Africa

Concern mounts about Guinea-Bissau commitment to curb drug trafficking, writes Ricci Shyrock.

By External Source
May 27 2020 (IPS)

Between 2002 and 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) faced the first pandemic of the globalized 21st century, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). Under the leadership of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland and through epidemiological, clinical, and logistical coordination, the WHO facilitated a strong and ultimately successful response to the outbreak. Today, the WHO is facing the coronavirus pandemic in an even more globalized and urbanized world, further complicating response and coordination efforts. What similarities do these two pandemics share, and what lessons in leadership might we be able to learn from the past?

The post LIVE STREAM: Former Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland on Pandemic Leadership appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Chicago Council on Global Affairs

 

Gro Brundtland, Former Prime Minister of Norway; Former Director-General, World Health Organization. Moderated by Catherine Bertini.

The post LIVE STREAM: Former Norwegian Prime Minister Brundtland on Pandemic Leadership appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Businessman Félicien Kabuga, who evaded capture for 26 years, says he was trying to help victims.

Djibouti Port. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By External Source
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 27 2020 (IPS)

The African Continental Free Trade Area was launched two years ago at an African Union (AU) summit in Kigali. It was scheduled to be implemented from 1 July 2020. But this has been pushed out until 2021 because of the impact of COVID-19 and the need for leaders to focus on saving lives.

Studies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and others state that the free trade area has the potential to increase growth, raise welfare and stimulate industrial development on the continent. But there are concerns. Some countries, particularly smaller and more vulnerable states, could be hurt. For example, they could suffer revenue losses and other negative effects from premature liberalisation.

African countries are increasingly connected to the global economy, but tend to operate at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are mainly supplying raw materials and other low-value manufactured outputs. Cooperation is needed between Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and industries to improve their competitiveness in global markets

The impact of COVID-19 will only worsen these structural weaknesses. The Economic Commission for Africa has reported that between 300,000 and 3.3 million people could lose their lives if appropriate measures are not taken. There are several reasons for this level of high risk. These include the fact that 56% of urban dwellings are in overcrowded slums, 71% of Africa’s workforce is informally employed and cannot work from home and 40% of children on the continent are undernourished.

Africa is also more vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19 because it is highly dependent on imports for its medicinal and pharmaceutical products and on commodity exports. The latter include oil, which has suffered a severe collapse in price.

Other contributing factors are high public debt due to higher interest rate payments than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, a weak fiscal tax base, and the negative impact on Africa’s currencies due to huge stimulus measures taken by OECD countries.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought these weaknesses into sharp relief. But it also provides an opportunity for African countries to address them. For example, they could accelerate intra-regional trade by focusing on the products of greatest need during the health crisis. Countries could also start building regional value chains to advance industrialisation, improve infrastructure and strengthen good governance and ethical leadership.

These are all vital to guiding African countries through the current crisis.

These goals can be achieved if African states adopt a “developmental regionalism” approach to trade integration. This would include fair trade, building regional value chains, cross-border investment in infrastructure and strengthening democratic governance.

 

Fair trade

A number of conditions need to be met for a free trade area to succeed.

Firstly, African states vary widely in size and economic development. As a result some may warrant special attention and specific treatment. In particular, among Africa’s 55 states 34 are classified by the United Nations as least developed countries. These are low income countries that have severe structural problems impeding their development.

Building trade agreements in favour of small and less developed economies will contribute to fairer outcomes of the free trade deal.

Secondly, African governments should include their stakeholders – businesses (both big and small), trade unions and civil society organisations – in the national consultation process. This will require effective institutions that enable the fullest participation.

Additional steps countries should take to cope with the fallout from COVID-19:

• Reduce tariffs on vital pharmaceutical products (such as ventilators), personal protective equipment and food products;
• Stimulate intra-regional trade by prioritising these products for an immediate or early phase down in the free trade area.

 

Building regional value chains

African countries are increasingly connected to the global economy, but tend to operate at the lowest rung of the ladder. They are mainly supplying raw materials and other low-value manufactured outputs.

Cooperation is needed between Africa’s emerging entrepreneurs and industries to improve their competitiveness in global markets. This would have a number of positive outcomes including:

• triggering industrialisation, which will transform economies
• helping African countries obtain a fairer share of the value derived from African commodities and labour, and
• improving the lives of people on the continent.

The current crisis creates an opportunity for African countries to build value chains on medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment.

The clothing and textile sector could also be restructured to meet the needs of the health sector while taking advantage of the breakdown in supply chains from China and Europe.

As more countries lock down their economies and apply movement controls, agricultural and processed food supply chains are disrupted. This creates opportunities to build regional supply chains and partner with retailers.

There are also opportunities to build infrastructure to support the health response: hospitals, water and sanitation, schools, low-cost housing and alternative energy.

African countries can also benefit from the growing interest in environmental tourism.

 

Cross-border infrastructure investment

Since most African countries are less developed, and many are small, intra-regional trade will require them to cooperate to improve their infrastructure. This includes physical ports, roads and railways as well as customs procedures, port efficiency and reduction of roadblocks.

