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By Anwarul K. Chowdhury
NEW YORK, Apr 8 2022 (IPS)

The other day a friend asked me “Can Russia be expelled from the General Assembly by a two-thirds majority?”

Almost impossible to do that, I responded.

Two of the articles of the Charter of the United Nations relate to the issue of possible exclusion of Russia from the United Nations. Article 5 talks about suspension and Article 6 talks about expulsion. According to those articles, the action needs be taken by the General Assembly with two-thirds majority, upon the recommendation of the Security Council. That recommendation of the Council cannot be made as it is subject to veto by the Russian Federation as one of the five Permanent Members.

The obvious follow-up question was “Has any country been ever expelled or suspended from the General Assembly?”

The U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) has effectively excluded a state on three occasions: Cambodia in 1997, Yugoslavia in 1992 and South Africa in 1974.

Ambassador Anwarul K Chowdhury

UNGA Resolution 47/1 was adopted on 22 September 1992 expelled Yugoslavia from the UN General Assembly. In this case, the Security Council by its Resolution 777 (1992) recommended action under Article 6 of the UN Charter, considering that the nation known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had ceased to exist and therefore recommended to the General Assembly to exclude Yugoslavia from General Assembly and asked the country as constituted to apply for membership in the United Nations.

Some countries tried to expel South Africa, which was one of the 51 founding members of the United Nations in 1945, because of its policy of apartheid, but the three permanent members of the Security Council – France, UK, and US – used their veto power to block that move.

After the Council informed the General Assembly on its failure to adopt a resolution, the then President of the General Assembly, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, ruled that the delegation of South Africa should be refused participation in the work of the General Assembly. His ruling was upheld by 91 votes to 22, with 19 abstentions on 12 November 1974.

Although remaining a member of the UN, South Africa was not represented at subsequent sessions of the General Assembly. Following South Africa’s successful democratic elections of May 1994, after 20 years of refusing to accept the credentials of the South African delegation, the General Assembly unanimously welcomed South Africa back to full participation in the United Nations on 23 June 1994. It also deleted its agenda item on “the elimination of apartheid and the establishment of a united, democratic and nonracial South Africa.”

It is also important recall that in 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on all member states to impose a trade boycott against South Africa. A US Congressional legislation aimed to ban all new U.S. trade and investment in South Africa and that acted as a catalyst for similar sanctions in Europe and Japan. In 1963, the UN Security Council called for partial arms ban against South Africa, but this was not mandatory under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Deadlock but not dead-end – other courses of action

As mentioned earlier, the suspension or expulsion of Russia is “almost impossible” according to the UN Charter. To that, I would add that it is a deadlock but not a dead-end.

Some UN watchers are of the opinion that there are still ways to limit Russia’s presence in the U.N. beyond the Security Council as has been decided today (7 April) by the UNGA to suspend its membership in the UN Human Rights Council.

According to the General Assembly’s 1950 resolution 377A (V), widely known as ‘Uniting for Peace’, if the Security Council is unable to act because of the lack of unanimity among its five veto-wielding permanent members, the Assembly has the power to make recommendations to the wider UN membership for collective measures to maintain or restore international peace and security.

For instance. most frequently, the Security Council determines when and where a UN peace operation should be deployed, but historically, when the Council has been unable to take a decision, the General Assembly has done so. For example, in 1956, the General Assembly established the First UN Emergency Force (UNEF I) in the Middle East.

In addition, the General Assembly may meet in Emergency Special Session if requested by nine members of the Security Council or by a majority of the Members of the Assembly. To date, the General Assembly has held 11 Emergency Special Sessions (8 of which have been requested by the Security Council).

On 1 March 2022, the General Assembly, meeting in emergency session, adopted a resolution by which it deplored “the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter. Can any other process feasibly be exploited to suspend a state in such circumstances, as a way of circumventing article 5? Yes, there is a way to try that.

Though the General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, but they are considered to carry political weight as they express the will of the wider UN membership.

Some UN watchers believe that Article 5 of the Charter is not completely the end of the road on suspension. They are of the opinion that that there are two dimensions to a state’s participation in the UN: the actual membership of the state (the subject of article 5 of the Charter); and the representation of that state at the General Assembly’s sessions.

Matters of representation are considered in the context of the General Assembly’s credentials process, which is the process by which the Assembly assesses the eligibility of individual delegates to represent their states at the Assembly’s annual sessions. The process is essentially procedural in nature. It is regulated not by the UN Charter but by the Assembly’s Rules of Procedure.

While the credentials process is usually a procedural one, the credentials process effectively gives the General Assembly the power to decide which authority should be regarded as the legitimate representative of the state – at least so far as the UN is concerned. UNGA could vote to suspend Russian delegation from participating in the General Assembly, a step that does not require the Security Council.

In this context, it has been asserted that “ This move, which would strip Russia of its right to speak or vote at the UN but allow it to retain membership, previously happened in 1974, when diplomats voted to suspend South Africa for its apartheid system.”

Veto is the Chief Culprit

The headline of my opinion piece for the IPS wire of 8 March 2022 argued that “Veto is the Chief Culprit” emphasizing that “Expulsion or Suspension is Not the Remedy”. Since 1946, all five permanent members have exercised the right of veto at one time or another on a variety of issues.

To date, approximately 49 per cent of the vetoes had been cast by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and thereafter the Russian Federation, 29 per cent by the United States, 10 per cent by the United Kingdom, and six per cent each by China and France.

I repeat my main contention in that opinion as “The chief culprit in the failure of unified global action by the UN is the continuation of the irrational practice of veto. As a matter, I have said on record that, if only one reform action could be taken, it should be the abolition of veto. Believe me, the veto power influences not only the decisions of the Security Council but also all work of the UN, including importantly the choice of the Secretary-General.”

Further, I added, “I believe the abolition of veto requires a greater priority attention in the reforms process than the enlargement of the Security Council membership with additional permanent ones. Such permanency is simply undemocratic. I believe that the veto power is not “the cornerstone of the United Nations” but in reality, its tombstone.”

Proactive UN leadership missing

Amid all these legal explanations, diplomatic exchanges, and diverse conjectures, it is unfortunate that questions have been raised about the reticence of the UN Secretary-General in getting his hands dirty and in getting more actively involved in towards ending the Russian aggression and promoting peace in Ukraine.

As much as I recall, this is first time the world public has done that about the role of the UN leadership so vocally. The UN website mentions “near daily press stakeouts by the Secretary-General” on the war in Ukraine. Is this the extent of his active role and involvement?

Well-respected UN watcher and former high UN official Kul Chandra Gautam in an opinion piece recently even exhorted the SG “not to hide behind the glasshouse at Turtle Bay and go beyond invisible subtle diplomacy to more visible shuttle diplomacy.” That is the way to go.

On 3 April, the UN website publicized a Twitter message from the SG saying: “I am deeply shocked by the images of civilians killed in Bucha, Ukraine. It is essential that an independent investigation leads to effective accountability.”

Just two pitiable sentences in Twitter (I wonder how many of the global population has a Twitter account). His operatives – the UN secretariat – misled the world by the trick headline: “UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday called for an independent investigation into the killing of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, a suburb of the capital, Kyiv.”

Which official language(s) of the UN would interpret “It is essential that an independent investigation leads to effective accountability” as “called for an independent investigation”? This is the height of public deception. I wonder why this is necessary.

The Ukraine President lamented on 5 April about the failure of UN Security Council saying that the Council can “dissolve yourselves altogether” if there is nothing it can do other than engage in conversation. First time, a UN Member State has spoken so frankly, so openly, so rightly in a speech before the Council which was at an impasse to stop the aggression in his country.

Unfortunately, it is widely understood that for the UN system, more so for the SG, the dominant instinct for being pro-active in any crisis situation is “the fear of failure.” That “fear” determines the process of decision-making in a big way. A global organization like UN should be smart and mature enough to understand the value of critical opinions to improve its efficacy. Unfortunately, we are not there.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury is Former Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN; President of the UN Security Council (2000 and 2001); Senior Special Adviser to UN General Assembly President (2011-2012) and Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the UN.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A view of the Security Council Chamber as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on screen) addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine on 5 April 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 8 2022 (IPS)

A legendary quote attributed to Joseph Stalin most likely applies to the United Nations too. “How many divisions does the Pope have?” asked the Soviet leader, interrupting a speech by Winston Churchill in a bygone era.

If you don’t have an army of your own, or a military force behind your edicts or your resolutions, so the argument goes, you are fighting a losing battle—even as the United Nations remains helpless in the face of thousands of civilian deaths and the destruction of densely populated cities by Russian armed forces in Ukraine since February 24.

When he addressed the UN Security Council via video-conferencing on April 5, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine did not pull his punches when he told delegates the purposes of the UN Charter, especially Article I — to maintain international peace and security — are being blatantly violated by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“What is the point of all other Articles (in the UN charter)? Are you ready to close the United Nations? Do you think that the time for international law is gone?” If not, “you need to act immediately,” he told delegates.

To support peace in Ukraine, he argued, the Security Council must either remove the Russian Federation from the UN, both as an aggressor and a source of war, so it cannot block decisions made about its own war, or the Council can “dissolve yourselves altogether” if there is nothing it can do other than engage in conversation.

“Ukraine needs peace. Europe needs peace. The world needs peace,” he insisted.

But what Zelenskyy did not realize was a longstanding political reality: Russia, along with the US, UK, France and China (P5), are “permanent members” armed with veto powers.

And they are “permanent” for life, either their life as a member state or the life of the United Nations– whichever comes first.

Meanwhile, the US led a successful campaign to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) with a resolution which garnered two-thirds majority in the General Assembly on April 7. The voting read: 93 Yes, 24 Noes and 58 Abstentions.

Which triggers the question: can Russia be suspended from its membership in the 193-member UN General Assembly (GA)?

Thomas G. Weiss, Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told IPS: “The GA suspended apartheid South Africa for 20 years, from 1974 to post-elections in 1994. Russia qualifies as a comparable pariah with its unprovoked and illegal war in Ukraine. It would be an important new precedent to say “nyet” to recolonization.”

The precedent in the HRC is Libya, which the HRC voted to suspend and then the GA by consensus voted to suspend that regime, said Weiss, Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY)

In an oped piece for IPS, Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, a former President of the Security Council and UN Under-Secretary-General, pointed out that the General Assembly effectively suspended three UN member states on three different occasions: Cambodia in 1997, Yugoslavia in 1992 and South Africa in 1974.

