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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jun 18 2020 (IPS)

How often have you heard someone lamenting or even condemning inequality in society, concluding with an appeal to meritocracy? We like to think that if only the deserving, the smart ones, those we deem competent or capable, often meaning the ones who are more like us, were in charge, things would be better, or just fine.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Meritocracy’s appeal
Since the 1960s, many institutions, the world over, have embraced the notion of meritocracy. With post-Cold War neoliberal ideologies enabling growing wealth concentration, the rich, the privileged and their apologists invoke variants of ‘meritocracy’ to legitimize economic inequality.

Instead, corporations and other social institutions, which used to be run by hereditary elites, increasingly recruit and promote on the bases of qualifications, ability, competence and performance. Meritocracy is thus supposed to democratize and level society.

Ironically, British sociologist Michael Young pejoratively coined the term meritocracy in his 1958 dystopian satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. With his intended criticism rejected as no longer relevant, the term is now used in the English language without the negative connotations Young intended.

It has been uncritically embraced by supporters of a social philosophy of meritocracy in which influence is supposedly distributed according to the intellectual ability and achievement of individuals.

Many appreciate meritocracy’s two core virtues. First, the meritocratic elite is presumed to be more capable and effective as their status, income and wealth are due to their ability, rather than their family connections.

Second, ‘opening up’ the elite supposedly on the bases of individual capacities and capabilities is believed to be consistent with and complementary to ‘fair competition’. They may claim the moral high ground by invoking ‘equality of opportunity’, but are usually careful to stress that ‘equality of outcome’ is to be eschewed at all cost.

As Yale Law School Professor Daniel Markovits argues in The Meritocracy Trap, unlike the hereditary elites preceding them, meritocratic elites must often work long and hard, e.g., in medicine, finance or consulting, to enhance their own privileges, and to pass them on to their children, siblings and other close relatives, friends and allies.

Gaming meritocracy
Meritocracy is supposed to function best when an insecure ‘middle class’ constantly strives to secure, preserve and augment their income, status and other privileges by maximizing returns to their exclusive education. But access to elite education – that enables a few of modest circumstances to climb the social ladder – waxes and wanes.

Most middle class families cannot afford the privileged education that wealth can buy, while most ordinary, government financed and run schools have fallen further behind exclusive elite schools, including some funded with public money. In recent decades, the resources gap between better and poorer public schools has also been growing.

Elite universities and private schools still provide training and socialization, mainly to children of the wealthy, privileged and connected. Huge endowments, obscure admissions policies and tax exemption allow elite US private universities to spend much more than publicly funded institutions.

Meanwhile, technological and social changes have transformed the labour force and economies greatly increasing economic returns to the cognitive, ascriptive and other attributes as well as credentials of ‘the best’ institutions, especially universities and professional guilds, which effectively remain exclusive and elitist.

As ‘meritocrats’ captured growing shares of the education pies, the purported value of ‘schooling’ increased, legitimized by the bogus notion of ‘human capital’. While meritocracy transformed elites over time, it has also increasingly inhibited, not promoted social mobility.

A different elite
Thus, although meritocrats like to see themselves as the antithesis of the old ‘aristocratic’ elite, rather than ‘democratize’ society through greater inclusion, meritocracy may even increase inequality and further polarize society, albeit differently.

While the old ‘aristocratic’ elite was often unable to ensure their own children were well educated, competent and excellent, meritocrats – who have often achieved their status and privileges with education and related credentials – have often increased their significance.

Hence, a meritocratic system – seemingly open to inclusion, ostensibly based on ability – has become the new means for exclusion, which Chicago University Professor Raghuram Rajan attributes to the digital revolution.

Meritocrats have increased the significance of schooling, with credential attainment legitimizing growing pay inequality, as they secure even better education for thus own children, thus recreating and perpetuating inequalities.

Recent public doubts about, and opposition to rising executive remuneration, MBA education, professional guild cartels and labour remuneration disparities reflect the growing delegitimization of ostensibly meritocratic hierarchies and inequalities.

High moral ground
To add insult to injury, meritocratic ideology suggests that those excluded are undeserving, if not contemptible. With progressive options lacking middle class and elite support, those marginalized have increasingly turned to ‘ethno-populism’ and other ‘communal’ appeals in this age of identity politics.

Unsurprisingly, their opposition to educational and economic inequalities and marginalization is typically pitted against the ethnic ‘Other’ – real, imagined or ‘constructed’ – typically seen as ‘foreign’, even if domestic, as the ‘alien within’.

Markovits argues that meritocracy undermines not only itself, but also democratic and egalitarian ideals. He insists that meritocracy also hurts the new ‘meritocratic’ and ‘technocratic’ elite, hoping to recruit them to the anti-meritocracy cause, perhaps reflecting his appreciation of the need to build broad inclusive coalitions to bring about social transformation.

“Progressives inflame middle-class resentment, and trigger elite resistance while demagogues and charlatans monopolize and exploit meritocracy’s discontents. Meritocratic inequality therefore induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism, verging on despair.”

Reducing inequality possible
In the US and elsewhere, tax policy, other incentives and even Covid-19 will encourage replacing mid-skilled workers with automation and highly skilled professionals, e.g., facilitated by the growing use of artificial intelligence applications.

One alternative is to reform labour market as well as tax policies and regulations to promote more skilled, ‘middle-class’ employment. Those introducing new technologies would then be motivated to enable more productive, higher income, middle-class employment.

A more open, inclusive and broader educational system would also provide the workforce needed for such technologies. Thus, the transitions from school to work, which have tended to increase inequality, can be transformed to reduce inequality.

Rather than de-skill workers to be paid less in order to become more profitable, ‘up-skilling’ workers to be more productive can also be profitable. For example, an Indian cardio-thoracic hospital has trained nurses for many routine medical procedures, allowing specialist doctors to focus on tasks really requiring their expertise.

At relatively lower cost, using workers who are not fully trained doctors, but are paid and treated better, can cost-effectively deliver important healthcare services at lower cost at scale. Such innovations would strengthen the middle class, rather than undermine and erode it.

The post Meritocracy Legitimizes, Deepens Inequality appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The June 9 peaceful physically distance protests before the police used water cannon to disperse the participants. Credit: MONIKA DEUPALA, BIKRAM RAI and SHRISTI SHERCHAN.

By Diya Rijal
KATHMANDU, Jun 17 2020 (IPS)

Last week, Kathmandu erupted with protests organised collectively through the social web by Nepal’s urban young fed up with the shenanigans of the country’s septuagenarian rulers.

Most demonstrators outside the prime minister’s resident in Baluwatar or at Mandala were millennials — born after the democratic changes of 1990. They were outraged by one scam after another and the government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis.

Pragati Parajuli joined the protests on 9 June after finding out about it through social media. She had been increasingly furious about the state of the quarantine facilities, neglect of returning migrant workers and felt she needed her voice to be heard.

“People are dying due to lack of food, they are deep in debt, and during such a scary time, when people have nowhere else to look at other than the government, the government has not been with the people,” said Parajuli.

The slogans during the demos zeroed in six main demands: PCR testing for everyone at risk, a 4-tier triage approach for the vulnerable population, proper protection for frontline health workers, and legal action against those stigmatising people at risk, relief for people most affected by the lockdown, and transparency and accountability in the Rs10 billion COVID-19 relief budget allocation.

The 9 June protest was largely peaceful, participants wore masks and maintained physical separation. It had been going on for more than an hour before police first miked asking protesters to leave the area. Then they advanced with water cannon, detaining 10 people.

“The crowd was triggered when police arrived to negotiate a timeframe for the protest, and started chanting murdabad,” explains Aayush Basyal who was also on the street that day.

Photographs of youngsters braving water cannons spread through social media platforms, and followers of the account COVID-19 Nepal: Enough is Enough snowballed. It even got the United Nations Human Rights to tweet calling on the government to ‘respect the right to hold peaceful assemblies and protests safely’.

The police attempt to quell a peaceful protest drawing attention to mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis, then took on a more aggressive anti-government tone. The government’s line has been that its COVID-19 lockdown procedures do not allow assembly of 25 or more people.

“I never expected the government to stoop so low and use force on teenagers who were sitting peacefully,” said Parajuli. “Why the concern about virus transmission at the end of the protest when it had gone on for more than an hour? Besides the police were themselves not maintaining social distancing.”

Shashank Shrestha does not recall any provocation from the protesters before the armoured vehicle with water cannon appeared. “If they allowed it go on for 20 more minutes, the crowd probably would have dispersed peacefully,” he added. “It was this show of force that fueled more protests the next day.”

Indeed, as the images and videos spread on the Internet, more young people responded to the call to come out on the street again not just in Kathmandu but in cities across Nepal.

Robic Upadhayay was among a dozen online organisers who was maintaining the Facebook site. He said: “Our view was that we should not have to protest. Let the government listen to the voices of the youth. My friends and I tried to share our views through social media, but the government did not listen. That is why we hit the streets,” explained Upadhyay.

The organisers then started getting requests to help mobilise protests in various other neighbourhoods, and the Facebook group became a platform that grew in a chain reaction to nearly 200,000 young people.

“We told them to protest, but to make sure that it was peaceful, non-violent, without political agenda and abiding by safety measures to reduce the risk of infection,” Upadhyay added.

During the 80-days extended lockdown, the government had failed to bring back the migrant workers-many stuck in countries without jobs. Nepal bring the first of the migrant workers back home but they did not meet the government’s own minimum standards and themselves became virus incubators. The young protesters were following this news on the digital media, and were aware of the hardships and suffering caused by government inaction.

As the protests escalated, #EnoughIsEnough started trending on Twitter, and other hashtags such as #SanitizetheGovernement and #DownwiththeIncompetency became online emblems of the protests.

 

Glimpses of the June 9 peaceful physically distance protests before the police used water cannon to disperse the participants. Credit: MONIKA DEUPALA, BIKRAM RAI and SHRISTI SHERCHAN.

 

Compared to protests in other parts of the world against the economic impact of the lockdown, the demonstrators in Kathmandu raised slogans and carried placards with messages on the coronavirus that were precise and looked like they were written by epidemiologists.

For example, they carried banners asking for more PCR tests and to stop using the unreliable RDT. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) does not recommend the use of Rapid Diagnostic test (RDT) which detects antibodies, and encourages the use of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) which tests for the actual virus because the false positives in RDTs.

There are also media reports of irregularities in the continuing imports of RDT kits. The government has allocated 6.8 billion to its COVID-19 response, of which 2.3 billion is for quarantine management. People went to the streets demanding to know where all the money has gone. In repsonse, the prime minister’s press adviser Surya Thapa shared an expenditure report after the protesters’ demand for transparency grew.

Sabin Gyawali was one of the coordinators for the protest in Butwal who tried to lay down the rules about distancing masks, but he says that with more than 1,000 people turning up it was difficult to enforce.

“The protest was peaceful, there was no violence, and no conflict with the police,” he said. “We felt a bit guilty that although we were protesting about the pandemic, we ourselves were not able to abide by the social distancing protocols.”

The demonstrations were also infiltrated by political parties, which made it difficult to get everyone to follow rules. “When we said sit, they would stand up,” Bataule says. “We did stop them from saying things that were offensive, and they did not grasp the idea that a protest could be independent.”

In Bhairawa, Sudipa Chaudhary Mahato says she decided spontaneously to join the protests because she identified with the cause. But her parents were initially reluctant to allow her to go out.

It was also a spur of the moment decision for Smriti Baral, one of the organisers of the protest in Pokhara on 11 June.  After seeing the protests spread in Kathmandu she felt it was her duty to make the voice of the younger generation heard.

“We had been sitting peacefully for an hour when a group of men joined us and started shouting political slogans, and that was when the police intervened,” Baral recalls.

One of the slogans the young demonstrators used was ‘Police Hamro Sathi’, and this helped defuse the situation in some places. Elsewhere, they distributed red flowers to police, and in one instance on Saturday in Kathmandu police stood at attention and saluted while the demonstrators sang the national anthem. 

To be sure, not all young people went out into the streets. Shikha Neupane said she supports the protest’s objectives, but disagrees with the method. “It is impossible to be physically separated when police intervene,” she said, and felt it was contradictory to be supporting PCR kits when the gatherings risked further spread of the disease. For Neupane, it was also the fear of becoming a carrier and infecting her grandmother.

