Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Young Palestinians drive their boat along the coast near the Gaza Sea port, selling boat rides as a way to earn a living. Credit: Laila Barhoum/ Oxfam

By Laila Barhoum
GAZA, Apr 29 2021 (IPS)

We were able to keep the coronavirus at bay for five months in Gaza, the densely populated Palestinian strip of land surrounded by Israel that I call home. But the Coronavirus doesn’t respect walls or artificial borders. While preparations were made for the pandemic to inevitably breach a blockade so few Palestinians can, we waited for it to come for us. And it did.

In one of the most sealed off places in the world, we knew the virus now insidiously spreading in our community could be catastrophic. In the early days the realities of over two million Palestinians, trapped between a wall and sea in Gaza, became suddenly shared with millions more around the world who were unable to leave their houses and going short on basic supplies. “Dear World, how is the lockdown? – Gaza” was trending on Twitter.

Now, like in the rest of the world, the virus is ripping through our already suffering community with a new surge calling for renewed lockdown measures – and with Ramadan beginning. But you can’t wear a mask when you don’t have one.

You can’t social distance when you live in a crowded refugee camp, or share a small house with a big family. You can’t wash your hands for 20 seconds when you don’t have enough running water. In Gaza, it’s hard to take measures to protect ourselves from a pandemic when we are already struggling to survive.

And as many countries begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel as the long-awaited vaccination programme gathers pace across the world, Gaza is once again left behind.

While Israel was celebrated globally for the leading pace of its vaccination rollout, the first shipment of 2,000 doses of the vaccine, intended for medical staff working in intensive care rooms and emergency departments, was initially blocked by Israeli authorities from entering Gaza.

For every subsequent batch of vaccines destined for our small coastal enclave, it will be Israel alone who determines whether it can enter. This is what its ‘separation policy’ means, keeping us isolated from the rest of the world and unable to break free from many chains, including the virus.

But it gets worse. As over half of the Israeli population are fully vaccinated against the Coronavirus, Israel used surplus vaccines as diplomatic bargaining chips, making deals with Czech Republic, Honduras, and Guatemala in exchange for UN votes and embassies.

Despite Israel’s vaccination campaign being extended to Palestinians with permits to work in Israel and its settlements, this does not come close to ensuring recovery in the Occupied Palestinian Territory or even covering our priority needs.

The long passage at the Erez crossing that Palestinians use to pass in and out of Gaza, when permitted. Credit: Laila Barhoum / Oxfam

Once again, Israel is refusing to effectively protect all Palestinians under its control and ensure their access to the most basic of healthcare, including an urgent vaccination campaign, that is their legal and moral obligation to provide.

This tells me and all other Palestinians across the occupied territory what we have been told so often before: that my life is viewed as inconsequential compared to Israel’s political position.

Our rights are traded away all too often to accommodate Israel, and so it is again with COVID-19. While countries around the world begin to vaccinate their citizens, Palestinians must fight to qualify as human beings who warrant even the most basic human rights. We see no indication that the world considers us deserving of a vaccine that can save our lives.

The Palestinian Authority recently received its first shipment of doses through COVAX, which are intended for healthcare workers and elderly people in the West Bank and Gaza. In the absence of a transparent Palestinian Authority COVID-19 strategy, some doses of vaccines destined for frontline workers have ended up in the hands of so called “VIP’s” – government officials, presidential guards and the Palestinian national football team.

There have been over 65,000 cases of COVID-19 in Gaza. Two months ago, as we waited and hoped for a vaccine, I became part of the statistics. After I tested positive, I was scared and I lost my sense of time and place, and kept thinking, what if it gets worse?

For almost a year I had been sounding the alarm about the poor conditions of the health system in Gaza. It was terrifying that I might need to go to the hospital for care. As my breath became shorter by the hour, I asked my lungs not to fail me. We are already failed by so many things here.

But I continue to fight and recover from the disease. And I can’t help but think about how much we need this vaccine and how it is only fair to have free and just access to it.

A safe, effective, and universal COVID-19 vaccine is a public health necessity, an economic priority, and a moral imperative for all people everywhere. Including my grandmother. including my fellow Palestinians. Including me.

Vaccines should never be bargaining chips. No one should be prevented from accessing life-saving vaccines because of where they were born, where they live, or how much money they have.

Here in Gaza, we are still trapped. Even if we get through this pandemic, I am not sure what will follow. The decisions that most shape our lives are made not by us, but by policymakers in Jerusalem, and to a lesser extent in Ramallah, Washington, and Brussels. They usually serve to increase our misery, not benefit us. No amount of strength, smarts, or ambition can overcome the powerlessness of living without rights.

A year into your pandemic lockdown, you may begin to understand what ours has been like. But your lockdown will end in the months to come. Ours has been in place for 13 years with no end in sight.

 

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The post A Free & Accessible Vaccine is Just out of Reach for Palestinians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer is a Palestinian living in Gaza and a policy officer for Oxfam.

The post A Free & Accessible Vaccine is Just out of Reach for Palestinians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

3 May is World Press Freedom Day. This is part of a series of IPS features and opinion editorials focused on media freedom globally.

By Raghbendra Jha
CANBERRA, Australia, Apr 29 2021 (IPS)

Edmund Burke called the press the fourth estate, the fourth pillar of democracy, with an oversight role on the remaining three pillars – the legislature, executive and the judiciary. In an ideal world, this fourth estate would have unimpeded access to the other three pillars so that the citizenry could be kept informed at all times. This freedom was conceived to be so sacrosanct that many countries have included it as a fundamental right, e.g., the US Constitution enshrined it as the very first amendment.

Raghbendra Jha

While this is the ideal state of affairs, even under the best of circumstances press freedoms have faced considerable challenges. The traditional newspaper is threatened by shrinking readership and concentration of ownership and control which implies that profitable markets will be served first, viz. global or at best national audiences.. There has been a considerable void in news reporting, particularly on issues affecting local populations. Other forms of media are unable to fill the gap. Television combines news with entertainment – infotainment- and traditional radio has been swamped by satellite radios. Local issues areneglected and many local media outlets including newspapers and television and radio stations are facing dire conditions. There has been a steady rise in media concentration in the past few decades https://theconversation.com/factcheck-is-australias-level-of-media-ownership-concentration-one-of-the-highest-in-the-world-68437

At the same time, the emergence and now overwhelming dominance of the social media and the Internet have given rise to a sharp proliferation of media outlets. Many of these are driven by the pure short-term profit motive and are difficult to regulate. All these forms of media are facilitated by the frictionless distribution enabled by the Internet and the disruptive effects of digital transformation. There is no dearth of people active on social and regular media, including some who should know better, who will, when forming an opinion about an issue, first come to their preferred conclusion and then work their way back to selectively choose evidence to support their conclusion. The world still awaits a business model that pays for accurate content at competitive rates. The overburdening with information makes it difficult for people to use discretion in the absorption of news so that the primary objective of press freedom, i.e., keeping the citizenry informed at all times, is belied. Nevertheless, in many countries with very distorted ownership patterns of traditional media social media outlets have provided a breath of fresh air and independence, especially when elements of the traditional media are themselves accused of improper conduct and reporting.

This point brings us to the issue of pressing challenges facing journalism and press freedoms. https://orca.cf.ac.uk/94201/1/DG_FoJ-Risks%20Threats%20and%20Opportunities_JJ.pdf

The first one is personalized news feeds. Facebook and Twitter have created cultures of maximal tribalism and infinite personalization. Users can silo themselves in self-made realities while taking part in collective expression of tribal outrage that often seem bewilder outsiders. The fact that such personalization can mould the opinions of large numbers of people is particularly worrisome. Second, the 24-hour news cycle forces reporters to publish articles without proper fact-checking. Even allegedly responsible media houses have had to retract stories because of the lack of proper checking. This leads to a deeper concern. Whereas the privilege of helping the citizenry to form opinions about key public issues lies with journalists, there is an implied responsibility that the information and analysis provided by the journalist is accurate and verifiable. This does not always seem to be the case. Indeed, some journalists have been accused of spreading “fake news” by pursuing their own agendas when pursuing their vocation. There have been well-known instances of both traditional and social media outlets pursuing political advocacy. The distinction between “news” and “views” has broken down in many cases and the citizenry is often ill equipped to discern the difference.

During the on-going pandemic another very serious issue has disrupted. Violence towards journalists is an old issue but the promulgation of long lockdowns has led to explosion of serious domestic violence and mental ill-health concerns. This has been described as a pandemic within a pandemic https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2024046

Under ordinary circumstances, the explosion of these domestic issues would be an important news story. However, lockdown orders have meant that many such instances all over the world get unreported. Clearly, women are the worst victims here. In particular, it has become increasingly difficult for women journalists to report on such issues. It is ironical that although women journalists are most suited to report on occurrences of domestic and sexual violence, they are the ones with minimal access to the victims of such abuse.

Even before the pandemic journalists- particularly women journalists – have been subjected to harassment and abuse.of several types: https://www.iwmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/IWMF-Global-Report.pdf

On World Press Freedom Day (May 3) there is need to ponder on these and many other issues relating to the role of the fourth estate. Freedom of the Press is invaluable in society. However, as with any other freedom, constant vigil and action are the price of this freedom. If we want a robust press this price will need to be paid.

Raghbendra Jha, Professor of Economics and Executive Director, Australia South Asia Research Centre, Australian National University.

 

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The post World Press Freedom in an age of remoteness appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

3 May is World Press Freedom Day. This is part of a series of IPS features and opinion editorials focused on media freedom globally.

The post World Press Freedom in an age of remoteness appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Freelance journalist Hopewell Chin'ono before testifying at Harare Magistrate Ngoni Nduna on the state of conditions at Chikurubi Maximum Prison. Credit: Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights

By Sibahle Zuma
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Apr 29 2021 (IPS)

Access to accurate information is vitally important during the pandemic, so that people can understand how to protect themselves and their families, and to hold their governments to account for their response to the health emergency.

But it is clear that many governments are instead working to hamper the flow of information. Many governments have used the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on the ability of journalists to do their jobs.

While there is an understandable need to limit the spread of false information about the virus, claims of ‘fake news’ are often being used as a smokescreen to imprison journalists and censor independent media organisations critical of governments. Some worrying trends have been in Africa.

Just like the virus, the persecution of the press has no borders, affecting journalists in many countries across the region. In its latest global report, the CIVICUS Monitor, an online platform that tracks civic freedoms, documented that journalists had been detained in at least 28 African countries. This was the top civic rights violation recorded in Africa during the past year.

From Chad to Nigeria and from Somalia to Zimbabwe, journalists have been arrested for their reporting on COVID-19. In Zimbabwe, investigative journalist Hopewell Chin’ono has been arrested three times since July 2020.

The persecution began after he published an exposé alleging corruption in the Health Ministry’s US$60 million procurement of protective equipment. Hopewell was targeted even though his reporting led to the sacking and arrest of the Health Minister.

He was rearrested in November on spurious charges of inciting anti-government protests and then again in January for a tweet alleging police brutality in lockdown enforcement. He is currently out on bail, but faces up to 20 years in jail if convicted of ‘peddling falsehoods’. Other Zimbabwean journalists have also been arrested for their reporting on the pandemic.

Hopewell Chin’ono’s lead lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa tells journalists outside the High Court that she is disappointed by the court’s decision to dismiss her client’s bail appeal. Credit: Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights

Online freedom of expression for journalists has also been curtailed under the pandemic. In Nigeria, journalists have been charged under the country’s cybercrimes law for their reporting on the pandemic. In Somalia, a news editor was arrested for a social media post alleging that a hospital ventilator was transferred to the office of the Somali President.

