Africa

Falling commodity prices, China's slowdown and other problems mean a bleak new year in store

Jumping for joy, camel rides and mountain pilgrimages

Nigeria has been battling the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram for the past six years but for some people life is now getting back to some degree of normality.

Women constitute nearly half of the country’s 1.25 billion people and gender equality — whether in politics, economics, education or health — is still a distant dream for most. This fact was driven home again sharply by the recently released United National Development Programme’s Human Development Report (HDR) 2015 which ranks India at a lowly […]

A local small farmer, Rosineide Maciel, watches the road improvement works on highway BR-163, which runs past her house in Itaituba municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MIRITITUBA, Brazil , Jan 8 2016 (IPS)

The BR-163 highway, an old dream of the Brazilian military to colonise the Amazon jungle, was revived by agroexporters as part of a plan aimed at cutting costs by shipping soy out of river ports. But the improvement of the road has accentuated problems such as deforestation and land tenure, and is fuelling new social conflicts.

The 350-km stretch of road between the cities of Miritituba and Santarem in the northern Brazilian state of Pará look nothing like the popular image of a lush Amazon rainforest, home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the world.

Between the two port terminals – in Santarém, where the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers converge, and in Miritituba on the banks of the Tapajós River – are small scattered groves of trees surrounded by endless fields of soy and pasture.

Cattle grazing peacefully or resting under the few remaining trees, taking shelter from the high temperatures exacerbated by the deforestation, are the only species of mammal in sight.“A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land.” – Mauricio Torres

“When we came here 30 years ago this was all jungle,” local small farmer Rosineide Maciel told IPS as she and her family stood watching a bulldozer flatten a stretch of the BR-163 highway in front of their modest dwelling.

Maciel doesn’t miss the days when, along with thousands of other Brazilian migrants, she was drawn here by the then-military government’s (1964-1985) offer of land, part of a strategy to colonise the Amazon rainforest.

Thanks to the paving of the highway that began in 2009, it takes less time to transport her cassava and rice to the town of Rurópolis, 200 km from her farm.

“It’s been easier since they improved the road,” she said. “In the past, there were so many potholes on the way to Rurópolis, and in the wet season it took us three days because of the mud.”

BR-163, built in the 1970s, had become practically impassable. The road links Cuiabá, the capital of the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso – the country’s main soy and corn producer and exporter – with the river port city of Santarém.

Of the highway’s 1,400 kilometres, where traffic of trucks carrying tons of soy and maize is intense, some 200 km have yet to be paved, and a similar number of kilometres of the road are full of potholes.

Accidents occur on a daily basis, caused in the dry season by the red dust thrown up on the stretches that are still dirt, and in the wet season by the mud.

But compared to how things were in the past, it is a paradise for the truckers who drive the route at least five times a month during harvest time.

Truck driver Pedro Gomes from the north of the state of Mato Grosso told IPS: “When soy began to come to Santarém, three years ago, sometimes the drive took me 10 to 15 days. Today we do it in three days, if there’s no rain.”

The BR-163 highway runs up to the entrance of the port terminal built in Santarém by U.S. commodities giant Cargill, where the company loads soy and other grains to ship down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean, and from there to big markets like China and Europe.

This and other ports built or planned by different companies in Santarém, Miritituba and Barcarena – in Belem, the capital of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon River – are part of a logistics infrastructure which, along with the paving of the highway, seeks to reduce the costs of land and maritime transport in northern Brazil.

The river ports and the road improvement have nearly cut in half the transport distance for truck traffic from Mato Grosso, which is around 2,000 km from the congested ports in the southeast, such as Santos in the state of São Paulo or Paranaguá in Paraná.

The Mato Grosso Soy Producers Association estimates the transport savings at 40 dollars a ton.

“Shipping out of ports in the north like Santarém has boosted competitiveness,” José de Lima, director of planning for the city of Santarém, told IPS. “BR-163 is a key export corridor that was very much needed by the country and the region.”

But the country’s agroexport model has many critics.

Road works on highway BR-163 in Itaituba municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

With the soy production boom in Pará, illegal occupations of land have expanded and property prices have soared.