Niraj Kafle has similar reasons for not joining: “The demands are legitimate, and they need to be addressed, but we are currently in a pandemic. What if there is a spike because of the protests?”

A petition addressing the demands of the demonstrations is circulating through social media platforms with nearly 5,000 signatures. Public figures like Miss Nepal Shrinkhala Katiwada, actress Priyanka Karki, and others like Ayushman Joshi, Sisan Baniya have shown their support through social media pages. Another online petition targets the Ministry of Health and WHO, and already has 12,000 signatures.
Yet another counter-petition which says the youth protests are putting thousands of Nepali lives at risk. Started by Binod Shrestha, it accused the demonstrators of having a political agenda and even called protests ‘second degree murder.’

The criticism seems to have hit home. In Facebook posts, some organisers have said the protests would continue, but in a way that does not require large gatherings of people. Indeed, the battleground appears to have shifted from the streets to cybersphere where there are heated discussions between the protesters and supporters of mainstream parties.
The protests also coincided with vote in Parliament on Saturday for an amendment to the official Nepal map that included Limpiyadhura, and many had asked that it be called off. Indeed, there were protests for the map and against the government going on simultaneously.

“It is a difficult time, and I understand why people are angry, I feel the same rage,” says Pragati Parajuli. “Some people see this as a moment in history to fight everything at once, but when that happens we lose sight of what we are fighting for. We need to be focused on the specific agenda of pressuring the government to be more effective in controlling the spread of the disease.”

 

This story was originally published by The Nepali Times

The post Social Movement Through Social Media appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Jun 17 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The cost and consequences of the land transformation grossly underestimated says the UN

The cost and consequences of land use change are underestimated as demonstrated by COVID-19. Investing in the over 400 million hectares of land earmarked for restoration will help to build back better and safeguard our relationship with nature.

“The rapid and negative economic and social impacts of COVID-19 worldwide show the consequences of land use change are underestimated. The failure to slow and reverse the process of land use change may come at a very high cost in the future. It is in our interest, therefore, to ensure that as part of building back better, we take steps to help nature recover so that it works with and for, not against us,” says Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

“In a short space of time, COVID-19, a zoonotic disease, led to the worst economic crisis since the Second World War. A majority of the countries went into lockdown for two-months, on average. The global economy is heading for a recession and social relations are changing. The urgency both at the policy and practical levels to slow down and reverse land use change cannot be overstated,” Thiaw said.

“On the policy level, building back better means ensuring the policies to pre-empt or minimize land use change exist. On the practical level, it means the incentives to inspire consumers and producers to avoid land use change are provided. Both call for a world where people accept the right to draw from nature comes with the responsibility to take care of it – a social contract for nature,” he added.

Zoonosis is the crossing of viruses from animals to humans. The international community has battled five zoonotic diseases in two decades. Medical science shows that three out of every four emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. Natural scientists claim land use change creates the ground for it, as the interaction and physical distance between animals and humans gets closer.

According to the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), over 70 percent of all the natural, ice-free land is affected by human use. Moreover, this could rise to 90 percent by 2050, if global land use follows the same path.

Agricultural land for food, animal feed and fibre is behind this vast change, according to IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land. For the most part, the by-products from agriculture are consumed by urban dwellers and foreign inhabitants, not the local communities producing the goods, according to the World Atlas on Desertification.

Out to 2050, over 500 million hectares of new agricultural land will be needed to meet the global food demand, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

“It’s reassuring, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, that we can build back better. In the last five years, countries agreed on the actions to halt land use change. Since then, close to 100 countries have earmarked areas for repair and restoration by 2030, in the largest ever global restoration initiative. A preliminary analysis shows over 400 million hectares earmarked under this initiative, which is about 80% of the agricultural land required to meet global food demand out to 2050,” he added.

The restoration of these areas as part of building back better to avoid future zoonosis would bring other crucial benefits, particularly mitigating climate change.

The IPCC Report shows that land-based actions are an essential part of the tools to be used to draw down carbon from the atmosphere into nature to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. It warns, however, that these land-based actions are only effective now, not later, because the land’s ability to fix carbon will decline, especially where the land is unhealthy.

Every year, the ecosystem services lost due to land degradation are worth US$10.6 trillion per year, according to a study by the Economics of Land Degradation. By contrast, switching to sustainable land management practices could deliver up to US$1.4 trillion in increased crop production.

“The time for action is ripe because the social and economic outcomes of restoring degrading land are consistent with what citizens are demanding from their governments – jobs, action on climate change, peace and security,” Thiaw adds.

“The involvement of consumers is also essential,” says Park Chong-ho, Minister of Korea Forest Service.

“The Republic of Korea has provided US$570 million dollars for 15 years since 1973 to reverse land use change because after the Korean War we learned that halting and reversing land change is only possible when consumers make different choices that are backed by financial investments that aid the desired change,” he explains.

“Deforestation rates fell sharply as poverty declined, and the government launched national forest rehabilitation projects to restore devastated forests and to support income generation of consumers. If consumers reward the land users who are increasing land productivity and governments provide additional support to them, it is possible to slow and reverse land degradation,” he added.

Republic of Korea is hosting the virtual global observance this year. Desertification and Drought day is held every year on 17 June, starting in 1995, with a view to raise awareness about the two issues.

NOTE TO EDITORS:

Detailed information about the observance is available on the UNCCD Website: https://www.unccd.int/actions17-june-desertification-and-drought-day/2020-desertification-and-drought-day

For interviews contact: kjimenez@unccd.int or press@unccd.int

Free to use materials for the media can be downloaded from the UNCCD site and cited appropriately to avoid copyright infringement. Available products include the programme for the day, messages from celebrities and world leaders, including Secretary General António Guterres and UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw, high resolution photographs, 6 short video films and human interest stories.

The post Press Release, Desertification and Drought Day, 17 June 2020 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The empty corridors of a locked down UN Secretariat in New York. Credit: United Nations

By Gita Gopinath
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 17 2020 (IPS)

The Great Lockdown is expected to play out in three phases, first as countries enter the lockdown, then as they exit, and finally as they escape the lockdown when there is a medical solution to the pandemic.

Many countries are now in the second phase, as they reopen, with early signs of recovery, but risks of second waves of infections and re-imposition of lockdowns. Surveying the economic landscape, the sheer scale and severity of the Global Lockdown are striking.

Most tragically, this pandemic has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. The resulting economic crisis is unlike anything the world has seen before.

This is a truly global crisis. Past crises, as deep and severe as they were, remained confined to smaller segments of the world, from Latin America during the 1980s to Asia in the 1990s. Even the global financial crisis 10 years ago had more modest effects on global output.

For the first time since the Great Depression, both advanced and emerging market economies will be in recession in 2020. The forthcoming June World Economic Outlook Update is likely to show negative growth rates even worse than previously estimated. This crisis will have devastating consequences for the world’s poor.

Aside from its unprecedented scale, the Global Lockdown is playing out in ways that are very different from past crises. These unusual characteristics are emerging all over the world, irrespective of the size, geographic region, or production structure of economies.

First, this crisis has dealt a uniquely large blow to the services sector. In typical crises, the brunt is borne by manufacturing, reflecting a decline in investment, while the effect on services is generally muted as consumption demand is less affected.

This time is different. In the peak months of the lockdown the contraction in services has been even larger than in manufacturing, and it is seen in advanced and emerging market economies alike.

There are exceptions—like Sweden and Taiwan Province of China, which adopted a different approach to the health crisis, with limited government containment measures and a consequently proportionately smaller hit to services vis-à-vis manufacturing.

It is possible that with pent-up consumer demand there will be a quicker rebound, unlike after previous crises. However, this is not guaranteed in a health crisis as consumers may change spending behavior to minimize social interaction, and uncertainty can lead households to save more. In the case of China, one of the early exiters from lockdown, the recovery of the services sector lags manufacturing as such services as hospitality and travel struggle to regain demand.

Of particular concern is the long-term impact on economies that rely significantly on such services—for example, tourism-dependent economies.

Second, despite the large supply shocks unique to this crisis, except for food inflation, we have thus far seen, if anything, a decline in inflation and inflation expectations pretty much across the board in both advanced and emerging market economies.

Scene in New York City Subway during COVID-19 Outbreak. Credit: United Nations

Despite the considerable conventional and unconventional monetary and fiscal support across the globe, aggregate demand remains subdued and is weighing on inflation, alongside lower commodity prices. With high unemployment projected to stay for a while, countries with monetary policy credibility will likely see small risks of spiraling inflation.

Third, we see striking divergence of financial markets from the real economy, with financial indicators pointing to stronger prospects of a recovery than real activity suggests. Despite the recent correction, the S&P 500 has recouped most of its losses since the start of the crisis; the FTSE emerging market index and Africa index are substantially improved; the Bovespa rose significantly despite the recent surge in infection rates in Brazil; portfolio flows to emerging and developing economies have stabilized.

With few exceptions, the rise in sovereign spreads and the depreciation of emerging market currencies are smaller than what we saw during the global financial crisis. This is notable considering the larger scale of the shock to emerging markets during the Great Lockdown.

This divergence may portend greater volatility in financial markets. Worse health and economic news can lead to sharp corrections. We will have more to say about this divergence in our forthcoming Global Financial Stability Report.

One likely factor behind this divergence is the stronger policy response during this crisis. Monetary policy has become accommodative across the board, with unprecedented support from major central banks, and monetary easing in emerging markets including through first time use of unconventional policies.

Discretionary fiscal policy has been sizable in advanced economies. Emerging markets have deployed smaller fiscal support, constrained to some extent by limited fiscal space. Furthermore, a unique challenge confronting emerging markets this time around is that the informal sector, typically a shock absorber, has not been able to play that role under containment policies and has instead required support.

We are now in the early stages of the second phase as many countries begin to ease containment policies and gradually permit the resumption of economic activity. But there remains profound uncertainty about the path of the recovery.

A key challenge in escaping the Great Lockdown will be to ensure adequate production and distribution of vaccines and treatments when they become available—and this will require a global effort. For individual countries, minimizing the health uncertainty by using the least economically disruptive approaches such as testing, tracing, and isolation, tailored to country-specific circumstances with clear communication about the path of policies, should remain a priority to strengthen confidence in the recovery.

As the recovery progresses, policies should support the reallocation of workers from shrinking sectors to sectors with stronger prospects.

The IMF, in coordination with other international organizations, will continue to do all it can to ensure adequate international liquidity, provide emergency financing, support the G20 debt service suspension initiative, and help countries maintain a manageable debt burden.

The IMF will also provide advice and support through surveillance and capacity development, to help disseminate best practices, as countries learn from each other during this unprecedented crisis.

The post The Great Lockdown Through a Global Lens appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Rwanda may be a small country of some 12 million people, but its membership in the East African Community provides it with a market of some 100 million. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE , Jun 17 2020 (IPS)

In its effort to accelerate Rwanda’s green growth development initiative, its local businesses encouraged their Italian counterparts to invest in the East Africa region.

In a virtual discussion, the director of operations at the Private Sector Federation (PSF) of Rwanda, Yosam Kiiza, said Rwanda’s strength lies with its membership with the East African Community (EAC). The EAC is composed of five countries and has a population of over 100 million people.

“This means that investing in Rwanda is an opportunity to export to the rest of the other member countries as well as the Great Lakes Region,” he said.

Rwanda also shares a border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) whose population is 80 million. Although the DRC is not yet a member of the EAC, it provides a vast market for its smaller neighbour, Rwanda, which has a population of 12 million.

Two webinars, organised by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) in partnership with Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA) as part of an agreement between the Italian and Rwandan ministries of environment, were held this month. The online discussions were aimed at facilitating green technology transfer and creating partnerships between companies from Italy and Rwanda.

Kiiza was speaking during the Jun. 10 webinar that targeted major stakeholders, such as institutions, entrepreneurs, investors, developers etc., who have a key role in the green growth and sustainable development of their country’s economy in both Italy and Rwanda.

Through its transformation to low carbon development and green growth, Rwanda is a minefield of opportunities. The first webinar was held on Jun. 03.

In the virtual discussion, REMA Deputy Director-General Faustin Munyazikwiye urged business people to embrace green investment to help the country meet its climate action plan and achieve its Vision 2050 — Rwanda’s growth plan to achieve high-income status.