Progress is already being made. Examples include the Mombasa-Nairobi Corridor; the Addis to Djibouti road, rail and port connection; and the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor, which handles more than two-thirds of West African trade.

Increased investment in these types of cross-border infrastructure projects will benefit regional integration.

 

Democracy and governance

Most African states have started accepting multi-party systems of governance. Many have also embraced a culture of constitutionalism, rule of law and human rights.

Democratic governance supported by active citizenship will create an environment of transparency and predictability that encourages domestic and foreign investment. Both are vital for growth and industrialisation. The process is also essential for the sustainability of regional economic integration and democracy in Africa.

Countries are becoming better at fulfilling their democratic obligations. For example, 40 African countries, including the Seychelles and Zimbabwe, voluntarily joined the African Peer Review Mechanism. The mechanism is a remarkable achievement that the free trade area agreement must build on.

 

The way forward

The free trade area could become a landmark in Africa’s journey towards peace, prosperity and integration. The COVID-19 pandemic, notwithstanding its devastating impact on the health and economies of Africa, could be an opportunity to advance the free trade area in a more developmental, inclusive and mutually beneficial way for African countries.

Faizel Ismail, Director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town

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

The post How a Post-COVID-19 Revival Could Kickstart Africa’s Free Trade Area appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The killings of three Chinese nationals come amid a crackdown on firms accused of discrimination.

Conseslus Kipruto is an Olympic and two-time World champion in the 3000m steeplechase. He's shared his homemade workout regime.

A communal farmer harvesting her maize crop in Seke communal lands, Zimbabwe. In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in digital agriculture. Credit: Tonderayi Mukeredzi/IPS

By Tonderayi Mukeredzi
HARARE, May 27 2020 (IPS)

Shurugwi communal farmer, Elizabeth Siyapi (57) can no longer be scammed by unscrupulous middlemen to sell her crops cheaply. Nowadays, before she takes her produce to market she scours her mobile phone, which has become an essential digital agriculture data bank, for the best prices on the market.

“When my livestock are sick, instead of waiting for an extension officer to physically visit me for help, which may take days, I just consult my phone to look for information on what to do,” she told IPS.

Siyaphi is one of approximately 34,000 small holder farmers across the country collectively using two smart phone-based solutions, Kurima Mari and Agrishare, promoted by German development agency, Welthungerhilfe Zimbabwe, to find markets, extension services, weather information and hire agriculture equipment.

Tawanda Mthintwa Hove, the head of digital agriculture at Welthungerhilfe Zimbabwe, said farmers have been using Kurima Mari to learn good agricultural practices and link with markets since 2016.

“Kurima Mari is available offline which eliminates the need for buying data. An extension officer updates the application on a regular basis and the updates are shared using bluetooth making it costless to the farmer,” he told IPS. “Whilst Agrishare is an online-based solution, it enables farmers to secure the best equipment in their homes, which reduces mobility costs.”

Over the last three years Siyaphi has utilised digital agriculture to find good agricultural practices. And her maize yield has multiplied from two 50-kilogram bags of maize to over three and a half tonnes.

• Though during the current COVID-19 lockdown in this southern African nation, her yields have reduced because of water restrictions.
• She told IPS that while markets remain available through the app, mostly via farmer to farmer contacts, transporting her produce to market has become the biggest problem because of lockdown restrictions. The current lockdown is in place indefinitely, though reviewed every two weeks by government. 

Hove said that mobile digital technologies improve the quantity and quality of farmer’s harvests by giving them current information on production practices. They also facilitate linkages, weather advisory services, add efficiency to commodity systems, which in the long run help increase farmer’s yields and make them more profitable.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in the use of digital agriculture.

• Other digital agriculture innovations include the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) and Econet Wireless championed, Ecofarmer Combo programme, which delivers weather-based insurance, real time location-based weather information and farming tips to over 80,000 communal farmers.
• Started by the churches in 2019, Turning Matabeleland Green, is another digital agriculture programme that uses satellite technology to send weather information and farming advice to over 2,000 farmers via the short message service.

Paul Zakariya, ZFU executive director, told IPS that mobile technology has enabled farmers to get farming advice in real-time, make online payments for inputs and services and access extension services from the tap of a phone, services that were previously available only through pamphlets and meetings.

According to the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN)  and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “Precision farming and new digital tools can help, enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of farming, while improving yields”.

But Charles Dhewa, the chief executive officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa, an indigenous systems company that operates eMkambo, another digital agriculture solution, said mobile applications were not yet directly benefitting smallholder farmers here.

“A few elite farmers with appropriate android phones could be benefitting here and there. That is why we have not positioned eMkambo Nest as a lead solution in our eMkambo platform,” he told IPS. 

Dhewa stated that although content was important, many farmers and traders don’t have time and bandwidth to toy with many of the available mobile and digital farming applications. The channels have reached their limits and are disintegrated, in addition to causing information asymmetry amongst farmers.

Digital literacy and the high cost of mobile communication is also reversing gains that could have been made by digital technology.

“The high cost of mobile money is worsening the situation, rendering mobile technology more of a luxury than a necessity,” he said. “Paying for agricultural commodities through mobile money is now more expensive.” 