“The paving of BR-163 has heated up the land market,” Mauricio Torres, at the Federal University of Western Pará (UFOPA), told IPS. “As this is happening in a region where illegal possession of land is so widespread and where there is no land-use zoning, it generates a series of social and environmental conflicts.”

This, in turn, has driven deforestation.

“Forests are cut down not only for agriculture but to make fraudulent land claims. A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land,” he said.

In 2006, the government launched a sustainable development plan for BR-163, aimed at reducing the socioenvironmental impacts caused by the paving of the road, by means of self-sustaining projects for local communities.

“But this pretty much just petered out,” UFOPA chancellor Raimunda Nogueira explained to IPS.

“If the communities along BR-163 are not strengthened, they will undergo a radical transformation,” she said. “For example, land prices are skyrocketing and small farmers are selling out, which accentuates the phenomenon of the latifundio (large landed estates).”

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon became more widespread in the 1960s, driven by the expansion of cattle ranching and the timber industry.

However, that did not leave the land completely free of vegetation, according to Nogueira, because subsistence farming “maintained different levels of regeneration of the forest.”

“When the big agricultural producers came in, they cleared all of those areas in the stage of regeneration that maintained a certain equilibrium,” said the chancellor, who estimates that around 120,000 hectares of land have been deforested to make way for soy.

Torres, meanwhile, referred to the emergence of other social problems like prostitution, involving minors as well as adults.

“There are towns in Pará that could turn into huge brothels for truck drivers,” he said.

The residents of Campo Verde, a town of around 6,000 people located 30 km from Miritituba, who depend on the production of palm hearts and on sawmills for a living, have started to feel the effects.

The town is located near the intersection of BR-163 and the 4,000-km Trans-Amazonian highway that cuts across northern Brazil.

“Only soy is going to come through here,” Celeste Ghizone, a community organiser in the town, told IPS. “An average of 1,500 trucks are expected to pass through every day. Just think of how many accidents we’re going to have with all of these truck drivers who drive through like mad men without even slowing down,” he said, adding that he is worried about rising crime and drug abuse rates.

When the improvement of BR-163 – including widening it to a four-lane highway along one major stretch – is completed, an estimated 20 million tons of grains (Mato Grosso currently produces 42 million tons) will be shipped northward to Amazon River ports rather than on the longer routes to ports in the southeast, by 2020.

The dream of agribusiness corporations is to continue expanding the soy corridor, by building a railway to Miritituba.

But Torres complained that “It’s important to stress that a paved BR-163 is not local infrastructure but is for the big soy producers of Mato Grosso. The state of Pará will become merely a transport corridor for soy exports.”

Edited by Verónica Firme/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

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A joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping patrol was ambushed in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region today by an unidentified armed group, who greatly outnumbered it and seized a machine gun, four rifles and rounds of ammunition.

Welcoming today’s announcement of the results of the first round of the presidential elections in the Central African Republic (CAR), the United Nations envoy for the country has invited the two candidates that will participate in an upcoming run-off poll, “to maintain the spirit of peace and restraint that has prevailed” throughout the process thus far.

Condemning the “reprehensible” deadly terrorist attack on a security training centre today in Libya’s coastal city of Zliten, the top United Nations official in the country said the incident again shows the urgent need for all stakeholders to press ahead with forming a recently-agreed unity government.

How Africa has been affected by Middle East dispute

This is one of a series of posts by the author on her research in 2013-2015 among women’s prisons and prison communities in Albania, Guatemala, Jordan, the Philippines and Zambia, with DIGNITY, the Danish Institute Against Torture. Find it published as a comparative report, and four individual studies. Her other posts cover issues from violence to prison conditions.

“Gradually our lives are deteriorating, and we aren’t free to do anything about it. You think: ‘there lies my future’. You see death coming slowly and there’s nothing you can do.” – Inmate, Zambia

By Jo Baker
LONDON, Jan 7 2016 (IPS)

It is a grim fact that prisoners in most countries suffer from poorer health than non-prisoners, and that their right to health is not always protected. But for certain groups these rights can be even more elusive. Such is the case for women.