Media outlets have been shut down, in another common tactic used to silence government critics and suppress critical reporting on state responses to the pandemic.

In Tanzania, where media outlets were regularly taken off-air or fined for not toeing the government line under the late President Maghufuli’s regime, the Communication Regulatory Authority suspended multiple outlets for their pandemic coverage, including for publishing death tolls. Tanzania’s official policy of pandemic denial under the late Magufuli saw the official counting of cases cease in the early days of the health crisis.

A similar trend was documented in Zambia, where the authorities have used COVID-19 as an opportunity to cancel the broadcast licence of the popular TV station, Prime TV, which was known for its critical coverage of the government. In April 2020, after the independent outlet’s coverage of the pandemic, the broadcast regulator cancelled the licence on public safety grounds and police prevented staff from leaving the building. The same station was suspended a year earlier for its coverage of parliamentary elections.

Instead of the repression, journalists should be recognised as key allies in debunking lethal disinformation. To make sure people are getting up-to-date, safe and relevant information about COVID-19, governments, independent media and civil society must work together to clearly define what qualifies as ‘fake news’.

Most importantly, to fight disinformation, governments must be more transparent and proactively disclose timely data on the state of the health emergency in their countries. The media must be able to access and interrogate such information.

On World Press Freedom Day, and over a year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, it is critical that independent media are able to operate freely, without fear of reprisals or detention.

Journalists are part of the solution to controlling the virus and combating disinformation. They should not be behind bars for doing their job.

 

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The post Press Freedom Vital in the Fight Against the Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer is a researcher with CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance based in Johannesburg

 
3 May is World Press Freedom Day. This is part of a series of IPS features and opinion editorials focused on media freedom globally.

The post Press Freedom Vital in the Fight Against the Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Journalists in the line of duty. Credit: Left - UNESCO/©Thomas Hawk; Right - UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Jonathan Rozen
NEW YORK, Apr 28 2021 (IPS)

Spyware’s repeated use to target journalists and those close to them poses an existential threat to the privacy required for press freedom to flourish. Without the ability to privately communicate with sources, conduct research, and compile information, journalists are hampered in their ability to keep the public informed and hold the powerful to account.

“The spyware attack revealed to me that regardless of where I am and what citizenship I hold, if the Moroccan government wants to gather surveillance, they will…It prevents you from being able to do your work because you don’t want to put people [you speak to] at risk,” said Samia Errazzouki, an editorial board member with the Moroccan Mamfakinch news site with U.S. citizenship. Errazzouki was based in the U.S. when she and 14 other Mamfakinch staff were targeted with spyware in 2012.

In March, the Committee to Protect Journalists mapped dozens of incidents where members of the media were targeted with sophisticated, secret surveillance on nearly every continent. The compiled reporting details how spyware products sold by companies based in Israel and Europe have been allegedly used by governments to reach across borders and oceans into the devices of journalists and their associates to monitor their lives without their knowledge.

“It’s not just the fear or anxiety,” said Errazzouki, who now considers the possibility of being unknowingly recorded by her devices’ cameras and microphones. “It’s real, the way it changes your everyday habits. Not changing your clothes in front of your computer. Putting your phone in a drawer to have a private conversation.…[There’s] some degree of paranoia.”

The evidence of spyware’s use against the press uncovered by investigators, including from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Amnesty International, and Reuters, outlines a chilling threat to the privacy required for journalists to work freely.

Unbridled use of technology to access and conduct surveillance on journalists’ devices promotes fear and self-censorship, often accompanied by physical intimidation or arrests.

In 2020, Moroccan journalists Omar Radi and Maati Monjib were arrested after being targeted with spyware. Monjib was granted provisional release on March 23 following a 19-day hunger strike, but Radi remains behind bars. Another journalist in India, Anand Teltumbde, was also jailed last year following similar spyware targeting.

How the efforts to hack these journalists’ phones may have contributed to their arrests remains unclear, but their experiences illustrate the familiar, tandem nature of digital and physical threats.

In Nigeria, for example, police used call record data to lure and arrest journalists and in Ghana reporters worry that digital forensics tools will be deployed to access information on seized devices. They have reason after the Washington Post reported that Myanmar police leveraged the same technology to search the phones of two jailed Reuters journalists and the Nigerian military sought a “forensic search” for sources on editors’ phones and computers.

Without a robust defense of privacy from governments, corporate leaders, and citizens, journalists’ phones will continue to be converted from useful tools into grave vulnerabilities.

*A shorter version of this report was also published in the April 2021 edition of The Washington Post Press Freedom Partnership newsletter.

 

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The post Spyware Threatens Press Freedom’s Privacy Imperative appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer is a Senior Africa Researcher with the Committee to Protect Journalists*.

 
3 May is World Press Freedom Day. This is part of a series of IPS features and opinion editorials focused on media freedom globally.

The post Spyware Threatens Press Freedom’s Privacy Imperative appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Across the world, several key mutant strains have emerged thanks to ongoing virus replication in humans.

By External Source
Apr 28 2021 (IPS)

With more than 300,000 new COVID cases a day and hospitals and crematoria facing collapse, Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called the situation in India “beyond heartbreaking”.

India’s government has blamed the people for not following COVID-safe public health directives, but recent data shows mask use has only fallen by 10 percentage points, from a high of 71% in August 2020 to a low of 61% by the end of February.

B.1.617, or what has been called the “Indian double mutation”, has drawn attention because it contains two mutations (known as E484Q and L452R) that have been linked to increased transmissibility and an ability to evade our immune system. Many experts in India now think this is driving the surge

And the mobility index increased by about 20 percentage points, although most sectors of the economy and activity had opened up. These are modest changes and do not adequately explain the huge increase in cases.

A more likely explanation is the impact of variants that are more transmissible than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.

 

Variants in India

Viruses keep changing and adapting through mutations, and new variants of a virus are expected and tracked in a pandemic situation such as this.

The Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG), a group of ten national laboratories, was set up in December 2020 to monitor genetic variations in the coronavirus. The labs are required to sequence 5% of COVID-positive samples from states and 100% of positive samples from international travellers.

The United Kingdom is currently testing about 8% of its positive samples and the United States about 4%. India has been testing about 1% altogether. INSACOG has so far tested 15,133 SARS-CoV-2 genomes. This means of every 1,000 cases, the UK has sequenced 79.5, the US 8.59, and India only 0.0552.

In the final week of December, India detected six cases of the UK variant (B.1.1.7) among international travellers.

The current second wave started in the northwestern state of Punjab in the first half of February and has not yet plateaued. One of the advisers to the Punjab government confirmed that more than 80% of the cases were attributed to the UK variant.

Significantly, the most affected districts are from Punjab’s Doaba region, known as the NRI (non-resident Indian) belt. An estimated 60-70% of the families in these districts have relatives abroad, mostly in the UK or Canada, and a high volume of travel to and from these countries.

B.1.617, or what has been called the “Indian double mutation”, has drawn attention because it contains two mutations (known as E484Q and L452R) that have been linked to increased transmissibility and an ability to evade our immune system.

Many experts in India now think this is driving the surge.

Even as India’s health ministry announced the detection of the mutants on March 24, it went on to add:

[…] these have not been detected in numbers sufficient to either establish or direct relationship or explain the rapid increase in cases in some states.

The head of the Indian Council of Medical Research said there was no reason for panic because mutations are sporadic, and not significant. That day, the states of Maharashtra and Punjab accounted for 62.5% and 4.5% of 40,715 new cases, respectively.

Across the world, several key mutant strains have emerged thanks to ongoing virus replication in humans. Both ability to replicate and transmit, and a better ability to escape our immune systems, led to the variants establishing themselves as dominant strains across geographies and populations.

The UK variant (B.1.1.7) is at least 30% more transmissible. At a recent webinar, Indian experts observed the “Indian strain” (B.1.617) is similarly transmissible to the UK variant, but there is little evidence so far of it being more lethal than the original virus.

 

Why higher transmissibility is so concerning

According to epidemiologist Adam Kucharski at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the conundrum is this:

[…] suppose 10,000 people are infected in a city and each infects 1.1 other people on average, the low end for the estimated rate of infection in England. After a month, 16,000 people would have been infected. If the infection fatality rate is 0.8%, as it was in England at the end of the first wave of infections, it would mean 128 deaths. With a variant that is 50% more deadly, those 16,000 cases would result in 192 deaths. But with a variant that is 50% more transmissible, though no more deadly, there would be 122,000 cases after a month, leading to 976 deaths.

In all likelihood, this is the current Indian scenario: a higher overall death count despite the variants being no more fatal in relative terms.

Setting up a genomic surveillance system and consistently testing 5% of the positive samples is an expensive but important tool in the journey ahead. This can help us identify emerging hotspots, track transmission and enable nimble-footed decision-making and tailored interventions.

Rajib Dasgupta, Chairperson, Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University

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

The post Why Variants are Most Likely to Blame for India’s COVID Surge appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated deforestation pressures and heightened the urgency of action to support sustainable forest management. The pandemic has the brought the importance of forests to global well-being into sharp focus. Pictured here forest in the Dominican Republic. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 28 2021 (IPS)

A new global report on forests says that while the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest threat to achieving ambitious forest protection goals, it has brought the importance of forests to global well-being into sharp focus, and that this recognition must now be met with collection action.

The inaugural Global Forest Goals Report was launched on Apr. 26, as part of the 16th United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) session which runs until the end of this week. It is based on data and information submitted by 52 member states, representing 75 percent of the world’s forests.

The report concluded that while countries have taken action to protect their forests, those efforts must be accelerated to achieve ambitious global goals.

It tracks the progress of countries in meeting the ambitious goals set out in the UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2030. Under that plan, countries vowed to accelerate the pace of forest protection by upgrading an initial focus on achieving net-zero deforestation to increasing global forest area by three percent by 2030 and eradicating extreme poverty for all forest-dependent people.

While it acknowledged the work done by countries in areas such as poverty reduction for forest-dependent people, initiatives to increase forest financing and cooperation on sustainable forest management, it stated that there is a lot more to be done. Noting that Africa and South America lost forest cover during the reporting period, the publication stated that forests remain under threat.

“Every year, seven million hectares of natural forests are converted to other land uses such as large-scale commercial agriculture and other economic activities. And although the global rate of deforestation has slowed over the past decade, we continue to lose forests in the tropics – largely due to human and natural causes,” it stated.

United National Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed said the report is being launched at a crucial time for the world’s forests.

The report cites growing concern by some countries that the economic fallout from the pandemic will lead to reduced donor funding for forests. It states that Africa, the Asia-Pacific Region and some countries in Latin America are facing dwindling forest financing, as scarce public funds are being prioritised on immediate public health needs.

Mohammed said while the COVID-19 crisis has dealt a blow to poverty alleviation and sustainable development goals, it is presenting an opportunity to make peace with nature through a green recovery, with healthy forests as a solid foundation.

“We are at a make or break moment. 2021 provides us a unique opportunity to halt the rapid loss of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation, while addressing the climate emergency and desertification and making our food systems more sustainable, with the sustainable development goals as our guide,” the deputy UN chief said.

UNFF Secretariat’s Officer-in-Charge Alexander Trepelkov presented a note on COVID-19’s impact on forests and the forest sector. It concluded that the pandemic has aggravated hardships for forest-dependent people and exposed systemic gaps and vulnerabilities.

It called for the integration of forest-based solutions into pandemic recovery, accelerated implementation of international forest-related targets and adequate resources for forestry.

Meanwhile, on the fringes of the event, a group of 15 international organisations launched a joint statement on the challenges and opportunities involved in halting deforestation. The Collaborative Partnership on Forests event was chaired by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

Director of the FAO’s Forestry Division Mette Wilkie told IPS that as ecosystems that are home to the vast majority of land biodiversity and 75 percent of freshwater, without forests, climate goals cannot be met.

