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UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Antonio Guterres
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 4 2022 (IPS)

The war in Ukraine continues to have a devastating impact on the people of that country. Civilians are dying in the most tragic circumstances every day. Millions of lives have been destroyed or put on hold.

This war is senseless, and we must all do everything in our power to bring it to an end through a negotiated solution in line with the UN Charter and international law.

We are doing all we can to reduce suffering and save lives in Ukraine and the region, through our humanitarian operations. And Martin Griffiths will be able to soon brief you on those developments.

But the war is also having a huge and multi-dimensional impact far beyond Ukraine, through a threefold crisis of access to food, energy and finance.

Household budgets everywhere are feeling the pinch from high food, transport and energy prices, fueled by climate breakdown and war.

This threatens a starvation crisis for the poorest households, and severe cutbacks for those on average incomes.

Many developing countries are drowning in debt, without access to finance, and struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and could go over the brink.

We are already seeing the warning signs of a wave of economic, social and political upheaval that would leave no country untouched.

That is the reason why I set up the Global Crisis Response Group: to find coordinated global solutions to this triple crisis, recognizing its three elements – food, energy and finance – that are deeply interconnected.

The GCRG has presented detailed recommendations on food and finance. I believe we are making some progress, namely on food.

Today’s report looks at the energy crisis, with a wide array of recommendations.

Simply put, it aims to achieve the energy equivalent of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, by managing this energy crisis while safeguarding the Paris Agreement and our climate goals.

I would like to highlight four of the recommendations of the report.

First, it is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities and at a massive cost to the climate.

The combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to $100 billion.

I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times.

And I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet.

Second, all countries – and especially developed countries – must manage energy demand. Conserving energy, promoting public transport and nature-based solutions are essential components of that.

Third, we need to accelerate the transition to renewables, which in most cases are cheaper than fossil fuels.

Earlier this year, I outlined a 5-point plan to spark the renewables revolution.

Storage technologies including batteries should become public goods.

Governments must scale up and diversify supply chains for raw materials and renewable energy technologies.

They should eliminate red tape around the energy transition, and shift fossil fuel subsidies to support vulnerable households and boost renewable energy investments.

Governments must support the people, communities and sectors most affected, with social protection schemes and alternative jobs and livelihoods.

Fourth, private and multilateral finance for the green energy transition must be scaled up.

Renewable energy investments need to increase by factor of seven to meet the net zero goal, according to the International Energy Agency.

Multilateral development banks need to take more risks, help countries set up the right regulatory frameworks and modernize their power grids, and mobilize private finance at scale.

I urge shareholders in those banks to exercise their rights and make sure they are fit for purpose.

Today’s report expands on these ideas, and Rebeca Grynspan will elaborate on them in a moment.
 
Every country is part of this energy crisis, and all countries are paying attention to what others are doing. There is no place for hypocrisy.

Developing countries don’t lack reasons to invest in renewables. Many of them are living with the severe impacts of the climate crisis, including storms, wildfires, floods and droughts.

What they lack are concrete, workable options. Meanwhile, developed countries are urging them to invest in renewables, without providing enough social, technical or financial support.

And some of those same developed countries are introducing universal subsidies at gas stations, while others are reopening coal plants. It is difficult to justify such steps even on a temporary basis.
 
If they are pursued, such policies must be strictly time-bound and targeted, to ease the burden on the energy-poor and the most vulnerable, during the fastest possible transition to renewables.

Footnote: Launching the third brief of the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres thanked the GCRG Task Team, coordinated by Rebeca Grynspan, and the Energy Workstream, for making this report possible.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in his address to the UN press corps while launching the third brief by the Global Crisis Response Group on Energy.

Venezuelan migrant Manuela Molina (not her real name) was promised a decent job in Trinidad, but minutes after her arrival she was forced into a van and taken to a secret location. Credit: IOM Port of Spain

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Aug 3 2022 (IPS)

Human beings have proved to be capable of producing innumerable practical inventions while much too often making the worst use of them. Take the case, per example, of how criminal groups heavily rely on digital platforms to trap and enslave their victims also for extracting and selling their organs.

Yes, technology now dominates most of human activities and, surprisingly enough, it is now presented as the perfect life-saving solution for the smallest and poorest households worldwide. Simply, it has replaced the precious human knowledge, which has been acquired over thousands of years.

And technology is now utilised by the world’s biggest ‘warlords’ to bomb unarmed civilians with drones, also carrying nuclear heads.

Meanwhile, internet and digital platforms are used by criminal gangs to recruit, exploit and control the victims of their human trafficking lucrative business. Among other crimes, victims of trafficking are also targeted for “organ harvesting.”

No wonder then that the 2022 World Day Against Trafficking in Persons (30 July) has focused on the use and abuse of technology as a tool that can both enable and impede human trafficking.

 

What’s behind human trafficking?

“Conflicts, forced displacement, climate change, inequality and poverty, have left tens of millions of people around the world destitute, isolated and vulnerable,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres ahead of World Day.

The COVID-19 pandemic has separated children and young people in general from their friends and peers, pushing them into spending more time alone and online, said Guterres.

“Human traffickers are taking advantage of these vulnerabilities, using sophisticated technology to identify, track, control and exploit victims.”

 

Slave markets, also in refugee camps

Obviously, given the clandestinity of these inhuman operations–and the negligent complicity of official authorities–, the number of victims is practically impossible to calculate.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that the number of “detected” trafficked persons amounts to over 150,000. Other estimates talk about as many as one million.

More than 60% of known human trafficking victims over the last 15 years have been women and girls, most of them trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Meanwhile, the criminal gangs’ operations have been extended everywhere, even in refugee camps.

In the article: Slave Markets Open 24/7: Refugee Babies, Boys, Girls, Women, Men…, IPS reported that, in addition to slave selling and buying deals in public squares, as reported time ago in ‘liberated’ Libya, a widespread exploitation of men, women, and children has been carried out for years at refugee camps worldwide.

One of them is a Malawi refugee camp, where such inhumane practice has been reported by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Malawian Police Service.

“I even witnessed a kind of Sunday market, where people come to buy children who were then exploited in situations of forced labour and prostitution,” said UNODC’s Maxwell Matewere.

The camp is also being used as a hub for the processing of victims of human trafficking. Traffickers recruit victims in their home country under false pretences, arrange for them to cross the border into Malawi and enter the camp.

Many other refugee camps, as it is the case of the Za’atari camp in Jordan, where tens of thousands of Syrian refugees are located once they had to flee the 11-years long devastating war on their country, are also suspected of being stage for human trafficking. And the list goes on.

 

The Dark Web

Often using the so-called “dark web”, online platforms allow criminals to recruit people with false promises, informs the UN, adding that technology anonymously allows dangerous and degrading content that fuels human trafficking, including the sexual exploitation of children.

On this, the UNODC explains that as the world continues to transform digitally, internet technologies are increasingly being used for the facilitation of trafficking in persons.

With the rise of new technologies, some traffickers have adapted their modus operandi for cyberspace by integrating technology and taking advantage of digital platforms to advertise, recruit and exploit victims.

 

Recruited through social media

Everyday, digital platforms are used by traffickers to advertise deceptive job offers and to market exploitative services to potential paying customers, explains UNODC.

“Victims are recruited through social media, with traffickers taking advantage of publicly available personal information and the anonymity of online spaces to contact victims.”

Patterns of exploitation have been transformed by digital platforms, as webcams and live streams have created new forms of exploitation and reduced the need for transportation and transfer of victims.

 

Trafficking in armed conflicts

A group of UN-appointed independent human rights experts, known as Special Rapporteurs, has recently underscored that the international community must “strengthen prevention and accountability for trafficking in persons in conflict situations”.

Women and girls, particularly those who are displaced, are disproportionately affected by trafficking in persons for the purpose of sexual exploitation, forced and child marriage, forced labour and domestic servitude, they warned.

“These risks of exploitation, occurring in times of crisis, are not new. They are linked to and stem from existing, structural inequalities, often based on intersectional identities, gender-based discrimination and violence, racism, poverty and weaknesses in child protection systems,” the experts said.

 

Structural inequalities

According to the independent human rights experts, refugees, migrants, internally displaced and Stateless persons are particularly at risk of attacks and abductions that lead to trafficking.

And the dangers are increased by continued restrictions on protection and assistance, limited resettlement and family reunification, inadequate labour safeguards and restrictive migration policies.

“Such structural inequalities are exacerbated in the periods before, during and after conflicts, and disproportionately affect children”, they added.

 

Targeting schools

Despite links between armed group activities and human trafficking – particularly targeting children – accountability “remains low and prevention is weak,” the UN Special Rapporteurs underlined.

Child trafficking – with schools often targeted – is linked to the grave violations against children in situations of armed conflict, including recruitment and use, abductions and sexual violence, they said.

“Sexual violence against children persists, and often leads to trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy and forced marriage, as well as forced labour and domestic servitude”.

 

Organ harvesting

The independent human rights experts also highlighted that in conflict situations, organ harvesting trafficking is another concern, along with law enforcement’s inability to regulate and control armed groups and other traffickers’ finances – domestically and across borders.

“We have seen what can be achieved through coordinated action and a political will to prevent trafficking in conflict situations,” said the group of Special Rapporteurs, advocating for international protection, family reunification and expanded resettlement and planned relocation opportunities.

Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country’s situation. The positions are honorary, and the experts are not paid for their work.

 

Protection services ‘severely lacking’

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on 29 July warned that protection services for refugees and migrants making perilous journeys from the Sahel and Horn of Africa towards North Africa and Europe, including survivors of human trafficking, are “severely lacking”.

“Some victims are left to die in the desert, others suffer repeated sexual and gender-based violence, kidnappings for ransom, torture, and many forms of physical and psychological abuse.”

All the above is just another tragic evidence of how big is the ‘dark web’ of the world’s so-called decision-makers.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte (on screens) of the Philippines addresses the UN General Assembly’s 76th session last year. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Barry Mirkin
DAVAO CITY, Philippines, Aug 3 2022 (IPS)

With the national election and transfer of power in the Philippines from outgoing President Duterte to incoming President Marcos Jr. in July 2022, it seems an appropriate time to briefly take stock of the country’s current demographic situation, as well as recent related developments.

According to the biennial global estimates and projections of world population issued by the United Nations Population Division in 2022, the Philippines population climbed to 114 million by mid-2021.

A global milestone will be achieved in November 2022, when world population is expected to breach the 8 billion mark. Population projections foresee that by 2050, the rise in world population will be concentrated in eight countries, one of which is the Philippines.

The country’s total fertility continues its gradual decline, falling to 2.5 births per woman in 2021. Some staggering statistics for the Philippines reveal that from the years 2004 to 2020, 36 in every 1,000 Filipino girls aged 15 to 19 years had already given birth.

A UNFPA staff member walks to a damaged health centre in General Santos on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Credit: UNFPA Philippines

Furthermore, during that period, one-half of all births were unintended. In comparison, world fertility is estimated at 2.3 births per woman and 1.5 births per woman in South-East Asia, of which the Philippines is part.

Abortion remains illegal in the Philippines, despite the over one million illegal and unsafe procedures estimated to be carried out annually. Anyone undergoing or performing an abortion risks up to six years in prison. It is the only country in the world, other than the Vatican where abortion remains illegal under any grounds.

While the Philippines is a global outlier concerning its stance on abortion, it should be noted that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down Roe versus Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States and thus creating a firestorm of protests.

As a consequence, a number of state governments are seeking to severely restrict abortion access.

In one of the few recent legislative successes regarding population, the Philippine Parliament in 2021 raised the legal age of sexual consent from 12 years, the lowest in Asia to 16 years. Nevertheless, the law contains a “Romeo and Juliet exemption” to protect younger lovers.

Other Parliamentary developments have proven to be unsuccessful. For example, in a country wrought with conservative values and a powerful Church, divorce continues to be illegal, except for the minority Muslim population (eight per cent of the total population), despite a number of attempts over the years to legalize divorce.

Annulment, an option to divorce can take up to four years, may only be granted on narrow legal grounds and at great financial expense. A Civil Partnership Bill has recently been introduced in Parliament, as a means of affording some legal protections to gay couples in a country that forbids same-sex couples from marrying. The bill, however, faces stiff Parliamentary opposition.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there were a record number of repatriated overseas Filipinos (OFWs), some 792,000 in 2020, due to COVID-related lockdowns and restrictions.

Under this program administered by the Philippine government, Filpinos work abroad on fixed-term contracts, usually in the oil-exporting countries of the Arab Region and generally for periods of one to two years, but with the possibility of renewal.

On a more positive note, the Filipino diaspora, i.e., those living and working abroad in 2021, estimated at between 10 to 12 million, remitted US$ 37 billion to the Philippines, a 5 per cent increase from the previous year.

The Philippines benefitted directly from the job creation and wage gains in the United States, which accounted for almost 40 per cent of remittance receipts. Other major remittance sources were Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

The top four global remittance recipients are India, Mexico, China and the Philippines, The United States has been the major source of global remittance outflows, amounting to US$ 75 billion in 2021.

Despite the ravages of the global COVID pandemic, remittances have proven to be highly resilient, as well as a major contributor to Philippine economic growth. According to World Bank projections, despite the ravages and uncertainty of the Ukraine crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, remittance flows to low and middle-income countries are expected to grow by four per cent in 2022.

Always a source of nurses for other nations, the significant exodus of nurses from the Philippines, amid the coronavirus pandemic has climbed, as 25 per cent more Filipino nurses migrated to the United States during the first nine months of 2021 than during the same period in 2020.

Based on the recent increases in COVID cases in the United States, as well as in other parts of the world, the departure of Filipino nurses is likely to continue and grow.

Given the country’s current demographic trends and future population projections, combined with the various failed legislative initiatives, the Philippines is unlikely to experience major demographic changes, at least in the near term.

In other words, same old, same old.

Barry Mirkin is former chief of the Population Policy Section of the United Nations Population Division.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Young people take part in a pro-democracy demonstration in Myanmar. Credit: Unsplash/Pyae Sone Htun

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 3 2022 (IPS)

A spike in state-sanctioned executions worldwide – including in Iran, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and more recently Myanmar – has triggered strong condemnations from the United Nations and several civil rights and human rights organizations.