Zakariya said despite an increased deployment of digital technologies in agriculture, farmers were using ICTs much less to improve agri-business. Beyond mobile applications, the country has been slow in adopting other appropriate technologies and innovations crucial in commercialising the country’s agriculture, which remains mostly subsistence. 

There is little use of high-end technologies with potential to enhance production and value chain competitiveness such as crop protection technology, soil and moisture sensors, drones, precision farming, molecular technology, use of global positioning systems and geographic information systems (GIS).

Zakariya said the uptake of modern, sophisticated technologies was capital intensive for most farmers while many more farmers lacked knowledge on the use and efficacy of the newer technologies.

Dhewa said that GIS has a better future in agriculture than mobile applications sharing information.

• The Digitalisation of the African Agriculture Report 2018-19 said there has been a significant growth in digitalisation for agriculture across the continent during the past 10 years.
• The report, authored by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation, said by 2019, there were about 390 distinct, active digitalisation for agriculture solutions, where 33 million small holder farmers were registered.
• But despite the impressive growth figures, only 42 percent of the registered farmers and pastoralists are using the solutions with any frequency.

According to Hove, it is rural farmers that have been hit hard by COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and prohibitive data costs, as such many can’t move their produce easily and have been deprived of income. This has forced some farmers to resort to middlemen.

Still, Hove said, some rural farmers have been able to find markets through the contact list (farmer to farmer) on the app as opposed to using the real-time markets list.

Meanwhile Siyapi said that she and other farmers struggle to buy data. As a lead and successful farmer, she requires about $16 a month in data but says other farmers can make do with $2.20 to download updates and peruse the marketplace.

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• COVID-19: India’s Harvests also Locked Down

The post Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe’s Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

In recent years, Zimbabwe has witnessed a rapid growth in the use of digital agriculture but uptake of modern technology is capital intensive for farmers.

The post Digital Agriculture Benefits Zimbabwe’s Farmers but Mobile Money is Costly appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Dr Julia Stamm
BERLIN, May 27 2020 (IPS)

Crises make us think smaller. When everything is uncertain, we turn inward: to our families, our communities, the immediate needs around us. We focus on the essential and the immediate; we survive.

On an individual level, this instinct can be clarifying, as it may bring into focus the realm of the Truly Important: our closest human relationships, our health, our community, our freedom.

Looking past this circle of immediacy, however, it’s clear to see that the current global pandemic will demand much more of us. Beyond the here and now, it is becoming increasingly clear that he Covid-19 crisis is creating enormous need and essential work for the future.

Preparing for and addressing these future challenges is also a matter of great urgency. Responding to the urgent needs of the moment while keeping the futures we want in our field of vision requires us to be intentional and thoughtful about the choices we make now.

The Futures Project exists precisely at this juncture where present and future come into conversation, and from this vantage point, it is clear that we cannot talk about problem-solving in the present without making sure we know where we want to go.

One need not look far to see the roadmap of future needs that is emerging in light of the Covid-19 crisis. If you follow the cracks, long-existent but willfully ignored, that have come starkly into view in the past few months, you can trace your way to some of the challenges that will shape our future.

With the closure of schools, we see not only the fact of disparate access to internet networks, but also the direct translation of this disparity into outcomes: some students will return to school having kept up with their learning, and others will fall further behind.

We see that for those without stable housing and access to food and water, social distancing, handwashing, and safe shelter at home are simply not possible. We see that our essential workers have long been the least celebrated, their livelihoods among the least protected. These are only a few examples.

Julia Stamm

We see also that solutions are possible—that, especially if we are willing to acknowledge the inequalities that we’ve grown comfortable with, in the parts of the world that benefit from them, we can fix our problems. This will take a massive reimagining of what’s possible, and a massive recalibrating of what is acceptable to us.

The UN75 global conversation initiative, launched to celebrate the 75th birthday of the United Nations in October 2020, has opened an international dialogue on precisely these topics.

The initiative asks people to talk about the future, asking three “big questions”: what kind of future do we want to create? Are we on track? What do we need to bridge the gap?

Of course, when these questions were written and the initiative launched, no one foresaw the upheaval that was to come. Given the massive disruption that Covid-19 has caused, these questions may, at first glance, feel out of place. In a crisis, everything feels immediate. And to some extent, it is true: we have to adapt, respond, pull together, and make it through.

Our view, though, is that crisis response and thinking about the future go hand-in-hand. In this uncertain moment, asking ourselves and each other about the futures we want to inhabit provides light for our path.

Given the sometimes-overwhelming scope of the crisis, using the future as our guide will help us find our next small step. 2020 was to be the beginning of a crucial decade for the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and even though most did not factor a global pandemic into their response plans, the SDGs also provide a blueprint for the future that can serve to guide our crisis response.

If we have any hope of repairing the cracks, of finding solutions to urgent problems that not only carry us through the moment but also pave the way to a more resilient future, we must bring people together across borders, sectors, and boundaries to create a vision for the future and make plans to act.