He said the suspension or expulsion of Russia is “almost impossible” according to the UN Charter. “To that, I would add that it is a deadlock but not a dead-end.”

Some UN watchers, he wrote, are of the opinion that there are still ways to limit Russia’s presence in the U.N. beyond the Security Council, as has been just decided by the UNGA to suspend its membership in the UN Human Rights Council.

Louis Charbonneau, United Nations director at Human Rights Watch, told IPS: “Given the evidence of war crimes and serious human rights violations committed by Russian forces in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine, it’s essential that the UN and International Criminal Court move swiftly with their investigations to gather and preserve evidence”.

He said the victims and their families need justice. Suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, a body it’s clearly unfit to be a member of, is an important step to holding Russian authorities accountable for their actions.”

After the vote to suspend Russia from the HRC, Charbonneau said: “The General Assembly has sent a crystal-clear message to Russia’s leadership that a government whose military is routinely committing horrific rights violations has no business on the UN Human Rights Council”.

He said gruesome images from Bucha have shocked people around the world. Victims and their families deserve to see those responsible held to account. Investigators from the UN and International Criminal Court should set the wheels of justice in motion by moving swiftly to gather and preserve evidence of war crimes.

In his address to the Security Council, the Ukrainian President also said the “UN Charter must be immediately restored and the system reformed so that the veto power does not represent the right to die, and so there is fair representation in the Council of all world regions.”

If tyranny in places from Syria to Somalia had received a response, it would have ceased to exist, and an “honest peace” would have prevailed.

A war against Ukrainian citizens would not have been launched. Instead, the world watched, and turned its eyes away from the occupation of Crimea, the war against Georgia, the taking of Transnistria from the Republic of Moldova and the preparations of Russian troops for another war near the border.

“The Russian military and those who gave them orders must be brought to justice and charged with war crimes in Ukraine, before a tribunal similar to the one created in Nuremburg,” he declared.

Asked whether Russia could be kicked off the Security Council, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said: “Look, the Security Council was created as a product of the creation of the UN after World War II. They are a member of the Security Council. That’s a fact. We can’t change that fact, but we certainly can isolate them in the Security Council. We can make their presence in that body very uncomfortable. And we have done that,” she added.

In an interview last week, she was asked: Given the restraints on the United Nations because they sit on the Security Council, because they still have the support of China—and given all that, does the world needs to have some sort of alternative body? That enforces the rule of law, that enforces the kind of values that, frankly, humanity demands?

“The UN is the body that we have, and we have to work to improve the UN and to continue to use this body to put pressure on the Russians. And while they do have the veto power, they can’t veto our voices.

“They cannot veto the Ukrainian president coming in front of the Security Council and condemning them. They cannot veto you, and others who are reporting the truth to the world. And they are uncomfortable”.

“And as for the Chinese, they’re uncomfortable in this position that they find themselves in defending what the Russians are doing. So, we’re going to keep the pressure on. We’re going to keep applying that pressure until Russia comes to understand that they cannot continue this unconscionable war against the Ukrainian people,” she declared.

Meanwhile, at a press conference on 6 April, one of the questions raised was about Pope Francis pointing out that the Ukraine war was a reflection of the impotence of the United Nations.

“Also, President Zelenskyy said something similar —that the United Nations, the way it is, should be completely reformed, even the Security Council. So, any comments from the Secretary General?”

Responding to the questions, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the UN and its Charter are resilient.

“We have faced crises in the past. It is a fact for all to see that, I think, the security aspect of it, which is really guided by the Security Council, is divided, and that is not the responsibility of the Secretary General. It is a reflection of the situation between the Member States and some of the most powerful Member States of this organization who sit on the Security Council”.

“But I think you have to look that the UN is more than just the Security Council. Right? The UN is the 1,200 or more colleagues that we have in Ukraine. It is the peacekeepers who are on the front lines in the Congo, in the DRC. It is all the humanitarian workers we have in the Sahel. And I think that part of the UN is working and is working as if… is working efficiently and trying to do whatever it can to alleviate the suffering of people around the world,” he declared.

IPS UN Bureau Repor

 

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By External Source
SUVA, Fiji, Apr 7 2022 (IPS-Partners)

The Pacific Community turned 75 on the 6th of February 2022. As we mark 75 years of the Pacific Community’s Service to the region, on the 6th of each month we will feature a key moment in history for the organisation.

At the 48th Meeting of the Committee of Representatives of Governments and Administrations held in 2018, regional leaders stressed that protecting and promoting Pacific culture was a fundamental and ongoing role for SPC and new language reinforcing the importance of culture was added to SPC’s priority areas. In the words of former SPC’s Director-General Dr. Colin Tukuitonga, “the cultural heritage of the Pacific is an invaluable treasure, bound up with SPC’s history, and key to our region’s future.”

SPC’s connection to Pacific culture traces it’s roots back to the founding of the organization, but its most visible efforts can been seen through the history of the Festival of the Pacific Arts and the establishment of the organizations Regional Media Centre.

In 1968, Pacific Leaders were becoming increasingly concerned about the erosion of traditional customary practices. In response, at the 8th Pacific Conference, a proposal was made to convene a Pacific arts festival. The idea was enthusiastically embraced and plans for the first South Pacific Arts Festival began.

The 11th Conference in 1971 expressed support for the Festival, with delegates emphasising ‘the importance of making it a Festival of Pacific culture without the intrusion of Western culture’. They wanted the peoples of the region to share their cultures and establish a deeper understanding and friendship between countries. The first festival was held in Suva in 1972 with more than 1000 participants from 14 Pacific countries and territories, making the event a resounding success.

To ensure it became a permanent event, a Council of Pacific Arts was formed at a meeting organised by SPC in 1975. Its mandate was to provide the SPC Conference with specific information about the Festival and, more generally to advise the Conference on cultural affairs. With the second Festival of Pacific Arts (FestPac) held in Rotorua, New Zealand in 1976, the event become firmly anchored as a permanent regional event. Since then, there have been 12 FestPac’s held in locations across the region, with the 13th currently planned for 2024 in Hawaii.

Not a single country, let alone a sub-region, is at the highest “model” stage of water security. The top five countries – Egypt, Botswana, Mauritius, Gabon, and Tunisia — are at best at a “modest” (just above average) stage of water security. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By External Source
Apr 7 2022 (IPS)

When it comes to water security – a reliable, good supply of safe water – just 29 African countries have made some progress over the past three to five years. Twenty-five have made none.

This data comes out of the UN’s first-ever assessment of water security in Africa. Published by the UN University’s Canada-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health, the assessment used 10 indicators to quantify water security in Africa’s 54 countries. Such an assessment had been done before in the Asia-Pacific region, but never for Africa.

The UN’s concept of water security encompasses various needs and conditions. These include: water for drinking, economic activity, ecosystems, governance, financing, and political stability. Water security, therefore, is not just about how much natural water a country has but also how well the resource is managed.

The assessment is limited by very poor data on some issues – such as access to drinking water or sanitation. It nevertheless offers some preliminary, but obvious, conclusions.

Overall levels of water security in Africa are low. Not a single country, let alone a sub-region, is at the highest “model” stage of water security. The top five countries – Egypt, Botswana, Mauritius, Gabon, and Tunisia — are at best at a “modest” (just above average) stage of water security.

Without water security, people are exposed to environmental and health risks, increased susceptibility to water-related disasters and lack water for economic and social use.

The assessment team hopes that as this quantitative tool develops, it will help generate targeted policy recommendations and inform decision-making and public-private investments toward achieving water security in Africa.

 

Key findings

The assessment introduced five stages of water security: Emerging (a score of 0 – 45), slight (45 – 60), modest (60 – 75), effective (75 — 90), and model (90 – 100).

Except for Egypt, all countries scored below 70. Only 13 of 54 countries were found to have a “modest” level of water security. Somalia, Chad and Niger appear to be the three least water-secure countries in Africa.

Over a third of the 54 countries had “emerging” level water security, representing a large gap to be closed to reach an acceptable level. These countries are home to half a billion people.

The situation doesn’t appear to be improving very quickly. Between 2015 and 2020, the continent as a whole progressed only by 1.1% based on the indicators.

 

Examining the indicators

Here is an overview of how countries fared on each indicator.

 

Access to drinking water

Access to “at least basic” drinking water services ranged from 37% of the population in the Central African Republic to 99% in Egypt. Regionally it ranged from 62% in central Africa to 92% in north Africa. Africa’s average basic drinking water service is 71%. This leaves behind about 29% of the total population, or more than 353 million people.

“At least basic” means access to improved water sources – such as piped water, protected hand-dug wells and springs. These either need to be “safely managed” (accessible on premises, available when needed, and free from contamination) or can be collected in a trip of 30 minutes or less.

Access to sanitation

Access to sanitation – meaning access to, and use of, sanitation facilities and services – was broadly similar at the regional level. There’s an average of 60% access to limited sanitation. This means at least 40% of the total population (483 million people) are left behind.

A few countries – Seychelles and most countries in north Africa – have reached, or nearly reached, 100%. The most challenged countries are Chad and Ethiopia.

Access to hygiene facilities

This indicator refers to access to practices like hand washing. The greatest access was found in north Africa (67%), the least access was in west Africa. Liberia was the lowest in the region with less than 10% access.

Chad and the Central African Republic suffer from the highest number of deaths from diarrhoea, an indicator of ineffective hygiene practices.

Per capita water availability

The amount of water available per person was highest in central Africa, with the Republic of Congo considered Africa’s most water-rich country. At the other end of the spectrum, half of the countries in north Africa appeared to be absolutely water scarce.

Water availability has recently declined in west, central and southern Africa. This was most notable in Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Somalia, Mozambique and Malawi.

Water use efficiency

This indicator assesses the economic and social value. The score is a sum of efficiencies – a measure of how well a country uses the water it has in its economy.

On this basis, water use efficiency appears to be lowest in north Africa (with Somalia lowest at the national level) and highest in central Africa (with Angola highest at a national level).

Water storage infrastructure

Water storage in large dams, measured in volume (m3) per capita, is deemed best in the southern Africa, worst in east Africa.

South Africa, with over 25% of all large dams in Africa, is outscored by Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, likely due to just one mega reservoir in those countries.

Half of all countries score very low, reflecting the continent’s low level of water storage development. Only Ethiopia and Namibia have increased their storage over recent years.

Wastewater treatment

Scores are highest in north African countries, lowest in east and west Africa, where 12 countries in each region treat less than 5% of wastewater. No country treats more than 75%. Only Tunisia, Egypt and Lesotho treat over 50% of wastewater.