Meanwhile, Kiiza said the PSF is keen on investments that will deliver green growth solutions primarily in public health, air quality, and environmental restoration as well as creating sustainable jobs in tourism, transport, agriculture and manufacturing.

“The Italian business community is ready for the challenge,” the President of the Small Industry of Assolombarda, Alessandro Enginoli, said. A study tour of 30 Italian companies – he continued — was planned for March. The tour, organised in cooperation with GGGI and the Italian Trade Agency, was cancelled because of travel bans implemented by both governments to curb the spread of COVID-19. However, said Enginoli, “I’m confident we can do it again as soon as possible, probably in October.”

He said the dialogue between the two federations, Assolombarda and PSF, started a year ago when he first visited Rwanda. Assolombarda is the regional private sector association from Lombardia Region and a member of the National Private Sector Federation, Confidustria. It is the largest industrial association in Italy, representing 7,500 companies. The Small Industries represents 4,500 companies with a turnover of about €32 billion.

“Italy is known for its high concentration of small and medium companies,” he said, adding: “This model is perfect for African needs. The Italian business model is a win-win model that creates local development and job creation.”

Absolute Energy, an independent investment platform focused on renewable energy, is already pursuing a path of affordable energy in Rwanda. According to Absolute Energy chief executive officer, Alberto Pisanti, energy is a means to development. He said considering that agriculture is more developed compared to other countries, closing the gap between the sector, water and energy is the way to go.

Pisanti highlighted the gaps in agriculture such as the fact that 70 percent of farm work in Africa is done manually, 90 percent has no artificial irrigation and that the continent has 50 percent of global uncultivated arable land and imports 66 percent of the food it consumes.

“There’s a lot to do. Clearly you need machinery, transformation, reduce waste and work as much as possible locally to avoid people migrating to the cities thus abandoning rural areas,” said Pisanti.

He said it was for that reason that his company believes in rural electrification and decentralized generation is key especially in countries like Rwanda. But there are challenges, he said, adding that doing a business in a village that is too small may not be viable.

Also sharing his experiences of running a business in Rwanda was Giovanni Davite, co-owner and executive director of Kipharma, a business started by his father in 1969. It now has a turnover of €12 million. He described Rwanda as a stable yet fast-growing country whose leadership has a strong vision. He warned though that it requires patience.

“If you’re in business to do a quick buck, Rwanda is not for you,” he said.

Other industries that made presentations include agriculture, ecotourism, wood, construction and textile. Representations were also made by by Daniele Kihlgren, President of Group Sextantio-DOM, which focuses on sustainable tourism and Vicky Murabukirwa, a senior partner from construction company Duval Great Lakes Ltd.

Diane Mukasahaha, the chairperson for the Apparel Manufacturing Group (AMG), said she was grateful that the Government of Rwanda banned the import of second-hand clothing because this has created an opportunity for the local industry. She said this industry creates a lot of jobs.

“In just one year, AMG created 500 jobs,” she said.

Italian Ambassador to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, Massimiliano Mazzanti, was pleased that the Embassy was involved in this initiative and encouraged entrepreneurs who want to start their business in Rwanda to avail themselves of the support of the Italian Embassy.

According to Claudia Beretta, who works on a project that is focusing on private sector engagement with GGGI, the Government of Rwanda does not leave out the word ‘green’ when talking about development. Responding to a question from IPS, Beretta said the airport is a good example of linking development to sustainability.

“It’s the biggest infrastructure project and the objective of the government is to have the greenest airport in Africa,” she said.

She said GGGI, an international organisation that assists countries develop inclusive and sustainable economic growth, is working closely with the government to make this vision a reality.  Beretta added that other opportunities exist in the renewable energy sector which can contribute towards reducing post-harvest losses. She said rural electrification through renewable energy could help farmers with refrigeration systems that would keep produce fresh until it reaches the market.

“The majority of the population is using charcoal and wood to cook and this is a big problem for the environment and health of the population. The government is working towards supporting new technologies and alternative fuels such as LPG,” she said.

Beretta noted that this is a challenge considering that buying power for rural communities is low although this could be overcome through business models that offer affordable energy.

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Cherie Blair meets with graduates from the Asian University for Women (AUW) at the Rohingya refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. More than 40 women from the university are involved in humanitarian work in the area. Credit: Asian University for Women

By Cecilia Russell
London, Cox’s Bazaar, Johannesburg, Jun 17 2020 (IPS)

The impact of COVID-19 lockdowns falls heavily on the shoulders of women even in the global north. Women take the brunt of housework and caretaking duties, homes schooling, working from home and perhaps looking after elderly parents, says Cherie Blair.

“Imagine you’re a woman in the Rohingya refugee camp (near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh). You left your own home with the few belongings you can grab and carry, and (are now) living in a crowded space,” she continues. “You can imagine how those difficulties compound.”

Blair, who is the chancellor at the Asian University for Women (AUW) and two graduates, Rimu Byadya and Tanzil Ferdous, were in an exclusive conversation with Inter Press Service (IPS). Blair, Byadya and Ferdous spoke about women, the Rohingya crisis and COVID-19.

Cherie Blair, Chancellor of the Asian University for Women (AUW). Credit: Cherie Blair Foundation for Women

Byadya and Ferdous are on the frontline of humanitarian efforts assisting the more than 800 000 Rohingya refugees now living in camps in Bangladesh.

Byadya explains that COVID-19 brought both practical and profound changes to the community. On a practical level, the food assistance programme had to change. Before the pandemic refugees were given a WFP Assistance Card (which functions like a debit card) and could choose their food. Now it’s pre-packaged to meet their nutritional and daily energy needs. On a more profound level, it has created social and economic challenges for both the refugees and the host communities.

A rapid gender assessment found women were acutely affected, she says.

“The impact is felt significantly in the host community. I think part of the reason is women in the refugee community were most likely to be home because of their traditional norms,” Byadya says. “This traditional role continued even though the humanitarian community had encouraged the women to become actively involved in the broader community. The impact of the lockdowns had also increased risks of gender-based violence, which is often not physical violence but mental and economic pressure.”

Blair agreed, COVID-19 has a huge impact.

“As we know, in Africa, for example, there have not been many deaths reported as in Europe and the US. But they have been affected by what has happened to the global economy,” she says. “The world knows about China’s pivotal role in the global supply chain. When China is locked down, the knock-on effects of that on the world’s economy are immense.”

Blair says there is much work to do COVID-19 has affected everybody.

Rimu Byadya, graduate of the Asian University for Women (AUW), now heads up the World Food Programme’s gender unit. Credit: Asian University for Women

“Whether it’s the conditions in Cox’s Bazar that are made more difficult, or, or the garment factories in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Many of them have just had their contracts cancelled. They have garments piling up there which they can’t sell. They have had to lay off their workers. Businesses are going out of business. I mean the compound impact of that on the local, national and international economy is immense,” she says.

Blair sees the solution is for women to become advocates for the “fundamental human right of women to be able to participate equally in society.”

She points out the depressing results in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020. These results indicated that in terms of economic opportunities, women were worse off in 2019 than they had been the previous year. The report suggested it would take 257 years before men and women get equality in this sphere.

“And part of that, I’m afraid, is about the impact of technology. And part of that is reflected in women being concentrated in low paid and part-time working (conditions).”

This fight for equity is a profoundly personal fight for Blair. When she was young – like Byadya and Ferdous are – she thought women had time to make the changes. Now with a granddaughter soon to be born – she says this child must have the same opportunities as her grandson.

Her foundation, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, is working toward the empowerment and mentoring of women in business – reaching out to businesswomen to give them the skills to survive and thrive post-COVID-19.

Tanzil Ferdous Ferdous, graduate of the Asian University for Women (AUW) works as the Assistant Project Control Officer at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency. Credit: Asian University for Women

Ferdous, as a young intern, watched as hundreds of thousands of the mostly Muslim minority Rohingya fled a violent crackdown in neighbouring Myanmar. She sees a need for the international communities’ involvement in finding a solution to the refugee crisis.

She recalls the situation in 2017 where the refugees came in massive waves into Bangladesh.

“We were listening to the trauma of refugees. Many of them were victims of sexual violence, and I spoke their dialect, so did a lot of translation and transcribing. I listened to their stories of physical violence, sexual violence – of seeing their children killed in front of them,” Ferdous says.

The Bangladeshi people were welcoming, but with COVID-19, there is a growing fear of the refugee community – misplaced fear that it is from the refugee camps that the disease will spread.

The irony is that within a month of the International Court of Justice at The Hague’s ruling relating to the protection of the Rohingya people – the world’s attention turned from their plight to COVID-19 pandemic. However, for those in the frontlines of humanitarian efforts for refugees living near Cox’s Bazar, their concern for the Rohingya’s future is paramount.

Blair acknowledges that this cannot continue forever.

“We have to give credit to Bangladesh, a small, but developing country itself welcomed the Rohingya. But that leads to tension in the local communities,” she says within a knock-on effect for the freedom of movement for the refugee community. Blair says that as a human rights lawyer, she is aware it would be a matter of law that the government of Myanmar would be required to report back to the court. So, the case isn’t going to go away. “There will be further interrogation of what’s happened.”

However, she acknowledged that these issues come up in the tide as news and then fall in the news agenda again.

“We have to raise our voices in whatever way we can,” she says.

Blair suggests that post-COVID-19 success lies in the development of leadership.

Returning to the AUW, she sees the development of young leaders – like Byadya and Ferdous – as a critical part of creating a success story for women and countries in Asia, like Bangladesh.

Blair said more than 40 women from the university were working in the humanitarian field in Bangladesh.

“I see the AUW a beacon on the hill, saying, spreading its light across the region and saying we value young women. Their education is an absolute priority if the world is going to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.”

The university, through its programmes, has created opportunities for some women in the Rohingya camps. It has reached women in the garment industries in Bangladesh. Moreover, it draws its students from a multitude of Asian countries and minorities groups.

“The whole idea of AUW is to come together to work together and add to the unique shared experience. The training that liberal arts give you to critically analyses your opinions and the opinions of others, engage in a dialogue so that they listen and learn from one another in the face of prejudice.

“I think it is very powerful and also obviously can be broadly applied at a time like this … when we should be working together to solve the crisis.”

Blair is optimistic about the post-COVID-19 era – no matter how bleak it may seem now.

Quoting Margaret Mead – Blair says: “Never underestimate the ability of a committed group of people to change the world. Mead said it’s the only thing that can (change the world).”

Rimu Byadya
Byadya graduated from AUW with a degree in Public Health and went on to receive a master’s in International Health and Tropical Medicine from the University of Oxford. Byadya now leads the Gender Unit of the World Food Programme’s Rohingya Response operations in Cox’s Bazar.

Tanzil Ferdous
Ferdous graduated from AUW with a degree in Economics and Development Studies. She is the first Bangladeshi to win the “Emerging Young Leaders Award” from the US State Department for her work in youth and community development and advancing women’s rights in Bangladesh. Ferdous now works as the Assistant Project Control Officer at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency.

The post Women Leadership Is Key to Successful Post-COVID-19 Era, Says Cherie Blair appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By External Source
Jun 17 2020 (IPS-Partners)

 

“If we keep producing and consuming as usual, we will eat into the planet’s capacity to sustain life…

…until there is nothing left but scraps.”

                     — Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification

 

As populations become larger, wealthier, and more urban, there is far greater demand for land.

Today, more than two billion hectares of previously productive land is degraded.

Over 70 per cent of natural ecosystems have been transformed.

By 2050, this could hit 90 per cent.

By 2030, food production will require an additional 300 million hectares of land

The fashion industry is the world’s second largest polluter after the oil industry.

By 2030, the fashion industry alone is predicted to use 35 per cent more land…

…over 115 million hectares, equivalent to the size of Colombia.

In the West Java Province of Indonesia, garment companies use 2500 liters of water…

…to produce just a single T-Shirt.

85% of India’s daily water needs would be covered…

…by the water used to grow cotton in the country.

100 million people in India do not have access to drinking water.

2020 Desertification and Drought Day will focus on links between consumption and land.

#FoodFeedFibre

The post 2020 Desertification and Drought Day appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Containment measures, such as physical distancing and self-isolation, may be impossible for those who rely on the support of others to eat, dress, and bathe. Credit: Bigstock

By Srilakshmi Bellamkonda
HYDERABAD, India, Jun 16 2020 (IPS)

Since the beginning of the year, more than 200 nations across the globe have been affected by COVID-19. Many are still reeling under the devastating effects of the pandemic, with both public health and the global economy having taken a major blow.