This is exactly the task that the UN75 questions facilitate, and the backdrop against which The Futures Project builds its work.

Our commitment during this time is to serve as a steward of thinking and doing that helps us all keep the futures we want to inhabit, and the futures we hope future generations can inhabit, in our field of vision.

Our current initiative, Innovators for the Future, bridges reflection and action, thinking and doing, by building off of the UN75 questions. By identifying projects that are having positive impacts on their communities now, while also keeping an eye on the future they want to see, we are looking at what the UN75 questions look like in action.

Innovators for the Future extends the UN75 dialogue by asking not only what kind of future we want to create, but also, what are we doing to get there? And for our part at the Futures Project, we’re asking: how can we help build the bridge between thinking and doing; between present and future?

Through our Social Impact Accelerator, we’re also lending a hand, supporting the do-ers of the world and the future visions for their communities towards which they are building.

Above all, The Futures Project and the Call for Innovators are about commitment to the idea that we can—and will—build better futures. We do not know exactly what this looks like.

Creating these future visions are part of the work. We do, however, believe wholeheartedly that our imagined world of tomorrow can teach us about how to do better today. We are committed to doing the work it takes to build the world that we see outlined in the UN Vision, and we remain hopeful.

The post UN@75 & the Future We Want appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Julia Stamm is Founder & CEO, The Futures Project, described as a “nonprofit initiative to transform the way we think about and shape the future, re-envisioning the role that technology and innovation can play in helping us realise the futures we want to create.”

The post UN@75 & the Future We Want appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Early successes have been hailed by some but governments must start getting more data, reports Anne Soy.

Ugandan firms discuss how their businesses are continuing to run despite the coronavirus lockdown.

Scientists have tracked a cuckoo's migratory flight from Africa to its breeding ground in Mongolia.

Open drainage ditch, Ankorondrano-Andranomahery, Madagascar. Credit: Lova Rabary-Rakontondravony/IPS

By Gareth Willmer and Fiona Broom
May 26 2020 (IPS)

Crucial global goals to reduce hunger and poverty and curb climate change have gone backwards or stalled, the United Nations Secretary-General warns in a new report, as the COVID-19 outbreak moves from being a health crisis to becoming the “worst human and economic crisis of our lifetimes”.

The number of people suffering hunger has increased, climate change is occurring faster than predicted, and inequality is increasing within and among countries, António Guterres says in his ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals’ 2020 report.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched four years ago to address the most pressing global needs for a sustainable future, including education and health improvements and reductions in social and economic inequalities.

“The effects of the pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate its impact have overwhelmed the health systems globally, caused businesses and factories to shut down and severely impacted the livelihoods of half of the global workforce,” he says in the report.

It comes on top of an existing slowing in progress towards many of the SDGs, and Guterres had launched a Decade of Action in September to turn things around.

The latest report, published last week (14 May), illustrates “the continued unevenness of progress and the many areas where significant improvement is required”.

The report has been released ahead of UN Economic and Social Council high-level meetings scheduled for July to provide a global, data-driven overview of the SDGs.

 

Women and girls

Last year’s report had already warned that there was “simply no way that we can achieve the 17 SDGs without achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls”.

In the 2020 review, Guterres says “the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled”.

Only half of the world’s women who are married or ‘in-union’ make their own decisions regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights, based on 2007-2018 data from 57 countries, the report says.

“People are talking about a global response in terms of a vaccine, I think we should pay attention to those who are talking about a global response to the coming food crisis.”

Social and economic development has been shown to accelerate when women have access to mobile phones, the report says, but phone ownership remains higher for men than for women.

More than 260 million children were out of school in 2017 and 773 million adults — two-thirds of whom are women — remained illiterate in 2018.

As of 2019, less than half of primary and lower secondary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa had access to electricity, computers, the internet and basic handwashing facilities, the report states.

Billions of people worldwide still lack access to safely managed water and sanitation services, including 2.2 billion people without safe drinking water.

And, the world is projected to miss the target to end poverty in all its forms as hunger increased for the fourth consecutive year and about 50 million children experienced acute undernutrition. Globally, 144 million children under five were still affected by stunting in 2019, with three quarters of these children in Central and Southern Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa.

Claire Heffernan, director of the London International Development Centre, a membership organisation, says the SDGs are incompatible with the COVID-19 pandemic on a political level.

“The SDGs reflected the political will of the time,” she says. “Today, in the midst of this pandemic, I think it’s safe to say global political will is in short supply.”

 

Food crisis

Subir Sinha, senior lecturer in institutions and development at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), says he is sceptical of suggestions in the report that progress has been made on poverty, because the quality of data from national governments has become worse.

He says that wage protections and labour rights need to be made into political issues to ensure they stay on governments’ radars.

“COVID-19 is going to make questions of hunger much worse,” Sinha says. “People are talking about a global response in terms of a vaccine, I think we should pay attention to those who are talking about a global response to the coming food crisis.”

The SDG progress report comes after the United Nations predicted last week that the COVID-19 crisis could push 130 million more people into poverty in the next 10 years.