“Forests also provide numerous products for everyday life – from the traditional use of wood to the masks, gloves and hand sanitisers that we all use during the current COVID-19 pandemic. They provide more than 86 million green jobs and support the livelihoods of many more people worldwide,” Wilkie said.

“As we increasingly encroach on forests and wildlife habitats to expand agricultural production, settlements and infrastructure, the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to people rises exponentially. It is evident that we cannot achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and the future we want unless we halt deforestation and forest degradation and increase our efforts to protect, manage and restore our forests.”

Wilkie, who chairs the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, told IPS that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated deforestation pressures and heightened the urgency of action to support sustainable forest management.

“Lockdowns have led to disruptions in markets and supply chains and caused job losses, triggering reverse migration into rural areas and increasing pressure on forests to provide subsistence livelihoods,” she said, adding that, “on the other hand, investing in forest restoration and the sustainable management of forests can create green jobs and livelihoods, and at the same time create habits for biodiversity and mitigate – and adapt to – climate change.”

 

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By UNESCO
PARIS, Apr 28 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Investigative journalist and media executive Maria Ressa of the Philippines has been named as the 2021 laureate of the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, following the recommendation of an international jury of media professionals. The Award Ceremony will take place on 2 May in Windhoek, Namibia, on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day Global Conference, and be streamed online.

Over a career spanning more than thirty years, Ressa has worked as CNN’s lead investigative reporter for Asia and the head of ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs. She has also been involved in many international initiatives to promote press freedom. In recent years, she has been the target of online attacks and judicial processes relating to her investigative reporting and status as manager of online outlet Rappler. She has been arrested for alleged crimes related to the exercise of her profession, and has been subject to a sustained campaign of gendered online abuse, threats, and harassment, which at one point, resulted in her receiving an average of over 90 hateful messages an hour on Facebook.

"Maria Ressa’s unerring fight for freedom of expression is an example for many journalists around the world. Her case is emblematic of global trends that represent a real threat to press freedom, and therefore to democracy."

-- Marilu Mastrogiovanni, Chair of the Prize’s international jury, investigative journalist from ItalyThe $25,000 Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to the defence or promotion of press freedom especially in the face of danger. It is named after Guillermo Cano Isaza, the Colombian journalist who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá, Colombia, on 17 December 1986. It is funded by the Guillermo Cano Isaza Foundation (Colombia), the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Finland) and the Namibia Media Trust.

About the 2021 World Press Freedom Day Global Conference in Windhoek

The 2021 World Press Freedom Day Global Conference will take place from 29 April to 3 May and focus on the theme of Information as a Public Good. More than 40 online and in situ sessions are planned, looking at topics such as the transparency of online platforms and the importance of media and information literacy. The conference will also tackle ways to promote and support independent media struggling to survive a crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when national and local media everywhere face financial instability and other pressures threatening their survival and their journalists’ jobs.

Source: UNESCO

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By Sunil J. Wimalawansa
NEW JERSEY, Apr 28 2021 (IPS)

The SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) affected the entire world; many died, millions got sick, and the misery continues. Second and third waves of SARS.Cov-2 infection are devastating most countries.

Non-strategic lockdowns and curfews (as in Sri Lanka) further aggravated the peoples’ misery, sufferings, daily lives, and economies, more than that from the virus. The toxic combination of COVID-19 and curfews devastated local productions and supply chains, livelihoods, people welfare, food security, and the county’s economy.

Many viral diseases can control using natural and non-pharmacological approaches, adhering to public health standards, personal hygiene, and maintaining health: COVID-19 is not an exemption.

SARS.Cov-2 viruses enter humans mainly through the respiratory tract epithelial, causing predominantly immunological (cytokine storm), cardiovascular (clots), and multiple endocrinological abnormalities.

In some, the combined effects can be deadly. In addition to supportive therapies, preventing clots, cytokine storms, and providing oxygen, treatments should be geared to prevent complications in the mentioned systems.

Approximately a quarter of persons who develop complications develop an intractable “post-COVID syndrome.” This protracted disease mainly arises from the longer-term adverse effects in the central nervous system (mainly the brain) and must be prevented.

The combination of strengthening the innate immune system with nutrient vitamin D and vaccination significantly reduces this serious complication following COVID-19.

Governmental actions to control COVID-19

Sri Lanka’s President delegated full responsibility of COVID control to a handful of people and made government funds available. Nevertheless, the lack of systems thinking, focus, practical strategies, and misinterpretations of data preclude proper control of COVID-19 that led to a countrywide community spread, from May 2020.

Moreover, weak leadership and egotism led to improper and vague policies jeopardising the economy, people, and the country. Ineffective and harmful policies (some originated from WHO and CDC) led to contradictions, confusion and collectively eroded public trust. The lack of transparency and accountability of the government and its administrators further compromised COVID control.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is working closely with global experts, governments and partners to rapidly expand scientific knowledge on this new virus, to track the spread and virulence of the virus, and to provide advice to countries and individuals on measures to protect health and prevent the spread of this outbreak.

The lack of vision and practical strategies, inexperience in managing epidemics, and the refusal to consult experts with managing epidemics led to creating flawed policies that hurt the economy.

Despite the hard work of healthcare workers and other frontline personnel, the second wave of COVID began in August 2020; within weeks, it got out of control. In June 2020, the author predicted the impending second wave in August and the third wave in April 2021.

The inability to comprehend the viruses’ biology, failure to adjust an effective (living)strategy to control the spread, and failure to use acceptable means to enhance natural immunity, prevented successful control of the epidemic.

Besides misinterpreting statistics and consequently enforcing island-wide curfew inappropriately, refusing community PCR testing, and preventing conducting crucial prevention and treatment randomised controlled clinical studies, and the failure to incorporate emerging scientific data for better management of COVID-19 were few lost opportunities for Sri Lanka.

What should have been done

Conducting broader preventative actions, including prioritising humane “home” quarantining and local production of high-quality, reliable PCR kits, would have markedly reduced the government’s economic burden and peoples suffering.

The government had plenty of time to prevent hospitals and the healthcare sector burden. For example, increasing the populations’ innate immunity could have achieved through safe sun exposure advice and vitamin D supplementation. These would have prevented COVID-19-associated complications and deaths.

There was no rationale for military-style, forced quarantining of people. Those exposed to a person infected with COVID-19 and PCR positive asymptomatic persons could have better and cost-effectively managed in their homes, with oversights from the medical officer of health and public health inspectors.

Such simple measures would have improved the safety and well-being of people and markedly reduce government costs. Collectively, these approaches would have cost less than 10% of what the government spent (and continue to spend) on COVID-19 and associated significant opportunity costs.

Community spreads could have prevented through geographically limited lockdowns not exceeding two weeks while supplying essentials to the local community. Shutting down entire districts or the country was a colossal mistake. Consequently, small businesses and self-employed and daily wage-earners accounting for two-thirds of adults in Sri Lanka were worst affected.

Pitfalls of managing COVID-19 in Sri Lanka

Public trust and cooperation are essential in successfully managing an epidemic or any severe crisis. The loss of trust was detrimental for the governance, especially the belief that neither the administration nor law enforcement has genuine interests or intentions to control the COVID-19 epidemic and protect the public. These concepts entrenched following turning the COVID misery into a profitable business.

Ironically, the decision-makers who enforced draconian restrictions had all supplies for themselves and full salaries. Simultaneously, the lower-middle-class and the poor, two-thirds of the country, suffered the most.

Besides, inappropriate curfew also interrupted local travel and businesses, tourism, air travel, hotel industry, import and export trade, and all supply chains, causing significant food insecurity and financial burdens on over 80% of the population. It will take years to recover from the harmful effects of COVID, amplified by poor administrative decisions.

The lack of candour and commercialisation of COVID-19 is understandably worrisome for the local public, expatriates, and the international community. Boosting the supply-chain-related businesses by respective administrations during the LTTE war and COVID-19 are remarkably similar: achieved at the public expense. In both cases, a handful of the same set of companies allied with the government became rich.

Moreover, faulty actions in 2020 significantly increased poverty and malnutrition, worsen existing medical disorders, the disease burden, suicides and excess premature deaths, and increase healthcare costs.

Instead of strengthening the power base, militarisation, and environmental destruction, the government should focus on disease prevention, improving education and health, supply chain, exports, national security, re-establish law and order and freedom of speech, increase food security, and lower the cost of living. These would facilitate getting the country back on track for prosperity.

 

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The post State of COVID-19 in Sri Lanka: Are Government Policies Effective in Controlling it? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer is Professor of Medicine, Director, Cardio-Metabolic Institute, New Jersey, U.S.A.

The post State of COVID-19 in Sri Lanka: Are Government Policies Effective in Controlling it? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A clean-up crew called in by AES Gener, owner of the coal-fired power plants operating in Quintero and Puchuncaví, regularly cleans the coal from the beach (Image: Saul Mansilla)

By Francisco Parra Galaz
SANTIAGO, Apr 27 2021 (IPS)

Standing on Punta Ventanilla, Carlos Vegas, 65, looks across at the industrial park which has been there most of his life. He looks at the impact of the 15 industries spread around the bay that connects the towns of Quintero and Puchuncaví, in central Chile.

Although he comes from a family of fishers, 20 years ago, the Chilean health authority prohibited him and his union from selling and cultivating mussels because they had high levels of cadmium, arsenic and copper. If people got sick, it would be his fault, he was told.

Carlos knows these waters of the Pacific like the back of his hand. He knows there will be deposits of coal on the beach tomorrow. He takes his mobile phone, looks at the data on the height of the waves in Puchuncaví, and said: “The tide is low, listen to me, tomorrow at eight in the morning, the beach will be full of coal.”

The next morning, a representative of the Navy — the maritime authority in Chile — walks along the coast and gives a warning. Coal is landing in Ventanas, the beach next to the industrial park. Immediately afterwards, a group of four artisanal fishermen, loaded with shovels and sacks, arrive to collect the coal left by the tide.

Hundreds of people in Quintero and Puchuncaví have suffered illnesses related to industrial pollution, now the Chilean towns are seeing a shift to renewables

When the sea is calm, and the waves are low, the coal is left in the sand. “This is like when you have the cup of milk. If you leave it still, the cream comes out on top. If you move it, it sticks,” explained José Carvajal, 58, a lifelong artisanal fisherman. He is the coordinator of the cleaning group convened by AES Gener, owner of the three coal-fired thermoelectric plants that operate in the area.

During January 2021, Ventanas artisanal fishermen collected four tonnes of charcoal on the beach. Over the years it has become normal to see the sand turn black at sunrise. The Terram Foundation estimated the amount of coal at 832 tonnes between 2009 and 2020.

How does a popular tourism destination end up saturated with coal year after year? In 2017, the Navy’s Maritime Prosecutor’s Office carried out an investigation and concluded that the deposits were due to “the lack of control by AES Gener in the management of waste from its production processes”. The company appealed and an investigation was reopened. It has not yet concluded.

In 2020, AES Gener burned more than 1.4 million tonnes of bituminous coal, mainly from the US and Colombia. It arrived in the bay on ships. Mechanical shovels and cranes extracted it and dumped it on a conveyor belt that extends 1.4 kilometers out to sea from the coast, taking it to an outdoor storage field. This process has operated for decades in the port of Ventanas.

Coal-fired power accounted for 39% of electricity generation in Chile in 2019, the year in which President Sebastián Piñera made an unprecedented announcement. He pledged to close all 28 coal plants in this small South American country – that contributes scarcely 0.26% of global CO2 emissions – by 2040. The decarbonisation of the energy mix became Chile’s main climate commitment, and underpinned its plan to achieve carbon neutrality.