Emerging markets seem to be especially vulnerable, given that their healthcare facilities tend to be ill-equipped to tackle a pandemic of this nature and scale. Worse, and even more worrying, is the fact that the end to this global crisis is still nowhere in sight, and we have not been able to assess the damage to lives and livelihoods.

Much of the advocacy on how to stay safe during the pandemic has not factored in the inability of people who are immobile or living with mental illnesses to follow these instructions. Containment measures, such as physical distancing and self-isolation, may be impossible for those who rely on the support of others to eat, dress, and bathe.


Despite governments having taken drastic steps, including offering varying degrees of support to their citizens, there remain certain sections of society that have been inadvertently excluded. Persons with disabilities (PwDs)—more than one billion in number globally—are one such group.

This is because much of the advocacy on how to stay safe during the pandemic has not factored in the inability of people who are immobile or living with mental illnesses to follow these instructions. “Containment measures, such as physical distancing and self-isolation, may be impossible for those who rely on the support of others to eat, dress, and bathe.” 1 The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a document highlighting this issue, and explaining how Persons with Disabilities may be at a greater risk of contracting COVID-19. Some of these include:

• Accessibility issues may limit how often PwDs are able to wash their hands
• PwDs who require additional support may find it difficult to practice physical distancing, and many caregivers may be reluctant to provide their services due to the contagious nature of the novel coronavirus
• People with intellectual impairments cannot be expected to cope with self-isolation
• People with visual disabilities rely on “touch functions for mobility and work”, thereby increasing their risk of infection
• Public health information remains inaccessible, which acts as a barrier, particularly for people with hearing impairments
• PwDs may be at greater risk, as people with underlying health conditions, particularly those related to respiratory function, immune system function, heart disease, or diabetes, are more likely to be infected with COVID-19

 

 

In India, the government needs to be more proactive

The situation is no different in India, where 2.21 percent of the population, or 26.8 million people are officially recognised as Persons with Disabilities. Here, some of the challenges highlighted above may be intensified, due to ignorance and poverty, or the lack of a conducive environment and amenities.

The Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPWD) recognises that People with Disabilities are more vulnerable to the virus because of their physical, sensory, and cognitive limitations. These limitations come in the way of their capacity to access, interpret, and use the information and services being made available to deal with COVID-19, and can lead to further marginalisation. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has also mandated that under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, departments in the states and union territories should disseminate information on COVID-19 in audio formats and Braille, while also ensuring that the government websites are accessible.

While these guidelines are welcome, their actual implementation requires long-term preparedness and mass awareness, backed by a multi-pronged approach. A recent study indicates that little progress has been made in implementing these guidelines, leaving people who are differently abled to rely on second hand information, which at times could be diluted and/or misinterpreted and misleading. Lack of captions and sign language communication in media coverage further excludes people with hearing impairments. Moreover, those with inaccessibility or people with hearing dysfunction, who depend on lip reading, are unable to communicate with doctors and health workers in this time of crisis.

Another challenge is accessing ration supplies and cooked food distributed by the authorities or organisations, since the mobility to the place of distribution is tedious, and additional infrastructural support at the distribution point is often limited. This lacklustre response is indicative of how we, as a society, have a long way to go in being sensitive to the needs of People with Disabilities. In Australia, to cite one example, a separate, exclusive shopping time slot is allocated for PwDs at grocery stores to ensure they have access in line with their needs. Another major blow for PwDs by the pandemic is to their livelihood and income generation. Two out of three PwDs in India today are unemployed, and a majority of the rest work in the unorganised sector as migrant or contractual labour—the group that has been most severely impacted by job losses due to the lockdown. Loss of income is among the main reasons why PwDs are being driven to the brink of poverty and exclusion.

 

What needs to change?

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Arman Ali, Executive Director, National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) demanded uniformity of pensions, increase in ex-gratia payments, announcement of an adequate economic package, information in accessible formats, and the enforcement of comprehensive, strict guidelines for the protection and safety of PwDs.

The state disability commissioners are nodal authorities assigned to coordinate with other relevant bodies. But since these positions are ad hoc in nature with no independence to plan and execute, there is little or no motivation to do what is necessary. This apathy points to the urgent need to establish an exclusive centralised statutory body, similar what other vulnerable sections have in place, such as the National Commission for Minorities and the National Commission for Women.

The urgency to address this cannot be overemphasised. We are already late in addressing the trauma and the inconvenience experienced by PwDs, and this needs to be alleviated with concerted and quick action. Some of these steps include:

• The Aarogya Setu app should include dedicated sections with specific information for PwDs and the information should be available in sign language
• Door-step delivery of food or rations should be ensured for free or at affordable rates
• Direct cash assistance can be provided, along with special provisions under the public distribution system (PDS) for PwDs
• Conversion of public materials into the ‘easy read’ format so that they are accessible to people living with intellectual disabilities or cognitive impairment
• Providing financial compensation for families and caregivers who need to be self-isolated and are prone to infection
• Setting up exclusive helplines in multiple formats (for example, telephone and e-mail) for PwDs to communicate with the government, ask questions, and raise concerns
• Considering caregivers as essential workers, providing them with curfew passes, and exempting them from other lockdown measures that may affect the continued provision of support services
• Ensuring adequate provision of facilities at quarantine centres and provision of transportation to and from the centres

While these are times when everyone needs to take good care of themselves and interact with others with caution, this is also the time for society to be aware of the needs of PwDs, and to ensure we do not forget those in need of assistance, support, and understanding.

Given the lockdown and the loss of livelihoods, the onus rests on the legislative and administrative agencies to address these gaps and to ensure the inclusion of People with Disabilities, both in letter and spirit.

 

Srilakshmi Bellamkonda heads the skill development initiative for people with disabilities (PwDs) at Dr Reddy’s Foundation

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

The post COVID-19 has Further Marginalised Persons with Disabilities appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Participation in horticulture gives Tanzanian youth income options within a short period

By External Source
Jun 16 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Horticulture is a field of agriculture that involves a short growing season averaging three months and offers quick yields and returns on investments despite the high rate of postharvest losses.

In Tanzania, with the Government-initiated National Strategy for Youth Involvement in Agriculture (NYSIA) for 2016–2021, horticulture is one viable option that would give Tanzanian youth income within a short period. Operated through the Ministry of Agriculture, the vision of the scheme is to empower youth to participate fully in agricultural development, contribute to economic growth, and address the challenge of unemployment.

Horticulture offers employment throughout each crop cycle, an aspect that is advantageous to youth employment, yet this field of agriculture records a high rate of losses. According to research, about 50 to 70% of horticultural output is lost during harvesting, handling, packaging, transporting, and marketing. Hence, postharvest management is critical to success in the horticulture sector.

Adella Ng’atigwa, a fellow of the Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE) in Policy for Youth Engagement in Agribusiness and Rural Economic Activities in Africa project, carried out a study on ways to empower youth to reduce horticulture postharvest losses in Tanzania. In the research, Ng’atigwa reveals that lowering the rate of postharvest loss for fresh produce would raise returns to young agripreneurs as well as increase food security in Tanzania.

Ng’atigwa conducted the study among youth in three of the six districts in the Njombe Region of the southern highlands of Tanzania. It reveals the stages at which losses occur, and some of the causes for crop loss that include poor storage facilities, weak transport systems, inadequate market location, poor handling, and inferior packaging materials.

Along with inadequate market location being a significant cause for postharvest losses in the Njombe Region, price fluctuations were cited as the most encountered problem facing young horticultural producers.

Based on the research findings, Ng’atigwa recommends staggered planting and harvest periods, timely harvesting, and ripening while warehoused, as ways to manage postharvest losses. Other recommendations include cold storage, solar drying, improved agronomic practices, more market places, and improved transport facility. Achieving these will raise returns and attract more youth to the horticulture industry in Tanzania.

Ng’atigwa added that there is a need to create incentives for the small and medium financial institutions and microcredit financial institutions in Njombe to provide loans with an affordable interest rate for youth. Such youth-friendly credit schemes will help them to access farm inputs and postharvest management (PHM) innovations.

With Africa striving towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and zero hunger, Tanzania’s move to improve horticulture, a sector that generates more than US$354 million per annum, is laudable. Addressing the challenge of postharvest losses would create a significant impact on the country’s economy and the livelihoods of youth investing their time and money in the sector.

Source: IITA News

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Credit: US government

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 16 2020 (IPS)

The world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons—estimated at over 13,400 at the beginning of 2020 – have a least one thing in common with humans: they are “retired” when they reach old age.

The 2020 Yearbook, released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), says there was a decrease in the number of nuclear weapons worldwide in 2019.

And this was largely due to the dismantlement of “retired nuclear weapons” by Russia and the US—which together possess over 90 per cent of global nuclear weapons.

The world’s nine nuclear-armed states—the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)—together possessed an estimated 13,400 nuclear weapons at the beginning of 2020.

This is a decrease of about 465 nuclear weapons—mostly dismantled– from the stockpile of 13,865 the nine states possessed at the beginning of 2019, according to the SIPRI Yearbook released June 15.

But what happens to these “retired” weapons?

Dr M. V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and Director, Liu Institute for Global Issues at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at University of British Columbia, told IPS: “We do know a fair amount about how the US deals with retired nuclear weapons, namely those weapons that are no longer part of the active operational arsenal, or the hedge (extra weapons, just in case), the strategic reserve, and so on.”

They are sent to the Pantex plant in Texas where the fissile pits are removed from weapons, said Dr Ramana, author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India.

https://federallabs.org/labs/national-nuclear-security-administration-nnsa-pantex-plant-0

Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Robert Kelley, a Distinguished Associate Fellow at SIPRI and a veteran of over 35 years in the US Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex, told IPS “You might try to make a distinction between “retirement” and “dismantlement.”

Weapons are really retired when there is no longer a military mission for them. That will happen when the delivery systems become obsolete, and is longer available. Or the mission disappears, he said.

An easy one, he said, is nuclear artillery shells. The US gave up on those in about the 1980s. So, there are no more “nuclear cannons.”

But since the nuclear shell was fired from a conventional cannon that could fire either a conventional shell or a nuclear shell, it was the mission going away that led to retirement, he added.

“Saner people started to realize that having a bunch of tactical nuclear shells that could be launched by low level military units was pretty stupid.”

“Many tactical weapons like that were retired but could conceivably come back. Once retired they would go into bunkers at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo Texas and await being dismantled — taken apart and pieces recycled,” said Kelley, who managed the centrifuge and plutonium metallurgy programs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In some cases, he pointed out, this is technically hard to do and the rate of dismantlement may only be a few weapons per year. The total backlog of all kinds is probably thousands in the US.

“The Brits had only two systems left in the 1980s — one bomb and submarine launched nuclear warheads. They gave up the mission for the bombs so they were retired and it was a years-long process to take them apart at Burghfield near Reading, UK”.

Dangerous work done very carefully, declared Kelley, a former Director of the Department of Energy Remote Sensing Laboratory, the premier US nuclear emergency response organization.

World nuclear forces, January 2020

Meanwhile, SIPRI points out that around 3,720 of the nuclear weapons are currently deployed with operational forces and nearly 1,800 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert

A key finding is that despite an overall decrease in the number of nuclear warheads in 2019, all nuclear weapon-possessing states continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals. And the outlook for arms control is “bleak.”

Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director at the Washington-based Arms Control Association (ACA), told IPS it is no surprise that SIPRI is reporting that the nuclear arms control outlook is bleak.

“We have been warning of the dangers of an unconstrained global nuclear arms race for quite some time. As global leaders appropriately focus on the steps necessary to deal with the deadly effects of the coronavirus pandemic, they cannot afford to lose sight of the actions necessary to address the ongoing threat of nuclear proliferation and catastrophic nuclear war—the ultimate pandemic”

He argued that tensions among the world’s nuclear-armed states are rising; the risk of nuclear use is growing; hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to replace and upgrade the already bloated arsenals of the world’s nine possessors of nuclear weapons; and key agreements that have kept nuclear competition in check are in serious jeopardy.

