the US and Canada “immediately clarify the reason for the detention and release the detainee,” as though there was no reason that could possibly justify her detention.

The nature of the alleged offense was disclosed in bail hearings that began on December 7. Court filings disclosed that the US accused Meng of bank fraud, alleging that she had lied to HSBC about Huawei’s connections to Skycom Tech, a Hong Kong company that did business with Iran from 2009 to 2014, defying US sanctions.

On December 8, Canada’s ambassador to China, John McCallum, was summoned to the Chinese foreign ministry where “solemn representations and strong protests” were lodged. Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng warned that unless Meng was immediately released, there would be “grave consequences.”

Threats of “grave consequences” were made on numerous occasions and were supported by state media, most notably the Global Times.

Then, on December 11, it was reported that Michael Kovrig, a former serving Canadian diplomat now with a non-governmental organization, International Crisis Group, was missing. Three days later, a foreign ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, announced that Kovrig and another Canadian citizen, Michael Spavor, were under investigation by state security officials “on suspicion of engaging in activities that harm China’s state security.”

Strikingly, the Canadian foreign minister, Christia Freeland, didn’t demand that China release the two Canadians. Instead, she said: “In the cases of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor, our immediate concern has been to gain consular access to them and to understand what the charges are that have been put on them by the Chinese authorities.”

That is to say, she took Chinese law seriously. She sought to understand the charges before demanding the release of her compatriots. This was the exact opposite of the Chinese approach, which was to overwhelm with a display of raw power and to heck with the law.

As China continues its inexorable rise and the US goes its uncertain way, Canada — and like-minded countries — will have to decide whether it can afford to stick to its traditions and values. That is the challenge posed by China to much of the world today.

Frank.ching@gmail.com
Twitter: @FrankChing1

This story was originally published by The Manila Times, Philippines

The post Canada-China impasse: Law vs power appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Migrants on a street in Casablanca, Morocco. Courtesy: Alié Dior Ndour

By Sejjari Mehdi
MARRAKECH, Morocco, Dec 18 2018 (IPS)

One of the most common words used by speakers during the Global Compact on Migration was “dignity”—granting migrants the dignity they deserve. As with any advocacy, there is a danger a word can lose meaning through overuse. But on the streets of Morocco the same word means a lot to migrants looking for work. And when they find it—both work and dignity—it can alter the entire migration equation. 

“Despite the difficulties I encountered at first, being in an irregular situation, I am working today in a private communications company after an operation launched by the Moroccan authorities to give residency permits to tens of thousands of immigrants living in the country illegally,” says Ahmadou, a Nigerian migrant, who has been living in Morocco for five years.

At first, he was all set on reaching that supposed El Dorado for so many migrants: Europe. But now the situation is different. Ahmadou says professional integration is the key. If you have no job, he says, then the ambition to reach Europe will never disappear.

“I am able to provide the necessities of life, especially housing,” Ahmadou says. “Of course, there are immigrants who suffer because they have inappropriate skills, or because of the fact some companies give priority to local citizens.”

Amid increasing international bickering—with a lengthening list of countries abstaining from the Compact—eventually 164 countries signed the non-binding Compact for “safe, orderly and regular migration.”

The Compact seeks to ensure migrants enjoy rights within a global vision based on joint management of migration between countries of origin, transit and hosting. Maintaining dignity underpins this effort—both for migrants and countries at large—by establishing a set of principles fostering integration of migrants within societies, while giving states full sovereignty in the enactment of national migration policies.

Indeed, the Compact is not binding, rather it invites countries to “develop national short, medium and long-term policy goals regarding the inclusion of migrants in societies, including on labor market integration, family reunification, education, non-discrimination and health, including by fostering partnerships with relevant stakeholders.”

The process of integration lately has proved arduous in many countries—Germany becoming a poster child for such frictions after welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from strife-torn countries—especially when it comes to employment for migrants, resulting in high unemployment levels.

Even if jobs are found, migrants in European countries are more likely to work on temporary contracts. Over time, though, the employment gap between migrants and native born does narrow in most countries, and even vanishes in a third, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED).

Morocco is in a similar position to European countries having shifted from being a country of origins and transit to also one of destination for migrants.

Hence Morocco’s authorities have launched a program through its Agence nationale de promotion de l’emploi et des compétences (ANAPEC)—which translates as the national agency for employment and skills—to facilitate access to job search assistance, provide employment assistance and promote work equity within companies.

Its ultimate objective is to is to guarantee an honourable and dignified life for regularised migrants by ensuring equitable access to the labor market.

But despite such measures, the number of migrants and refugees inserted into Morocco’s labor market remains limited. On any given day, young men from various countries in West Africa endlessly pace the streets around Marrakech’s iconic Jemaa el-Fnaa square and market place in the Medina quarter, amiably trying to hawk the likes of iPhones, watches, sunglasses and bright decorative shirts to passers-by.

Hence calls to increase the ANAPEC services and benefits available to migrants, to mobilise and stimulate micro-credit institutions to finance income-generating activities and enterprises by migrants, and to improve communications to incentivise the private sector about the importance of recruiting migrants.