Water governance

Governance takes into account the various users and uses of water with the aim of promoting positive social, economic, and environmental impacts. This includes the transboundary level.

Water governance appears to be most advanced in north and southern Africa and least advanced in central Africa.

Nationally, Ghana reported reaching 86% of integrated water resource management implementation in just two years – a significant improvement.

Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, and Comoros are the lowest-performing countries.

Disaster risk

Disaster risk is a measure of the potential loss of life, injury, or destroyed or damaged assets, which could occur to an ecosystem, or a community in a specific period of time.

North Africa appears to be the least risky sub-region (it has less exposure or high ability to adapt), with Egypt the least risky country. West Africa was the riskiest.

Some 49 of 54 African countries have seen increased disaster risk scores over five recent years.

Water dependency on neighbouring nations and water resources variability

Egypt stands out as Africa’s most water-dependent country. It relies on the Nile river which flows through 10 countries – Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, and Sudan – before reaching Egypt. And the southern Africa sub-region has a wide disparity in the available water per year.

 

Preparing for the future

Our paper calls for a pioneering effort to create global standards for water security measurement data and assessment.

Some critical components of water security simply cannot be assessed without good data. For example, it’s not possible to estimate the percentage of the African population that will have access to safely managed drinking water services or safely managed sanitation by 2030, a key UN Sustainable Development Goal.

Our water security assessment tool is a work in progress, guided by a goal of an influential and nationally-owned tool used by all African countries and that it helps generate targeted policy recommendations and inform decision-making and public-private investments in Africa.

Grace Oluwasanya, Research Lead, Water, Climate and Gender, United Nations University and Duminda Perera, Senior Researcher: Hydrology and Water Resources, United Nations University

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

Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Western Asia will not achieve universal early childhood education, according to a UNESCO report. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Apr 7 2022 (IPS)

Marisol Ntalami is one of 747,161 candidates who sat for the national Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in 2020.

“I come from a pastoral community. My father has five wives and many children. I am the only girl in the family to have completed primary school and now secondary school. My mother fought very hard for me to stay in school. I am a first-year university student studying actuarial science,” she tells IPS.

According to the Ministry of Education, there was almost a 50/50 split between genders in the exams, with 50.90 percent male participants and 49.10 percent female.

Kenya’s strides towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), the education goal, are well documented in the most recent benchmarking report by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics and the Global Education Monitoring Report. The East African country is one of the participating countries that has provided targets it expects to achieve by 2025 and 2030.

Like Kenya, two-thirds of countries identified their targets for 2025 and 2030 relative to six key SDG 4 indicators on early childhood education attendance, school attendance, completion, minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics, trained teachers, and public education expenditure.

The process started in 2021, and the report shows Kenya is “near-universal early childhood education, with plans to increase attendance to 86.7 percent by 2030. Kenya is also on track to achieve universal primary education by 2030.”

According to the respective countries’ benchmarks, not all countries in Sub-Saharan Africa will achieve SDG 4 by 2030.

“Countries that have participated in this benchmarking process have sent a powerful message. They had shown determination in advancing the promises they made seven years ago when they signed the SDGs,” Manos Antoninis, the director of UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, tells IPS.

“By setting concrete targets, they are no longer hiding behind an unreachable global goal. They are making plans to achieve it. This is a real opportunity for the global community to rally behind them and help their plans come true.”

According to the Ministry of Education, Uganda worked from the Education Sector Strategic Plan commitments to establish achievable benchmarks for education targets between now and 2030.

The report recommends that all countries that have not set their benchmarks do so in time for this year’s review of SDG 4 at the High-level Political Forum in July because it helps bring countries back on track towards bringing all children in Africa to school.

“As we continue to face peaks in the COVID-19 pandemic, data and evidence become even more important. In Rwanda, the close monitoring of national education priorities and the SDG 4 benchmarks will allow us to intervene quickly and in a tailored manner so that we ensure to live by our strong conviction that no child should be left behind,” a statement by Rwanda’s Ministry of Education says.

Overall, sub-Saharan Africa increased its primary education completion rate from 46 percent to 65 percent or by 19 percentage points, roughly one percentage point per year between 2000 and 2020. At this rate, the region is not on track and lags behind others in most education development indicators.

Nevertheless, between 2000 and 2020, a growing list of countries made notable progress in primary education completion rate.

Togo increased its primary education completion rate from 44 percent to 77 percent, Ethiopia from 18 to 57 percent, Burundi from 13 to 52 percent, Sierra Leone from 26 to 70 percent and Sao Tome and Principe from 46 to 57 percent.

By contrast, between 2000 and 2020, the primary completion rate in sub-Saharan Africa almost stagnated in some countries, like the Central African Republic, which showed a smaller increase from 28 to 35 percent, Guinea-Bissau from 20 to 26 percent and Uganda from 35 to 40 percent.

Against this backdrop, Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Education Commission Chair, lauds the commitment of countries that have set their national ambitions and contributions towards achieving the global education goal.

“This process, the first of its kind in education, follows best practices in other sectors like climate. These benchmarks demonstrate countries’ drive to accelerate education progress between now and the 2030 deadline,” Brown says.

“This comes at a time when the global education system faces a myriad of challenges. The percentage of trained teachers, for instance, has been declining for much of the past 20 years, with notable but not enough reversal of this trend in recent years.”

Reported slow progress towards SDG 4 is even though African countries, alongside Latin American countries, prioritise education more than any other region in their budgets.

The size of the challenge is large, and the budget itself is too small due to low levels of domestic resource mobilisation and largely stagnant external financial assistance. Education experts, like Antoninis, say it would be incorrect to say that sub-Saharan Africa has been derailed.

The region, UNESCO finds, has set off from much lower starting points due to poverty, malnutrition, health, conflict, displacement, and difficulties in managing unique characteristics such as its linguistic diversity.

Many of Africa’s children are taught at school in a language they do not speak at home. Additionally, changes in education take a long time to mature.

According to UNESCO, COVID-19 has also affected countries unequally. Even within the same region in Africa, some countries have kept their schools closed for two years, while others hardly closed them.

These closures are feared to have long-term damaging effects on Africa because of the lack of opportunities and capacity for distance learning. Still, the report finds that the main challenge remains the very low levels of student learning even when schools are open.

In all, just 3 of 10 of those students who complete primary school learn the basic skills expected of their level of education, the report finds.

Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and Western Asia will not achieve universal early childhood education. It is estimated that roughly two in three children will be enrolled in early childhood education by 2030.

Further, 8 percent of children of primary school age are predicted to be out of school in 2030. Kenya, for instance, will be far off from meeting SDG 4 for the upper secondary level because the country expects that only 64 percent of young people will complete school by 2030.

Overall, no region is on track to achieve universal completion of secondary education by 2030 because completion rates are expected to land at 89 percent at lower secondary and 72 percent at the upper secondary level by the deadline.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Julius Awaregya, Rev. Mpho Tutu van Furth and Don Mullan
ACCRA, Ghana, Apr 7 2022 (IPS)

How would the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu have reacted to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine? Differently than you might think.

The invasion of Ukraine is a mass human tragedy. It is killing Ukrainians, exposing families to violent atrocities, and has driven a refugee crisis of over 4 million people and counting. The war in Ukraine has also reawakened our fear of global war – even nuclear war – and the importance we place on global peace.

Julius Awaregya

Watching this conflict has us remembering many of the wise words of Mpho’s father, Bishop Tutu, who once said “I am not without hope. When we, humans, walk together in pursuit of a righteous cause, we become an irresistible force.”

The war in Ukraine has also driven global food shortages, particularly in Africa. And it has sparked an energy crisis, and a reckoning with our global addiction to oil.

Seeing this war unfold, Archbishop Tutu would have been horrified. He would have condemned it. But he also would have been unequivocal: this is a crisis of peace, but also a climate crisis, and a once-in-a-generation moment to rally humanity around solutions that could improve our climate, economic and food futures. He would have believed what we believe:

There can be no true global peace, ever, without global action to avert climate change. And this moment is the time we must begin to link these crises inextricably.

Perhaps ironically, as if challenging the human project, the invasion of Ukraine occurred simultaneously with the most urgent and stark, clarion call in history by the United Nations for universal action to mitigate the impact of global warming. Four days after Russian troops began their thrust into Ukrainian sovereign territory, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a detailed report entitled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability, on February 28.

Rev. Mpho Tutu van Furth

The report, and its followup just this week are unequivocal in their dire assessment that humanity is in serious trouble. Indeed, in comments accompanying the release of the report, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, described it as an “atlas of human suffering.” Guterres was clear in pointing the finger of blame: “The facts are undeniable,” he said. “This abdication of leadership is criminal. The world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson on our only home.” And amongst those are Russia and the West.

Putin’s purge of Ukraine has triggered the biggest refugee crisis on European land since WWII. The scenes along the Ukrainian border are heart-breaking. Scenes of traumatised and separated families seeking refuge. But also, stories of discrimination experienced by innocent African and Asian students also seeking shelter from the war. But if current climate trends continue, the IPCC expects a billion people living in vulnerable coastal communities across the globe to be at risk from rising sea levels in the next few decades, due to “submergence and loss”. The report is, literally, awash with examples of where this is already happening on every continent.

In other words, what we’re seeing in Poland and worldwide is fast becoming the daily norm worldwide, and could ultimately dwarf the humanitarian crisis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed. Seeing the scenes of suffering and bravery from Lyiv and Poland, we say that with humility. But what we see on the border of Poland and Ukraine today is soon to be the rule, not the exception, everyday of our lives if temperatures continue to rise.

Our only hope – and a response that would immediately aid Ukraine – is a collective uprising of humanity, fuelled by the same passionate determination evident in the Ukrainian people as they seek to protect their land. It is time to divert essential resources and energy away from war and the military industrial complex, to be urgently reinvested in a Marshall Plan that seeks to protect our common home and save humanity from existential threat.

Don Mullan

Here’s how.

First, nations seeking to end-run or make do by continuing to access Russian oil and fossil fuels must cease and find other alternatives. Nations are putting funds in escrow to buy oil as payment for a day when a better behaved Russia can accept their fee. This day clearly will not come, and these purchases undermine the last best hope for democracy in Ukraine – cutting off Russia’s greenhouse gas economy.

This is what’s best for peace. it’s also ultimately in the best interests of the global community and the planet.

Second, and closest to home for us: The IPCC Report highlights the importance of policymakers focusing on “climate resilient development,” which they argue helps build strength in every society to cope with climate change. We have such a solution – one that only needs awareness, funds and hope.