As Covid-19 restrictions that had previously delayed judicial processes were steadily lifted in many parts of the world, says Amnesty International (AI), judges last year handed down at least 2,052 death sentences in 56 countries—a close to 40% increase over 2020—with big spikes seen in several countries including Bangladesh (at least 181, from at least 113), India (144, from 77) and Pakistan (at least 129, from at least 49).

Other countries enforcing the death penalty, according to AI, include Egypt, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, Belarus, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), China, North Korea, Viet Nam and Yemen.

In military regimes, such as Myanmar, the armed forces play a triple role: judge, jury and hangman.

Dr Simon Adams, President of the Center for Victims of Torture, the world’s biggest organization that works with torture survivors and advocates for an end to torture worldwide, told IPS the recent execution of four pro-democracy activists by Myanmar’s military junta represents a sickening return to the “politics of the hangman’s noose”.

Arbitrary detention and torture have also been committed on an industrial scale, he said.

The military regime has detained over 14,000 people and sentenced more than 100 to death since the (February 2021) coup. While many governments around the world have condemned the recent hangings, it is going to take more than words to end atrocities in Myanmar, he pointed out.

“People are crying out for targeted sanctions on the Generals, for an arms embargo, and for Myanmar’s torturers and executioners to be held accountable under international law”, said Dr Adams, who also helped initiate the case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, where The Gambia is trying to hold Myanmar accountable for the genocide against the Rohingya.

The London-based Amnesty International (AI) said last May that 2021 “saw a worrying rise in executions and death sentences as some of the world’s most prolific executioners returned to business as usual and courts were unshackled from Covid-19 restrictions.”

Iran accounted for the biggest portion of this rise, executing at least 314 people (up from at least 246 in 2020), its highest execution total since 2017.

This was due in part to a marked increase in drug-related executions—a flagrant violation of international law which prohibits use of the death penalty for crimes other than those involving intentional killing, said AI.

Antony J. Blinken, US Secretary of State, said last week the United States condemns in the strongest terms the Burma military regime’s executions of pro-democracy activists and elected leaders Ko Jimmy, Phyo Zeya Thaw, Hla Myo Aung, and Aung Thura Zaw for the exercise of their fundamental freedoms.

“These reprehensible acts of violence further exemplify the regime’s complete disregard for human rights and the rule of law.’

Since the February 2021 coup, he pointed out, the regime has perpetuated violence against its own people, killing more than 2,100, displacing more than 700,000, and detaining thousands of innocent people, including members of civil society and journalists.

The regime’s sham trials and these executions are blatant attempts to extinguish democracy; these actions will never suppress the spirit of the brave people of Burma, (Myanmar), he added.

“The United States joins the people of Burma in their pursuit of freedom and democracy and calls on the regime to respect the democratic aspirations of the people who have shown they do not want to live one more day under the tyranny of military rule,” Blinken declared.

Condemning the execution of the four democracy activists by the military regime in Myanmar, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said last week: “I am dismayed that despite appeals from across the world, the military conducted these executions with no regard for human rights. This cruel and regressive step is an extension of the military’s ongoing repressive campaign against its own people.”

“These executions – the first in Myanmar in decades – are cruel violations of the rights to life, liberty and security of a person, and fair trial guarantees. For the military to widen its killing will only deepen its entanglement in the crisis it has itself created,” she warned.

The High Commissioner also called for the immediate release of all political prisoners and others arbitrarily detained, and urged the country to reinstate its de-facto moratorium on the use of the death penalty, as a step towards eventual abolition.

Meanwhile, in a statement released August 2, Liz Throssell, a Spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva said : “We deplore the hanging today of two men in Singapore and are deeply troubled by the planned execution of two others on 5 August.

The two, a Malaysian and a Singaporean, were hanged at Changi Prison this morning after they were convicted in May 2015 of drug trafficking and their appeals subsequently rejected.

Two other men, Abdul Rahim bin Shapiee and his co-accused Ong Seow Ping, are currently expected to be executed on Friday after Bin Shapiee’s family was notified of his fate on 29 July.

They were both convicted in 2018 of possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking and their sentences upheld on appeal. In the past, co-accused persons have almost always been executed on the same day.

“We urge the Singapore authorities to halt all scheduled executions, including those of Abdul Rahim bin Shapiee and Ong Seow Ping. We also call on the Government of Singapore to end the use of mandatory death sentences for drug offences, commute all death sentences to a sentence of imprisonment and immediately put in place a moratorium on all executions, with a view to abolishing the death penalty”, the statement said.

“The death penalty is inconsistent with the right to life and the right to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and there is growing consensus for its universal abolition. More than 170 States have so far abolished or introduced a moratorium on the death penalty either in law or in practice,” she noted.

Agnes Callamard, AI Secretary-General, said that “China, North Korea and Viet Nam continued to shroud their use of the death penalty behind layers of secrecy, but, as ever, the little we saw is cause for great alarm.”
⁠
The known number of women executed also rose from nine to 14, while the Iranian authorities continued their abhorrent assault on children’s rights by executing three people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime, contrary to their obligations under international law.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia more than doubled its number of executions, a grim trend that continued in 2022 with the execution of 81 people in a single day in March, according to AI

As well as the rise in executions seen in Saudi Arabia (65, from 27 in 2020), significant increases on 2020 were seen in Somalia (at least 21, from at least 11) South Sudan (at least 9, from at least 2) and Yemen (at least 14, from at least 5). Belarus (at least 1), Japan (3) and UAE (at least 1) also carried out executions, having not done so in 2020.

Significant increases in death sentences compared to 2020 were recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (at least 81, from at least 20), Egypt (at least 356, from at least 264), Iraq (at least 91, from at least 27), Myanmar (at least 86, from at least 1), Viet Nam (at least 119 from at least 54), and Yemen (at least 298, from at least 269), AI said.

In several countries in 2021, AI said, the death penalty was deployed as an instrument of state repression against minorities and protestors, with governments showing an utter disregard for safeguards and restrictions on the death penalty established under international human rights law and standards.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Aerial view of San Crisanto and its preserved mangrove, in the state of Yucatan, in southeastern Mexico. In addition to trapping and storing CO2, mangroves control coastal erosion, protect against hurricanes and clean water. However, in Yucatan, as in other similar ecosystems, they face threats from increasing urbanization, mass tourism and the effects of the climate crisis. Credit: Juan Pablo Ampudia / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
SINANCHÉ, Mexico, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

Two extremes of coastal development can be found side-by-side in the small community of San Crisanto, in the municipality of Sinanché in Mexico’s southeastern Yucatán state.

On one side is the mangrove forest that the community has conserved since 1995. It protects the settlement from coastal erosion, supports local fisheries and provides jobs in ecotourism. And, as of 2022, it is generating income from carbon credits.

On the other side, two large housing developments are taking shape. Such building work in the coastal zone is one of the biggest threats to mangrove ecosystems in Mexico and worldwide. But in San Crisanto, the forest is safe — for now.

“Fortunately, the mangroves are well,” says to IPS José Loria, president of the community-based San Crisanto Foundation, which oversees efforts to protect and restore them. “We’re working. Thanks to this, there is a better perspective regarding their environmental services.”

But elsewhere in Mexico threats to mangroves are rising. Meanwhile, uncertainty surrounds government-funded efforts to restore the coastal forests, and it is unclear whether the mangroves can cope with rising sea levels the global warming is creating.

 

 

Loss and restoration

Only three countries — Indonesia, Australia and Brazil — have a greater area of mangroves than Mexico, which had 905 086 hectares of these forests in 2020.

These fragile ecosystems have a dual role to play in the fight against the climate crisis. On one hand, they absorb and store vast amounts of carbon. On the other, they protect coastlines from storms and rising seas.

But they are under threat from the construction of aquaculture farms, infrastructure, and tourist development. Regulations intended to protect mangroves and wetlands haven’t stopped their devastation.

Mangrove deforestation affects three states in particular, according to Mexico’s Mangrove Monitoring System. In the northern territory of Sinaloa, it totaled 5 258 hectares between 2015 and 2020, in Baja California Sur it amounted to 1 068 and in the northern state of Nayarit, 247 hectares.

As well as deforestation, large areas of mangroves are being degraded by human activities. While the total area of degraded mangroves fell from 18 332 hectares in 2015 to 9 680 hectares in 2020, it increased in the states of Baja California Sur and Chiapas, in the south.

Replanting lost mangrove forests is one of the aims of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030, which was launched in 2019, but so far no mangrove restoration projects in Mexico have been registered on the UN’s database.

But many mangrove restoration projects are in fact taking place. Between 2006 and 2020, for example, Mexico’s National Forestry Commission (Conafor) approved 74 mangrove planting projects to compensate for deforestation elsewhere. These projects took place in 13 states, covered 11 479 hectares and cost 200 million dollars, according to Conafor data. Nayarit state has hosted 21 initiatives and the southeastern state of Veracruz, 18.

In addition to these deforestation-compensation projects, Conafor funded 11 mangrove restoration initiatives in 2021. Together, they planted 1,34 million mangrove seeds on 1 048 hectares, and cost 2,52 million dollars.

 

Mangrove logging in Puerto Morelos, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, in the Yucatán Peninsula, a forbidden activity by the environmental laws. In Mexico, mangroves face threats from urbanization, tourism development and the installation of aquaculture farms. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

 

Information vacuum

Claudia Teutli, a mangrove researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the state-run National Polytechnic Institute, critiques some aspects of policies towards mangroves.

“We don’t know the success of the projects, due to how the restoration has been done,” she told IPS. “It has been done mostly for offsets requirements [for environmental damage]. There wasn’t a goal of recovering the ecosystem.”

Teutli says the government’s monitoring system is out of date, and that restoration requires better strategies and knowledge of restoration sites.

“There is a confusion between restoration and reforestation,” she says. “We don’t know what was done and how. Success is more than the number of planted trees.”

Joanna Acosta, a professor of conservation biology at the state-run Autonomous University of Carmen in the southeastern state of Campeche, agrees.

“We don’t know where restoration has worked or where it has failed,” she says. “The governmental cartography doesn’t clarify if the mangroves are restored or not. We have to introduce transparency strategies, because there shouldn’t be intervention in areas already under restoration.”

The scale of the challenge is huge — Acosta estimates that Mexico has at least 235 000 hectares of mangroves that are not covered by conservation or management programs. She says that acknowledgement of the value of mangroves should work in favor of the design of public policies.

“Mangroves are the most resilient to the climate crisis, that’s why they should be protected,” she says. “It’s important to protect them due to their capacity for capturing and storing carbon, and because their degradation releases carbon dioxide.”

 

Inside San Crisanto’s large coastal mangrove swamp, in the southeastern state of Yucatán, which survives thanks to the local community’s efforts. Mexican policies for mangrove protection haven’t yielded clear results, as there is a lack of follow-up for monitoring and evaluation of the governmental support programs. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

 

Resisting rising seas?

The community in San Crisanto is capitalizing on this. It has begun selling carbon offsets based on the carbon its 850 hectares of mangrove forest stores.

San Crisanto is an ejido — an area of land owned by the state but held and managed communally by local people. Its mangroves also generate revenue from Conafor’s Environmental Services Payment Program. This year, the program is paying the ejido 53 dollars for each of 340 hectares of mangroves.

The ejido suggests the creation of a national mangrove network and a national coastal resources system.

“There should be some work for building the organization,” says Loria. “We are the starting point for correcting environmental processes and generating resilience.”

But despite San Crisanto’s successes, Loria acknowledges problems such as coastal erosion. This raises the questions of how Mexico’s mangroves will tolerate rising seas as the planet warms.

Some researchers say rising sea levels will outpace the rate at which mangroves accumulate sediment in the next 30 years if warming continues at its current rate. This would drown the mangroves. Other scientists, working in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, say mangrove forests will vary in their ability to cope with rising seas.

Teutli is upbeat, saying that as the sea level rises, mangrove sediments will accumulate, keeping the trees above the water level.

“[Mangroves] are adapting to flooding,” she says. “Before we thought they didn’t tolerate it. Tropicalization is coming and it is going to help the mangroves.”

This article is part of a two-story series that was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Edward Mukiibi first worked the fields as punishment. Now he is a firm believer that the slow food movement can save the planet. He was recently named as the President of Slow Food International. Credit: Slow Food International

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

Edward Mukiibi was forced to do agriculture at school as punishment for misbehaviour.

Instead of hating the punishment, he loved it, especially when he realised farming was the future of good food, health and wealth.

Mukiibi is a farmer and social entrepreneur from Uganda on a mission to prove that sustainable farming is the foundation of all fortune and a solution to overcoming hunger, unemployment, and biodiversity loss. He is an advocate for food production based on using local resources,   knowledge and traditions to promote diverse farming systems.

Mukiibi is a member of Slow Food International, a global movement advocating for local food production and traditional cooking.

In July 2022, Mukiibi (36) was named as the new President of Slow Food International at its 8th International Congress in Pollenzo, Italy.

“I feel good and happy about this appointment and also happy on behalf of Slow Food, which is a strong international food movement that has become more established not only in the founding continent of Europe but across the world, which is why it was now possible for the network for finding more able and enthusiastic leaders like me,” Mukiibi told IPS during an online interview.

Founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, Slow Food International works to cultivate a worldwide network of local communities and activists who defend cultural and biological diversity. They promote food education and the transfer of traditional knowledge and skills.

Convinced of the untapped potential of farming and the need to make agriculture attractive for the youth, Mukiibi founded the Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC). The project works with students and communities to cultivate a positive attitude in young people towards agriculture and locally produced food.

Citing that 70 percent of the population in Africa is below the age of 40, Mukiibi said Africa has a large young generation that can be involved in agriculture. Mukiibi deplored the practice in schools where farming was used as a punishment in the same manner prisons have young offenders working on large-scale farms to provide labour as part of corporal punishment.

“This prevents many young people from loving agriculture and food production,” said Mukiibi. “I am a victim of this kind of practice. When I was in school, I always wanted to change this by working with schools in a participatory way and introducing children to farming in a more interest-oriented manner.”

Mukiibi has also championed the development of Slow Food Gardens, a global project that has created thousands of green spaces to preserve African food biodiversity and help communities access nutritious food. Mukiibi has created gardens in more than 1000 schools in Uganda.

“Slow Food gives you a 360-degree view of food systems because it covers everything that transforms the way we grow, eat, market, process and save food,” said Mukiibi, explaining that slow food is a movement and philosophy about clean, good and fair food.