Jo Baker

For me, this was starkly illustrated during a visit to the clinic of a large women’s jail in the southern Philippines. Here, a very thin woman lay curled and still on a narrow wooden bench. Her hands were cradling her taut, bloated stomach, her eyes tightly closed. The nurse explained that she was an addict, arrested while heavily pregnant for drug possession (a sentence that keeps the country’s women’s jails lamentably stocked), and that her baby had died days earlier in a government hospital because of a condition related to her drug use, after a complicated labour. Being understaffed and short on medicine and beds in the prison, the best treatment she could offer the woman on her return, as she faced her withdrawal, post-labour pain, grief, separation from family, and possible years awaiting trial, were paracetamol, kind words and a bench. Hers would be a particular and gendered kind of purgatory.

In speaking with imprisoned women and healthcare practitioners across five countries, our research team commonly found harmful responses and barriers to healthcare that existed because the inmates were women. These included women who were imprisoned in Jordan while recovering from brutal gender-based violence (including honour crimes and rape), without adequate treatment or rehabilitation; women who prepared for and recovered from childbirth in dirty rooms with little more than substandard prison rations, water and soap; and women who were isolated and punished because of attempts to self-harm or commit suicide. “One girl used the edge of a seafood shell on her wrists,” recounted an inmate in the Philippines. “They scolded her. If you want to die, go ahead, do it now!”

These responses are of course unlikely to be particular only to these countries.

International standards (including the Bangkok Rules) now recognize that because women commonly face certain risk factors and backgrounds, they require a gender-specific framework for healthcare. More women than men suffer from particular diseases, including HIV, hepatitis and some cancers. They have differing sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs, including those relating for example, to birth, abortion and the menopause. They are more susceptible to particular mental health problems. Studies have found self-harm in prison to be up to ten times higher among women than among men, and suicide to also be proportionally higher. This list goes on.

Women (especially those in conflict with the law) are also, crucially, more likely to have been victims of sustained gender-based violence and sexual abuse. Yet prisons, which are increasingly taking in women, are rarely equipped to respond to these forms of trauma. As I was told quietly by one prison healthcare worker, gesturing to a courtyard of around 20 women. “Almost all the women here are mothers, and a lot have maltreatment and molestation in their histories. I can look around and count more than ten women who have been raped. Some have been prostituted by their families. Then drug use comes in and makes it a vicious cycle.”

These and other cultural factors lead to a different sense of shame, which can also work as a barrier to healthcare. For example inmates in Jordan, Zambia and the Philippines told me that they often avoided reporting urinary tract infections and SRH problems to male health staff. Yet some prisons for women don’t employ female doctors, and these issues remain unrecognized, and sometimes debilitating.

My research findings with DIGNITY (see our comparative study here) therefore stress the urgent need for every prison and place of detention to follow a framework for healthcare that is gender-responsive and trauma-informed – one that treats women’s specific health needs, and trains staff accordingly. In just a few facilities did we find gestures towards this.

But not all gender-sensitive health responses are medical. The traditional prison model – designed as a harsh criminal justice response to violent men – remains the basis for many institutions detaining groups that are neither violent, nor male. In the facilities where women told me of harsh disciplinary structures, negative relationships between staff and inmates, and their isolation from caring relationships, they tended to report very low morale, forms of depression, and other signs of serious struggle, such as self harm and hunger strike. This was markedly different in facilities (such the one described here in Albania) that connected the women with the outside community – particularly their children – and gave them tools to cope, learn, communicate and prepare for the future.

Meanwhile, exercise is known to be important to health and morale, and is a right of prisoners under international law (see the Mandela Rules). Yet only in one of five countries, the Philippines, were detained women encouraged and able to exercise every day. In the other countries, exercise and sports facilities of some kind were common only in prisons for men.

Many of our findings on health fell in line with those observed by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women in her 2013 report on women’s incarceration, and they indicated clear and harmful examples of discrimination. Yet in reviewing issues raised by UN treaty body reports, we found women’s health to largely be a gap: UN experts are not giving this area consideration.