The Great Green Wall is an epic African initiative whose aim is to cross the continent from Senegal to the Republic of Djibouti to combat desertification, restore degraded lands, protect biodiversity, and offer food and habitat security. We write today with deep concern for the global community, but also as champions of a project that could immediately address the food crisis, economic crisis and climate crisis facing Africa and the southern Hemisphere of the globe.

We have also decided, in memory of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu – inspired by the IPCC Report and in opposition to all war – to create the Desmond Tutu Peace Forest in Ghana and Burkina Faso as part of Africa’s Great Green Wall. This is a project for peace – one that would seek to turn global discord into optimism and action. Some of the last utterances of Archbishop Tutu’s remarkable life were in support of Africa’s Great Green Wall. In 2020 he said:

… one way to use our power wisely is for civil society across the globe to champion, in solidarity with Africa, the Great Green Wall. Supporting Africa in growing new lungs for the Earth. Lungs that become, with every tree planted, a ribbon of hope, inspiring interfaith harmony, and peacebuilding across the Sahel and throughout the continent.

In creating the Desmond Tutu Peace Forest, we also wish to highlight and support the four great legacy pillars of his life: the ending of all forms of apartheid and hate; the empowerment of women and gender equality; environmental integrity; and peace founded on justice for all.

These are the pillars that will uplift Africa. They are also the pillars that will move us from this conflict in Ukraine towards a solutions-focused humanity that seeks to weave peace from war; opportunity from climate emergency. The Great Green Wall is one of several solutions worldwide that can address the worst impacts of climate change – from the “Green New Deal” in the United States to the preservation and restoration of Amazon rainforest and ecosystems. It is also the least controversial, most immediately scalable and perhaps most powerful symbol of the future we hope to build together.

It’s popularly said and written that “the only way out is through.” The war in Ukraine is a conflict that clarifies the need to raise up solutions like the Great Green Wall – and the Desmond Tutu Peace Forest. The world’s most vulnerable people, indeed, all sentient beings and the Earth itself, need compassion, not conflict.

Help us to grow the Desmond Tutu Peace Forest, and let’s join today to move forward in his memory.

Julius Awaregya is the Founder and CEO, ORGIIS Ghana; Rev. Mpho Tutu van Furth is the Co-founder and CEO of Tutu Teach Foundation; Don Mullan is Founder and CEO, Hope Initiatives International.

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By Mushahid Hussain
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Apr 7 2022 (IPS)

The retrenchment of American power in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world, coupled with the war in Ukraine, has provided a geopolitical breather for China. Beijing is effectively deploying this to make strategic inroads into the region, given this vacuum and focus on Europe.

The recent invitation to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to address the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference in Islamabad is a ‘historic first,’ and a significant breakthrough for Chinese diplomacy. For the first time, the foreign minister of the Peoples Republic of China was invited to address the most representative platform of the 57-member body representing the 1.5 billion Muslims.

During his speech at the OIC conference in Islamabad on the 22nd March 2022, Foreign Minister Wang Yi talked about the “long standing relationship between China and the Muslim world” and reaffirmed that China would continue supporting Muslim countries in their quest for political independence and economic development.

Historically, China has always been etched in the Muslim consciousness as a country with a great civilisation based on knowledge, learning and development. For example, there is a famous saying of the Holy Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him), 1,400 years ago, which urged Muslims to “seek knowledge, even if you have to go to China,” implying that although China was physically far away from Arabia, it was a land of learning.

Soon after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, a professor of the prestigious American university Harvard, Prof. Samuel Huntington, talked of a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which he implied that Western civilization would be at odds with both the Islamic and the Confucian civilisations. Interestingly, he also talked of a united front of the Islamic and Confucian civilisations.

During his speech at the conference on Dialogue among Civilisations, held in Beijing in May 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned the contribution of the Islamic civilisation to “enrich the Chinese civilisation” and also referred to the Holy Mosque in Makkah (Mecca) as well as the travels to China of the Muslim explorer, Ibn Batuta, who wrote favourably on China and the Chinese people.

China has a longstanding relationship with the Muslim world. After the Chinese revolution in 1949, Pakistan was the first country in the Muslim world to recognise the People’s Republic of China in May 1950. The first institutional interaction between China and the Muslim countries took place at the 1955 Afro-Asian Summit in Bandung, Indonesia.

It was hosted by the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia and Pakistan and China were among the countries attending this historic summit. China shares a border with 14 countries, five of which are members of the OIC and none of these have border disputes with China.

In January 1965, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was formed, China was among the first countries who recognised it. And in the 1960s and early 70s, China also provided material support and aid to various Muslim countries that were facing economic and political pressures, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, South Yemen and Egypt.

As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China also has been in the forefront of countries that have a proactive approach to the Muslim world. China, for example, presented a Middle East peace plan and it was unveiled during visits to China in May 2013 by the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mehmood Abbas, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

During his meeting with the two leaders, President Xi Jinping presented the 4-point peace plan that called for an independent Palestine State alongside Israel, based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. While recognising Israel’s right to exist in security, the Chinese peace plan also called for an end to building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories of Palestine, cessation of violence against civilians and termination of the Israel blockade of Gaza.

The peace plan also called for resolving the issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and sought more humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians, while underlining that these are “necessary for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestinian Authority.”

China also has been principled on the issue of Syria urging an end to both interference in Syrian affairs and an end to the Syrian civil war. In January 2022, China invited Syria to be part of the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI).

China today is the largest importer of crude oil in the world and almost 50% of that oil comes from the Muslim countries of the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE. Saudi Arabia has also invited President Xi Jinping to visit the Kingdom and there have been media reports that China and Saudi Arabia are engaged in discussions to have their oil trade done partially in Yuan or the RMB, the Chinese currency.

Defence cooperation between China and the Muslim world is also expanding and the Chinese advanced jetfighter J10C is now in use in countries like Pakistan and the UAE. In January 2022, China and Iran signed a comprehensive Strategic Accord which will run for 25 years, worth well over $400 billion dollars.

The centre piece of China’s relationship with the Muslim world today is the BRI. Interestingly, the BRI was launched in two phases by President Xi Jinping, with two important speeches in two different Muslim countries. In September 2013, during the speech in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, President Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Silk Road Economic Belt.

During another speech in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, in November 2013, President Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Maritime Silk Road, both pillars of the BRI. And during his speech at the OIC conference on the 22nd March, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that “China is investing over 400 billion dollars in nearly 600 projects across the Muslim world under the BRI.”

He underlined that “China is ready to work with Islamic countries to promote a multi-polar world, democracy in international relations and diversity of human civilisation, and make unremitting efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind”. On the issue of Palestine and Kashmir, Wang Yi said that “China shares the same aspirations as the OIC, seeking a comprehensive and just settlement of these disputes.”

Another example of close ties between China and the Muslim world was the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, where a majority of Muslim countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar had a high level of representation, despite the boycott called by certain Western countries. Also, only last week, on the 30th March, China hosted an important conference, the Meeting of Foreign Ministers of Afghanistan’s Neighboring Countries, which was well attended.

China has also received support from Muslim countries on the issue of Xinjiang at the UN Human Rights Council. In fact, in July 2019, when a group of 22 nations led by the West sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council criticising China on Xinjiang, not a single Muslim country was a signatory of that letter, while another group of 37 countries submitted a letter on the same issue defending Chinese policies.

These countries included all the six Gulf countries plus Pakistan, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan — all Muslim countries.

Given the changing geopolitical scenario, where there is a shift in the global balance of economic and political power, away from West and toward the East, followed by calls for a New Cold War, China’s thrust for cooperation and connectivity, given the common threat of the Coronavirus pandemic and the need for connectivity through BRI, has a broad resonance in the Muslim world.

The Muslim countries see their relations with China as a strategic bond to promote stability, security and economic development in the Muslim world and the BRI has become the principal vehicle in the promotion of such an approach.

In the coming years, China’s partnership with the Muslim world is likely to be strengthened, given the mutuality of interests and the convergence of worldviews in upholding a world order based on International Law, the UN Charter and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

Ironically, thirty years after enunciating the Huntington thesis on the ‘clash of civilisations,’ which talked of the Islamic and Confucian Civilisations co-existence with each other but possible confrontation with Western Civilisation, recent developments may be pointers to a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Source: Wall Street International MagazineTop of Form/OTHER NEWS
https://wsimag.com/economy-and-politics/69117-chinas-entry-into-the-muslim-world

Chairman of the Senate Defence Committee Pakistani, Senator Mushahid Hussain was Bureau Chief in Islamabad of Inter Press Service (IPS) during 1987-1997 & later in 2014. He launched the first Public Hearings on Environment & Climate Change in the Pakistan Parliament. As Senator, he chairs the Senate Sub Committee on ‘Green and Clean Islamabad’ which has launched a campaign to ban plastic use in the Pakistani capital.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Egypt once again faces the prospect of a poor tourism season due to the Ukraine crisis. The region accounts for about six million tourists each year. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

By Hisham Allam
Cairo, Egypt, Apr 6 2022 (IPS)

Tourism to Egypt’s GDP is as vital as the Nile to its people. After Egypt’s tourism sector began to recover following the Russian plane crash in 2015. Then COVID hit, and now the Ukrainian war shot a bullet through its heart.

The protracted Russian conflict with Ukraine threatens several tourist destinations that rely on Russian visitors. Turkey, Uzbekistan, the UAE, Tajikistan, Armenia, Greece, Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Cyprus are among the top 25 countries for outbound Russian tourism by flight capacity, according to Mabrian Technologies, an intelligence platform for the tourism industry.

Egypt’s economy is also heavily reliant on tourism from Russia and Ukraine, with the two countries accounting for roughly one-third of all visitors each year. In 2015, Russia imposed a slew of punitive measures against Egypt in the tourism sector, wreaking havoc on the industry and its workers.

Due to the suspension of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian flights, the decline has become very apparent recently, especially in Sharm El-Sheikh, where occupancy rates are less than 35 percent, compared to 40 to 45 percent in Hurghada, according to industry insiders.

Egypt’s Travel & Tourism sector’s contribution to the nation’s GDP fell from $32 billion (8.8%) in 2019 to $14.4 billion (3.8%) just 12 months later, in 2020.

Egypt member of parliament Hany Alassal stressed that the opening of new tourism markets would help mitigate the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which harms the global and Egyptian tourism sectors.