Interview excerpts:

The slow food movement promotes biodiversity on the land and our plates. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

IPS: What is slow food? Is it the opposite of fast food?

Edward Mukiibi: The concept of slow food carries more of a responsibility than just literal meaning and the direct opposite of fast food. It carries more sense when combined with our philosophy of good, clean, and fair food for everyone. The concept means being responsible in everything we do when it comes to food, agriculture, and the planet. In being responsible for your food choices, you need to eat food and produce food that is good for the environment and good for the culture and the traditions of the people that safeguard it.

Another aspect of slow food is fairness. We need to ensure fairness when it comes to transactions. Openness and transparency when it comes to negotiations and working deals between the producers and consumers but also a declaration of information and the true identity of the producers of the food we eat. Sometimes people are not fair, especially big food chains, when they sell food produced by small-scale producers but brand it as their own production. We also need to ensure justice for smallholder farmers, justice for indigenous people and justice for the environment.

Slow Food is also a movement of actors and activists. We are a movement that involves everyone who thinks we need to urgently slow down climate change and the destruction food production is bringing to this planet. We need to slow down on policies that are against environmental equilibrium.

IPS: Is clean, good and fair food achievable, and are slow fooders meeting this goal?

Historically there have been a lot of ruthless, careless food production activities and cruel ways of production to the environment and to the people who are going to eat the food. A good, clean, and fair food system exists and is achievable. With all the challenges we are seeing, the conflicts, climate crisis and food insecurity created by the global food system can be reversed if everyone understands the concept of slow food, whose goal is to solve global challenges using local actions and activities done by the local communities.

We have many examples. So many communities in 160 countries are taking positive actions to regenerate the planet … It is not too late to regenerate the planet and rethink how food is produced, how food is handled and how food is consumed.

IPS: Climate change is impacting our food production. How do you see the Slow Food movement addressing this?

EM: Slow Food is promoting regenerative approaches to food production, including promoting agri-ecology, building traditional farming systems based on agroforestry, and preserving and protecting local food biodiversity and fragile ecosystems.

We are not only talking about climate change by going out to conferences. We are taking action through the thousands of communities taking practical work to promote agroecology, permaculture and traditional farming systems. In Africa, we count 3 500 agro-ecological gardens that have been created and managed in schools.

IPS: You mention Slow food in biodiversity protection. How and why?

EM: We have the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity because we are concerned about the rate at which we are losing biodiversity not only in the field but also biodiversity on our plates which makes our nutrition and diets dependent on a few highly controlled products.

We are working with cooks to bring back biodiversity on the plate. It is not enough to talk. We have to bring back what we are losing on the table and open the discussion from the dinner table about the wealth we are losing.

Slow Food has worked to create community value chains in different communities to protect food products at the risk of extinction. It means sharing knowledge about these products and that the community sits together to devise ways to protect and promote these food products.

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Farmer Mayra Rojas says that the Chinese-type fixed-dome biodigester built in back of her home in Carambola, in the municipality of Candelaria in western Cuba, has become part of her daily life and a key factor in improving her family's quality of life. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

Standing in front of a blue flame on her stove, getting ready to brew coffee, Mayra Rojas says the biodigester built in the backyard of her home in western Cuba has become a key part of her daily life and a pillar of her family’s well-being.

“Biogas is a blessing,” says Rojas, a farmer who lives in the rural community of Carambola, in the municipality of Candelaria, located about 80 kilometers from Havana in the western province of Artemisa.

A pioneer in the use of this form of renewable energy in her town, she explains that with biogas “I spend less time cooking and pay less for electricity,” while the savings have enabled the gradual upgrade of her old wooden house to a more solid cinderblock structure.

In addition, “it doesn’t blacken the pots, like when I used firewood. And now I get my nails done and they last, as does my hair after I wash it,” says the environmental activist who raises awareness about caring for nature among elementary school children, in an interview with IPS at her farm.

She also specifies that greater support from her husband and two children in household chores, cleaning the yard and taking care of the animals on the family farm, “and greater awareness of environmental care,” are other benefits brought about by the use of this alternative energy.

In fact, it was her husband, Edegni Puche, who built the biodigester, for which the family put up part of the cost, while receiving contributions from the municipal government and the local pig farm company.

At the back of the house are the pigsties where they raise pigs, as well as fruit and ornamental trees, while on an adjoining lot Rojas is setting up an organoponic garden, where she will grow different vegetables.

As she pours the freshly brewed coffee, she says that “before, when the pens were cleaned, the manure, urine and waste from the pigs’ food accumulated in the open air, in a corner of the yard. It stank and there were a lot of flies.”

But in 2011 she learned about the potential of biodigesters, where organic matter is decomposed anaerobically by bacteria, but in a closed, non-polluting environment that provides gas as an energy resource.

Training workshops and advice from specialists from the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (Cubasolar) and the Movement of Biogas Users (MUB) encouraged people to build biodigesters, Rojas said.

Founded in 1983, MUB brings together some 3,000 farmers who use the technology in this Caribbean island nation of 11.1 million inhabitants.

An incentive to expand biogas in Cuba was provided by the international Biomas-Cuba project, which began in 2009 and is due to finish this year, focused on helping to understand the importance of renewable energy sources in rural environments, the role of biodigesters on farms and in waste treatment systems on pig farms, among other objectives.

With funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (Cosude), the initiative is coordinated by the Indio Hatuey Experimental Station, a research center attached to the University of Matanzas in western Cuba, and involves related institutions in several of the country’s 15 provinces.

Mayra Rojas, her husband Edegni Puche and the couple’s youngest son stand in the backyard of their home. Family support for household chores, cleaning the yard and caring for the family’s animales, along with increased awareness of environmental care are other benefits that the biodigester has brought to the life of this rural Cuban woman. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Methane, from enemy to ally

Experts agree that the proper management of biological methane resulting from the decomposition of agricultural waste and livestock manure can generate value and be a cost-effective solution to prevent water and soil contamination.

As a potent greenhouse gas, methane has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, according to studies.

Therefore, its extraction and use as energy, especially in rural and peri-urban environments, can be a solution for reducing electricity consumption and for helping to combat climate change.

More than 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity generation is obtained by burning fossil fuels in aging thermoelectric plants and diesel and fuel oil engines, which pollute the air and contribute to global warming.

There are an estimated 5,000 biodigesters in Cuba, in a nation where a significant percentage of the 3.9 million homes use electricity as the main energy source for cooking and heating water for bathing.

“We have to make people more aware that the biodigester not only protects the environment and provides energy, but also brings savings, because the manure that is not used is money that is thrown away,” says Rojas.

It also provides biol and biosol, liquid effluent and sludge, respectively – end products of biogas technology that are rich in nutrients, ideal for fertilizing and restoring soils, “as well as watering and keeping plants green,” says Rojas as she proudly shows the varieties of orchids in her leafy yard.

Her biodigester has also proven its usefulness to the community, because when there are blackouts due to tropical cyclones that frequently affect the island, “neighbors have come to heat up water and cook their food,” she adds.

 

Mayra Rojas turns on biogas on her small stove to brew coffee in her home in the rural community of Carambola, in the municipality of Candelaria, in the western Cuban province of Artemisa. She says that with this clean energy source she spends less time cooking and saves electricity. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Obstacles

Rojas says that a major impediment to the spread of biodigesters in local communities and the country is the island’s economy, whose three-decade crisis was aggravated by the COVID pandemic and the tightening of the U.S. embargo.

The decapitalization of the main industries and financial problems are major factors in the low levels of production of cement, steel bars, sand and other elements used to make biodigesters, which are also necessary to reduce the high housing deficit and fix the portion of homes that are in poor condition.

The availability of manure is another stumbling block with a deficient pig and cattle herd, which will have to wait for the most recent government measures aimed at stimulating their growth and balancing it with domestic demand for meat to take effect.

“I received the support of the municipal government, the local pig company, plus the technical advice from Cubasolar” to build the six-cubic-meter Chinese-type fixed dome biodigester, explains Rojas. “But not all families have enough animals or can afford to build one.”

Perhaps that is why in Carambola it is only possible to find five biodigesters in a community of about 120 homes and 400 local residents, she added.

“Building a biodigester has become too expensive,” acknowledged Lázaro Vázquez, coordinator of Cubasolar in San Cristóbal, a municipality adjacent to Candelaria, who provided advice for the construction of the one on the Rojas farm, which is considered small-scale (up to 24 cubic meters per day).

Although costs depend on factors such as the size, type and thickness of the material, and even the characteristics of the site, specialists estimate that the average minimum cost for the construction of a small-scale biodigester cooker for household use is around 1,000 dollars, in a country with an average monthly salary of about 160 dollars at the official exchange rate.

Vázquez told IPS that low-interest loans should be made available, because “it will always be more economical to make biodigesters using domestic products.”

He pointed out that in Cuba “there is potential” to expand the network of biodigesters, which could reach 20,000 units, at least small-scale ones, according to conservative estimates by experts.

Two pigs stand in a pen built next to the biodigester in the backyard of the home of farmer Mayra Rojas. Experts agree that proper management of the biomethane resulting from the decomposition of agricultural waste and livestock manure can generate value and be a profitable solution to prevent water and soil contamination in Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Biogas, circular economy and local development

During a Jul. 21 session of Cuba’s single-chamber parliament, economic stimulus measures were announced, including an aim to increase the production and use of biofuels and biogas.

“Although it can be used in transportation…the main benefit of the biodigester is environmental and the efficiency of biogas lies in its final use,” José Antonio Guardado, a member of Cubasolar’s National Board of Directors and coordinator of MUB, explained to IPS.

In this regard, Guardado reflected that the direct use of biogas for cooking is much more efficient than if it is transformed into electrical energy or used to power a vehicle.

The head of MUB recommended “understanding the value of biogas technology in a comprehensive manner, taking advantage of all of its end products. This includes the supply of basic nutrients for soil fertilization that has a direct impact on food production.”

This would contribute to the closing of cycles of the circular economy, based on the principles of reduce, recycle, reuse, which promotes the use of green energies and diversification of production to achieve resilience.

“Evidently this final product, from biogas technology, will only be achievable locally, with the participation of all the actors of the Cuban economy, and social inclusion,” Guardado said.

Ministerial Order 395, issued in 2021 by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, stipulated that each of Cuba’s 168 municipalities must have a biogas development program and strategy, and must coordinate their management and implementation with their respective provinces.

The appointment of a government official to head the commission, to prioritize the allocation of materials to build biodigesters, seems to confirm the authorities’ decision to promote sustainable energy development from the local level.

A child looks after his younger sibling in Myanmar. Myanmar’s military junta is responsible for shocking violence against children caught up in the bloody aftermath of last February’s coup, a top independent Human Rights Council-appointed investigator said in June 2022. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has reported that landmines and unexploded ordnance have maimed or killed children in many regions of the country, with the highest casualty rate in Shan State in northeast Myanmar. Credit: World Bank/Tom Cheatham

By Jan Servaes
BRUSSELS, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

Myanmar has been embroiled in violence and civil unrest since the military ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in a coup in February 2021. The initially widespread peaceful protests were crushed with deadly force by the military and police.

The nonviolent opposition has since turned into armed resistance and the country has slipped into what some UN experts characterize as civil war. More than 1 million people are displaced by the violence, according to the UN.

In the first six months after the Myanmar military coup, civilians have been killed, imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, forcibly displaced and persecuted, as documented in a detailed report by Fortify Rights and the Schell Center for International Human Rights at the Yale Law School. The report argues that these acts amount to crimes against humanity.

Execution by Hanging

The executions of four political prisoners by the illegal military junta in Myanmar have also briefly disturbed some Western media and governments. Even the UN Security Council, including China and Russia, condemned the executions.

The G-7 also followed. They said the executions reflect “contempt” for the Myanmar people’s desire for democracy. These executions of four political prisoners, despite international appeals, set Myanmar back decades, it is said.

The brutal and inhumane nature of the military junta was reaffirmed when the families asked to collect the bodies after the hanging, the junta stated that they were not required by law to release the bodies.

“These horrific acts by a ruthless junta that has shown no qualms about waging war against the Myanmar people to bolster its power. The world community, and all ASEAN members in particular, should view these cold-blooded killings as yet another wake-up call about the true nature of the terror regime that Myanmar’s military is trying to impose on the country,” said Eva Sundari, former member of the Indonesian House of Representatives and board member of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR).

Through spokesman General Zaw Min Tun, the junta boasted in its response about the junta’s justice system, claiming that the four detainees enjoyed “full rights” and were “allowed to defend themselves in court”.

The question is what this means for the rest of the world — including India, China, Russia and ASEAN — and their involvement with the junta? The seriousness of the situation is compounded by the fact that the Myanmar regime plans to execute 41 additional political prisoners, and given the current situation, Myanmar’s military regime has nothing to lose in the proceedings.

“When the principles of civilized societies are challenged, it is not only an act of resistance to the principles in question, but also a demonstration of contempt for civilization itself,” said Youk Chhang, a survivor of the killing fields of the war under the Khmer Rouge, in the authoritative The Diplomat.

Landmines

Amnesty International has accused Myanmar’s military of committing widespread atrocities in Kayah, in the eastern part of the country. These war crimes are probably crimes against humanity. “The use of landmines by the Myanmar military is abhorrent and cruel.

At a time when the world has overwhelmingly banned these inherently arbitrary weapons, the military has placed them in people’s gardens, homes and even stairwells, as well as around churches,” said Matt Wells, Amnesty International’s deputy director of Crisis Response, in a statement.

Amnesty’s report states that landmines have been deployed in at least 20 villages in Kayah. Earlier this month, the Karenni Human Rights Group also accused military forces of planting landmines in villages and settlements in Kayah state. Villagers whose livelihoods depend on working their fields live in perpetual fear due to the presence of these landmines.

Earlier, UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, reported that landmines and unexploded ordnance have maimed or killed children in many regions of the country, with the highest casualty rate in Shan State in northeast Myanmar.

Beyond the immediate danger, planting landmines could prevent people fleeing violence from returning to their homes and fields, Amnesty International noted. “The military appears to be systematically laying landmines near where it is stationed and in areas from which it is withdrawing.”