“We are on the verge of an unprecedented global nuclear arms race. The resurgence of the nuclear weapons threat is due, in large part, to the failure of national leaders to seize earlier opportunities to significantly reduce the nuclear threat and to pursue a more intensive dialogue on measures to move toward the common goal of a world without nuclear weapons”.

Kimball said the failure of the United States just to agree to extend the only remaining treaty regulating the world’s two largest arsenals — the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty — before its 2021 expiration date is but one example.

“This dire situation requires new and bolder leadership from responsible states. They must work together to build majority support for a plan of action that calls for specific, concrete steps that would fulfill their legal and political commitments on to end the arms race and pursue nuclear disarmament, beginning now,” declared Kimball.

Kelley said modern strategic nuclear packages are highly integrated with the delivery system. The size, weight, shape, mounting bolts are designed at the same time as the military delivery system.

If an old ICBM, for example, is retired, the nuclear explosive becomes obsolete. So, it is retired, and there is very little one can do with it while it awaits dismantlement. The older systems are generally not interchangeable with something new so they really are obsolete.

“In terms of recycling, are you aware that the major weapons states have a huge glut of highly enriched uranium and plutonium?,” he asked

Under the Megatons to Megawatts program, the Russians retired hundreds of nuclear warheads and sold the diluted HEU to the US to burn in power reactors. Something like 10% of the electricity in the US is produced by burning uranium that came from Russian thermonuclear warheads, Kelley said.

There is a similar story for plutonium but it is longer and gets complicated.

“Are you aware that thousands of warheads designed for US service missions are awaiting retirement because there is no mission?”, asked Kelley.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The post When Old Age Catches Up, Even Nuclear Weapons Go into Retirement appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Justin Sandefur, Selene Ghisolfi, Ingvild Almås, Tillmann von Carnap, Jesse Heitner, and Tessa Bold*
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 16 2020 (IPS)

The world saw more new confirmed COVID-19 cases last week than any week to date. And as the pandemic grows, its epicenter is moving from advanced economies to more developing countries, including Brazil, India, and South Africa.

How is the pandemic likely to evolve as it spreads to poorer countries?

In a new working paper, we attempt to answer one piece of that question, predicting the infection fatality rate, or IFR, for COVID-19 for 187 countries based on demography, comorbidities, and the strength of health systems.

The IFR numbers we report are somewhat higher—sometimes dramatically so—than the figures given for many developing countries in earlier influential studies, including the Imperial College team’s scenarios for the global pandemic and a recent report by the WHO Africa bureau.

That difference can be chalked up to how we incorporate two factors: pre-existing health conditions, and the relative strength of health systems.

For many developing countries, comorbidities partially offset the advantages of youth

A recent study in Science by Salje et al., for instance, finds that with French-level healthcare, the probability of dying with COVID-19 rises roughly eight-fold when moving from the 60-69 age group to the 70 and above range. This is good news for developing countries, which generally have a much younger population than France.

Most previous forecasts of the COVID-19 infection fatality rate have incorporated this demographic advantage. However, they have generally not included the offsetting effect of cross-country differences in comorbidities.

Those comorbidities—such as diabetes, hypertension, and ischemic cardiovascular diseases— matter a lot. Data from Italy show that roughly 96 percent of COVID-19 fatalities report one or more relevant comorbidities.

Inverting that probability using Bayes’ rule and data on France’s IFR and comorbidity distribution, we find that the probability of dying from a COVID-19 infection for patients under 40 is roughly 134-times higher with a relevant comorbidity than without.

Developing countries generally have lower rates of relevant comorbidities compared to high-income countries (where the best measures of infection fatality rates come from). But whereas comorbidities are concentrated among the elderly in rich countries, some developing countries—such as South Africa—report a considerably higher share of these conditions among middle-aged people.

Future work would benefit from more careful treatment of comorbidities like HIV/AIDS that have higher prevalence in lower-income countries. But even a simple adjustment for comorbidities partially undermines many developing countries’ demographic advantages.

Evidence from other viral respiratory infections suggests a much bleaker scenario for COVID-19 in the developing world

So far, our estimates assume that an individual infected with COVID-19 in, say, Uganda has the same probability of dying as someone with the same sex, age, and number of comorbidities in France. Clearly that’s optimistic, given the overall capacity of Uganda’s health system relative to France’s. But exactly how optimistic?

To gauge how much fatality rates might vary with health system capacity, we draw on estimates of the infection fatality rate for another viral respiratory infection, namely influenza. We focus on children under five years old, to purge variation in age and comorbidities that typically begin later in life, and scale the odds ratio of dying from COVID-19 by the ratio of child influenza death rates across countries by income group.

Adjusting for health-system capacity in this way yields COVID-19 infection fatality rates that are considerably higher than previous estimates for the developing world. For the five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with the largest confirmed COVID-19 epidemics to date, our results are roughly twice as high as those from Imperial College, which does not factor in comorbidities or health system strength beyond a simple capacity constraint on hospital beds.

And they are roughly eight times higher than forecasts from the WHO Africa, which do not adjust for health system capacity and only scale the IFR downward (never upward) due to comorbidities.

Comparing predicted COVID-19 infection fatality rates across studies

Our results are more in line with the Imperial College predictions for Europe, as shown in the bottom panel above. For the five European countries shown, we can also compare to a more “gold standard” benchmark, i.e., infection fatality rates calculated on the basis of seroprevalence studies of a random sample of the population (blue bars).

Both our results and the Imperial college results match these seroprevalence studies fairly well on average, but fail to explain much of the intra-European variance (some of which may be due to variance in how deaths are counted, e.g., Belgium’s fairly liberal definition of a COVID-19 death to include all unexplained nursing home deaths).

In short, our IFR estimates seem fairly plausible for Europe, where we have an independent reference point, and our results suggest that earlier predictions for developing countries that ignore health system capacity may be far too optimistic.

In line with recent news reports, it’s likely young people will make up a larger share of COVID-19 deaths in the developing world

In the United States to date, patients over 75 years old represent over 60 percent of COVID-19 deaths. In Italy, the number of fatalities above 70 is 85 percent.

Both demography and weak health systems explain why COVID-19 deaths are more concentrated among younger people in the developing world

Although predicted IFRs display a steep age gradient in all contexts, due to demographic differences the bulk of deaths in low- and lower-middle income countries is predicted to come from middle-aged patients (40-70).

Less obviously, differences in health system capacity are also likely to flatten the age gradient of COVID-19 deaths in developing countries. In Europe, data is consistent with the hypothesis that intensive care saves the lives of a higher proportion of young than elderly COVID-19 patients. Thus, when high-quality intensive care is lacking, the advantages of youth are more muted.

These estimates are far from the final word on this question. But we hope that our calculations provide an important cautionary note about developing countries’ demographic advantages in facing down COVID-19.

Planning for the ongoing pandemic response and calibration of containment policies should factor in the wide variation in predicted IFRs across contexts. Specifically, policymakers in low-income countries should be cognizant that any demographic advantages with respect to COVID-19 fatality rates are likely to be partially offset by disadvantages in terms of the age-distribution of comorbidities, and even more so by gaps in health system capacity.

*Justin Sandefur is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) ; Selene Ghisolfi is an economics post-doc at the Laboratory for Effective Anti-poverty Policies Bocconi, and a PhD student at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University; Ingvild Almås is a professor of economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University; Tillmann von Carnap is a PhD student at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University; Jesse Heitner is a health economist at Aceso Global; and Tessa Bold is an associate professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University.

The post Predicting COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rates Around the World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jun 16 2020 (IPS)

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly impacted most economies in the world. Its full impacts will not be felt, let alone measured, until it runs its course. Many countries are still struggling to contain contagion, while the costs on both lives and livelihoods will undoubtedly have long-term repercussions.

Anis Chowdhury

Back to the future?
The pandemic has exposed economic vulnerabilities building up for decades, especially since the counter-revolution, against Keynesian and development economics in the 1980s, gathered pace with transnational corporation-led privatization, liberalization and globalization.

As the world become more interdependent via trade, finance and communications, inequality and economic insecurity have waxed and waned unevenly, exacerbated by deregulation, reregulation, financialization and less public social provisioning, undermining public health and social protection.

Policymakers shied away from addressing the fundamental causes of several financial crises from the 1990s (e.g., in Mexico, East Asia and Russia) and during the first decade of this century, e.g., the dotcom, food and global financial crises. Now, once again, all too many are focused on getting back to ‘business as usual’.

What multilateral coordination?
The global economic situation remains unpredictable, with uncertainties about the varied nature of pandemic recessions. Government responses have not only been diverse, but often poorly conceived due to the novel nature of the crisis. Impacts have varied with the contagion and policy responses, unhelped by often confusing, if not misleading metrics.

Such uncertainty is also reflected in the wide-ranging growth forecasts by major international organizations. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recognized the ‘Great Lockdown’ as due to ‘self-imposed’ contractions, leading to the “worst recession since the Great Depression”.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The IMF has supported government fiscal and monetary initiatives, declaring that it “stands ready to mobilize its US$1 trillion lending capacity to help its membership”. The World Bank has also promised an additional US$14 billion to help governments and businesses address the pandemic.

Plurilateralism also almost irrelevant
A March G-7 countries’ joint statement promised “a strongly coordinated international approach”, with no specific actions mentioned or forthcoming thereafter. Instead, countries have pursued their own divergent strategies, even banning exports of medical equipment.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to prioritise ‘America First’ while undermining most multilateral institutions and even plurilateral arrangements, including those created by the US, such as the G20.

Already, G20 members have been dragged into US-China tensions, as the White House blames China for the pandemic and other American problems. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the G20 chair for 2020, is itself embroiled in its own political and economic quagmire, undermined by falling oil revenues, worsened by its oil price war with Russia.

Poor diagnosis, bad medicine
Economic growth slowdowns, especially in manufacturing, services and trade, started prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Yet, the pandemic’s economic effects were expected to be short-term as factories and offices were closed, and strict ‘stay in shelter’ lockdowns were enforced to stop contagion.

The drop in economic output, as the epidemic began and spread to industrial hubs, has had international repercussions with supply chains disrupted.

Such supply disruptions have engendered and interacted with prolonged, wide-ranging demand shocks as Covid-19 crisis-induced policy responses and other uncertainties reduced consumption and investment spending, slowing economic growth and undermining employment.

Almost 2.7 billion workers, around 81% of the world’s workforce, work and earn less due to the Covid-19 recession, with those in lower middle-income developing countries losing most. And almost 1.6 billion in the informal economy are in the hardest hit sectors or significantly impacted by lockdown measures.

The longer the lockdowns persist, the greater the economic disruption and adverse impacts as the effects spread via trade and finance linkages to an ever growing number of countries, firms and households.

Governments have adopted various monetary and fiscal measures to try to revive and sustain economic activity. Such measures include cash transfers to households, extending unemployment insurance or social security benefits, temporary deferment of tax payments, and increasing guarantees and loans to businesses.

Early ‘stimulus packages’ assumed that the ‘pandemic shock’ would be short-lived and easily reversible. They have largely ignored addressing the unsustainability, inequality, instability and other vulnerabilities of their economic, social and ecological systems.

Monetary ruse, liquidity trap
Basel 3 recommended capital conservation and countercyclical capital buffers for all banks. Many central banks have cut interest rates and increased liquidity through a combination of measures, by lowering reserve and Basel 3 requirements, besides easing loan terms for new temporary loan facilities for banks and businesses.

Continued credit support, through unconventional monetary policies, has not addressed liquidity problems due to truncated business turnover. Increased liquidity provision has instead been captured by better ‘credit risks’, even fuelling inflation while doing little for the most vulnerable and needy, deepening pre-Covid-19 inequalities.

Unconventional monetary policies before Covid-19 were already creating stock market bubbles, instead of financing investments in the real economy, thus contributing to growing inequality.

Central banks have not been able to repair their balance sheets or draw back excess liquidity, for fear of financial sector collapse, thus ironically increasing its fragility by pumping in more liquidity, increasing speculation and fuelling inflation.

Fiscal traps unsustainable
Without better planned coordination, initial relief measures for households and businesses were often wrongly portrayed as fiscal stimulus packages while output has remained constrained by lockdown enforcement.

Despite cuts in government expenditure, especially for public health and social protection, there was little political will to increase progressive taxation. Still mounting government debt, already at historically high levels prior to the pandemic, has not helped.