“Russian tourism amounted to roughly 3.2 million Russian tourists in 2015, and it was anticipated to reach approximately 400,000 Russian tourists per month before the outbreak of war, whilst Ukrainian tourism amounted to roughly 3 million Ukrainian tourists in 2021,” Alassal said.

“The impact of the Ukraine crisis on Egypt’s tourism cannot be overlooked, especially in Sharm El Sheikh and Hurghada,” Faten Ibrahim, a tour guide, told IPS.

In comparison to beach tourism, which accounts for about 90% of Egypt’s total revenue from this sector, cultural tourism accounts for less than 5% of total revenue.

“We experienced a difficult period of stagnation with the emergence of COVID-19, specifically from March 2020 to March 2021. Since then, most workers in the tourism sector have worked for half the salary,” Ibrahim says.

“I can measure the impact of the absence of Russian and Ukrainian tourism on museums and historic sites through my daily work, as the number of tourists visiting these sites has nearly halved,” she adds.

Ibrahim, who has worked in the tourism industry for 28 years, points out that the situation significantly improved in October and November of last year, but the emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in December resulted in large cancellations of reservations, so the situation worsened dramatically in January.

According to WTTC research, COVID-19 sparks a 55% collapse in the sector’s contribution to Egypt’s GDP. The travel and tourism sector is also a major employer in the country, with a workforce of 1.25 million.

In 2017, the total contribution to the GDP was 374.6 billion EGP. It was forecast to contribute approximately 601 billion EGP to the Egyptian economy by 2028.

Amr El-Kady, the head of the Egyptian Tourism Promotion Board (ETPB), says that the Egyptian authorities are assisting stranded tourists from Russia and Ukraine, either to stay safe or return to their homes, in collaboration with the private sector.

“We’re going through a difficult time, but we’re handling it impressively,” El-kady tells IPS.

“It is a powerful propaganda campaign for Egypt, emphasizing that it is not only a tourist destination but also a country that looks out for its visitors in difficult times.”

He explains that the (ETPB) is currently working to open new tourism markets, particularly in Germany, England, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Switzerland, following the lifting of travel restrictions to Egypt.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By External Source
Apr 6 2022 (IPS-Partners)

 

ECW: The International Disability Alliance (IDA), Government of Norway and Government of Ghana hosted the second Global Disability Summit in February. At the summit you called on partners to commit to ensuring children with disabilities can access their inherent human rights, including the right to education. How can we transform the delivery of education in emergencies to ensure no child is left behind?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: UN Member States have committed to leave no one behind in their implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Ensuring no one is left behind also means inclusion of persons with disabilities. We have to make sure that children with disabilities are given access to quality education and assure their safe and meaningful participation. As a minimum this requires 1) disability-disaggregated data, 2) combatting stigma and discrimination, and 3) meaningful engagement of persons with disabilities in decision-making processes. For education in crisis and emergencies, it is vital to strengthen the capacity of teachers, ensure universal design of learning environments and materials, and provide linkages between education services and other support services such as health and protection, as well as to assure that education provides a safe space. The success of this work depends on close collaboration between states, multilateral organisations, civil society organisations, organisations of persons with disabilities, and a wide range of partners.

ECW: Norway is a leading donor and key strategic partner of Education Cannot Wait. Why is investing in education in emergencies and protracted crises important for our world? And why is it important for the people of Norway? What message do you have for other potential donors, including the private sector, who are considering investing in education through ECW?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: Education is essential to live healthy and productive lives. We need to assure that all children get a quality education, also children affected by crisis and conflict situations. Assuring the right to a quality education is a basic principle for the welfare system in Norway, and we would like to contribute to assuring this fundamental human right elsewhere. We are not going to achieve SDG4 if we do not assure that children affected by climate crisis can continue their education. I am concerned about the crisis situation facing millions of children in Ukraine, and I am glad that ECW has recently launched a programme to support the children in the country.

Norway is glad to be a co-convener of Education Cannot Wait’s replenishment conference. I urge all donors and private sector to rally around, and contribute to, the replenishment conference.

ECW: COVID-19, brutal conflicts and other emergencies are pushing children’s mental health and well-being to the limits, as they live through the unspeakable trauma of war, displacement, gender-based violence and other grave violations. How can psychosocial support and mental health services be applied to protect children and accelerate our work to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: In emergency situations, education is definitely an important factor in the mental and physical protection of children and youth. Education can offer learners protection through a safe, stable environment in the midst of crisis, and help restore a sense of normality, dignity, and hope by providing routine and structured activities that help build children’s social and emotional skills. To assure education is included in humanitarian response, and to assure schools are protected from attack, has been a priority for Norway for many years. This is why the Safe Schools Declaration is so important. We encourage all states to endorse and implement the Safe Schools Declaration. 114 countries have endorsed the declaration so far. Norway also calls for the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2601 (2021).

Ensuring that mental health services and psychosocial support are included in primary health care is important, especially during and after humanitarian crisis. Mental health is one of the most neglected areas of health. Teachers must be given training on how to best support their students and that students are provided with psychosocial support and mental health services. In addition, it is important to remember that teachers might themselves be affected by the emergency and be traumatized and might therefore also need to receive adequate support to manage the situation.

ECW: You previously served as Norway’s State Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development. How can the Grand Bargain Agreement’s Localization Agenda help improve the delivery of education in the world’s worst humanitarian crises?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: Our government has as one of its priorities to improve coherence between humanitarian and development efforts and to contribute to sustainable solutions. In this regard, strengthening local and national capacity to respond to humanitarian and protracted crises is important and should be given priority. In order to protect education in emergency situations it is an important principle that schools should not be used for military purposes. It is important that people affected by a crisis should be able to participate in and influence decisions. With regards to the education sector this should include involving and listening to the perspectives of students, parents as well as teachers and other education staff. The role of national organizations must be acknowledged. Such organizations can, for instance, play an important role in advocating for the right to education and making sure that the voices of affected populations are heard. They know the situation on the ground best, and it is crucial to involve them I all processes.

ECW: An estimated 64 million crisis-impacted girls are being denied their right to continuous quality, inclusive education. Recent analysis indicates that as many as 20 million girls may never return to school due to COVID-19. Why must we ensure every girl on the planet has access to continued quality education? How can we ensure education continuity from early childhood education through university?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: First of all, education is a right – for all children and young people, regardless of their gender. We know that girls and women who have been in school live healthier lives, have higher incomes and can take better care of their children. Women who are educated also play a stronger political and economic role in their own societies. Therefore, ensuring that girls get an education is paramount; it is valuable for each and every girl but also for society. I am appalled by the current situation in Afghanistan where girls, after a certain age, are denied the chance to get a secondary education.

Education systems, from early childhood to university, must be inclusive, and they should provide education that is gender transformative and of good quality. In many countries, girls drop out when they reach adolescence. Girls are not always in charge of their own bodies, and they must learn about gender equality, rights and reproduction to be able to uphold their rights. That is why comprehensive sexuality education is a priority in Norway’s development policy. It is also important that policies and practices that are pushing girls out of school are removed, for instance when girls are prevented from attending school when they get pregnant or after giving birth.

ECW: Around the world, we are seeing how the climate crisis is triggering conflict, displacement and disrupting progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals. How can we better connect climate, education and sustainable development in most-affected regions, like the Sahel, where its impact is particularly strong?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: We are only beginning to fathom the impact of climate change. Extreme weather is increasing in severity and occurrence. Climate change and environmental degradation impact access and quality of education in numerous ways. Through increased migration, through poverty and though malnutrition; as well as through the direct impact on school infrastructure and supplies. In many contexts, girls and women are disproportionally affected by crisis and displacement. We must have a special focus on protection of girls and on girls’ education when addressing the impact of climate crisis.

Climate change not only affects education delivery. The relationship is also the other way around as education is of essence to climate change prevention and emergency preparedness. Quality education enables children and their families to make informed choices and to become part of the climate change solution. It is positive that Education Cannot Wait has, for instance, provided support to countries such as South Sudan, Somalia and Haiti, which have all been affected by natural disasters. We must also focus on the Sahel countries, where the impact of climate change is particularly strong. I believe education and climate change needs to be put higher up on the international agenda.

ECW: Our readers would like to know you a little better on a personal level and reading is a key component of education. Could you please share with us two or three books that have influenced you the most personally and/or professionally, and why you’d recommend them to other people to read?

Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim: I love reading. One of my favorite books is Growth of the Soil (Norwegian Markens Grøde). To me it’s a love song to nature and I truly love spending time outdoors when off work. The author, Knut Hamsun, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Another favorite is Ben Okri. I love everything he writes. If I was to highlight some of his writing I would choose the poem titled “A New Dream Of Politics.” Not only because it challenges us as politicians but also because it is a salute to idealism.

About Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim

Anne Beathe Tvinnereim is Norway’s Minister of International Development. The Minister of International Development is responsible for international development efforts in countries outside the OSCE, the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan. She is also responsible for development cooperation under the auspices of the UN system, the World Bank, the regional development banks and other global funds and programmes. In addition, she is Minister for Nordic Co-operation and responsible for Norad, Norec and Norfund. Learn More

A man photographs an apartment building that was heavily damaged during escalating conflict, in Kyiv, Ukraine. Credit: UNICEF/Anton Skyba for The Globe and Mail

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Apr 6 2022 (IPS)

Prime Minister Bennett’s “neutrality” in the Russian war against Ukraine is outrageous and contemptable. It runs contrary to every moral principle that Israel is supposed to stand and fight for. Bennett must join the Western alliance in opposing Putin — a merciless tyrant who is committing crimes against humanity and must pay for it

Righting the Wrong

One cannot help but feel outraged by the conduct of Israel’s PM Naftali Bennett. He, like millions of people around the world, is witnessing the unfolding horror of the Russian invasion of Ukraine but chooses to remain neutral. Neutral in the face of a shattered country that sought nothing but to be free, and neutral in the face of indiscriminate bombing raining death and destruction.

How can a prime minister of Israel remain neutral in the face of cities being reduced to ashes and millions of refugees petrified of what tomorrow will bring? As a father, how can he maintain absurd neutrality when children are dying in the arms of weeping mothers and helpless young girls cower in fear with no place to hide?

How can a devout man no less exhibit such sickening aloofness when he sees the wanton destruction of schools, hospitals, and institutions and the ruthless defiance of human rights, when ten million Ukrainians became refugees or internally displaced, and when so many innocents are on the verge of death from thirst and starvation?

One might ask, what does it mean to be neutral? If you are neutral, what does this really translate to in the context of the unspeakable crimes Putin is committing against innocent Ukrainian citizens?