Thailand

The Thai government appears increasingly complicit in the deadly reign of terror by the Myanmar junta. On June 30, a plane from Myanmar, identified as a Russian-made MiG-29, violated Thai airspace during a bombing raid in eastern Myanmar. The jet raid led to the evacuation of homes and classrooms in the Phop Phra district in Thailand’s Tak province.

Videos taken from Thai territory and shared on social media show Myanmar jets shelling and bombing villages in Karen state, where deadly fighting rages between junta forces and armies controlled by the ethnic Karen National Union and the anti-coup People’s Defense Forces (PDF). In response, the Thai Air Force dispatched two of its own fighter jets and the Thai embassy in Yangon has reportedly issued a diplomatic warning to the junta.

Commenting on the incident, Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said in his typical nonchalant and authoritarian manner that the invasion of Thai sovereignty was “no problem”. The Thai government obviously wants to downplay and cover up the scale of the atrocities and humanitarian disasters unfolding in Myanmar.

Just a day before the Myanmar plane caused Thai schoolchildren to flee in panic, a Royal Thai Army delegation in Naypyidaw was shaking hands and exchanging gifts with Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the genocidal junta. While Thai authorities appear to be promoting ‘business as usual’ with Min Aung Hlaing’s criminal regime, the people of Myanmar and border communities in both countries are paying the price.

The desperate situation for the citizens of Myanmar has been exacerbated by the actions of the Thai authorities. Forced to live in the shadows, unable to gain legal status and faced with dwindling aid and resources, Myanmar refugees in Thailand have reported extortion and arbitrary arrest and detention.

Thai foreign policy towards Myanmar has arguably moved from deliberate blindness to complicity in mass atrocities at this point, https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/thailands-myanmar-policy-is-costing-communities-on-both-sides-of-the-border/ said.

Judgment of the ICC in The Hague

On Friday, July 22, the International Court of Justice ruled definitively that The Gambia has jurisdiction to continue its case against Myanmar for the genocide of the Rohingya. This is the first time a Genocide Convention case has been accepted from a country with no direct connection to the alleged crimes – resulting in a vote against by Chinese judge Xue Hanqin.

She agreed with the junta’s second objection which stated that “the applicant must have some territorial, national or other form of connection with the alleged acts”.

All 16 judges unanimously rejected three of Myanmar’s objections. It is worth noting that while Myanmar is now represented by a junta-led legal team, the objections in question are the same as those filed under the National League for Democracy government in 2020.

So now that the matter has been given the green light, it will probably take a few more years before real progress can be made.

A ‘murder regime’

Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing has made Myanmar a murder republic, claims David Scott Mathieson in The Irrawaddy: “The execution of four dissidents was not necessary to know that the regime of the coup leader Supreme General Min Aung Hlaing now falls into the same category as the Iraq of Saddam Hussein or a Latin American dictatorship in the 1980s.

That should have been clear since the day of the coup, given his decade-long massacre during the so-called ‘transition.’ But Min Aung Hlaing’s Myanmar is a new category of repressive military junta: a murder republic.” He hopes that “Min Aung Hlaing and his clique will eventually face trial.

Ideally, it should be more humanistic than how the killers of the SAC (the junta) have treated the people of Myanmar. Stand against a wall in front of a firing squad. That is what tyrants should be afraid of.”

Jan Servaes was UNESCO-Chair in Communication for Sustainable Social Change at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He taught ‘international communication’ in Australia, Belgium, China, Hong Kong, the US, Netherlands and Thailand, in addition to short-term projects at about 120 universities in 55 countries. He is editor of the 2020 Handbook on Communication for Development and Social Change
https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-981-10-7035-8

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Students in a BRAC primary school decorate the classroom with their own artwork. Credit: BRAC, Bangladesh

By Jaideep Prabhu
CAMBRIDGE, UK, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

The world needs tens of millions of new teachers by 2030, according to UNESCO – an order of magnitude that requires “frugal innovation.” I’ve studied frugal innovation for more than a decade, and it holds a vital key to this global challenge. A model created by BRAC in Bangladesh deserves special attention in this worldwide pursuit.

Frugal innovation is not innovation on the cheap. Rather it’s innovation that is designed from the outset to be affordable, scalable – and better performing than traditional models. That’s why it’s so important to achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 4, which is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

That goal requires that education be both universally available and able to meet quality standards. It must, therefore, be affordable, or it won’t be scalable globally.

I co-authored an early book on frugal innovation in emerging markets 10 years ago, titled Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth. It focuses on the private sector in emerging markets like India, China, and Bangladesh. Its thesis is that in such markets, innovation – the creation of new products and services – needs to be very different from innovation in the West, where it is synonymous with high technology, typically expensive and highly structured, and often elitist. In contrast, we argued that to reach large numbers of people on low incomes in informal economies of emerging markets, firms need products and services that are affordable and an approach that is frugal, flexible, and inclusive.

At that time, I was introduced for the first time to the founder of BRAC, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, and many other inspiring people at BRAC. From them I learned that the ideas we had written about in 2012 had been discovered and perfected by BRAC over four decades, and not for private profit but for social impact instead.

When BRAC started its work in education in 1985, poverty was widespread in Bangladesh. Forty percent of Bangladesh’s primary-aged children were not in school, and only 30 percent went on to complete primary education.

At that time, like elsewhere in the world, delivering education at scale in Bangladesh prioritized developing new infrastructure: building schools and hiring credentialed teachers to meet the demand. But building new schools in every community was impossible, and highly trained teachers were scarce.

Many children could not arrange to travel the distance to school because it was too far or unsafe – or they were needed at home during harvests. Children in ethnic minority groups faced additional obstacles, as did those with disabilities. Most teachers were men, which made parents unwilling to send young girls to school.

The key to BRAC’s approach to providing education at scale was not new infrastructure, but a new mindset. Indeed, the hallmarks of the BRAC approach were more or less exactly those we had written about in our book Jugaad Innovation: it was all about being frugal, flexible and inclusive. It was all about lateral thinking and working backwards from a deep understanding of the problem as faced by the people in the communities being served. And it was all about empowering those communities to be part of the solution.

BRAC’s eventual solution was ingenious. Instead of requiring students to go to distant schools, with all the related burdens and costs, BRAC brought schools to the students.

Instead of building expensive school infrastructure, BRAC took already existing infrastructure. It stitched together an extensive system of rented one-room schools in almost every community.

Instead of taking urban trained teachers, it trained local women to teach grades one through five, with up to 30 children maximum per classroom, instead of 50 to 60. Training non-formal women teachers from within the communities made scaling possible.

The outcomes were impressive. Almost 100 percent of students completed fifth grade, and BRAC students consistently did better than public school students on government tests. At its peak, this network consisted of 64,000 schools, and it has graduated 14 million students, mostly at the pre-primary and primary levels.

That is frugal innovation at its best: affordable, scalable, and better. It is community-based and locally led.

It is transformational on many levels: the number of children educated; the number of girls educated; the number of communities with schools; the number of women trained as teachers; the pipeline of students prepared for ongoing education.

Making significant progress toward achieving SDG 4 will require that kind of frugal innovation. BRAC is pointing the way.

The author is the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Business and Enterprise at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge in England.

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• Webinar: Lessons in Development from the Global South: 50 Years of BRAC

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

Colonial-style currency board arrangements have enabled continuing imperialist exploitation decades after the end of formal colonial rule. Such neo-colonial monetary systems persist despite modest reforms.

In 2019, Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio accused France of using currency arrangements to “exploit” its former African colonies, “impoverishing Africa” and causing refugees to “leave and then die in the sea or arrive on our coasts”.

Anis Chowdhury

Neo-colonial CFA
As France ratified the Bretton Woods Agreement on 26 December 1945, it established the Colonies Françaises d’Afrique (CFA) franc zone, enabling France to update pre-war colonial monetary arrangements.

The ostensible intent of the ‘Franc of the French Colonies of Africa’ (FCFA) was to cushion France’s colonies from the drastic French franc (FF) devaluation required to peg its value to the US dollar, as agreed at Bretton Woods.

Then French finance minister René Pleven claimed, “In a show of her generosity and selflessness, metropolitan France, wishing not to impose on her faraway daughters the consequences of her own poverty, is setting different exchange rates for their currency”.

In December 1958, the CFA franc became the ‘Franc of the Communauté Financière Africaine’ (still FCFA). In 1960, President Charles de Gaulle made CFA membership a pre-condition for decolonization in French West and Central Africa.

In recent years, the CFA has involved 14 mainly Francophone sub-Saharan African countries in two currency unions, both using the FCFA: the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) and the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC).

UEMOA comprises Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, while CEMAC includes Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Chad.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

France’s ‘incontestable advantages’
As de Gaulle’s finance minister, (later President) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing correctly complained about the US dollar’s “exorbitant privilege”. But he seemed blissfully ignorant of the French Socio-Economic Council’s 1970 report on the CFA’s “incontestable advantages for France”.

First, France could pay for imports from CFA countries with its own currency, saving foreign exchange for other international obligations. This became especially advantageous when the FF was weak and unstable.

Second, the French Treasury often paid negative real interest rates for CFA reserves. Thus, CFA countries have been paying it to hold their foreign reserves! Investment income accruing is deployed as French aid to CFA countries in the form of loans to be repaid with interest!

But CFA countries themselves cannot use their own reserves as collateral for credit as they are held by the French Treasury. Thus, during the global financial crisis, they had to borrow, mainly from France, at commercial rates.

Third, by supplying FCFA at the fixed rate, seigniorage – the difference between the cost of issuing currency and its face value – effectively accrued to France and the European Central Bank.

For every euro so deposited, the FCFA equivalent is issued and made available to the depositing country. When France joined the euro in 1999, one euro fetched 6.55957 FFs, or 655.957 FCFA.

Fourth, French companies operating in the CFA have been able to freely repatriate funds without incurring any foreign exchange risk.

CFA economies have thus effectively ceded monetary sovereignty to the French Treasury. Unsurprisingly, France’s monetary control has served its own, not CFA members’ economic interests.

CFA elites, French patrons
The CFA not only benefits France, but also elites in CFA countries. Their appetite for faux French lifestyles explains their preference for overvalued exchange rates.

The CFA also facilitates financial outflows, no matter how illicitly acquired, as long as they do not challenge the neo-colonial status quo. For decades, all manner of French governments have consistently backed these elites, often supporting despotic rule.

When its interests in Africa have been threatened, France has unilaterally deployed combat troops and superior armaments, always insisting on its ‘legitimate’ right to do so.

France is alleged to be behind military coups and even assassinations of prominent personalities critical of its interests, policies and stratagems. On 13 January 1963, only two days after issuing its own currency, Togo President Sylvanus Olympio was killed in a coup.

In 1968, six years after withdrawing Mali from the CFA, its independence leader and first President, Modibo Keita was ousted in a coup after trying to develop its economy along more independent and progressive lines.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose
When the CFA was first created in 1945, the colonies deposited 100% of their foreign exchange reserves in a special French Treasury ‘operating account’. This requirement was reduced to 65% from 1973 to 2005, and then to 50%, plus an additional 20% for daily foreign currency transactions or “financial liabilities”.

Thus, CFA states are still deprived of most of their foreign exchange earnings, retaining only 30%! Meanwhile, Banque de France holds 90% of CFA gold reserves, making it the world’s fourth largest holder of gold reserves.

The FCFA arrangement was supposed to end for UEMOA countries from 20 May 2020. However, the proposed West African ‘eco’ currency is still not yet in circulation, while the transfer of euro reserves from the French Treasury to the West African Central Bank has yet to happen.

While only six former French colonies in Central Africa formally remain in the CFA, the reform is less than meets the eye. France remains UEMOA’s ‘financial guarantor’, appointing an ‘independent’ member to its central bank board.

After its creation, FCFA parity was fixed at 50 to one FF. On 12 January 1994, the FCFA was devalued by half, as demanded by the International Monetary Fund and supported by France, following commodity price slumps and related foreign exchange problems.

The devaluation shocked CFA economies as the FCFA’s value fell by 50% overnight! This pushed up the prices of imported goods, especially food, while increasing the FF’s purchasing power.

Meanwhile, eight FF devaluations between 1948 and 1986 against the dollar and gold have also meant great losses to the value of CFA reserves. The claim that CFA countries have benefitted from anchoring the FCFA to a supposedly stable FF has been undermined by its 70% cumulative devaluation over this period!

No sovereignty, no development
Socialist Party President François Mitterrand was no less neo-colonial. He warned France would become irrelevant in the 21st century without controlling Africa.

In 2008, ex-President Jacques Chirac reportedly said, “We have to be honest and acknowledge that a big part of the money in our banks comes precisely from the exploitation of the African continent. Without Africa, France will slide down [to] the rank of a Third World power.”

Claiming to be from a different generation, President Emmanuel Macron promised to end neo-colonial arrangements. Yet, at the 2017 G20 Summit, he patronizingly declared Africa’s problem “civilizational”.

Such neo-colonial condescension refuses to acknowledge France’s continued exploitation of its West and Central African colonies. Clearly, CFA currency arrangements have limited their economic policy space and progress.

Colonial style exploitation has thus continued in Africa long after decolonization. Unsurprisingly, Chad President Idriss Deby declared, “we must have the courage to say there is a cord preventing development in Africa that must be severed”.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A man is tested for HIV at a health centre in Odienné, Côte d’Ivoire. Credit: UNICEF/Frank Dejongh

By Suki Beavers
MONTREAL, Aug 2 2022 (IPS)

This week, the global HIV response community is gathering in Montreal to address the crisis of stalling progress that is putting millions of people in danger.

Delegates here are clear on two things: first, the world is not on track to end AIDS, second, the world can still get on track and end AIDS as a public health crisis by 2030, but only if leaders are bold. This includes removing laws which are perpetuating the pandemic.

Punitive and criminalizing approaches to law have been catastrophic for the AIDS response. They need urgently to be repealed.

When people are targeted by punitive laws, they fear the government, and many hide from it. And this lack of trust spills quickly over into responding to a pandemic: a government that proposes to lock a person up one day is unlikely to be trusted when it sends them to an HIV test the next. When people fear public shaming, many try not to be seen. Too often, this means people miss out on HIV prevention, treatment, and care.

The evidence is clear: punitive laws that push people into the shadows are continuing to drive HIV.

In countries that criminalize consensual same-sex sexual activity, the evidence is clear that the risk of acquiring HIV is higher, access to HIV testing is lower and populations remain hidden, underground.