Instead, earlier tax cuts have increased public debt, while the failure to improve fiscal capacities after the 2008 global financial crisis has meant eschewing productivity enhancing public investments, boosting revenue via progressive taxation, and strengthening universal health coverage and social protection.

Designing recovery
The design of measures matters, crucially affecting likely effects. As countries prepare for recovery, they should ask what ‘recovery’ can and should mean. To address the many problems we have to contend with, it should not mean a return to ‘business as usual’.

First, as workplaces and social spaces – where people meet, socialize, shop, etc. – have to be redesigned and repurposed to meet precautionary public health requirements, such as physical distancing. Second, the unsustainable, financialized and grossly unequal pre-Covid-19 economy needs to be fundamentally transformed.

Covid-19 policy responses have rarely addressed deeper prior malaises, such as stagnant or falling productivity growth and declining labour remuneration, not to speak of ‘sustainable industrial policy’ measures to address global warming, resource exhaustion and other sustainability problems.

 

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By External Source
Jun 15 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Marking International Day of Family Remittances, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has released a message appealing for “people everywhere” to support migrants, at a time when remittances – the money migrants send home to support their families – have fallen by more than $100 billion, causing hunger, lost schooling and deteriorating health, for tens of millions of families.

In his message, Mr. Guterres recognized the determination of the 200 million migrants who regularly send money home, and 800 million families, in communities throughout the developing world, who depend on those resources.

Following a record $554 billion sent home by migrants in 2019, The World Bank estimated, in April, that the economic crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdown, would cause the “sharpest decline in remittances in recent history”, and projected a fall of 19.7 per cent. Millions of migrant workers have lost their jobs, pushing dependent families below the poverty line.

In order to help migrants, “engines of the global economy”, who make “crucial contributions to well-being across the world”, the UN chief called for a reduction in remittance transfer costs, financial services for migrants and their families – particularly in rural areas – and the promotion of financial inclusion for a more secure and stable future. Such measures are proposed in the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, described my Mr. Guterres as a “key platform for action”.

Migrants facing ‘socio-economic crisis’

At the beginning of June, Mr. Guterres launched a UN policy briefing on the protection of “people on the move”, in which he referred to the “socio-economic crisis” facing migrants, especially those working in the informal sector who have no access to protection schemes, and the drop in remittances which, he said equates to “nearly three-quarters of all official development assistance that is no longer being sent back home to the 800 million people who depend on it.”

The UN chief also called for human dignity to be upheld in the face of the crisis, suggesting that lessons can be learned from those countries which have implemented travel restrictions and border controls while respecting international principles on refugee protection.

On 16 June, from 9:30 to 11:30 Eastern Standard Time, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is hosting a virtual observance event for the International Day of Family Remittances: Supporting Remittance Families Build Resilience in Times of Crisis.

International Day of Family Remittances

The International Day of Family Remittances (IDFR) is a universally-recognized observance adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and celebrated every year on 16 June.
• The day recognizes the contribution of over 200 million migrants to improve the lives of their 800 million family members back home, and to create a future of hope for their children.
• Half of these flows go to rural areas, where poverty and hunger are concentrated, and where remittances count the most.
• The Day also calls upon governments, private sector entities, as well as the civil society, to find ways that can maximize the impact of remittances through individual, and/or collective actions.

The post UN chief in ‘support migrants’ plea, as remittances drop by 20 per cent predicted appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, Jun 15 2020 (IPS)

While the end of life remains the inescapable fate of every man, woman and child, death can be delayed as has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout human history. Amid the current coronavirus pandemic, a paramount objective is delaying death from Covid-19 for many millions of people across the globe.

Yet, now approaching 500,000 Covid-19 deaths worldwide and many more expected before a vaccine becomes available, the objective of delaying deaths due to the novel coronavirus is far from being realized. Greater efforts are clearly required to contain the pandemic’s spread and minimize its lethal consequences, especially among those most vulnerable.

Delaying death has significantly extended the length of human lives worldwide. Average life expectancy at birth today for the world is 73 years, or more than twice the level at the start of the 20th century. At age 60 years average life expectancy is 21 years, which is nearly a decade longer than it was at the end of the Second World War, with growing numbers of those older women and men surviving to become centenarians.

Since the start of 2020, the numbers of Covid-19 deaths have grown rapidly and spread relentlessly across the globe. Among the major regions, however, Covid-19 deaths are distributed very differently than the world’s estimated total annual deaths. The more developed regions, which account for 22 percent of total annual deaths worldwide, have experienced a surprising 72 percent of Covid-19 deaths (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division for estimated total annual deaths in 2020 and Worldometer for Covid-19 deaths as of 12 June 2020.

 

In striking contrast, the less developed regions, which account for 78 percent of the world’s estimated total annual deaths, have experienced about 28 percent of the Covid-19 deaths. A plausible explanation for this unexpected distribution of coronavirus deaths remains unclear.

In addition to its unusual regional distribution, Covid-19 deaths are heavily concentrated in the oldest age groups. In many developed countries, such as Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland, 80 to 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths are among those aged 70 years and older (Figure 2).

 

Source: National statistics as of 3 June 2020.

 

In general, children and adults below age 50 years have been found to have relatively low fatality rates from the disease. The elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, asthma and obesity, face higher risks of becoming severely ill from the coronavirus and have experienced relatively high Covid-19 mortality rates. Many of the elderly deaths have occurred in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, where the disease was able to spread easily due to close living conditions and inadequate health safeguards.

However, recent data from some developing countries, such as Brazil, India and Mexico, are finding that the novel coronavirus are killing far higher percentages of young people than was experienced in the wealthier developed countries. In India almost half of the Covid-19 deaths are reported to be below age 60 years and in Mexico nearly one fourth of the Covid-19 deaths were aged 25 to 49 years. This new twist in Covid-19 mortality highlights the unpredictable nature of pandemic as it continues to spread across the various regions of the world.

Covid-19 death rates also vary markedly by sex. More men than women have succumbed to the coronavirus. Current estimates are finding that the majority of Covid-19 deaths, approximately 60 percent, are men. Why the novel coronavirus tends to affect men more severely than it does women has not yet been established.

Historically, delaying death came about largely through a complex, integrated combination of individual behavior, collective action, scientific knowledge and human ingenuity. And that four-factor combination continues to be the basic strategy needed to effectively confront the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The less developed regions, which account for 78 percent of the world’s estimated total annual deaths, have experienced about 28 percent of the Covid-19 deaths. A plausible explanation for this unexpected distribution of coronavirus deaths remains unclear

As has been the case in previous pandemics, a crucial ingredient in confronting the novel coronavirus is individual behavior. Individuals, especially the elderly and those with preexisting health conditions, can take numerous precautions to limit their exposure to the coronavirus, minimize their chances of contracting COVID-19 and reduce the risks of infecting others. Those precautions need to be continued when people return to their normal daily activities, including employment, personal responsibilities and recreation.

Social distancing, hand washing, mask wearing, disinfecting touched surfaces, avoiding crowded places and staying at home when ill are among the responsible actions that each individual can take to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Prudent health practices are also essential at the workplace, in schools, in shops, during travel, when attending religious services and participating in social events.

Collective action to safeguard the public’s health and wellbeing is also a vital component in addressing the pandemic. In addition to facilitating testing, tracing and isolating and providing access to urgent medical care, local governments and communities can limit the number, size and types of gatherings, enlist the cooperation of businesses and institutions, identify people in need, support medical and essential workers and assist the elderly and other high-risk groups.

Governments at the national level have a key role in confronting the coronavirus pandemic. Based on past pandemics, history indicates that their efforts should focus on timely and decisive actions in critical areas. Among those areas are providing leadership, coordinating overall strategies, promoting sound information and clear messaging, supporting research, testing and data collection, softening the economic consequences and cooperating with regional and international efforts to curb the spread of the pandemic and limit its deadly consequences.

Also, very importantly, government officials should avoid politicizing the pandemic. National leaders need to unite the efforts of the entire country, as has been demonstrated in a number of countries such as Germany, Japan, New Zealand and Vietnam, to stem the spread of the coronavirus disease and reduce Covid-19’s death toll.

Much remains unknown about the novel coronavirus as the pandemic is still in its initial stages. Nevertheless, preliminary evidence clearly finds that early, comprehensive and sustained mitigation interventions by governments, local communities and public health organizations coupled with responsible individual behavior can result in comparatively low Covid-19 death rates.

Scientific studies are continuing to determine infection levels, case fatality rates, effective treatments, the extent of immunity after surviving an infection, health complications from the illness and whether herd immunity through infection can be achieved and if so, the expected numbers of deaths to reach herd immunity. Until a vaccine becomes available, scientific knowledge provides valuable insight and useful guidelines for individuals, communities and governments to curb the contagion’s spread.

Scientists and medical researchers around the world with the valuable support of governments, businesses, global agencies, foundations, non-governmental organizations and individuals are racing at record speed to discover a vaccine for Covid-19. Recently reported research efforts are encouraging and point to a possible vaccine in the near future. However, human ingenuity to develop an effective and widely available vaccine may require considerably more time for research and testing than currently envisioned.

Throughout its thousands of years of history, humanity has endured through many terrible pandemics. The deadliest pandemic in recent history, the 1918 influenza pandemic, killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Much has been learned from past pandemics and that accumulated knowledge and experience coupled with today’s medical and public health expertise should be utilized to effectively confront the current pandemic.

Irrespective of political ideology, religious beliefs, economic status, educational level, citizenship, age or sex, death remains the inescapable fate for the world’s population of nearly 8 billion men, women and children. Although unavoidable, death’s timing can be delayed even now amid the coronavirus pandemic through a combination of individual behavior, collective action, scientific knowledge and human ingenuity.

 

*Joseph Chamie is an independent consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division.

The post Delaying Death Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Left: German Ambassador to Singapore Ulrich Sante and Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan at the official opening of the German European School Singapore on Sept 13, 2018. Dr Sante says he will be leaving Singapore with a heavy heart but also a treasure trove of good memories. PHOTO: GERMAN EUROPEAN SCHOOL SINGAPORE

By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Jun 15 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The departing German envoy in Singapore, Ambassador Ulrich Sante, in a recent published article in the Straits Times shared some of his thoughts with the readership including on the impact on the community of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Among other things he has noted that it has implanted in us what in German is called Lebensangst, literally meaning ‘fear of life’ but in a broader sense, the loss of trust in resilience, and coldness. He has impassionedly argued: “We need to regain trust in each other again, to show warmth and affection and not treat everyone as potential messengers of death. Social distancing serves its purpose, but it cannot be a recipe for all time. It has the power to lead to social division, perhaps the most serious danger our societies face these days”. He is right. There is nothing to replace a light touch or a gentle caress to bring humans closer together. The handshake and the embrace were tools devised as humanity progressed towards civilized conduct, as these acts were performed to demonstrate that those hands carried no weapons.

This essay wishes to make three points with relevance to how pandemics have shaped human and societal behaviour in their wake. The first is that these have tended to strain love and friendship throughout ages. In Classical Greece, the historian Thucydides has recorded an account of a plague that ravaged Athens around the time of the Peloponnesian War. He noted the resultant breaks in friendships and observed “the dejection of mind” that accompanied it. To visit the sick at that time was to invite death on yourself; not to visit was to allow the stricken to die lonely and forlorn. It was truly placing yourself between Scylla and Charybdis. The Philosopher Aristotle described man, above all, as a social animal. The Greeks believed that social gatherings, theatres, the Olympic games and the like energized the human spirit and lifted the mind and intellect, enabling the pursuit of higher ideals.

Closer to our times, during the Asian Influenza of 1957-58, the pandemic spread from the Far East, through South East Asia to the South Asian sub-continent. But in a few weeks the severity of the virus gradually declined. That brought about a rapid change in human behaviour. The carrier of the germ was not seen as an angel of death, but a victim to be cared for. Friends and families rallied together. In this island, Singapore, communities such as the Chinese, Malays and Indians held hands and provided relief and succour to one another.