In this case it simply means that while these crimes against humanity are happening in broad daylight, Bennett refuses to condemn the Russian butcher because of cold-blooded political calculations, which he justifies in the name of Israel’s national security.

Whether Bennett’s decision to assume neutrality is because he wanted to act as a credible interlocutor between Ukraine and Russia or because he wanted Russia’s continued cooperation in Syria to bomb Iranian military installations or because he wanted to elicit Russian support against a new Iran deal or a combination of all three, Bennet has gravely betrayed Israel’s founding moral principles.

Bennett’s absurd position of neutrality has profoundly disappointed Israel’s allies, especially the US, which is the only credible power that has committed itself to Israel’s national security, be that against Iran or any other foe. In light of what is happening we should examine Bennett’s reprehensible behavior from two perspectives: Israel’s moral standing, and Israel’s relations with the United States.

Israel’s moral standing: Can Israel, given that its founding is intertwined with the Jews’ long and troubled history, assume a neutral posture when war crimes of such magnitude are occurring for all to see? How can Bennett abandon Israel’s basic moral tenets presumably because of national security concerns over Iran’s nuclear weapons program?

By maintaining “neutrality,” Bennett is siding with a thug and a ruthless killer, who has become a pariah and war criminal who dishonors everyone who has not condemned him in the strongest terms.

When the Prime Minister of Israel does not rise to the fateful cry for help and do what is morally right by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel’s democratic allies and save the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, he is dangerously compromising the country’s international standing both on moral and political grounds.

With the indiscriminate bombardment, missile strikes, and drones killing thousands of people, the summary execution of civilians, and the flattening of whole cities, the invasion of Ukraine is itself a horrendous crime against a sovereign nation and a gross violation of international law.

Mass graves discovered in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, confirm that Russian forces have indeed committed war crimes. Civilians were executed with their hands bound and their bodies placed in shallow graves containing hundreds of bodies.

These war crimes are a further trespass against humanity, a compounding of Russia’s transgression of all that we hold dear and sacred – including the dignity of human life and the right to live free from violence, brutality, and cruelty.

With all that unfolding horror, Bennett still refuses to provide air defense systems to stop these atrocities. Indeed, by refusing to offer such systems which can intercept projectiles without killing Russian soldiers, which, understandably he wants to avoid, he has become indirectly complicit in the horrifying death and destruction.

Israel’s detractors rightfully raise the question: has the decades-long Israeli occupation and the harsh way the Palestinians are treated made Bennett so morally numb and apathetic to the growing tragedy of the Ukrainian people?

It is no wonder; Bennett was born only five years after the occupation began; to him and many others, the oppressive and cruel occupation is simply a natural phenomenon. Bennett and his followers should recall what the philosopher and theologian Abraham Heschel once said: “Who is a Jew? A person whose integrity decays when unmoved by the knowledge of wrong done to other people.”

Bennett must remember, politically or otherwise, Putin will vanish sooner or later, but Israel’s moral failure under his stewardship will haunt it for decades to come.

Israel’s relations with the United States: For Bennett to openly and repeatedly express total opposition to the US’ efforts to strike a new Iran deal, and by refusing to heed President Biden’s call to aid Ukraine militarily, Bennett has effectively defied the only significant power that is unshakably committed to Israel’s national security.

Although Biden made it abundantly clear that the US will never allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, Bennett asserted, like his predecessor, that Israel will act against Iran as it sees fit, as if Israel can take on Iran’s nuclear program entirely on its own, which is an illusion.

This is where Bennett has demonstrated acute shortsightedness. America stood by Israel through thick and thin and never wavered. As the philosopher Cornel West observed, “We have to recognize that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty…”

It is America, not Russia, that provided massive economic and military aid in the tens of billions of dollars over the last decade alone. It is America, not Russia, that shielded Israel politically on every international forum and vetoed scores of anti-Israel resolutions at the UNSC and neutralized any threat to its national security.

Bennett seems to forget that the US, not Russia, will come to Israel’s aid on every front when needed, especially if it became necessary to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Israel can never do alone with all that might imply. And finally, it is the US, not Russia, whose strategic alliance with Israel stood the test of time.

Thus, when Israel does not join the US in support of Ukraine in this desperate hour of need, Israel is opening itself to the questioning of its loyalty and strategic relevance to America when nearly all the democracies in the world stood by the US and mobilized their resources against Putin’s evil design.

The disaster which is being inflicted on Ukraine by Putin also raises the question as to whether Israel deserves better treatment from the US, especially now that it has rebuffed Biden’s call to aid Ukraine in a meaningful way to save lives.

Although the US continues to support Israel publicly, as Secretary of State Blinken recently expressed while visiting Israel, the Biden administration hopes that Bennett will change his mind by offering to help and coming on board with NATO and the EU.

Bennett must answer the desperate plea of Ukraine’s President Zelensky by providing air defense systems, such as the Iron Dome, to intercept the bombs and missiles that are turning Ukrainian cities into piles of rubble.

Bennett’s betrayal of Israel’s moral foundation because of cold-blooded political calculations will haunt him and leave him morally naked in the eyes of Israel’s friends and foes alike. Bennet must also realize that Israel’s fate is tied to America’s and the closer he ties it, the better it is for Israel.

There must be no daylight between them, especially in the way of dealing with Iran’s nuclear threat. That is where Israel’s ultimate security rests while still remaining strong to deter any enemy. This may well be Bennett’s last chance to redeem himself and put Israel on the right side of history.

The whole world is watching.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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This year’s World Health Day launched a new warning: more than 13 million deaths around the world each year are due to “avoidable environmental causes”. Credit: Bigstock

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)

While the world’s top scientists and experts continue their arduous work to finally submit to politicians at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (7-18 November 2022), a new alert now emerges: the climate crisis has already become the single biggest health threat to humankind.

But this new alert should be no surprise: it rather constitutes the logic, expected consequences of the more and more intensive pressure of the life-keeping and life-saving natural resources.

No wonder: there are too many chemicals, lead, mercury, microplastics and a long etcetera, poisoning the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the oceans, the soil, the forests, the indispensable biodiversity and now also the world’s large reserves of water in both the North and South Poles.

Several of these consequences are visible –though apparently unwanted to be seen: destructive floods, deadly droughts, unprecedented heatwaves, the Earth’s lungs are suffocated, biodiversity is lost. And there is an increased risk of new zoonotic diseases transmitted between animals and humans.

This year’s World Health Day, marked on 7 April, launched the new warning. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 13 million deaths around the world each year are due to “avoidable environmental causes.”

This includes the climate crisis which is “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.” “The climate crisis is also a health crisis.”

 

The impacts

The world body reminds of the following facts:

• Over 90% of people breathe unhealthy air resulting from burning fossil fuels.
• Polluted Planet increases diseases like cancer, asthma, heart disease.
• A heating world is seeing mosquitoes spread diseases farther and faster than ever before.
• Extreme weather events, land degradation and water scarcity are displacing people and affecting their health.
• Pollution and plastics are found at the bottom of our deepest oceans, the highest mountains, and have made their way into our food chain.
• Systems that produce highly processed, unhealthy foods and beverages are driving a wave of obesity, increasing cancer and heart disease while generating a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
• Floods can cause poisoning
• Climate change makes wildfires more likely
• Above 40 degrees, heat strokes might happen, causing organ failure and even death
• Wildfires can cause death and injury from suffocation.
• Wildfires can cause trauma impacts on mental health
• Climate change is making floods more dangerous
• Zoonotic diseases – those diseases that can spread between animals and people – continue to have major impacts on human health. Every year, nearly 60.000 people die from rabies, and other zoonotic diseases such as avian influenza, Ebola or Rift Valley fever constitute additional threats.

 

2 billion people lack safe drinking-water globally, and 3.6 billion people lack safe toilets. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

Half of humanity already lives in danger zone

In spite of these and other dangers, the world is visibly doing too little, not to say almost nothing. In fact, the goal to limit future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, highlighted in the Paris Agreement on climate change, and driven home in last November’s COP26, gathering in Glasgow, is now on “life support” and “in intensive care,” the UN chief told the Economist Sustainability Summit on 21 March 2022.

The United Nations’ Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted some of the progress made at COP 26 last year but pointing to “the enormous emissions gap” conceded that “the main problem was not solved – it was not even properly addressed.”

 

Worsening

According to current national commitments, however, global emissions are set to increase by almost 14 percent during the rest of the decade.  Last year alone, global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by six percent “to their highest levels in history,” Guterres said, as coal emissions surged “to record highs.”

With the planet warming by as much as 1.2 degrees, and where climate disasters have forced 30 million to flee their homes, Guterres warned: “We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.”

 

“This is madness”

If we do not want to “kiss 1.5 goodbye…we need to go to the source – the G20” (group of leading industrialised nations), the UN chief said.

Noting that developed and emerging G20 economies account for 80 percent of all global emissions, he drew attention to a high dependence on coal but underscored that “our planet can’t afford a climate blame game.”

“Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use,” Guterres insisted. “This is madness.”

As fossil fuels reliance continues to put the global economy and energy security at the mercy of geopolitical shocks and crises, “the timeline to cut emissions by 45 percent is extremely tight.”

 

No cure in sight

In spite of all the feasible remedies indicated by the world scientific community –and the visible effects of the ongoing climate emergency– there is no actual cure in sight.

 

See what is at stake:

Politicians subsidise fossil fuel with six trillion dollars in just one year. In fact, they have spent such a huge amount –six trillion US dollars– from taxpayers’ money to subsidise fossil fuels in just one year: 2020. And they are set to increase the figure to nearly seven trillion by 2025.

Moreover, governments will double the production of energy from these very same, highly dangerous, global warming generators.

Carbon dioxide is the single most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, accounting for approximately 66% of the warming effect on the climate, mainly because of fossil fuel combustion and cement production

There are more lethal gases and fewer, weaker sinks

With one million species endangered, the web of life is at risk of extinction

Half world’s population, exposed to floods, storms, tsunamis, by 2030

The “Kidneys of the Earth” Are Disappearing, as Wetlands, which are considered as a natural solution to the global threat of climate change. They absorb carbon dioxide, help slow global heating and reduce pollution, hence they are often referred to as the “Kidneys of the Earth”. Specifically, peatlands alone store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined

Projection indicate that there will be a severe water stress, absolute scarcity for 2 to 4 billion humans by 2025

Meanwhile, the too harmful march of salt and plastics continue unabated on world soils

And there is another major consequence: millions of humans are attempting to escape the devastating impact of the climate crisis, fleeing their homes as migrants and refugees. What would Europe, the US, do with one billion climate refugees?