Puchuncaví has ​​already started its transition, with the closure, in December 2020, of the “Ventanas 1” plant, which had been operating since 1964. But the challenge is not simple for an area that has lived for more than half a century with multiple environmental consequences.

 

Half a century of sacrifice

Between August and October 2018, 1,553 children and adolescents were treated for symptoms of poisoning, including dizziness, fainting spells, nosebleeds, and panic attacks in eight medical centers in the Valparaíso region, according to a report by the Children’s Ombudsman.

The Supreme Court, in an unprecedented ruling, affirmed that the state had failed to protect the inhabitants of Quintero and Puchuncaví. But, at the same time, the ruling could not determine who was responsible.

The industrial park includes, among others, an oil refinery; a copper concentrate smelter; a coal-fired thermoelectric complex; a chemical storage and discharge terminal; a cement production plant; a natural gas thermoelectric plant; a terminal that stores gas; another fuel discharge terminal; and a lubricant plant.

In 2011, boys and girls from the rural school in La Greda were poisoned in March, August and November. The court proved Codelco’s responsibility for the mismanagement of its copper smelter. The school was relocated, to less than two kilometers away. In 2019, Chilean and US researchers published a study showing that children between the ages of one and five are at risk of cancer due to levels of exposure to arsenic in soils.

This industrial presence has not translated into positive development for the town. Puchuncaví records 27% of its population at poverty level, 7% higher than the national average, and 32% of its inhabitants lack access to basic services, 20% above the Chilean average.

 

Decarbonising the energy mix

Sebastián Piñera issued the order to close down the Ventanas 1 plant from the La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago on 29 December 2020. It was the oldest coal-fired thermoelectric plant in the country.

“It is a milestone in the energy history of our country,” said Fernanda Pinochet, regional ministerial secretary of energy for the Valparaíso region, who was present.

Three other coal-fired thermoelectric plants still operate in the Puchuncaví bay: Ventanas 2, Nueva Ventanas and Campiche. All owned by AES Gener.

“The closing of Ventanas 1 was the product of a tripartite effort between the company, the government and the union. We sat at the table to see what they needed and we were able to cover their needs completely,” said Pinochet. A total of 35 workers were part of the plant. Of these, 16 took early retirement and 17 were relocated to other plants in the same complex.

 

Residents of Quintero and Puchuncaví exercise on the beach, with the industrial park in the background (image: Saul Mancilla).

 

Hernán Ramírez, a researcher at the Terram Foundation, describes the closure as window dressing from the government: “Ventanas 1 was the oldest and smallest, with very high operating costs. Last year, according to data from the Electrical Coordinator, it burned 3% of all the coal that was discharged into the bay and ran for 140 hours throughout the year. The closure has no effect.”

The NGO Chile Sustentable carried out a study in which they showed the different theories on what a fair transition would be. Its author, Claudia Fuentes, says that the Chilean government’s proposal “is more than anything a timetable. Decarbonising was associated with shutting down plants, but later challenges were not seen, such as reconversion, environmental remediation and everything that has to do with a just transition”.

Chile said that it will develop a “Just Transition Strategy” as part of is climate change pledge (NDC), the formal commitment to the Paris Agreement, which will be one of its pillars for the decarbonisation process. In the coming months, the ministry of energy will present the draft of the strategy.

The process, however, still does not generate much trust in the local community. “They are not responsible for any environmental liability or negative externalities or people’s health. Because when you are diagnosed with cancer, you are left alone,” said Katta Alonso, representative of the organisation Women in the Sacrifice Zone in Resistencia.

It would propose that any transition begins with the closure of the three remaining coal-fired plants, and of Codelco’s copper smelter. The next step would be the reduction of the industrial park so that no more companies are installed and that the community decides what will happen in the territory.

 

Chile’s renewable future

Since the Decarbonisation Plan announced in 2019, six thermoelectric plants have already closed in Chile. Another five will do so by the end of 2024 and the remaining 17 will shutter before 2040. The government signed a voluntary agreement with the four companies that own the plants for the winddown: AES Gener, Italy’s Enel, France’s Engie and the Chilean Colbún.

Although coal continues to be the main source of energy in Chile today, the rapid growth of renewables also accelerated its demise. In the last 6 years, Chile quintupled the capacity generated with solar, wind and hydraulic energy. The projections of the current government indicate that these energies cover 70% of the mix by the end of this decade.

According to the ministry of energy, as of January 2021, there are 6,335MW of power plants under construction, of which 94% will generate renewable energy. The vast majority are solar and wind, which according to projections, will be able to cover all the fossil generation that Chile has today in 2040.

Investments in renewables come mainly from the same companies involved in decarbonisation: Enel, Engie and Colbún, which have been joined by other small players, in the country, such as Acciona.

However, the most important company in the whole process is AES Gener. It owns 14 of the 22 coal-fired plants operating today. Only Ventanas 2 will close before 2024. The rest are subject to new negotiations every five years. For Claudia Fuentes, AES Gener “has been the company most reluctant to change. They are the ones with the least commitment to shut down plants ”.

AES Gener controls 26% of the electricity generation market in Chile, with 3,541mw of installed capacity, of which 77% are today coal-fired thermoelectric plants. Although the company has expressed its interest in diversifying its parent company, its big bet in Chile is the Alto Maipo hydroelectric plant, which will add 531mw to its portfolio by the end of this year. This has been seen years of resistance from the local community who claim it would threaten the supply of drinking water in Santiago.

The company has announced the possible conversion of the infrastructure of its plants in Puchuncaví to seawater desalination plants or green hydrogen plants. In addition, a few weeks ago it announced the sale of its five coal-fired plants in Huasco to the WEG group as a step forward in its decarbonisation. However, WEG has not signed any closure commitments with the government.

*AES Gener was contacted to be part of this report but did not respond to interview requests.

 

This article was originally published by ChinaDialogue

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Apr 27 2021 (IPS)

 
Forgive me,
is all that you can’t say.
Years gone by and still
words don’t come easily,
like forgive me, forgive me.
              Tracy Chapman

The World Press Freedom Day on the 3rd of May is an occasion for celebrating humanity. Language enables us to transmit our thoughts in sound – a means of communication developed through our unique brain, combined with our capacity to control lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus. Over time, humans have also acquired skills to commit our language to writing.

Since language is the basis for human existence, it is particularly painful when we are denied expressions of thoughts and feelings. Not being listened to, abused and told to: “Shut up!”, make us suffer from being denied equal access to human fellowship. We are herd animals, a sense of belonging and freedom to express ourselves is essential for us all. This is probably the reason to why words in so many cultures are considered to be sacred – worthy of respect and even veneration. Several societies condemn verbal abuse and most religions consider lying to be a grave sin.

Generally, it is written words which are considered to be particularly sacred. However, these sacred words have often a spoken tradition behind them. Several sacred scriptures have been recited long before they were written down. In 1960, the Malian author Amadou Hampâté Bâ stated in a speech at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris:

“It is our duty to safeguard our inherited oral tradition, to try to transmit whatever we can of it before time and oblivion cause it to disappear from human memory. […] I concede that several of the world’s human inhabitants are illiterate, but I do not concede to you that they are ignorant. […] I remind you that in my country, every time an old man dies, a library has burned down.”

This respect for the spoken word, particularly in the form of recitation, is reflected in many of the world’s sacred texts. For many Muslims the sound of Qur’anic chant is an immediate means of contact with the Word of God. The sound itself is considered to have a divine source. Participation in Qur’anic recitation as reciter, or as listener, becomes an act of worship. This respect for the spoken and written word may be one reason to why so many religions condemn lying. The Lebanese scholar Al-Ḥurr Al-cĀmili (1624-1693 CE) accurately stated “All the evils have been locked in a room and its key is lying.” In the Christian Bible, Jesus is quoted as saying: “But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No.’ Whatever is more than these is of the Evil One,” while Buddhist scriptures proclaim that the path to bliss and righteousness contain:

“Correct speech: Refrain from lying. Do not engage in gossip, misleading, hurtful, or loose speech.
Right intention: Your intentions should be based on kindness and compassion. Proper action: Refrain from harming living things. Do not take any statement for granted.”

Honest and exquisitely expressed words might slightly open the gates to an otherwise incomprehensible core of existence. Like art and music, words may enable us to glimpse the greatness of the Universe and perhaps even grasp some of its inner meaning.

In the Bible, God creates the world with words:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

Most of us have a quite laid back attitude when it comes to expressing ourselves. After having used our words we tend to forget what made us utter them, that is if we do not consider them to be so significant that we decide to write them down. When such writings become “sacred” it means that they have gained an existence far beyond what one single person happened to say to another at a given moment. Such words often become Law, a solid foundation for a society’s existence and thus they obtain a decisive significance for an individual’s perceptions, thoughts and actions.

Apparently did writing develop independently in at least four ancient civilizations. Sometime in 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia, in Egypt 3200 BCE, in China 1200 BCE, and in the present Southern Mexico and Guatemala 500 BCE.

Written words were extremely important to ancient Egyptians. The Greeks called Egyptian characters hieroglyphs, sacred signs. Scribes were considered to convey the language of the gods and Thoth, the god of wisdom and maintainer of the Universe, was believed to possess a book that included the entire set of rules governing Cosmos. Written and carefully recited words empowered objects and sacred actions. Words were believed to enable the deceased to awaken to a new existence beyond death. Every sacrificed object – water, necessities of life, incense, and ornaments – was through sacred words charged with power. It was not only objects that through words were filled to the brim by force, the words themselves were also loaded with power, meaning that so called “word plays” endowed words and sentences with a wide range of meanings and allusions. A single word could thereby allude to objects, the deceased, gods and demons, forces and a large variety of powerful concepts and ways of thinking.

Mastering all this knowledge made the art of writing extremely difficult. Becoming a scribe required a long, tough education, which not only meant mastering the complex depiction/writing of words, the difficult grammar and underlying allusions, it also included learning rituals by heart, mythology, accounting, mathematics and geometry. All that was required not only to master religious obligations, but also administrative tasks. However, the reward was worth it. An Egyptian scribe escaped hard work under a scorching sun, did not pay taxes and reached high positions. Sometime 3,200 years ago, someone wrote on a papyrus a text he called The Happy Scribe:

“Is there anyone here like Hardedef? Is here another one similar to Imhotep? There is not in our time a Noferti, or a Cheti, foremost of them all. I ask you to remember a man like Pathemdjehuti, a Chacheperrasonb. Is there perhaps another one like Ptahhotep or Kaires? The gates and halls that were built for them have fallen into disrepair. Their mortuary priests do no longer exist. Their resting places are forgotten. But their names are still mentioned due to the books they wrote, because they were so beautiful. Those who wrote them, their memory lives on forever. Become a scribe! Put this into your mind, so that your name might become like theirs. A book is better than a burial chamber covered with writing, than a burial chapel never so well built. Become a scribe and live forever.”

For many later authors writing became a life-absorbing vocation, while several of them spent a lifetime searching for the right word. One of them, Gustave Flaubert, wrote:

”Whatever we want to convey, there is only one word to express it, one verb to animate it, one adjective to qualify it. We must therefore go on seeking that word, verb or adjective, until we have discovered it and never be satisfied with approximations, never fall back on tricks, even inspired ones. Or tomfoolery of language to dodge the difficulty.”

The right words have been found by vociferous writers and speakers, enabling them to inspire and empower people. You might think of Martin Luther King’s rousing speech:

”I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

Bold journalists have with beautiful and adequate expressions dared to pinpoint injustices. Like Émile Zola when he in 1898 accused the French establishment of punishing the innocent Alfred Dreyfus:

”What they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so. My duty is to speak out, not to become an accomplice in this travesty. My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of an innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit.”