A second point is the proclivity for finger- pointing blame at aliens or foreigners. The Black death in Europe in the fourteenth century, that decimated the continent’s population, was attributed to the Mongol hordes from the Central Asian steppes that had been besieging and attacking the cities of Mediaeval Europe relentlessly. The cholera epidemic in Britain in the nineteenth century was said to have emanated from Calcutta, in Bengal, British India. In turn, when the outbreak occurred in East Coast America later in the century, it was the Irish community from the British isles, who constituted the indigent segment of the immigrant population was blamed. The most recent example of this is a current one ,that of President Donald Trump’s insistence on calling the COVID-19 “Wuhan virus” , even alleging that it was manmade in a laboratory rather than involving ‘zoonatic’ animal to human contagion ,to the great chagrin of the Chinese. Indeed, this accusation has not only sharpened the divide between US and China considerably, to the extent of bringing the world closer to the onset of a new Cold War, or even a full-blown war.

A third point would be the resultant empowerment of the State. Because other elements within the civic system , such as the civil society , the private sector and the non-governmental institutions do not possess the wherewithal to counter a threat of the proportions a pandemic of the current kind pose , the State , by default , has to step in. This is often with the consensus of the community. Since States would concern themselves with their own population, this can come at the expense of globalist sentiments. Since supply chains can become affected, there would be a consequent preference for self-reliance. This would militate against the notion of globalization and free trade based on the principles of comparative advantages. Global bodies that have been created to uphold and encourage free trade are adversely affected. We see an example of this in the growing ineffectiveness today of the World Trade Organization, leading to the resignation of its Director General. Burgeoning nationalism would prioritize State self-interest, as is evidenced in the US pushback against the World Health Organization, alleging its bias for China. As States, as individuals, self-isolate, multilateral institutions, including the United Nations, suffer. The absence of a global watchman as the UN could sharpen inter-state issues and disputes. Increasing self-reliant isolationism, weakening of multilateral institutions, and growing nationalism can feed inter-State conflicts as we see in the current spats between the US and China and China and India. Massive numbers of Pandemic deaths erode the fear of large number of fatalities that can result from war, which is always a deterrence to inter -State conflict. A combined result of all this is that Wars are rendered more likely. As a result, even the thresh-hold of a Nuclear war could be lowered.

So, what happens to the individual as all these phenomena unfold. It is, not surprising, therefore, that in most recent times there is a perceptible rise of a sense of helplessness that a person might feel. Hence, there would be, as there perhaps is, a propensity to a resort to seeking contentment from the circumstances in the best way possible. This explains the growing popularity all across the world of the ideas proffered by Stoicism, a philosophy that originated in Classical Greece. It evolved at points in time when human beings were confronting situations that they felt they were unable to control, including epidemics and war. Note the similarity to our own current times. Stoicism taught that eudaimonia or happiness (in Greek) can be found by accepting the moment as it presents itself. The famous Stoic teacher Epictetus once displayed the supreme serenity of reason by calmly observing : “If I am to die now , I shall die; If I am to die later , then I shall have my lunch, for the hour of lunch has come, and I shall tend to dying later!”

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

The post Human and Societal Behaviour: How Pandemics Have Shaped Them appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By African Development Bank
Jun 15 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The African Development Bank has responded swiftly to the needs of its member countries during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Bank’s operations have continued to run smoothly since the first cases appeared in early March, despite the wide range of lockdowns and measures imposed by governments to flatten the curve.

The COVID-19 pandemic is forecast to cause Africa’s GDP to drop by between $22.1 billion and $88.3 billion.

African countries, with the experience of having fought off Ebola, are working to adapt to this new threat and looking to the Bank for an effective, multilateral response to the crisis.

As of June 12, the Bank’s COVID-19 emergency packages have reached the continent’s five geographic regions.

West Africa

Before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, West Africa was home to at least four of the continent’s fastest-growing economies, and it has felt the impact of the disease hard, as borders remain closed and economic and social distress deepens.

Gambia, Mali and Niger will benefit from an ECOWAS support package to bolster national health systems in response to the pandemic. Much of the funds to this region will seek to address shortages in personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators and other emergency equipment. The support will also enable governments to provide shortfall cash to the millions of people who have been affected by mass layoffs or are unable to work because of lockdowns.

• Nigeria – 288.5 million euros
• Senegal – 88 million euros
• Côte d’Ivoire – 75 million euros
• Cabo Verde – 30 million euros
• ECOWAS – $22 million

North Africa

The North African region is the worst hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 60,000 cases as at 12 June. The disease has already triggered a sharp drop in household incomes in North Africa, as export and tourism earnings suffer. The region will be assisted with a series of emergency operations to boost containment measures and help to ensure the supply and distribution of laboratory tests and reagents. The package will also support national and regional coordination mechanisms.

• Morocco – 264 million euros
• Tunisia – 180 million euros
• Egypt – $500,000

East Africa

East Africa, the continent’s fastest-growing region economically, has been simultaneously struck by the coronavirus outbreak and an infestation of desert locusts, a double whammy for the region’s farmers and economies.

In a region of climate change and water scarcity, post-harvest losses and poorly developed agricultural markets could threaten the promise of economic reforms and investment.

Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda are the top-performing countries, which have all seen a sharp fall in tourism revenue.

• Kenya – 188 million euros

Southern Africa

A decisive lockdown has been effective in stemming the spread of COVID-19 in the region’s economic powerhouse, South Africa. The spread of the virus is by no means curtailed. Measures taken across the region to contain the pandemic have affected millions of people, many of whom work in the informal economy.

Assistance to this region comes in the form of preventive and protection measures as well as financial assistance to the vulnerable beyond the end of the epidemic.

• Mauritius – 188 million euros
• Zimbabwe – $13.7 million

Central Africa

In Central Africa, Cameroon has reported over 8,000 cases as at 12 June and significant community transmission.

The package approved for this region, $13.5 million, will target the provision of PPEs, testing kits and healthcare and laboratory facilities, for Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, which is among the countries with the least number of ventilators on the continent.

• CEMAC/RDC – $13.5 million

Timeline of COVID-19 support:

The Bank’s rollout of emergency response support to assist African countries began in March and has provided a package of financial relief and preparedness and response assistance.

March 27: The Bank raised $3 billion from the Fight COVID-19 Social Bond, the largest dollar-denominated social bond ever launched in international capital markets. Proceeds from the bond, with a three-year maturity, will help alleviate the impact of the pandemic on livelihoods and Africa’s economies.

April 2: The Bank provided $2 million in emergency assistance to the World Health Organisation (WHO) to bolster the capacity of member countries on infection prevention, testing and case management. WHO Africa will also boost surveillance systems, procure and distribute laboratory test kits, and support coordination at national and regional levels.

April 8: The Bank announced a COVID-19 Response Facility that will provide up to $10 billion to African governments and the private sector to tackle the disease and mitigate suffering that results from the economic downturn and job losses.

The post African Development Bank COVID-19 response: moving from commitment to action appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Samson Tanui, from Kenya’s Eldoret town in the Rift Valley region, is practising agroecology and his permaculture unit has become the centre of attraction for farmers from near and afar amid food shortages during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Jun 15 2020 (IPS)

With just a quarter of an acre of land in Kesses near Kenya’s Eldoret town in the Rift Valley region, Samson Tanui is practising agroecology and his permaculture unit has become the centre of attraction for farmers from near and afar amid food shortages during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

“Many people are impressed that even with the markets being closed to enable social distancing and the containment of COVID-19, my household had sufficient food and even more to sell to neighbours,” the 45-year-old farmer and a father of two told IPS.

On his plot, he grows different types of vegetables including kales, amaranth, vine spinach, ordinary spinach, tomatoes, capsicum, chilli and African nightshade. For the food crops, he grows maize, arrow roots and sweet potatoes in a homemade greenhouse. He also keeps chicken, has beehives for honey, rabbits, dairy goats, a dairy cow and pigeons.

As a result, Tanui’s household has been food secure since 2017 despite the small piece of land on which he farms. He’s also become an inspiration to several farmers who come every Saturday to learn about permaculture.

Tanui’s methods of agriculture are proven to be sustainable. In fact, the Food Sustainability Index, created by the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), recognises that agroecology “taps into traditional agricultural knowledge and practices, plays an important role in sustainable farming by harnessing local ecosystems”.

“Tapping into local ecosystems, for example via using biomass and biodiversity, the traditional farming practices that make up agroecology can improve soil quality and achieve food yields that provide balanced nutrition and increase fair trade,” the Food Sustainability Index notes.

However, a new study by researchers from Biovision, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the United Kingdom-based Institute of Development Studies shows that such sustainable and regenerative farming techniques have either been neglected, ignored or disregarded by major donors.

The study titled ‘Money Flows: what is holding back investment in agroecological research for Africa?’ released on Jun. 10 focused mainly on; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, because it is the biggest philanthropic investor in agri-development; on Switzerland, a major bilateral donor; and Kenya, one of Africa’s leading recipients and implementers of agricultural research for development.

One of the major findings, according to Hans Herren, the President for Biovision, is that most governments, both in developing and developed countries, still favour “green revolution” approaches, with the belief that chemical-intensive, large-scale industrial agriculture is the only way to produce sufficient food.

“These approaches have failed,” said Herren, winner of the 1995 World Food Prize and 2013 Right Livelihood Award. “They have failed ecosystems, farming communities, and an entire continent,” he said in a statement to the press.

Herren added, “With the compound challenges of climate change, pressure on land and water, food-induced health problems and pandemics such as COVID-19, we need change now. And this starts with money flowing into agroecology.”

However, Dr Lusike Wasilwa, a senior research scientist at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (KALRO), believes that donors are investing more money in industrial agriculture not because it is the magic bullet for Kenya and other African countries, but because they have an agenda.

“Kenya needs to wake up and find its position in production of crops such as avocado and macadamia nuts, which are largely grown using sustainable and largely environment-friendly methods,” Wasilwa, who is also the director of Crops Systems at KALRO, told IPS. “No donor is willing to support such crops that could easily make Africa rich,” she said.

So far, Kenya is the number one country in avocado production in Africa and fourth in the world. It is also third in the world for macadamia nut production.

“We should not let donors set our research agenda because they are not going to fund research that [will help Africa] make money,” the scientist told IPS in an interview. She challenged the government to honour the Malabo declaration and invest at least 10 percent of the GDP in agriculture instead of waiting on donors for finance.

According to the new report, just like the case of Tanui in Eldoret, agroecology has the potential to build resilience and sustainability at all levels, by reducing vulnerability to future supply shocks and trade disruptions, reconnecting people with local food production, and making fresh, nutritious food accessible and affordable to all.

This, according to the scientists, will reduce the diet-related health conditions that make people susceptible to diseases, and provide fair wages and secure conditions to food and farm workers, thereby reducing their vulnerability to economic shocks and their risks of contracting and spreading illnesses.

However, the findings show that very little agricultural research funding in Africa is being used to transform such food and farming systems.

The scientists found that only 3 percent of Gates Foundation projects in Africa support sustainable, regenerative approaches or agroecology. 

Nonetheless, the report points out that support for agroecology is now growing across the agri-development community, particularly in light of climate change. But this hasn’t yet translated into a meaningful shift in funding flows.

“We need to change funding flows and unequal power relations. It’s clear that in Africa as elsewhere, vested interests are propping up agricultural practices based on an obsession with technological fixes that is damaging soils and livelihoods, and creating a dependency on the world’s biggest agri-businesses. Agroecology offers a way out of that vicious cycle,” Olivia Yambi, co-chair of IPES-Food said in a statement.

According to KALRO’s Wasilwa, Africa has huge population that can potentially provide manpower, sufficient land, good soil, and the sun, “but the only problem is that we do not support what is the best for the continent”.

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UN Security Council in session. Credit: United Nations

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jun 15 2020 (IPS)

Many UN supporters expressed disappointment that Secretary General Antonio Guterres said almost nothing, until last week, about police violence against African-Americans in the United States, or about the massive protest movement that has erupted and the repressive response to the protests by US authorities and police forces.

This moment of grievance towards UN silence and impotence prompts us to look for answers in the structure and history of the UN: why is it unable to call to account its most powerful member when the most basic rules of human rights and democratic conduct are so clearly violated?

The answer is that the UN was created in 1945 to operate under the control of its most powerful members – the United States, in particular, and also the other four Permanent Members of the UN Security Council (the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China).

The UN Charter makes this perfectly clear, but so also does the history of the Organization and the way in which it has grappled with global conflicts over the years. The Charter gives to the Permanent Members a near monopoly over the selection of the Secretary General.

Anyone holding this office has been carefully selected to avoid controversy and to act cautiously when it comes to these sponsors.