We know that men who have sex with men living in countries where they are not criminalized are half as likely to be living with HIV compared to countries where they are criminalized, and eight times less likely to be living with HIV compared to countries with extreme forms of criminalization.

Gay men and other men who have sex with men are three times more likely to know their HIV status if they live in a country that does not criminalize same-sex sexual behaviour. Population size estimates for gay men and other men who have sex with men are also more likely to be implausibly low where such criminal laws exist.

So too, laws which criminalize gender identity, HIV status, drug use, and sex work, discourage and obstruct people from accessing vital health services: the costs of these laws remaining on statute books would include millions of lives lost and the perpetuation of the AIDS pandemic.

The laws described above that criminalize same-sex sexual conduct have also been utilized to target trans people in many countries, alongside laws prohibiting cross-dressing or “impersonating the opposite sex” as well as petty offence laws.

The use of these criminal laws perpetuates transphobia, discrimination, hate crimes, police abuse, torture, ill-treatment and family and community violence. It obstructs trans people from access to HIV prevention, treatment and care.

In 36% of countries with available data, more than 10% of transgender people reported avoiding healthcare in the last 12 months due to stigma and discrimination. Studies show that transgender people who have experienced stigma in health care settings are three times more likely to avoid health care than transgender people who have not experienced stigma.

Criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, exposure or transmission undermines effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support because fear of prosecution discourages people from seeking testing and treatment, and deters people living with HIV – and those most at risk of HIV infection – from talking openly to their medical providers, disclosing their HIV status or accessing available treatment services.

Criminalization of drug possession for personal use propels new HIV cases. The presence of criminal laws and associated enforcement has been associated with higher rates of needle sharing, increased HIV risk behaviours, reduced access to HIV services and increased prevalence of HIV.

Where sex work is criminalized, HIV rates are seven times higher than in countries where it is partially legalized. In jurisdictions with enabling legal environments, prevalence of HIV among sex workers is similar to the rest of the population, indicating it is not involvement in sex work that creates HIV risk, but the lack of an environment that enables sex workers to protect their health and wellbeing.

Criminal laws prevent sex workers from being able to screen clients, negotiate condom use, or access the protection of law enforcement if they are in danger of, or experience, physical and sexual violence. Fear of stigma or arrest can also prevent sex workers from being able to access HIV services on an equal basis with others.

Studies have long shown that decriminalization of sex work could avert between 33-46% of new HIV infections among sex workers and their partners.

The criminal law is one of the harshest tools that governments wield, and one of the most blunt. Punitive approaches are harm where help is needed. They ferment stigma, fear and hatred and are perpetuating a health disaster.

We have powerful reasons to hope, however, that with a strong push, punitive approaches to HIV can end.

We have the high-level political declaration agreed last year at the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AIDS. One of the critical commitments that countries made was to reform laws that create barriers to accessing HIV services or increase stigma and discrimination, in order to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.

We have support available on how to most effectively reform laws so they support rather than undermine the HIV response. The Global Partnership for Action to Eliminate all forms of HIV Related Stigma and Discrimination, is bringing together governments, civil society and the United Nations, to exchange learning on what works.

One key lesson is that for law reform to have maximum success, changes should be shaped by the communities most affected, from the start through to implementation.

We are seeing that law reform is not only possible, it is happening across all continents. In recent years sparked, by court judgements and law reform efforts, punitive laws are continuing to disappear.

Last year the Bhutanese Parliament passed a reform which ended the criminalization of same sex relationships, Botswana’s Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that decriminalized same-sex relationships, and Angola began implementing their new criminal code which no longer criminalizes same-sex relationships.

This year already both Belgium and Victoria, Australia have removed laws criminalizing sex work, and Zimbabwe has decriminalized HIV exposure, non-disclosure and transmission.

We have the evidence of what works. It is no coincidence that the government of New South Wales, Australia, a jurisdiction that does not criminalize sexual orientation, gender identity, HIV status, or sex work, recently announced it is on track to eliminate new HIV infections by 2025.

Decriminalization is happening, but it is too slow. In 2022, of the countries reporting to UNAIDS: 14% criminalize gender expression, 36% criminalize consensual same-sex sexual relations, 62% criminalize HIV exposure, non-disclosure and transmission, 90% criminalize possession of drugs for personal use and all reporting countries criminalize some aspect of sex work.

In 2021, 70% of new HIV infections were among groups who are affected by these laws. Eastern Europe and central Asia, Middle East and North Africa and Latin America have all seen increases in annual HIV infections over several years.

In Asia and the Pacific UNAIDS data now shows new HIV infections are rising where they had been falling. Without movement on societal enablers, and on criminal laws in particular, we will struggle to reverse this trend, let alone end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.

We can end AIDS, but to do so we must end the punitive laws perpetuating the pandemic. Now.

Suki Beavers is UNAIDS Director of the Equality and Rights for All Global Practice.

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Excerpt:

The 24th International AIDS Conference is taking place in Montreal, July 29 to August 2.

Farmers in Bangladesh would welcome an early warning system that does not rely on smartphones. Authorities and devising an SMS service after devastating floods killed many people and destroyed harvests. Credit: Rafiqul Islam/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
DHAKA, Aug 1 2022 (IPS)

Ziaur Rahman, a farmer of Pakuar Char under Sariakandi Upazila in Bogura, cultivated jute on a newly emerged river island (char) in the Brahmaputra River, but this year’s flood washed away his crop.

“Flood is very common in the char areas during the monsoon. Despite that, I sowed jute seeds on the char. This year, the flood hit our locality too early, damaging my jute field,” he said.

Ziaur said his jute field was almost mature and could have been harvested within a couple of weeks, but the sudden deluge damaged it.

“I did not get flood forecast in time, and that was why I failed to harvest jutes, incurring a heavy loss this year,” he said.

Like Zillur, many farmers lost their crops to the devastating flood that swept Bangladesh’s northeast and northwestern regions in June this year.

According to Bangladesh Agriculture Minister Dr Abdur Razzaque, floods damaged Aus (a type of rice) paddies of around 56,000 hectares across the country this year.

The Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FFWC) under Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) issues daily flood bulletins and warnings, but the people living in remote and vulnerable areas hardly benefit because they do not have the proper technology.

Under the digital flood forecasting and warning system introduced in 2021, the FFWC issues flood warnings to the people living in flood-prone areas through ‘Google push notifications’ three days to three hours before a flood hits.

To receive flood warnings, people need an android mobile phone. The notifications are sent to these devices through a Google alert between three days and three hours before the onset of a flood, depending on the system’s predictive capacity.

BWDB, in collaboration with tech-giant Google and Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, developed the system, which is now functional in the 55 districts of the country.

Sarder Udoy Raihan, an FFWC sub-divisional engineer, said the BWBD has available data on floods and sends those to Google.

Google improved flood mapping using its topographical data and sends ‘push flood notifications’ to those living in flood-prone areas.

While this system has been helpful, many people living in remote chars and flood-prone areas do not have access to smartphones and the internet, so they don’t receive digital flood warnings.

BWDB has decided to launch a toll-free SMS service containing flood-related messages and information, said officials at BWDB.

The BWDB, a2i, Google, International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have already started a collaboration to reach the flood warnings and information at the doorsteps of the people living in the country’s flood-prone areas through toll-free mobile SMS service. This will enable them to take measures to protect their properties before a flood hits.

FFWC executive engineer Arifuzzaman Bhuyan said talks continue with the stakeholders concerned, including Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), to introduce the SMS service.

“Introduction of the SMS flood alert service depends on the BTRC as there is an issue of cost involvement,” he said, hoping that the BWDB would be able to launch the SMS service in the next season.

Once the toll-free SMS service is introduced, mobile phone users living in flood zones will be identified using their cellphone tower ping, and SMS will be sent to them containing information on the rise or fall of river water level, severity of flood and details of the nearest shelter.

Raihan said it would be possible to send around 36 million SMS per year through mobile phone operators if flood warnings could be sent to people through SMS.

Sardar Mohammad Shah-Newaz, a former director of Flood Division at Dhaka-based think tank, Institute of Water Modelling (IWM), said if the flood forecast were not appropriately disseminated to those living in flood-prone areas, it wouldn’t help.

“Almost all people of the country use mobile phones. If the flood warnings could reach the people living in flood-prone zones through toll-free mobile SMS, they would be able to take precautionary measures to save their properties and minimise their loss and damage to this end,” he said.

Suggesting automation of the flood forecasting system in Bangladesh, Shah-Newaz said the BWDB could introduce the SMS service, and it should launch the service as soon as possible.

Deluge is a common phenomenon in Bangladesh. During every monsoon, flood hits different parts of the country, causing a huge loss of lives and assets.

Due to heavy precipitation upstream in India’s northeast states, Bangladesh experienced devastating floods in its northwestern districts and Sylhet division, leaving millions of people stranded and triggering a humanitarian crisis.

According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), the death toll from this year’s floods has reached 123 in the country. The total deaths were recorded from May 17 to July 17 in 2022.

Of the total deceased, 69 people died in Sylhet, while 41 in Mymensingh, 12 in Rangpur and one in Dhaka.

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Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC and “one of the unsung heroes of modern times,” according to Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, authorized his own biography before dying of brain cancer in 2019. Author Scott MacMillan wrote Hope Over Fate based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Abed and his friends, family and co-workers. Credit: courtesy of BRAC

By Scott MacMillan
Redding Conn, USA, Aug 1 2022 (IPS)

About seven years ago, I started working on a project with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC. It was originally supposed to be a memoir: the story of Abed, the mild-mannered accountant who would rid the world of poverty, as told by the man himself. I was privileged to be Abed’s speechwriter for the last several years of his life, and I would sit for hours listening to stories from his remarkable life: of his boyhood in British India, his love life in London in the 1960s, his three marriages, and how, in 1972, with a few thousand pounds from the sale of his flat in Camden, he launched a small nonprofit organization to aid refugees, originally called the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee. Many people would go on to call BRAC, which Abed led until his death in 2019, the world’s most effective anti-poverty organization.

That seemed like a story worth telling in full, and after some coaxing, Abed gave me permission to begin ghostwriting his autobiography. He was an exceptionally private person, however, and cringed at anything with a whiff of self-promotion. “You have me pontificating!” he once scolded me after an early draft of one speech.

I was about halfway done with his memoir when he told me to stop. The story, as I had written it, did not feel right coming from him. He much preferred to let BRAC’s work speak for itself—which may explain why so few people outside his native Bangladesh knew who he was or the magnitude of what he had accomplished.

Abed eventually came around to the idea that his story needed to be told by someone, even if it would not ultimately be him. He asked that I use the material I had gathered to write the book myself, in my own words—which I did, even knowing that many of those words would fall short of the task. The book, Hope Over Fate: Fazle Hasan Abed and the Science of Ending Global Poverty, is released today by Rowman & Littlefield.

An accountant’s story

Abed told stories, but he was not a good storyteller in the typical sense. He did not sprinkle his speeches with anecdotes of the “ordinary” people he had met, as politicians sometimes do. He was an accountant, and for him, numbers told stories.

So here is the story he would tell of his native Bangladesh—no names or faces, just a chorus of statistics. At the moment of its independence in 1971, Bangladesh was the world’s second-poorest country, with a per capita GDP of less than $100, a nation of sixty-six million living on a patch of flood-prone land the size of Iowa. One in four children died before their fifth birthday. As late as 1990, the country still had one of the highest maternal mortality rates, at 574 per 100,000.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in his later years, visiting a BRAC school. Credit: courtesy of BRAC

In the 1990s, however, things began to change, rapidly and almost miraculously. Quality of life improved at a historically unprecedented rate. By 2013, under-five mortality had plummeted to just 40 per 1,000 live birthdays; maternal mortality had dropped similarly. These and other changes constituted “some of the biggest gains in the basic condition of people’s lives ever seen anywhere,” according to The Economist.

People standing up for themselves

What happened? Abed’s work had much to do with it. BRAC trained and mobilized people, giving them a sense of self-worth that many had never felt before. They began standing up for themselves against landlords, corrupt government officials, and imams opposed to women’s rights. Often, he found what people really needed was hope—a sense that, with a modicum of outside help, their fate could be in their own hands.

His methods were varied and novel. Incentive-based training gave health information to mothers so they could save their own children’s lives. Women took small loans from BRAC to buy cows and handlooms, the first time they had owned anything of substance. Since they had nowhere to sell the milk and fabric they produced, Abed built up the dairy and textile industries by launching enterprises that bought the women’s goods. These enterprises, owned by BRAC, turned out to be profitable, so he plowed the money back into the poverty programs. Abed also launched fifty thousand schools, plus a commercial bank and a university. BRAC now likely reaches more than one hundred million people in about a dozen countries in Africa and Asia. No other nonprofit or social enterprise has reached such scale.

Yet Abed was no ascetic, self-abnegating Gandhi. He left the office at a reasonable hour and enjoyed coming home to the comforts of domestic life, to the sound of family and the warm smell of spices from the kitchen. Twice a widower, he told me of his loneliness between his marriages, and how, despite his preoccupation with work, he found it hard to return to an empty house.

The science of hope

How, then, did he do it? Remarkably, Abed would sometimes say that BRAC had done relatively little to help Bangladesh rise from the ranks of one of the poorest nations on earth. It merely created the enabling conditions: it was the poor themselves, especially women, who worked tirelessly, once those conditions were in place, to change the conditions of their lives.

I suspect this is why he thought his own story did not deserve so much attention, especially compared to the millions of women who had long labored on the fringes of society, who would one day, in his words, “be their own actors in history, and write their own stories of triumph over adversity.”

So this is the biography of a man, yes, but it is also the biography of an idea—the idea that hope itself has the power to overcome poverty. Near the end of his life, Abed spoke of “the science of hope”—the study and practice of giving people a sense of control over their own lives. “For too long, people thought poverty was something ordained by a higher power, as immutable as the sun and the moon,” he wrote in 2018. His life’s mission was to put that myth to rest, which is why the story of Abed is the story of the triumph of hope over fate.

Scott MacMillan is the author of the Hope Over Fate: Fazle Hasan Abed and the Science of Ending Global Poverty (Rowman & Littlefield), from which this is adapted.
This excerpt is adapted by permission of the publisher. The book is available now from major retailers.