About 35 million people are expected to fall below the extreme poverty line this year as a result of the pandemic, with 56 per cent of them in Africa, the UN’s World Economic Situation and Prospects as of mid-2020 report predicted.

The global economy is forecast to lose a staggering US$8.5 trillion in production over the next two years due to the pandemic, the UN report says.

This is a “tremendous setback” for sustainable development, Elliott Harris, UN chief economist and assistant secretary-general for economic development, told SciDev.Net.

“[The pandemic] is particularly affecting the more vulnerable groups … because these are the ones whose activities generally require some form of physical proximity to others.”

 

Remittances

Remittances from migrant workers in the global North could face a hit – in countries such as Haiti, South Sudan and Tonga, remittances constitute more than a third of gross domestic product.

“You have an abrupt cut of people’s livelihoods and incomes, and then you’ve got different kinds of cascading effects through the bigger food system,” says Sophia Murphy, senior specialist in agriculture, trade and investment at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

There are also fears about what the pandemic could mean for long-term food security, with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) estimating that 130 million more people in low- and middle-income countries may be pushed into acute food insecurity this year.

Bumper crops in some regions are at risk of being wasted. India has been hit by COVID-19 at harvest time, with crops left unpicked and difficulties getting grain to market for sale before it spoils.

This comes after rising hunger in the three years to 2018 pushed undernourishment back to levels seen around 2010.

Evidence of price rises has already emerged. In Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, the WFP notes a 10 per cent surge in the price of a typical local basket of food – comprising fish, pulses, peanut paste, cassava flour, oil and condiments – in the space of two weeks.

The organisation expects food price rises to occur more widely, as this is happening in countries such as Syria, where prices have more than doubled in the past year.

“I think it’s probably much more widespread than we realise because we’ve never encountered an emergency on this sort of scale before,” says Jane Howard, head of communications, marketing and advocacy at the WFP’s London office.

“It’s like having an emergency in every single country that you’re working in.”

Some countries are already reeling from other problems, such as the locust swarms in East Africa, leading to potentially “devastating” impacts, she adds.

 

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

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By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, May 26 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Despite all the preoccupation with the current raging pandemic, it sadly appears that there has been no let-up in the global arms race among the major powers. In mid-May, the United States President Donald Trump, at an event for his new Space Force at the White House made a significant announcement, It was that the US was building right now an “incredible” new missile which would travel faster than any other in the world “by a factor of almost three”. This was obviously a response to the latest Russian ‘Avangard’ missile, which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims in invincible, with a speed of twenty times that of sound. The Chinese, reportedly are also feverishly working on their own hypersonic counterparts. All these would be strategic tools to significantly alter the war-fighting capabilities of humanity in the future.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

Up until recently, around the times of the First Great War (1914-1918) war fighting was based on come rather simple techniques Battlefield outcomes could be based on certain straight forward equations. One was a mathematical model, named after its proponent, called ‘Lanchester’s Law’. According to it, between two confronting sides, the higher number or greater firepower had better chances of winning. More complex formulae were derived therefrom. But it had too many limitations for use in contemporary conflict.

So, ideas evolved further. A system called ‘network’ enabled smaller numbers with lesser firepower to be more effective in an ‘asymmetric conflict’ which is also now called ‘sub-conventional’ war Non-state actors like the ‘Hizbulllah’ in Lebanon used these principles involving a hierarchical mode of communications effectively against an ostensibly more powerful Israeli army.

In 1996 two researchers of the US Rand Corporation, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt gloated a more refined concept in a document entitled ‘The Advert of Network’. The US has since pioneered an even more sophisticated version, which only modern well-equipped armies were capable of implementing. This was called ‘Network-centric operations’. Simply put, it involved four loops of sensors: First, identification of enemy assets, second, command and control of decision-making; third, target elimination, and fourth, logistics. Most modern armies now have ‘net-work command’, with latest communications and computers, with the Signals Branch at its care.

Now there are those who hold that even this ‘network-centrism’ is vulnerable. This is particularly go with the advent of ‘Artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare. The ‘Networks’ could be susceptible to disabling by such weapons. Today, as the new US space Force makes evident, battlefield domains are no longer confined to land, air, and sea. It now also includes space, deep-sea, cyber-space, and the solar electro-magnetic spectrum. Cyber-attacks can knock-out high value assets, including not only military command and control, but also critical civilian functions like banking, travel and telephony which would paralyze life-style, without a single shot being fired!

Today there is a race to build ever more ‘autonomous weapons’ such as smarter drones. Contemporary ‘intelligent machines’ can react at superhuman speeds, that are hard presses to match. There are those who argue future ‘Artificially intelligent’ weapons may be able to think ahead of the human brain, which could cause unique issues.

Actually, this is not much different from some 2500 years ago, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote : “speed is the essence of war”. Military analysts are already speaking of a coming “battlefield singularity” in which the pace of combat will eclipse the pace of human decision-making. Fastest reaction in the shortest possible time will be the key to overwhelming the adversary. It would be akin to what is known as “OODA’ in aerial dogfighting. The ‘Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act’. So, will machines in battlefield take over from the human protagonists? The answers, at least for now, is happily, no. Even if fully autonomous weapons could possible led humans to code battlefield control, the ultimate critical decisions about how this technology is used, will still rest in human hands.