However, many of these outspoken heroes of well-written and just words have had to pay for their honesty with their lives. Like the poet Osip Mandelstam, who under the bloody tyranny of Josef Stalin with a great poem dared to break the fearful silence of many of his fellow citizens:

We are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay,
more than ten steps away you can’t hear what we say.
But if people would talk on occasion,
they should mention the Kremlin Caucasian.

Dictators hate to be disclosed in all their nakedness; their stupidity, fears, disdain for others and raving violence. However, it is not only in dictatorships that unsung heroes of free speech are silenced, and even killed. In 2020, nearly seven out of every ten journalists killed lost their lives in countries “at peace” and an unaccounted number were threatened and abused, often due to investigations into cases of local corruption, organised crime, misuse of public funds and environmental misdemeanour. In 2020, Reporters Without Borders revealed that to their knowledge 50 journalists had been killed, 387 had been detained, 54 held hostage and four were missing. So, not only on the 3rd May let us pay homage to the guardians and heroes of the sacred word and express our disdain for all those who do not respect words; who cheat, lie, abuse, maim and kill to keep us all in ignorance and fear.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

 

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The post Sacred Words appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

May 3 is World Press Freedom Day. This feature is part of a series highlighting the current state of media freedom globally

The post Sacred Words appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Apr 27 2021 (IPS-Partners)

A renowned Pacific gender equality champion and Technical Advisor of Shifting the Power Coalition, Sharon Bhagwan Rolls, believes that gender equality is about men and women working together and this can be achieved by diversifying media content to break gender stereotypes.

She highlighted this while speaking on Women and the Media, which is one of the 12 priority areas of concern in the Beijing Platform for Action (BPA) on Gender Equality. The BPA is a resolution adopted by the United Nations at the end of the Fourth World Conference on Women on 15 September 1995. The resolution adopted to promulgate a set of principles concerning the equality of men and women.

Bhagwan Rolls said the recent global media monitoring project is a useful tool to gauge ways in which women are included or not included in media content.

“It’s really important to note that gender issues are not only about women, or simply adding women to the mix. To get better at promoting gender equality through the media, we need to start looking at diversification of content; how we make the linkages with gender equality commitments to all areas of society, and promoting women’s leadership in all her diversity,” she stated.

Bhagwan Rolls said government ministers need to help break the gender stereotypes by reviewing ways their government initiative stories are produced.

“There needs to be greater cohesive action and collaboration to produce stories that aren’t just promoting what the government is doing, but actually having conversations with women from different sectors. Even if it is simply promoting women working within government ministries, profile these women, show the public how these women are contributing to moving the agenda forward,” she explained.

Prior to the BPA, in 1994, at the 6th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women and 1st Meeting of Pacific Ministers for Women, and in preparation for the Fourth World Conference for Women, held in Beijing, China in 1995, delegates from 22 Pacific Island countries and territories met in Noumea and endorsed a set of principles and a plan of action to advance gender equality in the region – The Pacific Platform for Action on the Advancement of Women and Gender Equality (PPA).

The PPA was a landmark achievement for the region, and a remarkable one as it emerged prior to the globally negotiated and endorsed BPA, and its 13 critical issues mirrored most of the critical areas of the BPA.

For Pacific Island Countries and Territories, BPA implementation from 1995 was twinned with actioning the PPA. The PPA has been central to accelerating implementation of the BPA in the region.

The 14th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women (27-29 April), will see the launch of the Pacific Beijing +25 Report, which takes stock of progress, recommendations, and what must be done to achieve full and equal participation and inclusion of all women and girls of all diversities.

Source: The Pacific Community (SPC)

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A young child participates in a plant workshop organized by UNDP Peru and FAO in Ayacucho, Peru. Credit: UNDP Peru

By Peter Paul van de Wijs
AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands, Apr 27 2021 (IPS)

Last week, the world marked Earth Day – an opportunity to put the spotlight on the pressing needs of our planet, in the face of ever-growing impacts by humanity, and galvanize action to change practices and behavior. Yet these issues were not, and cannot be, addressed in a single day. Resolve and action to protect the environment is a 365 days-a-year endeavor.

The accumulating corporate contribution to the damaging impacts on the Earth – by businesses and other organizations – is significant. Therefore, the role of companies, in participating in solutions that safeguard the natural environment, are also crucial.

To identify and recognize how a company is impacting on the sustainability of the Earth, the starting point is transparency. The GRI Standards – the world’s most widely for sustainability reporting – offer any organization a common language for communicating their impacts on people and planet.

So, what is the role of GRI, through reporting, in catalyzing action by organizations, large and small, to safeguard the environment?

I spoke to Bastian Buck, GRI Chief of Standards, and Marco van der Ree, GRI Chief Development Officer, to find out more.

Q: The theme of Earth Day 2021 was, ‘Together, we can prevent the coming disasters of climate change and environmental destruction. Together, we can Restore Our Earth’. This is a significant ask. How can sustainability reporting support the required action – by companies, governments or other organizations?

Marco: We know the planet is in serious distress and organizations need to understand their impact – positive and negative – on the planet. GRI reporting essentially provides them with a ‘risk map’, so they can identify where they have impacts and consequently what action they need to take.

Bastian: Communicating their impact through our Standards enables companies to have important, timely societal dialogues with their stakeholders – including customers, investors, civil society and governments. What sustainability reporting does is to provide information that is critical in decision-making processes, internal and external to the company. helping companies and stakeholders determine their role in this transitional moment in the global debate on how to restore our planet.

Bastian Buck

Q: Addressing environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change were key focus areas for Earth Day. How do the GRI Standards relate to this? What is GRI doing to ensure the Standards remain relevant and capture impacts in these crucial areas?

Bastian: Disclosure on environmental impacts has always been at the core of the GRI Standards and our standard setting activities. What they also do is address the corresponding societal topics that cannot be ignored, if organizations are to fully understand and change how they impact on the environment. Progress to net zero by 2050 or stopping biodiversity loss, for example, have broader societal impacts and that’s why comprehensive sustainability reporting is needed that gives a holistic picture.

Marco: GRI cover topics that range from biodiversity to energy, water to emissions – all of which help companies understand their environmental impact. We don’t stand still and regularly update or add new Standards, as guided by changing societal expectations on good corporate behavior. For example, in 2020 our new Waste Standard launched, which seeks to enable companies move away from the ‘take make waste’ model and embrace circular practices.

Q: Recent research from KPMG indicates that the number of companies conducting sustainability reporting rises year on year. Most larger companies now do so – with a majority choosing to use the GRI Standards. What is the biggest challenge to continuing to spread the practice of reporting, and what’s the benefit of using a common standard?

Marco van der Ree

Marco: If we really want to change our behavior as a global society in order to protect the Earth then sustainability reporting, transparency and disclosures will have to become mandatory for all companies and organizations. As I have said previously – there is no business on a dead planet

Bastian: We need mandatory sustainability reporting – across as many jurisdictions as possible and addressing as many themes as possible. The recent moves we are seeing in the EU offer encouragement that change is happening. We have come a long way through promoting voluntary disclosure, and different regions and nations will move at a different pace. However, we should not lose sight of the vision of mandatory, global sustainability standards that apply to all.

Q: GRI says that it provides the Standards as a ‘free public good’. What does this actually mean and, given that standards development is a costly activity, how can GRI continue to update and deliver globally relevant sustainability standards?

Marco: GRI wants all organizations to have free access to the Standards so that there are no barriers to access – and therefore no barriers to embracing transparency. Last year, we created the Global Standards Fund to bring together a group of funders from governments, corporates, foundations and individuals who are passionate about supporting the Standards.

If you think of the multiplication effect of a sustainability standard, the impact of the investment in updating it goes a long way. For example, we estimate that updating the GRI Biodiversity Standard will cost 350,000 Euro. On the one hand, a local conservation project might be able to safeguard a few hectares of rainforest, for a limited time, with these funds. Yet an improved Biodiversity Standard, freely available to all, can help improve the practices of thousands of companies around the world.

Q: Finally, what is your personal motivation for working for GRI and in the field of sustainability reporting? What was your career journey to get to this point?

Bastian: I joined GRI 15 years ago because I believe that sustainability reporting, and the dialogue and action that it enables, is essential if we are move away from environmentally harmful business models. Reporting is a key tool in the transition. Therefore, in 2021, the GRI Standards are more important than ever before.

Marco: I have worked in sustainable development around the world for 25 years, starting out with managing socio-environmental community projects in Brazil. From these early beginnings, I realized that we can only protect this Earth by working together. If businesses change their behavior and take responsibility for their impacts, they can become truly sustainable. The GRI Standards provide a clear pathway for companies to do just that.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Chief External Affairs Officer, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Apr 27 2021 (IPS)

Producers and consumers seem helpless as food all over the world comes under fast growing corporate control. Such changes have also been worsening environmental collapse, social dislocation and the human condition.

Longer term perspective
The recent joint report – by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration – is ominous, to say the least.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

A Long Food Movement, principally authored by Pat Mooney with a team including IPES-Food Director Nick Jacobs, analyses how food systems are likely to evolve over the next quarter century with technological and other changes.

The report notes that ‘hi-tech’, data processing and asset management corporations have joined established agribusinesses in reshaping world food supply chains.

If current trends continue, the food system will be increasingly controlled by large transnational corporations (TNCs) at the expense of billions of farmers and consumers.

Big Ag weds Big Data
The Davos World Economic Forum’s (WEF) much touted ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (IR4.0), promoting digitisation, is transforming food systems, accelerating concentration in corporate hands.

New apps enable better tracking across supply chains, while ‘precision farming’ now includes using drones to spray pesticides on targeted crops, reducing inputs and, potentially, farming costs. Agriculture is now second only to the military in drone use.

Digital giants are working with other TNCs to extend enabling ‘cloud computing’ infrastructure. Spreading as quickly as the infrastructure allows, new ‘digital ag’ technologies have been displacing farm labour.

Meanwhile, food data have become more commercially valuable, e.g., to meet consumer demand, Big Ag profits have also grown by creating ‘new needs’. Big data are already being used to manipulate consumer preferences.

With the pandemic, e-retail and food delivery services have grown even faster. Thus, e-commerce platforms have quickly become the world’s top retailers.

New ‘digital ag’ technologies are also undermining diverse, ecologically more appropriate food agriculture in favour of unsustainable monocropping. The threat is great as family farms still feed more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

IR4.0 not benign
Meanwhile, hi-tech and asset management firms have acquired significant shareholdings in food giants. Powerful conglomerates are integrating different business lines, increasing concentration while invoking competition and ‘creative disruption’.

The IPES-ETC study highlights new threats to farming and food security as IR4.0 proponents exert increasing influence. The report warns that giving Big Ag the ‘keys of the food system’ worsens food insecurity and other existential threats.

Powerful corporations will increase control of most world food supplies. Big Ag controlled supply chains will also be more vulnerable as great power rivalry and competition continue to displace multilateral cooperation.

There is no alternative?
But the report also presents a more optimistic vision for the next quarter century. In this alternative scenario, collaborative efforts, from the grassroots to the global level, empower social movements and civil society to resist.

New technologies are part of this vision, from small-scale drones for field monitoring to consumer apps for food safety and nutrient verification. But they would be cooperatively owned, open access and well regulated.

The report includes pragmatic strategies to cut three quarters of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions and shift US$4 trillion from Big Ag to agroecology and food sovereignty. These include “$720 billion in subsidies” and “$1.6 trillion in healthcare savings” due to malnutrition.