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Farmer Luis Edgardo Pérez kneels next to a loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) seedling which he just planted using one of the climate-resilient techniques he has learned to retain rainwater and prevent it from being wasted as runoff on his steep terrain in the Hacienda Vieja canton in central El Salvador. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN PEDRO NONUALCO, El Salvador , Aug 1 2022 (IPS)

With the satisfaction of knowing he was doing something good for himself and the planet, Salvadoran farmer Luis Edgardo Pérez set out to plant a fruit tree on the steepest part of his plot, applying climate change adaptation techniques to retain water.

This is vital for Pérez because of the steep slope of his land, where rainwater used to be wasted as runoff, as it ran downhill and his crops did not thrive.

Before planting the loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) tree, Pérez had previously cut part of the slope to create a small flat circular space to plant it.

This technique is called “individual terraces” and seeks to retain rainwater at the foot of the tree. He has done the same thing with the new citrus trees planted on his small farm.

He learned this technique since he joined a national effort, promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to make farmers resilient to the impacts of climate change.

“In three years this loquat tree will be giving me fruit,” the 50-year-old farmer from the Hacienda Vieja canton in the municipality of San Pedro Nonualco, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz, told IPS, smiling and perspiring as he stood next to the newly planted tree.

San Pedro Nonualco is one of 114 Salvadoran municipalities located in the so-called Central American Dry Corridor, a strip of land that covers 35 percent of Central America and is home to more than 10.5 million people, whose food security is threatened by inconsistent rainfall cycles that make farming difficult.

The Reclima Project is the name of the program implemented by FAO and financed with 35.8 million dollars from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which supports climate change mitigation and adaptation in the developing South. The Salvadoran government has also contributed 91.8 million dollars in kind.

The program was launched in August 2019 and in its first phase led to the installation of 639 Field Schools to promote agroecology practices in which 22,732 families are participating in 46 municipalities in the Salvadoran Dry Corridor.

In addition, 352 drip irrigation systems will be installed, and 320 home rainwater harvesting systems have begun to be set up in 12 municipalities in El Salvador.

By the end of the program, it will have reached all 114 municipalities in the Dry Corridor, benefiting some 50,000 families.

Patricia Argueta, 40, plants a green bell pepper (Capsicum annuum) seedling in the community garden of Hoja de Sal, in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco in central El Salvador. She is one of the farmers learning new agroecological techniques as part of a project aimed at helping them combat the impacts of climate change. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

Learning and teaching

Pérez is one of the 639 farmers who, because of their enthusiasm and dedication, have become community promoters of these climate-resilient agricultural practices learned from technicians of the governmental National Center for Agricultural and Forestry Technology.

He meets with them periodically to learn new techniques, and he is responsible for teaching what he learns to a group of 31 other farmers in the Hacienda Vieja canton.

“You’re always learning in this process, you never stop learning. And you have to put it into practice, with other people,” he said.

On his 5.3-hectare plot, he was losing a good part of his citrus crop because the rainwater ran right off the sloping terrain.

“I was losing a lot of my crop, up to 15,000 oranges in one harvest; because of the lack of water, the oranges were falling off the trees,” he said.

On his property he has also followed other methods of rainwater and moisture retention, including living barriers and the conservation of stubble, i.e. leaves, branches and other organic material that cover the soil and help it retain moisture.

Pérez’s citrus production is around 50,000 oranges per harvest, plus some 5,000 lemons. He also grows corn and beans, using a technique that combines these crops with timber and fruit trees. That is why he planted loquat trees.

“I love what I do, I identify with my crops. I like doing it, I’m passionate about it,” he said.

Ruperto Hernández, 72, finishes preparing the organic fertilizer known as bokashi, which he and other families benefiting from a program promoted by FAO in El Salvador use to fertilize their crops in the San Sebastián Arriba canton of the municipality of Santiago Nonualco in central El Salvador. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

Collectively is better

About five kilometers further south down the road, you reach the San Sebastián Arriba canton, in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco, also in the department of La Paz.

Under the harsh midday sun, a group of men and women were planting cucumbers and fertilizing with bokashi, the organic fertilizer that the farmers have learned to produce for use on their crops as part of the FAO program.

“We are tilling the soil really well, we put in a little bit of organic fertilizer, mix it with the soil we tilled and then we put in the cucumber seed,” 72-year-old farmer Ruperto Hernández told IPS.

To make the fertilizer, Hernández explained that they used products such as rice hulls, molasses, charcoal, soil, and chicken and cattle manure.

“The more ingredients the better,” he said.

Hernández also showed the water conservation techniques used on the farm. These included shallow irrigation ditches dug along the hillsides at a specific angle.

The seven-hectare plot is a kind of agroecological school, where they put into practice the knowledge they have learned and then the farmers apply the techniques on their own plots.

Among the women in the group was Leticia Valles, who has been working with a towel over her head to protect herself from the sun.

Valles said this was the first time she was going to try using bokashi to fertilize her milpa – a term that refers to a traditional farming technique that combines staple crops like corn and beans with others, like squash.

“We have always used commercial fertilizer, but now we’re going to try bokashi, and I’m pretty excited, I expect a good harvest,” she said during a break.

They and the other participants in the program have also been taught to produce ecological herbicides and fungicides, which not only benefit the land but also their pocketbooks, as they are cheaper than commercial ones.

Imelda Platero, 54, and Paula Torres, 69, stand in a cornfield in the canton of Hoja de Sal in central El Salvador. They are two of the most active women involved in promoting actions to adapt agriculture to climate change in their village in the Dry Corridor. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

Changing sexist habits

Further south, near the Pacific Ocean, is the village of Hoja de Sal, also in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco, which is taking part in the Reclima Project as well.

The effort in this village is led by Imelda Platero, who coordinates a group of 37 people to whom she teaches climate-resilient practices on the plots of the Hoja de Sal cooperative, created in 1980 as part of the agrarian reform program implemented in El Salvador.

A total of 159 cooperative members collectively farm more than 700 hectares of land, most of which are dedicated to sugarcane production. And the members are entitled to just under one hectare of land to grow grains and vegetables individually.

But she not only teaches them how to plant using agroecological methods to combat the impacts of climate change.

She also teaches the 27 women in the group to become aware of the role they play and to empower them, as part of the program’s focus on gender questions.

“I was outraged when I heard stories about one member putting a padlock on the granary so his wife couldn’t sell corn if he wasn’t there; that is called economic violence,” said Platero, 54.

And she added: “We have been working on this issue, it is a challenge. It is still hard, but the women are more empowered, now they grow their corn and they sell it how they want to.”

Another important aspect is to respect the cosmovision and ancestral knowledge of peasant farmers in the area.

For example, Paula doesn’t plant if she can’t see what phase the moon is in,” said Platero, referring to Paula Torres, a 69-year-old farmer who is one of the most enthusiastic participants in the initiative.

Torres and her husband Felipe de Jesús Mejía, with whom she has raised 15 sons and daughters, are two weeks away from harvesting the first ears of corn from a bright green cornfield that is glowing with life. She is sure that this is due to the organic fertilizer they used.

“I’ve seen the difference, look what a beautiful milpa,” said Torres.

She added that now that she has seen how well the techniques work, she will use them “till I die.” Last year she and her husband produced about 1,133 kilos of corn, and this year they expect to grow more, by the looks of it.

“It’s never too late to learn,” she said, as she bent down and cut zucchini (Cucurbita pepo), which she sells in the community, in addition to cooking them at home.

Credit: UNICEF/Noorani

UN human rights experts are warning of a direct link between the pandemic, socio-economic vulnerability and the risk of exploitation, including forced labour or being sold, trafficked and sexually exploited.

The UN commemorated the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons on July 30.

By Tsitsi Matekaire and Tara Carey
LONDON, Aug 1 2022 (IPS)

It is often those least responsible for causing climate change that suffer the most from the impacts. And such is the case with women and girls in Malawi – one of the world’s poorest and lowest carbon-emitting countries but ranked fifth in the Global Climate Index 2021 list of nations worst affected by climate-related extreme weather.

Climate change exacerbates sexual and gender-based violence in numerous ways, pushing people further into poverty, enflaming conflict over depleting natural resources, forcing migration, and compounding pre-existing gender discrimination. All these and many other forces conspire to put vulnerable women and girls in greater danger of sexual abuse and exploitation.

A recent study by Cambridge University analyzing scientific literature on extreme weather events found that gender-based violence — such as sexual assault, intimate partner violence, or trafficking, both during and after disasters — are recurring issues in studies worldwide.

In Malawi, the climate crisis is already triggering more erratic and extreme weather, resulting in chronic water, food, and financial insecurity for millions. Over the past twenty years, droughts and floods have increased in intensity, frequency, and scale, causing devasting environmental, social, and economic damage.

Around 9 out of 10 people in Malawi depend on rain-fed agriculture, and over half the population is food insecure. Rising temperatures, unreliable rains, and extreme weather events like cyclones influence food production and costs.

The economic downturn triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has disrupted global supplies of cereals and fertilizers, have pushed prices up further.

According to World Bank data, 82% of Malawi’s population live in rural areas, and women account for 65% of smallholder farmers, making them particularly exposed to food insecurity. Women are often dependent on natural resources, and many earn a living in the informal sector, leaving them less able to withstand economic and environmental shocks.

Climate change is a threat multiplier

Climate change is not just an environmental problem – it acts as a “threat multiplier” interacting with social systems to exacerbate systemic inequalities. So, although everyone is affected by the ravages of the climate crisis, the vulnerability of individuals varies depending on their gender, geography, class, ethnicity, and age.

Global warming and environmental damage are gendered because the ability of women to adapt is hampered by their social status and limited income, education, and resources. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men and commonly have less schooling, decision-making power, and access to finance.

When yields from harvests are reduced, this leaves subsistence farmers with little or no surplus produce to sell to earn money for purchasing basics like medicine, clothes, sanitary products, schooling, and agricultural inputs for bolstering farming production.

Being unable to produce enough food to feed their families or pay for other essentials puts women under intense pressure to find alternative sources of income. This renders them more susceptible to sexual exploitation, which can take various forms such as transactional sex in exchange for goods, and being trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.

Family financial hardship also disproportionately affects girls, who are frequently pressured to drop out of school to do domestic work and find paid employment. This, in turn, increases their susceptibility to exploitation, including false promises made by traffickers about jobs and education further afield.

In addition, girls experience higher rates of child and forced marriage, as parents may view marriage as a coping strategy to elevate monetary difficulties and shield daughters from sexual violence. It is estimated that around 1.5 million girls in Malawi are at risk of becoming child brides as a direct result of climate change.

There are other ways that existing gender roles interplay with climate change and sexual violence. In Malawi and across sub-Saharan Africa, gathering water and firewood is widely deemed the responsibility of women and girls. A lack of clean water and depletion of natural resources caused by environmental degradation means they often have to travel further to acquire scarce resources.

Not only does this use up precious unpaid time that could be spent on beneficial activities such as income generation or schooling, but it also heightens their exposure to rape and sexual assault. And in some instances, women and girls must contend with sexual exploitation and abuse by those who control access to limited natural resources, such as at water collection points.

The system is failing victims of sexual and gender-based violence

For the vast majority of victims of trafficking, sexual violence, and exploitation, justice goes unserved. Caleb Ng’ombo runs People Serving Girls at Risk (PSGR), a frontline organization in Malawi that works to end human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, prostitution, and child marriages.

Caleb explains, “Victims are being failed by Malawi’s criminal justice system. Few cases make it to court. Those that do are plagued by multiple delays, and perpetrators are rarely punished.”

“Child marriage, sexual exploitation, and trafficking have blighted the lives of thousands of women and girls across Malawi, and the worsening climate crisis is putting more at greater risk. The government should not turn a blind eye to gender-based human rights violations. Addressing these problems must be central to climate response, including disaster and adaption planning.”

Malawi is a source, transit, and destination country for sex trafficking, and climate crisis is fueling it. PSGR and international women’s rights organization Equality Now have submitted a joint complaint to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) highlighting the poor implementation of anti-trafficking legislation by the Government of Malawi is leaving girls unprotected against sex trafficking.

Malawi’s criminal justice system needs to respond better to the realities and needs of survivors, including safeguarding them against further exploitation and ensuring support services are readily available.

Effectively addressing this crisis requires a gender-responsive, human rights-based approach from the state, one that targets the root causes of gender discrimination.

Climate change also demands action from wealthy industrialized nations that bare the largest responsible for global warming due to their high emissions, both historical and current.

Around the world, a growing climate justice movement is calling for Global North governments to provide countries like Malawi with international finance for climate adaption, restitution for damages already caused, and national debt cancellation so money can be redirected towards supporting those in need, in particular women and girls and other marginalized groups.

With global temperatures continuing to rise, it is vital that laws, policies, and funding deliver on the distinct vulnerabilities and requirements of women and girls so they are protected against gender-based violence and better able to cope with future climate shocks.

Tsitsi Matekaire is the Global Lead on End Sexual Exploitation at Equality Now and Tara Carey Head of Media.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Due to its structure, methane traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide (CO2) making it 80 times more harmful than CO2 during the 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.. Credit: Bigstock

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

Strangely enough, two major scientific findings, both announced in July, did not attribute the current dangerous world’s disasters to the proxy war unfolding in Ukraine.

One of them, released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), warns that the current, unprecedented heat waves hitting the Planet will be more severe, more frequent and more intense, and will last longer over several decades to come.

The other scientific study, launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), focuses on the dangers of what it calls: “secret methane leaks.” Methane is a colourless, odourless gas, responsible for more than 25% of the global warming the Earth is experiencing today.

Being both issues so highly interlinked and relevant to the present and the immediate future of life on Earth, here are some of their related key findings.

 

The “secret leaks”

The methane leaks are an open secret in the oil and gas industry and it is feeding the climate crisis, explains UNEP. Throughout its report, it provides the following information and explanations.

Massive methane leaks, known as super-emitter events, have been taking place at oil and gas fields all over the world, from the United States to Turkmenistan.

The releases, most of which can be traced to equipment failures, can last for weeks.

One outside of a storage facility in Los Angeles in 2015 haemorrhage almost 100,000 tonnes of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere over the course of four months.

In June this year, researchers at Spain’s Polytechnic University of Valencia, said they uncovered the latest known super-emitter event at an oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

The installation discharged 40,000 tonnes of methane during a 17-day spell in December 2021 — equivalent to 3% of Mexico’s total annual oil and gas emissions.