A variety of reforms have been proposed over the years to give the UN and its Secretary General more autonomy. NGOs and smaller states would like to see a stronger UN and a leader that could call the big powers to account.

Some have proposed more financial independence for the UN, so that major dues contributors could not withhold financial support as a means of pressure. A global tax could serve this purpose but mere mention of such a tax by a UN think tank drew such fire from Washington that UN officials immediately disavowed the idea.

Today the UN is teetering on the brink of insolvency in spite of its compliant posture.

Another reform idea is to make the Secretary General more independent of pressure from Permanent Members by changing the rules of the election process and by mandating a single, seven-year term.

A 1996 study by two former UN officials proposed the seven-year term as part of a larger reform project. Instead of the standard arrangement of two five-year terms, the authors proposed a single seven-year term in hopes of lessening the pressure that re-election inevitably brings.

http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/06/un-chiefs-silenced-big-powers-vetoes/

This idea is useful perhaps but not by itself a very powerful tool to shield the UN leader, as there are so many means of pressure and threats (and re-election is only effective, anyway, as a means of pressure in the first term).

No person acting as Secretary General can be unaware of the ultimate danger that too much independence can bring. Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest Secretary General of them all, died in an aircraft crash in Africa that most observers now believe was the result of a direct attack on his plane, organized with the direct involvement of three of the five Permanent Members.

More recently, Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his second term, made cautious statements that were critical of the US-UK role in the Iraq War. Washington and London read him the riot act and came close to removing him from office.

In the end, he was allowed to continue to serve, but most of his closest advisors were forced out of office.

Antonio Guterres knows UN finances are under threat and he knows that if he acts there will be serious consequences. If we want him to be able to speak out, we must insist on the transformation of his office and of the UN itself.

 

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Excerpt:

James A. Paul, a writer and consultant, was Executive Director of Global Policy Forum (1993-2012), an NGO monitoring the work of the United Nations. He is the author of the book “Of Foxes and Chickens: Oligarchy & Global Power in the UN Security Council,” and was for many years an editor of the Oxford Companion to Politics of the World.

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Congestion before the project came into force. Credit: WFP/Nalifa Mehelin

By Srabasti Sarker
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Jun 15 2020 (IPS)

The novel coronavirus has affected the lives of millions worldwide at its very onset. The situation in Bangladesh is no different. Wearing masks and washing hands frequently have become the new normal. The first laboratory confirmed COVID-19 case was identified in Cox’s Bazar on 23 March. Unforeseen circumstances often lead to unprecedented innovative actions as is exemplified by a Humanitarian Access Project.

To mitigate the spread of COVID-19 amongst the 860,000 Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar, the Government of Bangladesh moved rapidly to reduce the humanitarian footprint in the refugee camps.

Refugees in Cox’s Bazar live in cramped makeshift shelters made of bamboo and tarpaulin with less than one metre between each shelter. Physical distancing is not an option in the densely populated camps. Simple hygiene practices such as regular hand washing can be difficult in a place where even access to clean water is limited. To mitigate the spread of the virus in and out of the camps and to ensure the continuity of the humanitarian assistance in the safest way possible, a solution had to be found.

Jointly launched by the Logistics Sector and its lead-agency the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the Inter-Sector CoordinationGroup (ISCG) and the Office of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC), the Humanitarian Access Project supports government authorities to regulate vehicle access to the camps while allowing humanitarian entry in accordance with the prioritised needs of the population.

Initially, the access control entailed RRRC approving a list of vehicles each day and the local and national law enforcement agencies manually cross-checking each vehicle against the RRRC approved list to ensure access is granted only to the authorized vehicles. This process created long waiting times and bottlenecks of up to two hours, leaving less time to deliver essential humanitarian assistance needed in the camps.

Eventually, those involved came up with the idea of QR coded vehicle passes for a limited number of vehicles. This vehicle monitoring system is now enabling the authorities track the number of vehicles as well as passengers entering the camps daily. Now that a number of cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the camps, this system becomes even more important to help the humanitarian community maintain essential services.

Logistics Sector and WFP staff assisting the Bangladesh Army to distinguish a vehicle from a particular humanitarian organisation by scanning the unique QR code. Credit: Logistics Sector/Uttam Das

The Quick Response Code (QR-Code), is an effective, fast readable technology used for scanning various details of a vehicle.

Sahand Tahir, Information Management Officer in the logistics sector, explained how a fully digitized vehicle tracking tool was designed and introduced in less than 48 hours to minimize delays at the checkpoints. “WFP staff assist the authorities to distinguish vehicles from the respective organisations going to the camps by scanning the unique QR codes the vehicles have been provided with. This enables the authorities to cross-check the vehicles and approve them for entry while practicing physical distancing as vehicle occupants are not required to get out of the vehicle,” he said.

At present, there are seven checkpoints where 11 staff are supporting the Bangladesh Army, Border Guard Bangladesh and local police in this work.

One vehicle driver Larry Areng told IPS, “The process now takes anywhere between 10 and 15 seconds per vehicle. Before this system came into effect, we would have to wait long hours in traffic before our vehicles were given access to the camps. This would waste our valuable time needed to deliver humanitarian assistance in the camps. The system has made my life a lot easier.”

The WFP Representative in Bangladesh, Richard Ragan emphasised, “This collaboration between agencies to get projects up and running is extremely important in the fast-paced environment of emergencies. The entire humanitarian community has reduced the number of vehicles and staff entering the camps to about 540 vehicles and 2300 staff each day.”

Amongst other things, these workers provide food, health and nutrition guidance, WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and logistics services, and site management; for the entire camp. All of these are critically important activities for the refugee population in the context of COVID-19.

Since August 2017, more than 745,000 refugees fled to Cox’s Bazar, following an unprecedented exodus of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports the total refugee population to stand at 860,000. As a result, the humanitarian operation supporting the government-led response was scaled-up to manage the crisis.

 

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Jun 15 2020 (IPS)

The #MeToo movement triggered worldwide protests that hopefully was instrumental in making people better aware of a continuous and often hidden mistreatment of women. Maybe can the current I can’t breathe movement make people realize that institutional racism is far from extinct.

It was in 1967 the term Institutional Racism was coined by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton. They wrote that even if individual racism can be quite easy to detect, institutional racism is less perceptible. Such racism makes a difference between people through more subtle means than outright discrimination. It is expressed through disparities in wealth, income, criminal justice, employment housing, health care, political power and education. Carmichael and Hamilton stated that the entire United States is imbued with institutional racism. A social ill that can only be abolished if people, irrespective of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin, are provided with equal, appropriate, and professional services.

The concept of institutional racism has been further developed and is no1w generally referred to as systemic racism to indicate how ideas of white superiority are captured in everyday thinking, influencing the entire society, not only from an institutional point of view but on all levels of social interaction. Racism has become intrinsic in the social fabric and colours the thinking and behaviour of all individuals living within such a society. Stokely Carmichael became increasingly troubled by the disinterested, oppositional, or even violent response he was met with and came to despair about the effectiveness of non-violent opposition to racism, stating that if it was only going to work if ”your opponent has a conscience. The United States has none.”

It is easy to be reminded of Carmichael’s desperation when the current U.S. president is rambling, telling U.S. governors ”Overwhelming force. Domination … it’s a beautiful thing to watch […] If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you. You’ll look like a bunch of jerks. […] I will not allow angry mobs to dominate.”

Donald J. Trump´s parlance reveals his thinking and state of mind. Dominance has nothing to do with equality, compassion and social justice – it is all about power. Social dominance means that human relations are not based on justice, but on the maintenance and stability of group-based social hierarchies. Accordingly, it favours institutional- and individual discrimination.2

Such a system makes us believe there is a difference between ”us” and ”the others”. National bigots, whose presence now is felt all over Europe and the U.S., tend to avoid the word “race”. It is considered to be an outdated concept, which died with Nazism and Apartheid. However, racism is just changing appearance. The basic idea remains, that ”white” people with their roots in Europe are better than people, especially those of a darker complexion, who find their origin in other parts of the world. Racism is apparently now hiding its ugly face under the cover of ”culture”. This “new” racism stresses ”insurmountable cultural differences”, and has thus become a racism without racism.

Racist notions consider human behaviour to be biologically preconditioned instincts. Objectionable demeanour of ”others”, i.e. people not belonging to your own racial category, may be referred to their ”inferior genetic code”. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has rightly pointed out:

Why imagine that specific genes for aggression, dominance, or spite have any importance when we know that the brain’s enormous flexibility permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous? Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviour. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological – and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.3

It is hard for fortunate people to fathom the misery emerging from poverty and even harder to accept that their indifference may be a cause for the torment of others. Primo Levi’s introduction to his personal memories of the bottomless hell of Auschwitz describes this difficulty in having empathy with those who suffer misery and injustice:

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.4

Fatal misconceptions about people’s ”racially determined” qualifications was driven to murderous absurdity by Nazi extermination policies, many of which could be traced back to the disgusting writings of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, especially his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, which was published in four volumes between 1853-55. In those books Gobineau did with ingenuity, but fuzzy science, claim “Aryan” racial superiority and the right of this race to dominate the world. Gobineau´s fantasies attracted people who considered their privileged position was well-deserved, due to a ”superior biological nature”. They claimed not much could be done about other people’s misery – after all it was considered to be hereditary and determined by implacable ”natural laws”.

Gobineau differentiated not only between a superior ”Aryan” race and racially inferior ”riffraff” outside the borders of the European continent, he also explained Europe’s social differences along racial lines. For him, the ”underdevelopment” of the European proletariat was not caused by lack of education, weak resource allocation and limited rights, but was simply due to the fact that they were ”common people” with bad genes.

Such perceptions were with delight and relief embraced by members of the privileged classes. Instead of arriving at the correct conclusion that State and Government should support health, education and guarantee human rights, they could now state that poor people’s misery was hereditary, they were simply unable to assimilate benefits provided by nature. It was no longer a question that equal rights and welfare policies could clean up the large urban ghettos, instead wealthy citizens had to be protected from a threatening underclass, which was kept in place by police and military. Stephen Jay Gould again:

How convenient to blame the poor and the hungry for their own condition – lest we be forced not to blame our economic system and our government for an abject failure to secure a decent life for all people.

The classification of humans into social classes and different races have served economic interests and been the basis for policy decisions, like restricting state support to education, public health and legal rights. Similarly, categorizations of people into different groups with specific and genetically transfixed characteristics have been used as a defence for abuse of power, exclusion and exploitation. Racism veils the structural causes to poverty, exclusion and disease, transferring the responsibility for their own misery and marginalization to the unprivileged themselves.

Racism is concerned with the surface, assuming that the exterior determines inner qualities. To judge someone on the basis of appearances is a serious violation of an individual’s integrity and personality. Being forced to submit to the prejudices of strangers is a painful experience that daily affects millions of people. Frantz Fanon wrote in his book Black Skin, White Masks from 1953:

A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal Negro family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.5

Fanon, who was a psychiatrist, compared the feeling of being black with what it means to be a Jew. According to him, the two groups were victims of discrimination. However, a Jew might choose to hide her/his Jewishness, while a black person immediately is revealed as being of ”another race” and accordingly exposed to the inquisitorial gaze of racists, becoming the object of their condemnation and contempt, completely devoid of any interest in the personality and qualities of the despised ”Negro”.

Racism combined with convictions about their own superiority may hinder decision makers like Donald J. Trump and his equals from addressing the very core of a problem, in the case of the recent upheavels – the lack of individual rights and possibilities which prevents the poor themselves from finding viable solutions to their problems. They ignore social disparities and revert to the use of violence, or what they label as ”dominance”, a combative approach that can only result in more tension and violence. Instead, it is now high time to once and for all get rid of the most absurd obstacle to development and equal rights – racism, and above all try to cleanse our own minds from its deadly poison.

1 Carmichael, Stokely and Charles V. Hamilton (1992) Black Power: Policis of Liberation. New York: Vintage.
2 Sidanius, Jim and Felicia Pratto (1999) Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hiearchy and Oppression, Cambridge: Canbridge University Press.
3 Gould, Stephen Jay (1977) Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 257.
4 Levi, Primo (1987) If This is a Man and The Truce. London: Abacus, p. 17.
5 Fanon, Frantz (1977) Black Skin, White Mask. New York; Grove Press, p. 143.

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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