IPES-ETC also recommends taxing junk food, toxins, carbon emissions and TNC profits. It also urges criminal prosecution of those responsible for famine, malnutrition and environmental degradation.

Food security protocols are needed to supercede trade and intellectual property law, and not only for emergencies. But with food systems under growing stress, Big Ag solutions have proved attractive to worried policymakers who see no other way out.

Last chance to change course
Historically, natural resources were commonly or publicly shared. Water and land have long been sustainably used by farmers, fisherfolk and pastoralists. But market value has grown with ‘property rights’, especially with corporate acquisition.

Touted as the best means to achieve food security, corporate investments in recent decades have instead undermined remaining ‘traditional’ agrarian ecosystems.

Big Ag claims that the food, ecological and climate crises has to be addressed with its superior new technologies harnessing the finance, entrepreneurship and innovation only they can offer.

But in fact, they have failed, instead triggering more problems in their pursuit of profit. As the new food system and corporate trends consolidate, it will become increasingly difficult to change course.

Proposed by the WEF, the UN Secretary-General’s Food Systems Summit later this year clearly seeks to promote corporate ‘solutions’. Very timely, A Long Food Movement is an urgent call to action for the long haul.

With so much at stake, representatives of food producers and consumers need to act urgently to prevent governments from allowing a UN sanctioned corporate takeover of global governance of food systems.

 

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The post Struggle for the Future of Food appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Climate change, while affecting all of us, will be felt by the youth, who do not have an alternative planet. Credit: Miriet Abrego/IPS.

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, Apr 26 2021 (IPS)

Recently, I participated in Kids Climate Summit 2021, a virtual event that gave younger students an opportunity to take a stance on climate change, express their concerns, and learn about global climate and the actions we all can take to mitigate climate change. 

Among the other panelists were an elected Member of U.S. Congress, Rep Sean Casten, who serves on several House Committees including House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and House Science, Space, and Technology, an astrophysicist, Jeffrey Bennett, and a 19 year old climate justice activist, Jamie Margolin.

Listening to young people take a stance on climate change and hearing their well-articulated and very alarming concerns about the changing climate re-inspired my commitment to do my best and to keep calling on everyone to take action to ensure our younger generation inherits a livable planet

Over a month ago, I also participated in another webinar -broadening our horizons-organized by an Eighth grader who is passionate about educating communities on the climate crisis. Through her webinars, Nyla hopes to “amplify voices, to educate and inspire change.”

Listening to young people take a stance on climate change and hearing their well-articulated and very alarming concerns about the changing climate re-inspired my commitment to do my best and to keep calling on everyone to take action to ensure our younger generation inherits a livable planet.

Around the world, young people continue to speak up while demanding for actions by elected officials, Governments, Corporations and researchers like myself and everyday citizens. For example, last month, on March 19, the Fridays for Future climate activism movement, led by Greta Thunberg, organized a strike in 68 countries to call out World powers “empty promises” to cut down greenhouse gas emissions.

Undoubtedly so, young people have a reason to be mad and to protest. Despite, countries setting goals, according to the United Nations Climate Change, recently published NDC Synthesis report,  Climate Commitments are NOT on track to meet Paris Agreement Goals.

Governments, corporations and all stakeholders in climate change, must listen. Young voices ideas and demands must be acted upon.

To begin with, youth can be appointed as climate change youth envoys or in councils that can provide input to initiatives being rolled out to address climate change. The United Nations already has climate change youth envoys.

The White House under President Biden recently announced its environmental justice advisory 26 member’s council and among those appointed is an 18 year old, from New York, who has been engaged with climate crisis protests. He will have a seat at the table, helping give input to the American Government as it creates climate policies.  This should be the norm. As a matter of fact, all elected State Governors, Senators and corporations and other climate agencies that have advisory boards should include and appoint the youth. They deserve a seat at the table at all climate change.

Alternatively, governments and all stakeholders including corporations need to carve out spaces to bring youth and listen to their voices, ideas and demands. This is beginning to happen and it is commendable to see Presidents and Governments carving out spaces to include youth.

For example, recently the UK government, Italy and Singapore held a youth climate dialogue that was aimed at driving youth action and understanding their concerns on issues of sustainability and climate change. Moreover, the ideas brought forward need to be included in policy formulations. And if possible, youth should also be involved in disaster preparedness planning and response actions.

Importantly, institutions of higher learning and research centers where climate change research happens should do their best to ensure that the youth have recent information about the science and other developments in climate change.

Society at large would benefit from having youth that understand climate system and the initiatives governments are taking to mitigate it and know how to apply the most recent science in their engagement endeavors.

This calls for more scientists to not only do the research, but, communicate it in formats that are accessible. Doing so will ensure that young students and everyday citizens who want to be guided by science in taking climate action to have what they need.

It is encouraging to see professional societies where the scientists belong to actively rolling out science communication training workshops and events to ensure that scientists have numerous opportunities to learn how to communicate their science to the public.

Even better, scientific journals are beginning to cater for young students. For example, Frontiers for Young Minds is a journal publishing articles in format that are accessible to young students, because they are the ones who review the articles.

Climate change, while affecting all of us, will be felt by the youth, who do not have an alternative planet. Their voices must be heard, and their ideas incorporated in climate mitigation and adaptation policies. They must be involved at every level of taking action against climate change.

 

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.

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Credit: United Nations

By Joseph Gerson
NEW YORK, Apr 26 2021 (IPS)

Despite the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), we are confronted by the increasing dangers of great power war, even nuclear war.

Instead of making necessary investments to ensure public health, reverse climate change and ensure the security of their peoples, trillions of dollars are being wasted to construct new nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, including new hypersonic delivery systems.

The U.S. and Russia are the lead drivers of this race to annihilation, with more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. The U.S. is in the process of upgrading all its nuclear weapons and deploying an entirely new and more deadly nuclear triad at an estimated cost of two trillion dollars.

Faced with U.S. conventional supremacy and the expansion of NATO to its borders, Russia has increased its reliance on nuclear weapons and is deploying new and more exotic nuclear weapons.

We face the existential danger that escalation of the conflict in Ukraine and accidents and miscalculations as the two powers confront one another in the Baltic and Black Seas, could escalate beyond control.

In each case, in addition to the drive for imperial power, military-industrial complexes contribute to the nuclear crisis. There also demands coming out of Ukraine to the effect that if it is not allowed to join NATO, it should construct its own nuclear arsenal.

Potentially more dangerous is the new U.S.-Chinese Cold War. Here the Thucydides Trap, the historic dynamic of inevitable conflict between rising and declining powers, is driving this dimension of the nuclear arms race. In its effort to retain its regional (and global) hegemony, the U.S. is moving to deploy standoff nuclear-armed cruise missiles targeted against China.

It is also pressing increased deployments of its “missile defenses” which can serve as shields for U.S. first-strike swords along China Asia-Pacific periphery. These, in turn, lead Chinese policy makers to serious consider increasing the size of their much smaller nuclear arsenal and the possibility of abandoning their no first use doctrine.

The explosion of spending for nuclear weapons and their delivery systems is not limited to the great powers. The Johnson government in Britain has just shocked the world with the announcement that it will increase the size of its nuclear arsenal by roughly 30%.
France is deploying new nuclear armed submarines designed to threaten nuclear war throughout the 21st century. Pakistan is in the process of trying to match India’s nuclear triad. Israel is secretly expanding it Diamona nuclear weapons site.

And having been repeatedly threatened by U.S. conventional and nuclear attacks, North Korea has publicly announced it will continue manufacturing more nuclear weapons and diversifying their delivery systems which threaten South Korea, neighboring nations and even the United States.

This is suicidal madness. Here in the United States, as Tax Day and Congressional debates over the national budget approach, popular movements and the Congressional Defense Spending Reduction Caucus are demanding significant reductions in military spending. Funding for the replacement of the nation’s ground based and first strike ICBMs and “more usable” low-yield battlefield weapons are thought to be most vulnerable to funding cuts.

As the Russell-Einstein Manifesto warned the world at the height of the first Cold War in 1955, humanity faces the choice of life or death for our species. They appealed to the world to press for nuclear disarmament, to “remember your humanity and forget the rest.”

Fifty years ago, the nuclear powers committed in Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

The world’s nuclear powers must be held to the NPT commitments. Governments won’t deliver us the nuclear free world humanity requires for survival. It can only be achieved by popular pressure.

I encourage people around the world to join the International Peace Bureau initiated Global Days of Action on Military Spending, now under way and continuing to May 17 and to press on beyond to stanch the existential nuclear danger with nuclear disarmament actions and demands for Common Security diplomacy.

*Dr Joseph Gerson’s books include Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World and With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion and Moral Imagination.

 

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The post US-China Cold War Could Lead to a More Dangerous Nuclear Stand-off appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The writer* is President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau.

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Children display dexterity during a free play session prior to the pandemic. Credit: BRAC

By Erum Mariam
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Apr 26 2021 (IPS)

Conventional wisdom is that the health of young children is not at great risk from COVID-19, but, in the Global South, the space constraints imposed on young children by the pandemic pose a significant risk to the stimulation on which brain development thrives. Early childhood development is further jeopardized by the pandemic’s impact on caregivers.

A new early childhood development infrastructure has been built in Bangladesh by BRAC, the largest international development organization in the world, providing weekly one-on-one phone calls by trained specialists to the caregivers of 40,000 infants and children under the age of six. It offers educational and psychosocial support – and a model that can benefit children worldwide.

A child’s early years are crucial to brain development, and stimulation is especially important. With schools closed in Bangladesh beginning in March 2020 – and play groups thereby halted and young children largely at home – the challenge was to ensure stimulation within home environments.

The program that emerged combines playful learning for children and psychosocial support for caregivers through mobile phone communications and a multi-layered architecture of specialized training and outreach. While enhancing needed stimulation among children, this replicable program also engages and supports family members in children’s learning and raises the prospect of continuing that engagement after the pandemic.

The program is part of a much wider drive for play-based learning by BRAC. A multi-year partnership between BRAC, the LEGO Foundation, and Porticus supports an extensive play-based learning initiative. Through this initiative, BRAC has created 110 community-based Play Labs in Bangladesh, Uganda, and Tanzania. Another 400 Play Labs have also been created within government primary schools in Bangladesh (with 300 of them supported by Porticus and 100 by the LEGO Foundation). BRAC has further trained 315 adolescent girls and young women to act as facilitators or Play Leaders in the community-based Play Labs. The Play Labs are safe spaces where children can engage in play, supported by a play-based curriculum that is culturally sensitive and designed to suit the local contexts, while also promoting children’s cognitive, language, physical, and social-emotional development.

Children engaged in a storytelling session with the Play Leader prior to the pandemic. Credit: BRAC

Both the play spaces and curriculum are designed by BRAC Institute of Educational Development, BRAC University (BRAC IED). Within a few months of the Rohingya influx in 2017, BRAC IED as part of BRAC started developing and implementing the Humanitarian Play Lab model within Child Friendly Spaces. The Humanitarian Play Lab is an adaptation of BRAC IED’s award-winning Play Lab model, adapted to the humanitarian context of the Rohingya camps, where play is used as a tool for healing from trauma as well as for learning. Since December 2018, the model has continued to run for Rohingya infants and children under the age of six as part of the Play to Learn project, in partnership with Sesame Workshop, International Rescue Committee, and New York University, with funding from the LEGO Foundation.

For children in displaced communities, the COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis on top of a crisis. It is vital to provide these children – and their caregivers – with improved access to learning, psychosocial support, safe spaces, and playful early learning and stimulation opportunities to help address trauma, support healthy development, and provide a sense of routine and normalcy. Play helps children better manage trauma, especially when they have experienced crisis, violence, and poverty.