The principal security threat that the world confronts now is not military, it is an unconventional one, a malady, COVID-19 like the ‘Smart Weapon’, it is a ‘smart virus’, It is unseen, moves swiftly, adapts fast and mutates easily. Any battle-strategy, classical of modern, would advocates to those equally susceptible, the need to combine budget and brains to combat this unforeseen and deadly foe. True, it is easier said than done. But the clear absence of any-logical alternative would be a powerful factor in achieving this end. Uniting against this common, enemy COVID-19, is our Hobson’s Choice, one that has no option.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is Principal Research Fellow at ISAS, National University of Singapore, former Foreign Advisor and President of Cosmos Foundation Bangladesh.

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier

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Russia urges peace talks as the US accuses it of meddling in the Libya conflict.

Their 15-year sentence triggered a diplomatic row resulting in the recalling of the US ambassador.

South Africa’s white rhinoceros recovered from near-extinction thanks to intense conservation efforts. Experts around the world have called for international and local cooperation for biological preservation to prevent future pandemic. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 2020 (IPS)

A future repetition of the current COVID-19 pandemic is preventable with massive cooperation on international and local levels and by ensuring biological diversity preservation around the world, experts recently said.

How to prevent the current crisis in the future

• According to the World Health Organisation the coronavirus originated in bats, and original theories had circulated the virus spread to humans from a wet market in Wuhan, China.

In celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity held on Friday, May 22, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) held a series of panels, bringing together experts to speak about this year’s theme “Our solutions are in nature”.

The current COVID-19  pandemic was the key theme in all the discussions and various experts from around the world shared their thoughts on topics such as the link between the current coronavirus crisis and biodiversity, methods and practices that can unite different communities and solutions that humans can carve out from our access to nature.

Many of the experts echoed the notion that better conservation can play a crucial role in preventing such a crisis in the future.

“Better conservation of large intact natural areas, including natural world heritage sites and urgent measures to address illegal wildlife trade are really considered important to limit the emergence of new diseases in the future,” Mechtild Rössler, director of the World Heritage Centre (WHC), said at the panel. 

“Focus should not only be gazetting protected areas but also on creating and [enabling] conditions [where] these areas can fulfil their biodiversity conservation objectives,” she added.

Paul Leadley, a researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay, pointed out that human health is “linked indissociably” with the condition or health of nature, and that about 70 percent of emerging diseases are a result of human contact with animals, including causes such as deforestation and trade and consumption of wild animals.

As such, he said, it’s crucial that we have preventative measures instead of carving out measures only in response to a crisis, as is happening now.

“We need to be more proactive and researchers and decision makers must understand that we need it to be upstream,” he said at the “What changes are necessary?” panel. “We need to identify diseases that could emerge before they spread, [and] we [need to] start to better understand the change from transmission from animals to man.”

And these issues have an economic impact as well.

Rössler noted that heritage sites in 90 percent of the countries where heritage properties are located have been partially or fully closed due to loss of entrance fees, thus contributing to the local economy in a negative way.

Closures of sites have caused major socioeconomic impact for communities living in and around these sites, Rössler said, including disruption of community life, aggravated poverty and serious issues related to the monitoring of conservation practices.

Rössler isn’t alone in this observation.

Roderic Mast, co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature SSC Marine Turtle Specialist Group, recently told IPS that they have been receiving reports of how a lack of monitoring and enforcers on the ground have caused increased illegal poaching in places such as Indonesia and French Guiana.

International and local cooperation

Leadley, who is also an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) expert, further said it’s crucial for international and local cooperation in order to prevent such transmissions.

Rössler echoed a similar thought, and called for a “stronger commitment” between all parties.

“We need a stronger commitment from all governments to conserve and manage these areas, to exclude them from unsustainable development activities and we need increased solidarity and cooperation among nations to achieve that,” she said, adding that it will also help communities further contribute to actions surrounding climate change.

Tim Christophersen, coordinator of the Nature for Climate Branch at United Nations Environment, highlighted the youth’s activism on the matter.

“We see the emergence of a global restoration movement from youth networks to communities that want to rebuild their livelihoods all across the world so this movement is already emerging,” he said at the panel “What are the possible ways to regenerate ecosystems and restore our connections with biodiversity?”

Christophersen is also a focal point for the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem restoration 2021-2030, and said the next decade has a lot of opportunities for learning between local and international communities.

“What we can do with the U.N. decade is to link local activities to a global umbrella to give people at a local level more tools and hopefully more resources, more inspiration and a connectedness to a global movement where we can learn from each other,” he said.

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A union says the health ministry bears "full responsibility" for doctors' deaths from Covid-19.

The 50 return home a month after a woman working as a maid in Beirut was found for sale on Facebook.