While the discharge was caught, it remains challenging to trace emissions of methane, which is colourless, odourless and responsible for more than 25 percent of the global warming the Earth is experiencing today, explains UNEP.

 

80 times more harmful

The UNEP study also warns that, due to its structure, methane traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide (CO2) making it 80 times more harmful than CO2 during the 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere.

As countries develop plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst effects of climate change, experts say it’s vital to have a better handle on how much methane is being released into the atmosphere, including from super-emitter events.

Cutting human-caused methane by 45 per cent this decade would keep warming beneath a threshold outlined by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

 

Who are the “super-emitters”?

To track and measure methane emissions, the United Nations Environment Programme in October 2021 launched the International Methane Emissions Observatory. It catalogues discharges from the fossil fuel sector, and soon waste and agricultural releases as well.

“The oil and gas industries are major producers of methane, emitting the gas during drilling, production, and other parts of their operations. Methane is also sometimes released intentionally from oil and gas facilities for safety reasons.”

The agriculture sector is also “a large emitter of methane,” particularly from livestock and the growing of certain foods, such as rice.

“Waste is the third most common man-made source of methane as bacteria break down organic matter in landfills.”

 

The Planet is baking

One major consequence of the un-wanted-to-be controlled methane leaks, among too many other just profit-making driven activities, is the unrelentless climate emergency.

On this, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has also in July launched further scientific findings: heatwaves will be more intense, last longer, and will occur more and more frequently… for decades to come, into the 2060s.

The UN specialised body had earlier alerted on record-high temperatures in India and Pakistan, reaching up to 50 degrees Celsius.

Let alone the over four-long severe drought wave hitting the whole East of Africa, and the record high temperature registered in so many other world’s regions.

The findings take, among others, the case of the United Kingdom, which, with 40 degrees Celsius, has just issued “the first ever Red Warning for exceptional heat.”

In other European countries, such as Portugal and Spain, temperatures have reached highs up to around 46 degrees Celsius.

 

Degradation of air quality

It is worth pointing out that high temperatures are not the only adverse consequence of heat waves, says Lorenzo Labrador, Scientific Officer at WMO’s Global Atmosphere Watch Programme.

“The stable and stagnant atmosphere acts as a lid to trap atmospheric pollutants, including particulate matter, increasing their concentrations closer to the surface.”

Likewise, the abundant sunshine, high concentrations of certain atmospheric pollutants and stable atmosphere is conducive to episodes of ozone formation near the surface, which has detrimental effects on people and plants.

“We have broken an all-time high in the UK”, on 19 July said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary-General.

 

The new normal?

“In the future, this kind of heatwave is going to be normal. We will see stronger extremes. We have pumped so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that the negative trend will continue for decades. We haven’t been able to reduce our emissions globally” WMO’s chief warned.

“The negative trend in climate will continue at least until the 2060s, independent of our success in climate mitigation.”

 

Harvests at risk

The unduey addressed climate emergency also impacts the present and future of food.

In fact, “we are expecting to see major impacts on agriculture. During the previous heatwaves in Europe, we lost big parts of harvest. And under the current situation, this heatwave is going to have a further negative impact on agricultural activities”, warned Petteri Taalas.

 

Temperatures, higher in Europe than elsewhere

According to the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) temperatures will rise more quickly in European areas than elsewhere.

In the Mediterranean, a worrisome combination of climatic impact-driver changes (warming; temperature extremes; increase in droughts and aridity; precipitation decrease; wildfires increase; mean and extreme sea levels; snow cover decrease; and wind speed decrease) is expected by mid-century if global warming exceeds 2°C.

 

Respiratory, cardiovascular diseases

Health systems are also challenged by heatwaves.

“When a heatwave goes along with high levels of pollution it exacerbates respiratory, cardiovascular diseases and conditions especially in large urban spaces that are not adapted to cope with these high temperatures,” said Maria Neira, Director of Environment and Health at the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Reliable access to food and water is at stake, as with agricultural production levels at risk”, and there will be water scarcity for sure.”

“99% of the global population is breathing air that does not meet the health standards set by WHO, hugely impacting chronic respiratory and cardiovascular conditions.”

 

Climate chaos

Greenpeace International’s Chris Greenberg is clear: Global heatwaves are fossil fuel-driven climate chaos.

“Unprecedented danger will be the new normal if we don’t take urgent action to stop fossil fuel-driven climate change.”

From Canada and the United States to Russia and even the Arctic, adds Greenberg, record-breaking heat waves are putting lives, livelihoods, and communities at risk, says Greenberg.

“… The entire global community needs to demand that fossil fuel companies and corporate polluters stop accelerating climate change with reckless, profit-hungry drilling and burning of coal, oil, and gas.”

Other than the current dangerous climate crisis, greed and money-making have been pushing humanity towards its collapse.

Heat waves increase the risks of crop failures, threatening food security for billions of people. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, USA, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

Across the U.S., and around the world, particularly Europe, heat records are being shattered. Accompanying these extreme temperatures are fires caused by the heat that are burning both homes and forests. While extreme heat is impacting some areas of the world, flooding is impacting other areas including Colorado and Virginia in the U.S., and in other countries around the world including Brazil and Ecuador.

These climate-linked events that are occurring in regions and areas that have never been impacted before send the signal that no one is immune to climate change. All countries and citizens must act with urgency to mitigate this existential threat.

As countries consider climate mitigation initiatives, they need to be sure to strengthen agricultural crops’ resilience to extreme heat, drought, insect herbivory and flooding, that have become increasingly common

Indeed, these historical catastrophes create an important moment for all of us, including policy makers at both the state and federal level, to roll out bold reforms on many issues, including heat and agriculture.

As countries consider climate mitigation initiatives, they need to be sure to strengthen agricultural crops’ resilience to extreme heat, drought, insect herbivory and flooding, that have become increasingly common. These crops include maize, rice, soybeans, wheat and tomatoes.

Like humans, crops are sensitive to extreme heat. When temperatures increase, crops wither, their health deteriorates, and normal development is affected. Studies have shown that crops and crop varieties that are susceptible to heat stress are impacted the most.

Heat stress causes the deterioration of several important plant physiological processes including photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration. Further, it causes the accumulation of toxic substances in plant cells including phenolic compounds and reactive oxygen species.

Plants’ ability to grow is affected and their life cycle is shortened. Ultimately, crop yields are reduced with consequences for food supply and agriculture, an important sector of the economies of many countries including the US, the UK, Spain, France and many African countries.

In the US, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, agriculture and related industries contributed $1.055 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020. In the UK, in 2021, agriculture contributed around 0.5% to the economy.

In China, the agricultural sector contributes 8.9% to China’s GDP.  In African countries and other emerging countries, agriculture can account for more than 25% of GDP according to the World Bank.

Heat waves increase the risks of crop failures, threatening food security for billions of people.

Indeed, scientists around the world have generated evidence of the crop and yield losses associated with heat waves and extreme temperatures. A 2017 study that examined extensive published results showed that temperature increase reduces global yields. Similarly, a 2018 study that examined more than 82,000 yield data from 17 European countries also found the same trend.

Crop failures and productivity losses due to excessive heat, drought and flooding are taking place in many countries.  The magnitude of these crop failures, however, varies enormously depending on the region and its wealth.

African countries, for example, suffer the most. A 2022 report prepared by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on climate change reported that intense heat waves, frequent droughts and floods have reduced agricultural productivity in African countries by 34 percent.

Worrying is the fact that crop devouring pests such as the fall armyworm and locusts, pests that have emerged to be serious pests also thrive when temperatures exceed the normal. Because insects are poikilothermic (meaning their temperature varies with the environment), elevated temperatures are associated with increased metabolic rate and an increased consumption of plants, leading to greater damage.

Additionally, insects like the fall armyworm can adjust their life-history strategies, further allowing them to thrive across a wide range of stressful temperatures. What’s more is that recent models suggest that each additional degree of warming will increase crop losses to insects by 10-25 percent.

It’s clear that as governments begin to strategize on how to mitigate heat waves, and other climate change brought about extremes, they must not forget agriculture.

Strengthening agricultural resilience can include developing disaster preparedness and response plans, continuing to fund agricultural research and other climate change research and accelerating outreach and education about climate-smart practices.

Climate-smart practices that can alleviate crop failures when extreme temperatures arise are diverse and include:

1. Planting heat and drought tolerant crop varieties that have been bred to enhance their photosynthetic capacities and water use efficiencies when periods of stress occur
2. Applying products such as silicon and silicone nanoparticles,  and
3. Using inoculants made from naturally occurring beneficial soil microbes that can confer tolerance to heat and drought among other stressors.

 

Thankfully science researchers around the world continue to advance our understanding of crops response to climate-linked stresses. We can learn from them.

In the race to mitigate climate change brought about heat waves, we must not forget strengthening agriculture.

 

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

Credit: EBRD

By Vanora Bennett
LONDON, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

Until Russia went to war on Ukraine in February, Ukraine was known as the “breadbasket of Europe”. One of the largest grain exporters in the world, it provided about 10 per cent of globally traded wheat and corn and 37 per cent of sunflower oil, United Nations figures show. The yellow and blue of its flag mimic its rolling golden fields under blue summer skies.

The war has darkened this picture beyond recognition.

Despite the conflict, Ukrainian farmers are still growing grain, at levels estimated to be around three-quarters of a normal year. But, with Russia blockading the Black Sea ports through which Ukraine would usually export about 5 million tonnes a month, the country is now struggling to get just 2 million tonnes a month out westward by choked road, rail and river routes.

This is not only an existential problem for Ukraine, whose grain exports are one of the biggest contributors to its economy, but also for the millions of people worldwide who would normally import and eat this grain. The World Food Programme (WFP) says that as many as 47 million people, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, are at risk of acute hunger.

Addressing this food security risk is a double challenge for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which works both in Ukraine and neighbouring countries affected by the war, and in southern and eastern Mediterranean countries which are struggling to import food.

Vanora Bennet. Credit: EBRD

Inside Ukraine, 18 million tonnes of grain from last year’s crop are waiting in siloes for export. Space is at a premium and the squeeze is getting worse. The figures become still more dizzying once you add in the winter wheat and barley crop now being harvested, and the spring crop including sunflower and corn that will also join the queue in a couple of months’ time.

“The biggest issue is storing the grain. There is some warehouse and silo capacity free, but not enough for the harvest taking place now. We’ve been told they are missing 15 million tonnes of capacity, even before the spring crop harvest that’s coming in in two months’ time,” says Jean-Marc Peterschmitt, EBRD Managing Director for Industry, Commerce and Agribusiness. “It is unclear how it will play out.”

“For now, the only solution is temporary storage – silo bags or floor storage or even storage in the field with some basic covers, which obviously will deteriorate the quality of grain,” says Natalia Zhukova, EBRD Director, Agribusiness. “Silo bags can pretty much preserve the quality for 12 months because they are hermetically sealed so infections or pests cannot develop inside. But simple silos without proper drying or ventilation will obviously have problems.”

“Getting grain out of the country and being able to store the harvest inside the country are the mirror image of each other, because whatever you get out is freeing up storage capacity for the next harvest,” adds Peterschmitt. “Getting it out so far has been not a great experience. But it’s vital to find more ways to do that.”

As the quantity of Ukrainian crops waiting for export and potentially rotting in siloes and fields increases, hopes that Ukraine could soon resume exports in something like their usual quantities rose briefly last week when a tenuous U.N.-brokered deal to lift the blockade on the key Ukrainian port of Odessa was agreed in Turkey on 22 July.

Less than 24 hours later, however, Russian cruise missiles hit Odesa. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying the attack cast serious doubt on the credibility of Russia’s commitment to the deal, accused Russia of “starving Ukraine of its economic vitality and the world of its food supply.”

Yet, by 25 July, Ukraine said it still hoped to start implementing the deal within as little as a week, and was making preparations including demining essential sea areas, and setting up naval corridors for the safe passage of merchant vessels and a coordination centre in Istanbul.

Still, for now, amidst the uncertainty, it’s back to working within the limits of wartime.

Within Ukraine, a significant part of the €1 billion of EBRD investment pledged for this year is earmarked to support domestic food security. As part of the EBRD’s Resilience and Livelihoods Framework (RLF), a €200 million multi-instrument Food Security Guarantee works across the food chain in Ukraine, both helping farmers buy fertiliser and retailers get food into the shops.

And there are other, smaller, freight transport options out of Ukraine for grain export if access to Black Sea ports continues to be blocked. The Danube River, whether in Ukraine or neighbouring Moldova or Romania, could be one option.

Throughput at Moldova’s Giurgiulesti Port on the Danube has already doubled in 2022. Another possibility might be supporting improvements to road and rail exports to help carry more freight overland.

In the southern and eastern Mediterranean (SEMED) region where the EBRD also works, meanwhile, all countries rely on imports to make enough dietary energy available domestically. The level of reliance on Russian and Ukrainian grain is unusually high.

Food prices are currently at an all-time high, making sourcing scarce imports from elsewhere ruinously expensive.

As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s senior economist, Katya Krivonos, told a panel discussion at the EBRD Annual Meeting in May, Egypt, which has 5.4 million undernourished people, usually sources more than 40 per cent of its calorie imports from Russia and Ukraine.

“Climate conditions in SEMED don’t really allow them to grow grain. In arid countries, the question is how in the longer term to become more food secure, in a more sustainable way. We are looking at ways to help these countries find the commodities that they need,” says Iride Ceccacci, the EBRD’s head of Agribusiness Advisory.

In this region, the Bank is looking at expanding its work on agribusiness and food security beyond its current focus on the private sector to support SEMED countries to secure import of grains in this context of unprecedented high prices.

In Tunisia, 50 percent of all food calories are imported. Jordan imports approximately 90 percent of wheat and barley, which are essential staples and water intensive crops to produce. Morocco, which is generally less reliant on imports, is facing one of the worst droughts in decades.

In May, the EBRD joined forces with other international financial institutions – the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the African Development Bank (AfDB), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group – to formulate an IFI Action Plan to Address Food Insecurity.

“People in SEMED are very frustrated that they came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, having coped with it with a lot of resilience, and were looking forward to some positive growth.