When schools closed due to the pandemic, children no longer had access to the safe spaces provided by the Play Labs and Humanitarian Play Labs. BRAC felt the need to stay connected to children and their families, so Play Leaders and other frontline staff started using mobile phones to maintain regular contact with program participants. That initial instinct led to the creation of the telecommunication model called Pashe Achhi (English translation: Beside You), a remote learning mechanism that not only provides learning opportunities for children and psychosocial support for caregivers but also serves as a new emergency infrastructure for early childhood development.

Experts at BRAC IED brought together psychologists and play-based curriculum developers to develop 20-minute tele-conversational scripts, with a component for psychosocial support and another component on play-based learning. BRAC trained 1,300 Play Leaders on the effective delivery of scripts. The Play Leaders now facilitate weekly 20-minute one-on-one calls with caregivers and children from both Play Lab and Humanitarian Play Lab families. An initial pilot of a five-to-seven-minute conversation proved to be inadequate, and the 20-minute design now in use allows for meaningful engagement with both caregiver and child. The call scripts emphasize active listening as well as practicing empathy to ensure that callers can listen and address parents’ feelings and suggest play-based stimulation strategies to engage with the children within the home environment.

In calling the caregivers of infants and children under the age of two in the Rohingya camps, Play Leaders provide basic psychosocial support plus tips on how to take care of infants and stay safe from COVID-19. For children ages two to six in the Rohingya camps, Play Leaders speak with the children and mothers or caregivers. For children ages four to five across Bangladesh, Play Leaders engage remotely with children through activities such as reciting Bangla rhymes, while giving the adults basic psychosocial support, tips on engaging with the children, and health and hygiene messages.

BRAC has begun to expand the Pashe Achhi project to target infants and children under the age of five and their families from vulnerable backgrounds across Bangladesh. These families often lack access to basic early childhood development services, and BRAC sees great potential in Pashe Achhi to promote optimal children’s development and help break the cycle of poverty.

In total, outreach to caregivers of 40,000 children now takes place weekly, providing support for both the children and the adults. The fact that such scale was reached within weeks underscores the need and the replicability. Data has been collected throughout, and research is underway to assess the impact quantitatively and qualitatively, but anecdotal evidence makes clear the extraordinary value of this intervention. Its impact includes enhancing children’s stimulation in every household; addressing the well-being of children and adults; engaging children and their families in early childhood education; increasing educators’ connections with the children’s households; and addressing pedagogical and social-emotional needs, while also providing capacity building for front-liners and addressing their well-being.

Some of the lessons that implementation has already revealed are especially illuminating: First, play is key. It provides a profound educational vehicle and an easy way to engage households in ways that can potentially continue throughout a child’s education. Second, engagement can enhance both learning and psychosocial support. A child’s learning is greatly affected by the relationship with caregivers, hence Pashe Achhi places great emphasis on developing the caregiver-child bond. Third, the content must be kept simple to enable scaling.

The model depends on empathetic and educational conversations, the impact of which must be maximized to reach enough people. Fourth, the pervasiveness of technology is far more important than whether it is state-of-the-art. In this case, a cutting-edge initiative was developed with basic mobile phones.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated innovation in the education of young children. Extending that innovation could benefit children broadly long after the pandemic has subsided.

 

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The post Addressing the Impact of COVID-19 on Infants and Young Children appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The author is the Executive Director of the BRAC Institute of Educational Development, BRAC University in Bangladesh.

The post Addressing the Impact of COVID-19 on Infants and Young Children appeared first on Inter Press Service.

SIPRI’s research on arms and military spending has been the core of the Institute's work since its foundation in the 1960s. Credit: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

By Thalif Deen*
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 26 2021 (IPS)

The United Nations– which is desperately seeking funds to help developing nations battling a staggering array of socio-economic problems, including extreme poverty, hunger, economic inequalities and environmental hazards– has continued to be one of the strongest advocates of disarmament.

The world body has relentlessly campaigned for reduced military spending in an attempt to help divert some of these resources into sustainable development and humanitarian assistance.

But according to a new report released April 26 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditure rose to nearly $2 trillion in 2020, an increase of 2.6 percent, in real terms, from 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the world to a virtual standstill for the last 14 months, apparently has had no impact on military spending.

Ironically, four of the five biggest spenders were permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC), namely the US, China, Russia and UK. The fifth biggest spender was India, currently a non-permanent member of the UNSC.

Military spending by China, which is currently in a new Cold War with the US, grew for the 26th consecutive year.

The latest figures of rising arms expenditures by some of the big powers makes a mockery of the UN’s longstanding pleas for cutbacks and diversion of funds from the military into sustainable development.

William D. Hartung, Director, Arms and Security Program at the Washington-based Center for International Policy told IPS: “At a time when a global pandemic, climate change, and racial and economic injustice pose the greatest risks to human lives and livelihoods, the increase in global military expenditures in 2020 marks a dismal failure by policymakers across the world to address the most urgent challenges we face”.

He argued that even a fraction of. the nearly $2 trillion spent on the military last year could have gone a long way towards sustainable investments in public health, environmental protection, and combating inequality.

“World leaders can and must do better,” said Hartung.

The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) points out that over the past century, governments have sought ways to reach a global agreement on reductions in military expenditures. Various proposals were discussed in the League of Nations, and later in the UN. Early proposals in the UN focused on reducing the expenditures of States with large militaries, and on freeing up funds for development aid.

China’s J-15 Naval Fighter Jet. Credit: Chinese Military Review

“But proposals for cutting military spending did not materialize,” says UNODA. However, they led to the development of the UN Standardized Instrument for Reporting Military Expenditures in 1981—later renamed United Nations Report on Military Expenditures (MilEx)—under which countries are encouraged to report on their military expenditures.

https://undocs.org/en/A/75/140

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Full Professor with the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS “the latest military spending data from SIPRI are difficult to reconcile with the reality of the world we live in today”.

In a year in which the global community was dealing with the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic, SIPRI’s data show that military spending continued unabated. Military spending increased in nine of the 10 countries with the highest military expenditures, she pointed out.

Even though the global economy as measured by global gross domestic product (GDP) decreased by 4.4 percent, she said, global military spending increased 2.6 percent over the year. Global military spending is going in exactly the wrong direction.

“Unfortunately, the United States continues to lead the world in military spending, accounting for 39 percent of the global total,” said Dr Goldring, who is Visiting Professor of the Practice in Duke University’s Washington DC program and also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

According to SIPRI’s data, that’s more than the rest of the top 10 military spenders combined. And It’s more than twice the total of the countries which are most commonly perceived by US policymakers as its main military competitors, Russia and China, she added.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, told IPS it is indeed ironic that four of the five permanent members of the UNSC are the largest military spenders.

“The more ironic problem is the fact that all of these countries spend a small fraction of these amounts on social programs, which explains to a great extent the growing poverty in all of these countries”.

Needless to say, he noted, the key to reducing military budgets is directly connected to the level of tension between the various countries.

“I do not expect any serious discussion about world disarmament unless many of the consuming conflicts are resolved, and in particular the growing, rather than diminishing, tension between the United States, Russia, and China,” Dr Ben-Meir declared.

‘The recent increases in US military spending can be primarily attributed to heavy investment in research and development, and several long-term projects such as modernizing the US nuclear arsenal and large-scale arms procurement,’ said Alexandra Marksteiner, a researcher with SIPRI’s Arms and Military Expenditure Programme.

Meanwhile, China’s military expenditure, the second highest in the world, is estimated to have totalled $252 billion in 2020. This represents an increase of 1.9 per cent over 2019 and 76 per cent over the decade 2011–20. China’s spending has risen for 26 consecutive years, the longest series of uninterrupted increases by any country in the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database.

In an open letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last September, the Berlin-based International Peace Bureau called for world disarmament and the reduction of global military spending.

“We write to you on behalf of the International Peace Bureau and more than 11.000 signatories to express our support for your call for a global ceasefire. We would also like to emphasize the need for (nuclear) disarmament and the reallocation of money from the military to healthcare, social, and environmental needs – to the fulfilment of the Social Development Goals.”

This pandemic has also made clear that states need to re-prioritize their spending. While many of the problems raised by the pandemic could have been at least partially solved, it was the lack of funding which hindered it, the letter declared.

Last month, the United Nations was hoping to raise soma $3.85bn from more than 100 governments and donors at a virtual pledging conference. The funds were meant to avert widespread famine in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen,

But the total pledges amounted to only $1.7bn – less than half – in what the UN secretary general described as a “disappointing outcome”. “Millions of Yemeni children, women and men desperately need aid to live. Cutting aid is a death sentence,” António Guterres said in a statement.

In its latest study, SIPRI said even though military spending rose globally, some countries explicitly reallocated part of their planned military spending to pandemic response, such as Chile and South Korea. Several others, including Brazil and Russia, spent considerably less than their initial military budgets for 2020.

‘We can say with some certainty that the pandemic did not have a significant impact on global military spending in 2020,’ said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘It remains to be seen whether countries will maintain this level of military spending through a second year of the pandemic.’

Dr Goldring pointed out that in 2020, approximately 1.8 million people around the world died of covid. SIPRI’s military spending figures suggest that the countries with the highest military expenditures decided that business as usual was the correct direction to follow, despite the covid pandemic.

“This is a time for reevaluating priorities. Countries should be giving priority to the health and welfare of their people, rather than continuing to fund the military-industrial complex. Cutting military spending would free funds for human needs and sustainable development.”

“The UN has suggested diverting funds from military expenditures to fund sustainable development. But in reality, this isn’t a question of diverting funds – it’s devoting them to what they should have been allocated to in the first place.”

“In the early days of his Administration, President Biden has not shown an inclination to reverse the United States’ excessive military spending patterns. He is proceeding with expensive new nuclear weapons and continuing to propose bloated military budgets.

There’s still time to reevaluate this approach, restructure US military spending, and focus on human needs. Cutting the military budget would also free US financial resources to help deal with the urgent global problems of the covid pandemic and the climate crisis.”

“More than a decade ago, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “The world is over armed, and peace is underfunded.” Unfortunately, this statement continues to be true.”

*Thalif Deen is the author of the newly-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That.” The 220-page book is peppered with scores of anecdotes– from the serious to the hilarious– and is available on Amazon worldwide and at the Vijitha Yapa bookshop in Sri Lanka. The links follow:
https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/
https://www.vijithayapa.com/

 

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The United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake, told IPS that the Summit achieved an important goal of bringing institutions and political conversations closer to young people. Clockwise from top left: Jayathma Wickramanayake, Swetha Stotra Bhashyam, Emmanuel Sindikubwabo, Diana Garlytska. Courtesy: International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 23 2021 (IPS)

Following almost two weeks of talks on issues such as climate change, innovation, marine conservation and social justice, thousands of young people from across the globe concluded the first-ever International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) One Nature One Future Global Youth Summit with a list of demands for action on nature.

Under three umbrella themes of diversity, accessibility and intersectionality, they are calling on countries and corporations to invest the required resources to redress environmental racism and climate injustice, create green jobs, engage communities for biodiversity protection, safeguard the ocean, realise gender equality for climate change mitigation and empower underrepresented voices in environmental policymaking. 

“Young people talk about these key demands that they have and most of the time, they are criticised for always saying ‘I want this,’ and are told ‘but you’re not even sure you know what you can do,’” Global South Focal Point for the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN) Swetha Stotra Bhashyam told IPS. “So we linked our demands to our own actions through our ‘Your Promise, Our Future’ campaign and are showing world leaders what we are doing for the world and then asking them what they are going to do for us and our future.”