 

Pandemics fueled by climate change

Should all the above not be enough, please also know that the World Health Organization has just launched a global bug-busting plan to prevent new pandemics, which are feared to be fueled by climate change.

The plan is aimed to stop the spread of common, mosquito-borne diseases – known as “arboviruses” – which threaten more than half the world’s population. And the main target of the initiative is four of the most common arboviruses: Dengue, Yellow fever, Chikungunya, and Zika.

The World Health Organization poses some sound questions: Are we able to reimagine a world where clean air, water and food are available to all? Where economies are focused on health and well-being? Where cities are liveable and people have control over their health and the health of the planet?

Up to you to judge!

Migrant encampment in the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Credit: Adam Isacson.

By Adam Isacson
WASHINGTON DC, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)

“The migrants try to organize themselves to stay safe,” a humanitarian worker told me as we stood near a town square in Reynosa, Mexico, steps away from the U.S. border. More than 2,000 people from many countries, blocked from asking for asylum in the United States, were packed into this square block, living under tents and tarps, amid port-a-potties and cooking fires. Children were everywhere.

“They move the women and children to tents closer to the center of the square, to protect them from kidnappers.” Many nights, men raid the square, guns drawn, taking people away and holding them for ransom under brutal conditions.

It was my fourth day of a mid-March visit to the Texas-Mexico border region, and my second day visiting Mexico’s easternmost border state, Tamaulipas. Part of me was beginning to wonder whether the United States’ border and migration policies were somehow being designed with input from the Mexican organized crime groups that prey on migrants. It would be hard to devise a system that benefits these “cartels” more than the current one does.

Part of me was beginning to wonder whether the United States’ border and migration policies were somehow being designed with input from the Mexican organized crime groups that prey on migrants. It would be hard to devise a system that benefits these “cartels” more than the current one does

Tamaulipas is a large state, bordering more than 200 miles of Texas from Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico. Of Mexico’s six border states, it is the only one to have a level-four “Do Not Travel” warning from the U.S. State Department, “due to crime and kidnapping.”

Two cartels, and smaller factions, fight frequent running gun battles with each other and with security forces—while also corrupting and penetrating government institutions so thoroughly that the population has long ceased to view them as protection.

Given all this, one might expect migrants to try and avoid Tamaulipas and its dangers. Though many do, for the past nine years this has been the busiest part of the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehends more migrants in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley (McAllen, Brownsville, and surrounding towns), across from most of Tamaulipas, than it does in any other of the nine sectors into which it divides the border.

As Texas dips down far to the south here, this is the closest point on the border to Central America, so the agency encounters tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans here each year, along with Mexicans displaced by violence elsewhere in the country.

Many are parents with children. I also met some of a growing number of migrants now coming from Colombia, Haiti, and Venezuela. The vast majority hope to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities and ask for a chance to petition for asylum in the United States, claiming threats to their lives if returned.

This is also a busy route for migration because Mexican organized crime has locked down the routes across the border. Those who can pay several-thousand-dollar fees, selling everything they own and borrowing the rest, cross with cartel-sanctioned smugglers. It’s a huge moneymaker for organized crime, and for the corrupt Mexican security and migration officials who get paid to look the other way.

I was struck by the level of control that organized crime has over the lives of residents, and especially of migrants, in the Tamaulipas border cities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros. Cold War-era East German officials would be impressed.

Nobody is allowed near the Rio Grande: riverfront parks sit empty. Those who try to cross without having paid a fee are beaten, or worse. Those who lack a “password” or other proof that they have paid cartels’ exorbitant fees are kidnapped.

Migrants, including parents and children, get held in fetid stash houses, while their captors text terrifying videos to relatives in the United States, instructing them to transfer ransom payments in the thousands of dollars. If nobody pays, they are disappeared, enslaved—forced to perform labor for the cartels—or even killed. Mexican security forces almost never come to the rescue.

In Nuevo Laredo, groups of kidnappers circulate in vehicles near the bridges from the United States, looking for recently removed migrants lacking the right “passwords,” whom they then kidnap. (Five days after my visit to Nuevo Laredo, Mexican soldiers arrested the cartel leader who had maximum control over the city’s criminal activity, unleashing days of mayhem with burning vehicles, shootouts, and grenades lobbed at the U.S. Consulate.)

In Matamoros, I asked whether “maybe 20 percent” of migrants waiting there had been kidnapped before. “Oh, it’s higher than that,” a humanitarian worker replied.

And every day, though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is aware of the dangers and the consequences, the U.S. government delivers more victims to the criminals. The “Title 42” pandemic policy, which the Trump administration launched in March 2020 and the Biden administration is prolonging until May 23, has expelled non-Mexican migrants into Tamaulipas roughly 250,000 times since Joe Biden’s inauguration, without giving them a chance to ask for asylum in the United States.

Mexican citizens were expelled into Tamaulipas 160,000 times during that period. To them, we must add 25,000 Mexican deportees, mostly migrants whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested in the U.S. interior.

After Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leaves them at the bridges, kidnappers are often waiting. Meanwhile, with the pretext of reducing COVID exposure, Title 42 closed the official border crossings to asylum seekers, making it impossible to exercise the right to ask for protection as laid out in U.S. and international law.

Those expelled, and the adults and children bottled up waiting for a chance to approach the ports of entry, are among the most vulnerable populations in the Western Hemisphere, and they’re just steps from the U.S. border. In February, researchers from the University of Texas estimated that roughly 9,500 people were waiting in Tamaulipas border cities for an opportunity to ask for protection in the United States.

Border-wide, Human Rights First has collected evidence of at least 9,886 cases of kidnappings, torture, rape, and other violent attacks on asylum seekers whom Title 42 has stranded since 2021. In Tamaulipas the count of abuses is greater than the statistics indicate, because the security situation makes data collection so difficult.

This is why it feels as though the current U.S. policy was designed to benefit the cartels. If migrants who fear return to their countries could safely cross Mexico, then report to a port of entry and have their cases processed, considered, and adjudicated as quickly as due process allows, the cartels’ business model would implode.

But instead, closing the ports of entry and delivering migrants to danger have created ideal incentives for that business model.

This vulnerable population can’t wait for the rule of law to arrive in Tamaulipas. The U.S. government must act to take the business away from the criminals preying on migrants. What it needs to do is already laid out in U.S. law. No new legislation is required.

Since 1980, U.S. immigration law has made clear that the official ports of entry are a proper place for asylum seekers to approach and express to CBP officers their fear of return to their countries. For more than two years, though, Title 42 made it impossible to approach a port of entry.

Once Title 42 ends in late May, asylum seekers must be able to come to a port of entry, not pay criminals’ “tolls” to cross the Rio Grande. Then they should be processed—checking backgrounds and health records, beginning asylum paperwork, evaluating the credibility of fear claims—in facilities with the space and manpower to do it quickly.

Robust alternatives-to-detention programs can keep people in the system. Years-long adjudication backlogs can be shrunk by adding asylum officers, and by rebuilding and rethinking the creaky immigration court system.

While working toward these reforms, the administration must immediately curtail unsafe removals of migrants, which enable violent abuse and provide money-making opportunities to organized crime. Deportations, expulsions, and other removals to border cities must minimize the likelihood of kidnapping.

That means avoiding removals at night, avoiding removals when no Mexican authorities are present, helping Mexican migrant shelters meet their needs including security, and avoiding “lateral” removals that send migrants into territory controlled by different criminal organizations.

Failing to take these steps will enrich cartels and feed terror, with Tamaulipas being the most extreme and riskiest example. Ending Title 42 and building up the sort of asylum process that our own laws envision isn’t just humane.

By draining away the profits along with the cruelty, it’s one of the smartest counter-organized crime strategies the U.S. government can pursue at its southern border.

 

Excerpt:

Adam Isacson is Director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America

Zimbabwe has been urged to invest in road safety including improving its poor road infrastructure. Credit: Busani Bafana/ IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)

When driving at night in Zimbabwe, watch out for a pair of eyes on the road and slow down. You may hit a giraffe inside a pothole. So goes an often-told joke.

It may be an unflattering hyperbole about the quality and safety of Zimbabwe’s roads, but it is not far from reality.

Zimbabwe’s roads are not famous for their aesthetics, nor quality and least of all, their safety. Last year more than 2000 people died on the country’s roads, and scores of others were injured.

About five people on average die every day in road crashes in Zimbabwe, according to a review report on the country’s road safety launched in January 2022. However, the World Health Organisation reckons the realistic figure is three times more.

The discrepancy may result from the government counting only deaths on the scene of the crash. In contrast, global practice counts deaths within 30 days after the crash, says Lee Randall, an occupational therapist and road safety researcher, explaining that many countries in Africa have poor statistical systems and do not generate timely and accurate crash data.

Zimbabwe’s road safety review, conducted by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in partnership with the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Road Safety, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the government, sought to reduce road crash deaths and injuries in the country.

High road crashes, a toll on the economy

Road traffic crash deaths in Zimbabwe rose by 34 percent between 2011 and 2019, while fatalities rose from 1 836 deaths in 2016 to an average of 2 000 deaths per year between 2017 and 2019, the report found. Bus drivers and passengers accounted for 50 percent of the fatalities.

Road crashes, blamed mainly on a combination of human error, poor road infrastructure and defective vehicles, take a toll on lives and the economy in terms of health care costs.

Launching the review, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Executive Secretary Vera Songwe noted that the cost of road crashes is heavy on the African economies, especially as they try to rebuild amidst the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Anything that takes away from Africa’s GDP growth becomes important because we need every bit of it to move forward better,” said Songwe. “The request by the Zimbabwe authority to review their transport and safety is encouraging given the dire road safety situation in the country but also the economic context that is very difficult.”

Research in 2018 by the Traffic Safety Council of Zimbabwe indicates that the country experiences an average of 40 000 road traffic crashes which cost about US$406 million annually, and these account for an estimated 3 percent of Zimbabwe’s GDP at $14 billion.

“Zimbabwe is the only one of the SADC countries that have called for this kind of road review and good for the government for doing it because it is a big step towards rectifying the situation of road crashes,” Randall told IPS. “It is a wake-up call to see these grim realities of road crashes for countries especially low- and middle-income countries where crashes consume a huge proportion of GDP that could instead be used for development and alleviating poverty.”

Even the Global Economy’s Survey rates Zimbabwe’s roads poorly with a score of 2.8 in 2019 compared to the world average for quality of roads based in 141 countries at 4.07 points.