But instead, they’re now getting this massive new hit, mainly through high food prices but also through high energy prices, which affect fertiliser prices so will also have an impact on domestic food production,” says Heike Harmgart, Managing Director, SEMED, at the EBRD.

She adds: “Now middle-class people in Egypt are buying less meat because food price inflation has been so high in the supermarket. And governments are worried because high food prices were one of the triggers of the Arab Spring in 2011, and there’s a very clear connection between political unrest and high bread prices”.

“What everyone wants to avoid is social unrest. The EBRD has been working on urgent food security response projects to support SEMED countries, with a first transaction now Board approved for Tunisia. These investments include technical assistance designed to promote sustainable solutions for grain supply chains in the region.”

Gérald Theis, Chairman of CereMed UK Ltd, a big grain trader, vividly describes working first with the supply problems of the Covid era, which raised prices and the threat of protectionism, and then the war on Ukraine, which began on 24 February.

“February 24 was like 9/11, or a tsunami,” he told the EBRD Annual Meeting’s food security panel. “We didn’t sleep much for a while. In eight days, we saw a move of nearly US$ 200 dollars per tonne – a percentage rise of 160 per cent.”

Asked what his sense was of where food security was heading next season, he replied: “I’m sorry to say I don’t know, if we speak about long-term. Today I would say a day is like a month used to be before. Nobody knows when this war will end or how it will end.”

“Even if it stopped tomorrow, we traders don’t think that things will go back to normal – there are too many issues with logistics, broken bridges and railways, silos and sanctions. In this environment, we believe prices will stay at a high level and it’s going to be extremely volatile.”

Source: EBRD

Vanora Bennett is EBRD Green spokeswoman / Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Georgia and Armenia

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Along a street in the historic center of Lima, 11-year-old Pedro makes chalk drawings on the sidewalk for at least four hours a day to bring some money home. He is one of thousands of children and adolescents in Peru who work as child laborers, which violates their human rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

In the afternoons he draws with chalk on the sidewalk of a downtown street in the Peruvian capital. Passersby drop coins into a small blue jar he has set out. He remains silent in response to questions from IPS, but a nearby ice cream vendor says his name is Pedro, he is 11 years old, and he draws every day on the ground for about four hours.

Pedro, too shy or scared to answer, is one of the children and adolescents between the ages of five and 17 engaged in child labor in Peru, a phenomenon that grew during the years of the pandemic due to the rise in poverty, which by 2021 affected a quarter of the population.

According to official figures, children and adolescents involved in child labor number 870,000 nationwide, some 210,000 more than in 2019, Isaac Ruiz, a social worker and director of the non-governmental Centre for Social Studies and Publications (Cesip), told IPS in an interview.

Cesip has been working for 46 years advocating for the rights of children and adolescents."For every year of education that a child loses, he or she also loses between 10 and 20 percent of income in his or her adult life; poverty is reproduced." -- Isaac Ruiz

Ruiz explained that in order to define child labor, two concepts must be separated. The first refers to the economic activities that children between five and 17 years of age perform in support of their families for payment or not, as dependent workers for third parties, or for themselves.

The second is work that violates their rights and must be eradicated, which is addressed by national laws and regulations in accordance with international human rights standards established by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and other agencies.

The ILO classifies child labor as a violation of fundamental human rights, which is detrimental to children’s development and can lead to physical or psychological damage that will last a lifetime. Child labor qualifies as work that is harmful to the physical and mental development of children.

On the contrary, it is not child labor, according to the agency, when children or adolescents participate in stimulating activities, voluntary tasks or occupations that do not affect their health and personal development, nor interfere with their education. For example, helping parents at home or earning money doing a few chores or odd jobs.

The minimum working age in Peru is 14 years old. Work is classified as child labor when it is performed below that age, when it is dangerous by its very nature or because of the conditions in which it is performed, and when the workday exceeds the legally established limit, which is 24 hours per week if the child is 14 years old, and 36 hours per week if the child is between 15 and 17.

The worst forms of child labor are when adults use children and adolescents for criminal activities or exploit them commercially or sexually.

Juan Diego Carayonqui, 15, poses for a photo on the street where his home and the small store on its first floor are located in Huachipa, a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of Lima. He works 49 hours a week in the small family business, longer than the hours legally stipulated for adolescents in Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

According to figures from the government’s National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (Inei), 1,752,000 children and adolescents were working in 2021. That number was 2.6 percent higher than the pre-pandemic 25 percent recorded in 2019.

Of this total, 13.7 percent are engaged in hazardous activities, which means that 870,000 minors between the ages of five and 17 engage in work that poses a risk to their physical and mental health and integrity.

In this South American country of around 33,035,000 people, children and adolescents in this age range represent 19 percent, or about 6,400,000, of the population according to INEI data.

“Not all economic activities carried out by children and adolescents must be eradicated. If they have a formative role, for example helping out in a family business for an hour a day or on weekends, and they go to school, have time for their homework, to socialize, and for recreation, they will probably be learning about the business,” said Ruiz.

But, he added, “the situation changes when it becomes child labor, when the activities are hazardous.

“Child labor is when it is beyond their physical, emotional or mental capabilities and when it takes up too much of their time and competes negatively with education, homework and the possibility of recreation,” he explained.

As examples, he cited selling things on the street going from car to car, picking through waste in garbage dumps, carrying packages or crates in markets, doing domestic work, or working in mines or agricultural activities where they are exposed to toxic substances harmful to their health.

The government must accelerate the design and application of public policies for the eradication of child labor, Ruiz said.

“For every year of education that a child loses, he or she also loses between 10 and 20 percent of income in his or her adult life; poverty is reproduced,” he said.

The expert called for measures to correct this situation in order to prevent child workers from continuing to be left behind in terms of opportunities and rights.

“If I had children I wouldn’t make them work,” says Juan Diego Carayonqui, who since the age of seven has spent his afternoons working in their small family store to help his mother, with whom he poses in the shop where he spends a large part of his day. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

“I would not make my children work”

Juan Daniel Carayonqui is 15 years old and since the age of seven has been working in the small shop that operates out of his home, located in Huachipa, a poor hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital with an estimated population of 32,000 inhabitants, mostly people who have come to the city from other parts of the country.

His mother, María Huamaní, arrived in Lima at the age of 10 from the central Andes highlands department of Ayacucho, fleeing the civil war that killed her mother and father. Orphaned, she was raised by aunts and uncles. Eventually she met the man who would become her husband and together they started a family. In their view, work is the way to progress in life.

In a park near his house, Carayonqui told IPS: “I started working when I was seven years old in the store, with simple tasks, memorizing the prices of the products. Then I gained experience and learned how to deal with customers, and now I work in the afternoons when I get out of school.”

Carayonqui is in his fourth year of high school, which he will finish in 2023, and his goal is to study biology at university. His dream is to travel around the country; he loves nature and dreams of discovering some unknown species and helping to bring new value to Peru’s biodiversity.

He has spent much of eight of his 15 years behind the counter of the store where he sells groceries and stationery products, from 2:00 in the afternoon until closing time, about seven hours a day. This adds up to 49 hours a week, so Carayonqui would officially be considered a victim of child labor.

But in his family’s view, work is the road to progress. His paternal grandmother, who also moved to Huachipa from the highlands, has a garden where she grows vegetables to sell at the wholesale market. Carayonqui helps her out on Wednesdays, carrying the heaviest bundles.

“My grandmother says that through work you overcome poverty and achieve your dreams, but I think it’s better to overcome it by studying,” he said.

Carayonqui knows that as a good son he must help his mother when she asks him to: “I have to help her because she needs me and because I love her.” But he also understands that spending his entire childhood and adolescence working has deprived him of focusing on his homework, of going out to play with his friends, of having fun.

He gets up every day at six in the morning, gets ready to go to school now that classrooms are open again this year post-pandemic, has breakfast and goes to school. He comes home at 1:30 p.m., eats lunch and by 2:00 p.m. he is at the store. His mother often leaves him in charge because she has other work to do.

If he has children, he will not do the same thing, he says. “I would encourage them to be responsible but I would not make them work, I would encourage them to study in order to get out of poverty,” he said.

Margoth Vásquez, a 17-year-old Peruvian teenager, worked 72 hours a week as a nanny and housekeeper during the pandemic to earn an income and cover her needs, she told IPS during an interview in a neighbor’s living room near her home on the outskirts of Lima. Her goal is to finish high school this year and begin to study nursing the following year. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Overexploitation

Margoth Vásquez also lives in Huachipa. She is 17 years old and was interviewed by IPS at the home of one of her mother’s friends. She wants to remodel her family home with what she earns as a nurse; her dream is to study nursing.

During the pandemic, she had to work to buy what she needed and pay off a debt. Her father, who doesn’t live with her and doesn’t pay alimony, gave her a chest of drawers for her birthday, which he didn’t pay for: she had to.

She took work caring for an eight-month-old baby and cleaning the family’s home from 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday. In exchange for working as a housekeeper and nanny for more than 72 hours a week she earned about 150 dollars a month.

She worked there for a year and a half. But it was stressful because she could not find time to do her homework and turn it in (classes were online because of the pandemic). This year she will finish high school and next year she will apply to study nursing.

“I want to help my grandmother who raised me, take care of her, get married, have children. To have a good life,” she said.

Reki Jimu (51) has lived with HIV for nearly two decades. Here he shows a container of antiretroviral drugs to HIV/AIDS support group members at Chitungwiza government hospital outside Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS.

By Jeffrey Moyo
CHITUNGWIZA, Zimbabwe, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

In 2001, when Reki Jimu was 30 years old, his wife died aged 27.

The now 51-year-old Jimu said the couple’s two sons died prematurely. Both were underweight and frail, although the couple had been previously blessed with a baby girl, Faith Jimu, who is now a 29-year-old mother of three.

Jimu was born in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland Central Province in Mazowe Citrus Estate, with his rural home located in the province’s Mukumbura area in Chigawo village.

Two years after his wife, Tendai Goba, died following a very long illness, which he said eroded her weight, Jimu was tested for HIV and found to be positive.

“My wife Tendai died in 2001, succumbing to AIDS, although then we had no proof she suffered from it. She had Kaposi’s sarcoma – a cancer associated with AIDS,” Jimu told IPS.

His diagnosis did not dampen his zeal to live – although he encountered a lot of discouragement from relatives, friends, and colleagues.

“When I started losing weight, people said I was being bewitched by my brother whom they claimed had goblins that were sucking out my blood,” Jimu said.

He said the back-biting started when his wife and two sons were still alive.

“Some naysayers were even blunt in their statements during the early days when my wife was sick, at the time our sons were alive. People said my sons were very thin because they had AIDS. We would hear this and never say anything in return. But of course, our sons died prematurely because they were all underweight (but) before we knew they had HIV,” said Jimu.

But thank God, said Jimu, the couple’s daughter, who was born before the couple contracted HIV/AIDS and has lived on without the disease and is now a parent.

Yet Jimu, even as his first wife kicked the bucket, has never given up on life.

Now residing in Chitungwiza, a town 25 kilometres southeast of Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, in 2003, soon after testing positive for HIV, Jimu immediately started taking antiretroviral treatment, and that has kept him going for almost two decades.

In fact, for close to two decades, 51-year-old Jimu has lived with HIV/AIDS, sticking to his antiretroviral treatment without fail.

Thanks to his belief in ARV treatment, now Jimu looks like any other healthy person.

“Look, I’m looking good. Nobody can tell I’m HIV positive. Nobody can even tell I’m taking ARV drugs unless I tell them myself,” bragged Jimu.

He has soldiered on with life despite being HIV positive.

In 2007, Jimu became the founder, leader and pastor of the Christian Fellowship Network Trust, a support group that he said has become pivotal in supporting people living with HIV and AIDS in Chitungwiza.

He has not stopped embracing life, and through the help of HIV/AIDS support groups, Jimu said he married again a year after he had tested positive.

Francisca Thomson, his second wife of the same age as him, is also living with HIV.

“Francisca is my queen, very beautiful girl, I can tell you, and we are so happy together,” boasted Jimu.

Jimu said he, like any other average person, has become a beacon of hope to many living with HIV.

He said he became open about his HVI/AIDS status at a time when the public loathed people like him and when HIV/AIDS stigma was rife.

“I am one of those people who used to appear on national television on an HIV/AIDS advert clip in which I was saying I didn’t cross the red traffic light… I am a pastor…  I am HIV positive, adverts of which were sponsored by Population Services International,” said Jimu

Now a known fighter against HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe, Jimu cannot hold back his gratitude for the Chitungwiza General Hospital here, which he said made him what he is today- an epic HIV/AIDS peer educator.

Zimbabwe has about 1,4 million people living with HIV/AIDS.

Living with HIV has not forced Jimu into a cocoon.

Instead, he said the condition has merely turned him into an ardent defender of many others.

“I’m now very active in offering routine counselling services and spiritual guidance to many who newly test positive for HIV and seeing me with the positive mindset I have. Many are adjusting quickly to their HIV-positive status and moving on with their lives,” said Jimu.

Yet, for Jimu, it has not been easy getting where he is now.

He said over the years, he has come face to face with stigma, saying many people around him were disgusted at merely seeing him sick.

Jimu said landlords quickly evicted him when they heard of his status.

“As a tenant at the many houses I have lived in, I would be quickly given notices to leave because people were afraid to live with me thinking I would just one day wake up dead in their homes or infect them with HIV. I would hear people gossiping about my sickness, some saying I was now a moving skeleton, some urging me to visit prophets for healing, some saying I must go back to the village and die there,” said Jimu.

Over the years, however, things have gotten better, with Jimu saying his relatives have begun to embrace him.

Yet, in the past, he had to contend with all the sneering and discrimination from both kith and kin.

“Being loathed and discriminated against were the things I have encountered in church, work and many other places. At many gatherings we would attend with my late wife, we would be made to take back seats as people were ashamed of having us occupying the front seats, obviously ashamed of how we looked because of the signs of sickness on us,” recalled Jimu.

But that is now a thing of the past.

As more and more people living with HIV are beginning to find it easier to live with the disease, Jimu has a message for them.

“I urge people who are HIV positive to take their medication during prescribed times without defaulting even when they feel they are now healthy and fit,” he said.

And he also carries an almost similar message for those on the brink of marriage.

“I urge couples to get tested for HIV before engaging in sex. If one is found positive, they can be assisted by health experts to live healthy lives without infecting each other with the disease,” said Jimu.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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