Bhashyam is one of the young people dedicated to climate and conservation action. A zoologist who once studied rare species from the field in India, she told IPS that while she hoped to someday return to wildlife studies and research, her skills in advocacy and rallying young people are urgently needed. Through her work with GYBN, the youth constituency recognised under the Convention on Biological Diversity, she stated proudly that the network has truly become ‘grassroots,’ with 46 national chapters. She said the IUCN Global Youth Summit, which took place from Apr. 5 to 16,  gave youth networks like hers an unprecedented platform to reach tens of thousands of the world’s youth.

“The Summit was able to create spaces for young people to voice their opinions. We in the biodiversity space have these spaces, but cannot reach the numbers that IUCN can. IUCN not only reached a larger subset of youth, but gave us an open space to talk about critical issues,” she said. “They even let us write a blog about it on their main IUCN page. It’s called IUCN Crossroads. They tried to ensure that the voice of young people was really mainstream in those two weeks.”

The United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake, told IPS that the Summit achieved an important goal of bringing institutions and political conversations closer to young people. During her tenure, Wickramanayake has advocated for a common set of principles for youth engagement within the UN system, based on rights, safety and adequate financing. She said it is important for institutions to open their doors to meaningful engagement with young people.

“I remember in 8th or 9th grade in one of our biology classes, we were taught about endangered animal species. We learned about this organisation called IUCN, which works on biodiversity. In my head, this was a big organisation that was out of my reach as a young person.

“But having the opportunity to attend the IUCN Summit, even virtually, engage with its officials and engage with other young people, really gave me and perhaps gave other young people a sense of belonging and a sense of taking us closer to institutions trying to achieve the same goals as we are as youth advocates.”

The Youth Envoy said the Summit was timely for young people, allowing them to meet virtually following a particularly difficult year and during a pandemic that has cost them jobs, education opportunities and raised anxieties.

“Youth activists felt that the momentum we had created from years of campaigning, protesting and striking school would be diluted because of this uncertainty and postponement of big negotiations. In order to keep the momentum high and maintain the pressure on institutions and governments, summits like this one are extremely important,” Wickramanayake said.

Global Youth Summit speakers during live sessions and intergenerational dialogues. Courtesy: International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

Other outcomes of the Global Youth Summit included calls to:

• advance food sovereignty for marginalised communities, which included recommendations to promote climate-smart farming techniques through direct access to funding for marginalised communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and extreme events,
• motivate creative responses to the climate emergency, and
• engineer sustainable futures through citizen science, which included recommendations to develop accessible education materials that promote the idea that everyone can participate in data collection and scientific knowledge creation.

The event was billed as not just a summit, but an experience. There were a number of sessions live streamed over the two weeks, including on youth engagement in conservation governance, a live story slam event, yoga as well as a session on how to start up and scale up a sustainable lifestyle business. There were also various networking sessions.

Diana Garlytska of Lithuania represented Coalition WILD, as the co-chair of the youth-led organisation, which works to create lasting youth leadership for the planet.

She told IPS the Summit was a “very powerful and immersive experience”.

“I am impressed at how knowledgeable the young people of different ages were. Many spoke about recycling projects and entrepreneurship activities from their own experiences. Others shared ideas on how to use different art forms for communicating climate emergencies. Somehow, the conversation I most vividly remember was on how to disclose environmental issues in theatrical performances. I’m taking that with me as food for thought,” Garlytska said.

For Emmanuel Sindikubwabo of Rwanda’s reforestation and youth environmental education organisation We Do GREEN, the Summit provided excellent networking opportunities.

“I truly believe that youth around the world are better connected because of the Summit. It’s scary because so much is going wrong because of the pandemic, but exciting because there was this invitation to collaborate. There is a lot of youth action taking place already. We need to do better at showcasing and supporting it,” he told IPS.

Sindikubwabo said he is ready to implement what he learned at the Summit.

“The IUCN Global Youth Summit has provided my team and I at We Do GREEN new insight and perspective from the global youth community that will be useful to redefine our programming in Rwanda….as the world faces the triple-crises; climate, nature and poverty, we made a lot of new connections that will make a significant positive change in our communities and nation in the near future.”

The Global Youth Summit took place less than six months before the IUCN World Conservation Congress, scheduled forSep. 3 to 11. Its outcomes will be presented at the Congress.

Reflecting on the just-concluded event, the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth is hoping to see more of these events.

“I would like to see that this becomes the norm. This was IUCN’s first youth summit, which is great and I hope that it will not be the last, that it will just be a beginning of a longer conversation and more sustainable conversation with young people on IUCN… its work, its strategies, policies and negotiations,” Wickramanayake said.

 

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Two decades of investments in malaria so far have saved a staggering 7.6 million lives and prevented 1.5 billion malaria cases. But progress plateaued by the end of 2019 with political will and funding declining. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Joy Phumaphi and Sarthak Das
Apr 23 2021 (IPS)

The occasion of World Malaria Day amidst a global pandemic warrants an examination of the intersection between our decades long battle against the world’s oldest known fever and the newest known pathogen fueling a global pandemic.

In our estimation, one theme is abundantly clear: effective management of COVID-19 through coherent public health responses protecting their people are underpinned by strong leadership. For months now, we are largely operating with the same set of public health guidance such as physical distancing and masking.

When national leadership decide to prioritize an issue, there is no question that progress will follow; malaria provides an excellent example. After two decades of strong political commitment and effective interventions, 21 countries from every region worldwide eliminated malaria, and many more are on the cusp of elimination. 7.6 million deaths have been averted since 2000

From Singapore to Spain, Mauritania to Manhattan, outcomes, however, have been radically different. Yes, capacities to test, track and treat vary widely; the poor face greater risk exposure. Even with these disparities, it is clear that leadership is key: from accepting the guidance of science to the role of communities in translating policies into action.

When national leadership decide to prioritize an issue, there is no question that progress will follow; malaria provides an excellent example. After two decades of strong political commitment and effective interventions, 21 countries from every region worldwide eliminated malaria, and many more are on the cusp of elimination. 7.6 million deaths have been averted since 2000.

How then, in the midst of a global pandemic, can we accelerate the fight against malaria? Indeed, what are relevant lessons from malaria for public health amidst COVID-19?

Three areas are critical to re-accelerate the momentum and ensure malaria elimination remains a viable goal.

First, we must maintain the political will that drives leadership at multiple levels– families to communities to districts up to the national level.

Second, we need sustained financing for malaria and to communicate effectively to leaders the return on investment in terms of improved health outcomes.

Third, we must clearly articulate the link between malaria and health systems strengthening.

 

1. Leadership & continued renewal of political commitment

Progress to date has shown that political will is fundamental to elimination. Leaders in the two regions have demonstrated this political will.

From the 2000 Abuja Declaration, 2006 Abuja Call, 2012 African Union Roadmap, 2013 Abuja Declaration to the 2014 commitment of East Asia Summit Leaders to eliminate malaria in Asia Pacific by 2030 and the commitment of the Heads of State and Government of Africa to eliminate malaria also by 2030.

We believe that with continued political leadership; reinforced by increased public and private sector funding to expand access to life-saving tools, we can – and must – end malaria. The establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, the President’s Malaria Initiative as well as ALMA and APLMA were due to this political commitment and demonstrates shared responsibility and global solidarity.

To effectively translate political will to action and impact, sub-national leadership at the district, provincial and state levels is also critical, particularly as we approach elimination. Strong local leadership can support sub-national tailoring of interventions based on locally available data to maximize impact in both the Asia Pacific and in sub Saharan Africa.

To drive the malaria response, joining the dots coherently between all levels of Governments, from Heads of State right to the hearts of communities, including the most vulnerable and hard to reach, is the only way to ensure sustainable change.

 

2. Sustain Financing for Malaria

Political will translated to financial commitment for malaria must be sustained. We have come so far and have a historic opportunity to end a preventable and curable disease, in a time marked by devastating communicable disease impact.

Two decades of investments in malaria so far have saved a staggering 7.6 million lives and prevented 1.5 billion malaria cases, which in turn has significantly reduced burdens on health systems worldwide, improved maternal and child health, survival and prosperity.

But WHO’s 2020 Global Malaria Report shows progress plateaued by the end of 2019 with political will and funding declining. There is too much at stake if we do not sustain the momentum on the gains we have made to date: Malaria can put immense strain on economies, having a damaging impact on some nations’ GDP by as much as an estimated 5 – 6%.

It has been estimated that the malaria “penalty” to GDP ranges from 0.41% of GDP in Ghana to 8.9% in Chad, all of which could be regained following elimination of malaria. Complete eradication of the disease would increase GDP in Uganda by 50 million USD.

In Asia, despite the progress made, malaria elimination has the potential to save over 400,000 lives and avert 123 million malaria cases, translating to almost $90 billion in economic benefits for Asia Pacific.

Countries in Africa are rolling out and leading multisectoral End Malaria Councils and Funds which are keeping malaria high on the local political, development and local funding agenda. These institutions have resulted in increased action from the private sector and the public, sustaining the countries’ responses.

Surging investments in ending malaria is the pathway to eradication and will strengthen our ability to respond to future threats in this pandemic era. Investments in malaria have supported the scaling up of a community health workforce that serves as the eyes and ears on the ground for millions of fever-suffering children, adolescents and adults that don’t reach health clinics.

 

3. Fighting malaria to build stronger health systems

The basic yet most critical component of the fight against malaria, infectious disease management and public health at large is to test, track and treat. Strengthened surveillance, real-time data, and diagnostics are critical for early detection of malaria and other infectious diseases like COVID-19.

Africa has established the Africa CDC and its Regional Collaborating Centres to support African countries in their efforts to strengthen health systems and improve surveillance, emergency response, prevention and control of diseases. Asia Pacific countries are looking to establish similar mechanisms in the wake of the pandemic.

Countries that invested in frontline malaria capacity and interventions – especially Community Health Workers– are now leveraging them effectively for the COVID-19 response. Last year alone, malaria control efforts prevented ~500 million fevers, and one million Community Health Workers equipped with malaria Rapid Diagnostic Tests diagnosed 267 million fevers. Seven of ten symptoms overlap between malaria and COVID-19, led by fever.

This speaks to the importance of integrating the surveillance of malaria within the broader health system. From 40,000 Health Extension Workers and an estimated three million Women’s Development Army Volunteers in Ethiopia, 33,000 trained front line healthcare workers in Uganda, to 1 million Village Health Volunteers in Thailand – all are managing COVID-19 while continuing to provide effective malaria case management during the outbreak.

While there is no single magic bullet for malaria elimination, evidence suggests that investments in the fight against malaria can in turn strengthen health system preparedness and help protect against current and future pandemics.

This World Malaria Day, we must come together as political, social, religious, administrative and economic leaders and recommit the political will and combined action to protect our people, to re-accelerate gains against malaria, and leverage malaria investments to fight COVID-19 and emerging diseases.

We have the tools and technology to test, track, and treat the most prevalent forms of the malaria parasite. Countries like Bhutan or Botswana have shown us what progress is possible; places the ten highest burden countries in Africa as well high burden countries in Asia Pacific such as India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea reveal what work remains.

We know these challenges can be addressed; seizing this moment to double down on accelerating the task of malaria elimination while strengthening health systems is not only possible, but critical for our planet in the age of pandemics. To support this, platforms that allow for the exchange of expertise among leaders across districts and across national borders, that help track policy progress towards the end goal and drive accountability, can help make the difference.

 

Ms Joy Phumaphi is Executive Secretary, African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), former Minister of Health, Botswana

Dr. Sarthak Das is DrPH, Chief Executive Officer, Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance (APLMA) & Communicable Disease Threats Initiative

 

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