The human rights of these women entitle them to better, and must be championed, internationally and in their own countries. As once said by Dostoevsky, society must be judged by the way that it treats its prisoners. Or rather, and as told to me by one mother and survivor of domestic violence, sentenced to life in a Zambian prison: “If you’ve offended, certain things you must accept. But I don’t deserve to pass through some of these things. I came to prison healthy. I’m not intending to leave sick.”

(End)

Gina Din, the Founder and CEO of the Gina Din group, is a businesswoman from Kenya specializing in strategic communication and public relations. She was named CNBC outstanding businesswoman of the year for East Africa 2015 as well as 40 most influential voices in Africa. Siddharth Chatterjee is the UNFPA Representative to Kenya.

Denis, a 38-year-old Ugandan bank worker, usually takes a packed minibus known as a matatu to and from his day job through the capital Kampala’s notorious potholed and gridlocked roads. But two weeks ago, he tried a new option: the city’s passenger train, relaunched for the first time in two decades. “It’s safe, it’s better […]

Dominican journalist Amelia Deschamps addressing a workshop in Santo Domingo on the role of reporters with regard to climate change. Researchers and journalists from Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic took part in the event. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

By Ivet González
SANTO DOMINGO, Jan 6 2016 (IPS)

Environmentally committed journalists in the Caribbean point to a major challenge for media workers: communicating and raising awareness about the crucial climate change agreement that emerged from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris.

“Scientific information must be published in clearer language, and we must talk about the real impact of climate change on people’s lives,” journalist Amelia Deschamps, an anchorwoman on the El Día newcast of the Dominican channel Telesistema 11, told IPS.

She was referring to the communication challenges posed in the wake of COP21 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 in Paris to produce the first universal agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions and curb the negative impacts of global warming.

“So far good intentions abound, but there are few practical steps being taken in terms of mitigation and adaptation,” said Deschamps.

In the view of this journalist who specialises in environmental affairs, media coverage of global warming “has been very weak and oversimplified,” which she said has contributed to the public sense that it is a “merely scientific” issue that has little connection to people’s lives.

“People are more concerned about things that directly affect them,” said Deschamps, who is also an activist for risk management in poor communities, and considers citizen mobilisation key to curbing damage to the environment.

The 195 country parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in the French capital adopted a binding universal agreement aimed at keeping a global temperature rise this century “well below 2 degrees Celsius” with respect to the pre-industrial era.

Scientists warn that the planet is heating up as a result of human activity, and this is causing extreme weather events such as heat waves, lengthy droughts and heavy rainfall. In addition, clean water, fertile land and biodiversity are all being reduced.

Coastal areas are already suffering the consequences of rising sea levels, a process that according to scientific sources began 20,000 years ago, but has been accelerated by global warming over the last 150 years.

Small island nations such as those of the Caribbean are among the most vulnerable to climate change, while their emissions have contributed very little to the phenomenon.

“As journalists and communicators we have not managed to identify the right messages to make the public feel involved in this issue,” said Deschamps at a workshop organised by the Cuban Environmental Protection Agency, the Dominican Chapter of the Nicolás Guillén Foundation, the Norwegian Embassy and the Inter Press Service (IPS) international news agency.

Marie Jeanne Moisse, a reporter and environmental educator who works in the climate change office in Haiti’s Environment Ministry, spoke during a workshop in Santo Domingo about the media’s role in reporting on and raising awareness about global warming. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

To train reporters from the Caribbean, a group of experts from Cuba, Mexico and the Dominican Republic offered a Nov. 23-26 course on “Social Communication for Risk Prevention, Gender and Climate Change” in the Dominican capital.

The course was attended by 41 journalists from Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It included three talks that experts gave to students from two rural schools and to a group of 25 Haitian-Dominican women.

“The media need to be trained to provide more information at a national level on the phenomenon and about the agreement reached at COP21,” said Marie Jeanne Moise, an official in the climate change office in Haiti’s Environment Ministry.

According to Moise, a communicator and educator on the environment, “there is alarming talk today about global warming, and people are scared. But that doesn’t mean they know about the phenomenon or about how to protect themselves, to reduce the impacts on their lives.”

Moise urged journalists and reporters to “go to the roots of the problem.”

“News coverage focuses on catastrophes and on how vulnerable we are. But little is said about what contribution the media should make to help bring about a positive change in attitude towards the environment.”