Rafiullah Wardak looks upon his newborn daughter Amina, recovering after being wounded by gunmen who stormed a maternity award in Kabul on May 19, 2020. Mr. Wardak's wife, Nazeya, was among at least 24 people killed in the attack, including women, nurses, and newborns. Credit: Courtesy of the Rafiullah Wardak family published @csmonitor

By Sheikha Hend Al Qassimi and Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 26 2020 (IPS)

Consider this. 24 women, children and babies were murdered at a hospital in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Even by standards of a country as accustomed to bloodshed as Afghanistan, the May 12 attack on a Kabul maternity clinic was an event of unmitigated horror.

That anyone could target women at their most vulnerable and infants in their first hours of life defies belief and makes one despair of the world that welcomed little Amina. Born just two hours before the attack that killed her mother, Amina’s leg was shattered by a bullet.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “Any attack on innocents is unforgivable, but to attack infants and women in labour… is an act of sheer evil”.

The incident throws into relief the need to protect vulnerable populations even as the world struggles with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Health workers operating in difficult circumstances, such as the heroic Dr Najibullah Bina who led the team that conducted the first surgery on little Amina’s leg, continue to expose themselves and their families to the virus as well as to terror attacks.

Sheikha Hend Al-Qassemi

The pandemic has an alarming potential to reverse hard-won socioeconomic gains inspired the March 2020 appeal by UN Secretary-General António Guterres for an immediate global ceasefire, which asked all warring parties to silence their guns to facilitate the delivery of aid and open up space for diplomacy

Women generally are at specific risk and disadvantage in Afghanistan, largely for reasons of culture. Their lives, quite separately from their deaths, are constrained in many ways that affect their health, education, nutrition and well-being. One of the most dangerous places in the world for a woman to give birth, Afghanistan is a microcosm of vulnerability for women and children, with a maternal mortality rate of around 638 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and around two physicians for every 10,000 people.

Afghanistan must figure out how to best support women and children when health efforts are under threat by both terrorists and a dangerous virus.

Around the globe, COVID-19 is worsening the situation for women already at risk, such as those in abusive relationships. Many millions are now required by emergency regulations to remain at home with their abusers, removed from the gaze of those who might otherwise see them and offer help.

And with one in every three women globally experiencing physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime, the issue is startlingly grave.

Siddharth Chatterjee

UNFPA, the UN’s Population Fund, says the COVID-19 lockdown is disproportionately affecting women and children. It is resulting in millions more cases of violence, child marriage, female genital mutilation and unintended pregnancy. “The new data shows the catastrophic impact that COVID-19 could soon have on women and girls globally,” said Dr. Natalia Kanem, UNFPA’s Executive Director.

Their well-being and economic resilience are threatened not only by the lockdown itself, but also by scaling down of health services and support such as hotlines, crisis centres, shelters, legal aid, protection, and counselling services.

The horror in Afghanistan further illustrates the urgency of the UN Secretary General’s clarion call for the peace-humanitarian action-development nexus to deal with conflicts, violent extremism, and other forms of instability. Now more than ever, there is a need for approaches that address social, economic, and political drivers of radicalisation.

There will be no one-size-fits-all model, and each country must continually assess which members of society are at the highest risk. If vulnerable groups are not properly identified and suitable responses developed, the consequences of this pandemic may be more devastating than we have dared to imagine.

Humanity has often been guilty of detachment regarding the plight of vulnerable populations. The COVID-19 threat is an opportunity to change course. While the virus does not discriminate, we must be careful lest our responses to it end up further entrenching current inequalities.

Images of two-hour-old Amina, swaddled in a blood-drenched blanket and with a bullet in her tiny bones must exponentially rouse our collective humanity and question the normalisation of indifference to the most vulnerable.

Sheikha Hend Al Qassimi, a multifaceted Emarati Princess, is an accomplished editor and writer, successful entrepreneur and architect and a committed philanthropist. She has a Masters in Marketing, Management & Communications from the Paris Sorbonne University. A Bachelor of Arts and Design with a double major (Architecture and Design Management) from the American University of Sharjah. Follow her on twitter- @LadyVelvet_HFQ

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator to Kenya. He has served in various parts of the world with UNFPA, UNICEF, UNDP, UNOPS, UN Peacekeeping and the Red Cross Movement. A decorated Special Forces veteran, he is an alumnus of Princeton University. Follow him on twitter-@sidchat1

This OPED was originally published in Forbes Africa.

The post No Woman Should Ever Die Giving Life appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Zoltán Kálmán is Permanent Representative of Hungary to the Rome-based UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP). He was President of the WFP Executive Board in 2018.

By Zoltán Kálmán
ROME, May 26 2020 (IPS)

Hunger and food insecurity continue to rise. The official 2019 statistics refer to 821 million people suffering from hunger all over the world. According the recently launched Global Report on Food Crises, there are further 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse. WFP estimates that due to the impacts of COVID19, additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. This means a total increase of 265 million people. If there will be no appropriate and urgent actions, “we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months”, said David Beasley, WFP Executive Director, addressing the UN Security Council on 21st April.

The most important drivers are conflicts, weather extremes and economic shocks, and all linked directly to extreme poverty and inequalities. This alarming situation is aggravated by and strongly interlinked with unsustainable practices in agriculture. Land use/cover change, environmental pollution, climate change are important drivers of biodiversity loss and soil degradation. Food losses and waste, diet-related health impacts are further undesired consequences of unsustainable food systems.