“Parlais vous Francais?” one migrant, sits by his trinkets laid out on the street, says hopefully to a potential foreign customer walking by, asking if he speaks English. But a shake of the head and a school-boy French apology are all that follow.

The migrant smiles and keeps waiting for another potential customer.

“Continuing to improve the conditions of migrants’ access to public services and rights, including the right to decent work, will push lots of migrants to realise their dreams here without the need to ride the waves of death across the Mediterranean,” Ahmadou says.

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The post The Arduous Search for Dignity Through Integration and a Pay Check appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Niaz Murtaza
Dec 18 2018 (Dawn, Pakistan)

Prime Minister Imran Khan recently invoked Franco-German peace to urge old rivals India and Pakistan to make peace too. But like so many of his ideas, this one is naïve given how that peace emerged. Using a noble anti-imperialism cry, Germany often attacked France and others. Fed up with wars in Europe, global powers finally imposed regime change and pacifism on it by occupying it for long.

Dr Niaz Murtaza

But distant Pakistan-India conflicts don’t affect world powers enough to risk invading nuclear states. At most, they may impose ineffective sanctions. This raises a tantalising issue. Who would they see as Germany here? The instinctive Pakistani response may be India. But, the merits of the Kashmir cause aside, they admonish us as the instigator of the ’48, ’65 and ’99 conflicts and cross-border attacks. So it’s unwise for us to harp on the German model.

Let’s review other cases where foes became friends, especially split states with border disputes. Left holding at high cost only a few small towns surrounded by rebels, Sudan wisely — albeit surprisingly — let South Sudan split after a long war. But India is more in control in Kashmir. The split didn’t resolve the status of Abyei, an oil-rich area, leading to many skirmishes. South Sudan is now too beset by internal wars to press its claim. In terms of parallels, Pakistan is more beset by internal wars, though their scale is much lower.

Who would they see as Germany here?

Eritrea split from Ethiopia after a long war. There was initial amity, both being run by Tigrinya tribe ex-rebels which had separately fought a pro-Moscow Ethiopian regime. But ties later soured over a border town (Badme). After a bloody war, the UN brokered truce and then arbitration, giving Badme to Eritrea. But big brother Ethiopia rejected the ruling. Alert Pakistani minds may see parallels. The bigger state from which the smaller one split here rejects a UN ruling too. The UN didn’t award Kashmir to Pakistan, but ruled for a referendum which may lead to that outcome if held. Eritrea too pursued freedom based on claims of being a nation, despite being multi-ethnic and never having been a united free state ever. So the parallels increase.

The parallels may appear even more seductive for Pakistani minds given the rapid recent happy ending where the bigger state agreed to give Badme to Eritrea after a transformational leader Abiye Ali won power in Ethiopia. This talk of a wise leader making huge changes may feed perfectly into Imran’s naïve narratives about the power of such leaders (like him, in his view) to make history.

But having perhaps built up too much excitement, I must sadly deflate it now. Ethiopia’s generosity on Badame reflects mainly not the wisdom of one change leader, but its extended rapid growth. This catapulted a change leader to power as it can’t grow further with its old controlled sociopolitical system. With this rapid growth, fight on an obscure town distracted it from bigger goals. So the parallels end. Kashmir is not an obscure town but a strategic region. India has already seen prolonged rapid growth without it showing generosity on Kashmir but only on smaller, Badme-scale, tiffs with other neighbours. But China has made big compromises, though only tactical and not permanent ones, in pursuit of fast growth. With its split province Taiwan and other foes, it has ignored border issues and engages economically with them to strengthen itself.

Among other cases, Japan, Iraq and Serbia too were pacified only after defeats and regime changes effected by the West. The US and Moscow became less hostile, again only after a regime change in Moscow, forced in its case by economic and state collapse. Such collapse is unlikely here. But parallels-wise Pakistan faces more endemic economic woes. Jordan and Egypt made peace with Israel but under unelected regimes seeking US favours to survive. Again, it is Pakistan which has often had unelected regimes seeking US favours to survive but they too haven’t bent much on Kashmir.

So globally, it is not the wisdom of great leaders but forced regime change in one state which has mainly made foes become friends or at least less hostile. Other causes are economic growth, US alliance and internal conflict. But on most such factors, it is Pakistan which is weaker. Still, its relative weakness will not force it to eschew Kashmir. However, nor will India’s growing strength entice it to eschew it either, unlike Ethiopia. This creates a clear stalemate on a permanent solution. That leaves the China tactical model as the only one worth invoking, however alien and shocking the idea of ignoring territorial issues for economic progress may seem to fossilised hawkish minds. If both states demilitarise their conflict and reach an interim solution on Kashmir to focus on economic ties and growth, amity could reach South Asian shores too.

The writer is a Senior Fellow with UC Berkeley and heads INSPIRING Pakistan, a progressive policy unit.
murtazaniaz@yahoo.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

The post From foe to friend appeared first on Inter Press Service.