The Haitian official said COP21 “created greater unity among the Caribbean as a vulnerable region that needs to adopt a common position.”

The countries in the region that took part in COP21 are negotiating as part of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), made up of 15 mainly island nations, and as part of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

Ahead of COP21, CARICOM launched the “1.5 to Stay Alive” campaign to raise awareness on the effects of climate change, especially on small island states, while strengthening the region’s negotiating position.

CARICOM estimates that inaction could cost its member countries 10.7 billion dollars in losses by 2025, or five percent of GDP, and some 22 billion dollars by 2050, or 10 percent of GDP.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, are on the list of the 10 countries most vulnerable to natural disasters, according to the Climate Change and Environmental Risk Analytics report published in 2012 by Verisk Maplecroft, a global risk analytics and forecasting company based in Britain.

Besides physical and economic exposure to events like earthquakes and hurricanes, these countries are vulnerable due to social inequality, a lack of preparedness, and unequal distribution of local and regional capacities, said the study, which compared 197 countries using 29 indices and interactive maps analysing major natural hazards worldwide.

Dominican blogger and human rights activist Yesibon Reynoso said that in his country “quite a lot is known and talked about, with regard to the environment, because of the current circumstances.”

But, he said, “for example, deforestation is not always punished. Impunity reigns through exploitation with the support of corruption in the state.”

In his view, “environmental rights are not addressed in accordance with how essential they are to life, in the country and around the globe. There is no traditional social and political respect for the environment.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

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• DEVELOPMENT: Is The Media Doing Enough?
• More IPS Coverage on Climate Change in the Caribbean

Mensarum enim voragines et varias voluptatum inlecebras, ne longius progrediar, praetermitto illuc transiturus quod quidam per ampla spatia urbis subversasque silices sine periculi metu properantes equos velut publicos signatis quod dicitur calceis agitant, familiarium agmina tamquam praedatorios globos post terga trahentes ne Sannione quidem, ut ait comicus, domi relicto

Car in roof, Lupita's twirl, queen's selfie and a supermoon

Quod opera consulta cogitabatur astute, ut hoc insidiarum genere Galli periret avunculus, ne eum ut praepotens acueret in fiduciam exitiosa coeptantem

Nigeria's president announces plans to raise spending by 20% next year by borrowing heavily amid falling oil prices

Att.Editors: The following item is from the Emirates News Agency (WAM)

By Emirates News Agency (WAM)
ABU DHABI, Dec 22 2015 (IPS)

(WAM) – The Gulf Today, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) newspaper has said that years of strife and with millions of its people scattered across the globe, peace is what Syrians yearn for. The country is in ruins and the spreading of radicalism poses major security challenges regionally and globally.

“The Syrian conflict has rattled the world so much that any initiative aimed to restore peace in that country should be welcomed without any hesitation,” said ‘The Gulf Today’ in an editorial published on Monday.

“In this context it is good that in its first resolution that focuses on ending Syria’s five-year-long war, the Security Council has now given the United Nations an enhanced role in shepherding the opposing sides to talks for a political transition, with a timetable for a ceasefire, a new constitution and elections, all under UN auspices.

“Also to give the Syrian peace prospects a strong push, foreign ministers from 17 countries gathered in New York before the council’s session. The UAE has always been a peace-loving country and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Foreign Minister, also took part in the meeting, presided over by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

“As Kerry put it, the UNSC has sent a clear message to all concerned that the time is now to stop the killing in Syria and lay the groundwork for a government that the long-suffering people of that battered land can support.

“More than 250,000 people have been killed since Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011. The civil war has been the main driver of mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their shattered homeland as of mid-year.

“An opportunity for peace has at last emerged. All parties involved in the talks should seize the chance. There is a dire need for leaders deliberating on the Syrian issue to take a flexible approach.

“The unambiguous goal is end to violence and a negotiated peace solution. The participating leaders should leave no stone unturned in achieving that,” concluded the Sharjah-based daily. (WAM) (END/2015)

Egyptian champions Zamalek will remain in country's top flight after reversing a decision to pull out in protest against refereeing.