Transition to more sustainable food systems could be an adequate response to these challenges. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals including the zero hunger target is still possible but it would require urgent and coordinated efforts. There is a growing consensus that transition to more sustainable food systems is indispensable and requires innovations.

Transition should start with the sustainability assessment of current food systems, including the economic dimension of sustainability. In this regard, we should bear in mind that economic viability is largely determined by policy incentives. Governments worldwide spend around USD 700 billion (OECD Economic Outlook 2019) every year on farm support, contributing to the profitability of the food systems and the farming methods applied. As a result, in many countries of the world, unsustainable, input intensive industrial, monoculture farming has become profitable. However, science can demonstrate that with a levelled playing field, sustainable approaches and practices would be economically viable and competitive alternatives. This becomes even more obvious if we apply the “true cost accounting” principle and internalise all positive and negative environmental and social externalities. To reverse the negative trends and to make food production more sustainable, appropriate and evidence-based policy incentives are required to promote and favour sustainable and innovative solutions.

In agriculture “innovation is an imperative” but it should not be considered as an objective itself. Innovation should rather serve as means to reach our shared goals: to eliminate poverty and hunger and respond to the challenges listed above. Therefore, we should ensure that innovations are available, accessible and affordable also in the most remote areas, and for the poorest of the poor. In the least developed countries priority should be given to those innovations that are focusing on the basic needs. In any way, innovations should be inclusive and follow the participatory approach. National priorities should be respected and development proposals should be elaborated together with local communities, to improve their livelihood, including through alternative farm- and non-farm employment opportunities (in food processing, services, etc.). Sustainable innovative approaches, such as agroecology, are inclusive, rely on traditional knowledge and apply the most advanced, objective science and most up-to-date innovations and technologies. The Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) is an evidence of the feasibility and usefulness of combining traditional knowledge and innovation. Artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation, precision agriculture, drones, satellites, smart phones and many other innovations could be supportive of agroecology and have a role in optimizing food chains, managing water resources, fighting pests and diseases, tackling desert locust upsurge, monitoring forests, increasing preparedness of farmers when disasters strike, etc. Regarding artificial intelligence, it is appreciated that FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu has recently taken an important step by signing the Rome Call for AI Ethics, emphasizing the need to “minimize the new technology’s risks while exploiting its potential benefits”.

Innovations, according to past and present prevailing practice, have been focusing on how to produce more, how to get higher yields, how to increase productivity, etc. These are all important, but we need to bear in mind that we already produce enough food for the whole world. More than one third of the food produced is lost or wasted, provoking unnecessary (and avoidable) environmental impacts of food production.

Departing from the past, innovations should focus on the real problems and offer solutions to current challenges of preserving biodiversity, restoring soil fertility, reduce pollution, modernise rural infrastructure and reduce the digital divide, preserve and create rural jobs, improve education, reduce food losses and waste, etc. All having essential role in achieving the basic objectives: eliminate poverty and hunger.

Innovations, including biotechnological methods, should be sustainable. Great majority of broadly accepted and applied biotechnological methods (fermentation, cheese making, etc.) are considered appropriate from sustainability point of view, while others (such as genetic modification – GM) are contentious. In addition to the human health concerns related to the GM crops, the undesired impacts of monoculture cropping on soils and on biodiversity and the seed- and other input supply dependency for farmers, particularly smallholder family farmers, justify following the precautionary principle. In this regard, independent and neutral scientific research should help all countries and all farmers to understand the potential risks and benefits of GM crops. There is no “one size fits all” solution, therefore, farmers should be in a position to take a free and informed decision and choose to produce them or not. While providing policy advice to countries, FAO, as a knowledge-based UN technical agency should continue to follow this approach and neither promote nor speak against producing GM crops. To maintain its credibility and independence, FAO should continue to generate and disseminate neutral scientific evidence on this complex and contentious issue.

Sustainable innovations, such as agroecology, could contribute to economic viability, provide appropriate solutions to many of the environmental challenges and are socially inclusive, addressing rural employment and livelihood. This is particularly relevant in Africa, where in some countries 60-80% of the population live in rural areas and their livelihood is based on agriculture.

It is important to note, however, that developed countries would also need to transform their food systems, making them more sustainable, applying sustainable innovations. In this regard, it is remarkable that the European Commission has proposed the innovative Farm to Fork Strategy for a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system and the EU Biodiversity Strategy to bring nature back into our lives, preserving and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity. The two strategies are at the heart of the European Green Deal and are “mutually reinforcing, bringing together nature, farmers, business and consumers for jointly working towards a competitively sustainable future“.

 

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The post Innovation Is an Imperative – for Sustainable Food Systems appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Zoltán Kálmán is Permanent Representative of Hungary to the Rome-based UN agencies (FAO, IFAD, WFP). He was President of the WFP Executive Board in 2018.

The post Innovation Is an Imperative – for Sustainable Food Systems appeared first on Inter Press Service.