After Cameroon, Ethiopia and Uganda, Zimbabwe is the fourth African country to launch a road safety performance review report that takes stock of progress in implementing the first United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020. The Second Decade of Action for Road Safety targets to reduce road traffic death and injuries by at least 50 percent by 2030.

Randall, who has researched widely on the bioethics of road safety, believes that road crashes should not be happening in the first place because most are avoidable and could be minimised with proper attention to the overall road traffic system.

Enforcement of road rules is critically important, and robust, well-resourced enforcement systems are important, but Randall said you cannot have traffic cops on every kilometre of every road every hour of every day.

“We have to appeal to our inner traffic cop, which is our moral sense that rests on a good level of insights into what the crash risks are and into human behaviour and literal training on what the laws are in a particular country. We need to drill road safety concepts into people at an early enough age to influence their behaviour in the road traffic system over their lifetimes,” said Randall. He is a founder of the Road Ethics Project, a non-profit company that engages people in ethical conversations and recognises individuals who have effectively contributed to reducing road crashes, injuries and deaths.

Second-hand cars and poor safety checks

Songwe also noted an increase in the importation of second-hand vehicles in Zimbabwe and other African countries, urging for a reduction in the importation of cars that are not up to standard that cost lives and are detrimental to economic development.

“As a continent, we need to take off importation of vehicles that are not up to standard that end up costing lives and are detrimental to economic development,” Songwe said.

Zimbabwe imports vehicles worth over $340 million annually, according to figures from the national data agency, Zimstat.

In 2021 Zimbabwe, through a Statutory Instrument, banned the importation of second-hand vehicles ten years and older. But that has not stopped the grey imports, which ordinary Zimbabweans can afford to drive, a sharp contrast to the top-end luxury vehicles government splurges on.

High deaths, low investment in road safety awareness

The review made several recommendations for Zimbabwe to improve road safety, noting that the country had the worst road crash mortality rates among its neighbours.

Jean Todt, United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Road Safety, said Zimbabwe could reverse its high crash deaths rate if it implemented the review report’s recommendations.

Todt said 90 percent of people and goods in Africa are moved by road and that transport and mobility can only be sustainable if it is safe. Africa has the highest road fatality rates per 100 000 people. Globally 1.3 million people are killed every year from road crashes, and over 50 million are injured.

It was recommended that Zimbabwe establish a road Crash Database and improve its statistical indicators and disaggregated data while implementing a post-Crash Care Response and Coordination System. Currently, Zimbabwe does not have a single national three-digit emergency call number to facilitate timely road crashes and response reporting.

The review report also recommended developing a 10-year national road safety strategy and action plan to improve road safety in Zimbabwe by 2030 and the establishment of a Road Safety Fund.

Speaking at the launch of the review report, Zimbabwe’s Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care, John Mangwiro, said the country was committed to road safety by implementing recommended actions, including opening a crash and emergency reporting institution.

Poor medical health systems had meant that many survivors of road crashes died when they reached hospitals owing to the lack of post-crash care.

The review had good news. Zimbabwe can accelerate road safety and reverse road crashes by investing in public education on road safety, implementing effective policies and improving the road system infrastructure.

On the road to better roads

Last year the government declared the country’s road network a state of disaster. It announced an allocation of $400 million to fund road rehabilitation and upgrading through the Emergency Roads Rehabilitation programme. The Zimbabwe government recently announced an ambitious road development plan to rehabilitate the country’s road network, which covers more than 78 000 km. Some of the roads are more than 30 years old.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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During the last couple of decades, the mountain gorilla population in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park has steadily increased to more than 400. Credit: UNEP / Kibuuka Mukisa

By Leslé Jansen
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)

On the battleground that has become African wildlife conservation, rural communities find themselves in the middle of a tug-of-war that is bound to the past on one side, and their future, on the other.

And judging from political developments in former colonial power, Britain, these communities – the custodians of wildlife in several southern African countries – are holding fast in their fight to secure a future in which the power to use their natural resources for their own good, rest firmly in their hands.

The UK government intends passing anti-hunting legislation containing a ban on British hunters bringing their trophies home. For African communities that rely on so-called trophy hunting as a major source of income, such bans not only undermine their right to sustainably use and manage their wildlife, which includes hunting, to their benefit but also threaten their livelihoods.

And there’s evidence, as in the case of Kenya, that they harm conservation as well.

According to reports, the government no longer intends to introduce its Animals Abroad Bill in the current parliamentary session, citing a lack of parliamentary time. Similar planned legislative restrictions in the United States, intended to undermine hunting tourism in Africa, have also failed to materialise. There also now appears to be legislation proposals with a similar objective in the making in Italy and Belgium.

The hunting trophy import ban represents a conflict between two distinct schools of thought on conservation. One is an approach supported by African governments’ policies and international conservation authorities, which holds up the sustainable use of natural resources practices by hundreds of communities across several African countries.

The other, which has become increasingly popular in western nations and urban areas where people no longer have a direct link to the natural environment, holds animal rights and welfare as paramount, even to the detriment of the rights and welfare of the people responsible for the conservation of that wildlife.

While the legislative attempts in the UK, US and possibly now Europe as well, aimed at curbing so-called trophy hunting in Africa might reflect current Western notions of animal rights, they are way out of touch with current African thinking, international conservation bodies and treaties.

This broader view takes cognisance of the key role that indigenous people and local communities play in conserving their environment, and how ignoring their rights and customs has contributed to our current environmental crisis.

Rights that have been won the hard way are not easily relinquished. Current African governments that have successfully overturned colonial laws in favour of their citizens can therefore be expected to strongly resist all attempts to undermine these policies.

In the field of conservation, these policies include recognising the rights of rural African communities to use their wildlife sustainably. Sustainable use includes developing wildlife-based industries – including hunting and photographic tourism – that links these communities with global, high-value markets for African wildlife.

Colonialism decimated traditional systems, which existed for centuries, in which African communities lived with wildlife and used it in sustainable ways. These people suddenly became poachers of animals that overnight were no longer their property to use freely anymore.

Restoring the rights of rural communities to their natural resources is by no means straightforward. Many communities have been displaced from their former territories and in some cases need to rebuild their social and cultural norms and learn to work within modern policy frameworks.

Traditional relationships with nature have been disrupted as a consequence of historical upheavals and modern urbanisation trends. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is therefore a journey that communities and southern African governments have embarked upon in post-colonial era, towards the future of African conservation. Given the complexities of modern-day Africa, this journey will not be short or easy.

These devolution of rights efforts were given a recent boost from the African Union’s human rights agency, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, in the form of Resolution 489, which calls on African states and non-state actors to both recognise and support the rights of local communities to manage and use their resources sustainably.

This resolution was taken within the context of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights that affirms the rights of all peoples to “freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources” (Article 21) and their right to “economic, social and cultural development with due regard to their freedom and identity” (Article 22).

This hand of support comes at a time when this concept is being threatened on many fronts. The Namibian CBNRM programme, as the most advanced of its kind on the continent, has become a special target for those who seem to prefer the former colonial methods of animal protection that were imposed on Africans.

Similarly, the proposed anti-hunting legislation in the UK and the US focused on animal protection, while ignoring the rights of local communities to practice their approach to conservation.

The over-emphasis on hunting caused by this ideological battle detracts from the real issues that need to be urgently addressed if conservation in Africa is to succeed. As expressed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on the status of the natural world and measures needed to safeguard it, world authority and the African Commission, local communities are in desperate need of support from all stakeholders, especially in the wake of COVID-19.

Rather than poking holes in community conservation efforts or trying to impose romanticised ideas about animals on people living with wildlife, time and money would be far better spent on finding solutions to the many challenges faced by rural people.

Ultimately, the future of African wildlife will be determined by African people – especially those living in rural areas. These communities have faced human rights abuses and marginalisation for decades, so it behoves all state and non-state actors to provide the kind of support they need to fully exercise their rights.

Further, none of these supporting stakeholders should dictate how these rights should be exercised, but rather create an enabling environment that allows for democratic, informed decision-making at the lowest possible levels of governance.

Rather than opposing African nations that have active hunting industries, global North could become true partners in African conservation by supporting community conservation efforts. While African states must heed the call of Resolution 489 by enacting and implementing their own community conservation policies, this would be easier if the UK, the US and other governments supported them in these endeavours.

Given the current environmental crisis and the history of colonialism in Africa, creating barriers to community-based conservation is both counter-productive and unjust. Despite its many detractors, African community conservation is here to stay.

The only question that external stakeholders must answer is: Are you willing to put aside ideology in order to support African communities conserve their wildlife for the good of us all?

Leslé Jansen is CEO of Resource Africa Southern Africa, an NGO that supports rural African community efforts to secure their rights to access and sustainably use their natural resources in order to sustain their livelihoods.

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By Menghestab Haile
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)

Food systems are under severe stress around the world now. The thresholds of tolerance are already exceeding limits with millions facing acute food and water scarcity throughout all continents. Over a quarter of Africa’s population are facing hunger and food insecurity. Conflict, droughts, flooding, rising unemployment, inequality, economic crises, and the impacts of Covid-19 pandemic have been ravaging the Continent on an unprecedented scale.

Menghestab Haile

In Southern Africa, the food systems are heavily dependent on traditional small holder farmers who are mostly women and old men and is largely reliant on rainfed agriculture which is highly vulnerable to climate change. These are compounded by very high youth unemployment and unfortunately the youth are not interested in working in agriculture in its current form.

Evidence points out that more than 50 million people are acutely food insecure, mostly women and children with 36 million of them in Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) 3 and 4. Weather extremes that disrupted recent growing seasons are again wreaking havoc. The last quarter of 2021 was one of the driest for 40 years in southern Madagascar, southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique, southern Angola, Namibia and most of Malawi. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s biggest hunger emergency, home to Africa’s largest population of IDPs and biggest source of refugees, a staggering 26 million children, women and men are acutely food insecure. The impact of the worst drought in four decades in Southern Angola has left 1.6 million in misery and destitution. In Mozambique 1.9 million are experiencing hunger and acute food needs. These statistics are based on the field assessments of international partners.

Rural and urban populations are equally affected. In Zimbabwe, severe poverty and food insecurity has increased in urban areas representing 2.4 million people or 42 percent of the urban population. There is an increase in internally displaced people within the region. In February this year we have witnessed how recurrent powerful storms have battered coastal areas on Madagascar and Mozambique causing dozens of fatalities, forcing hundred of thousands people from their homes, knocking out power and crippling other infrastructure. Added to these is recurring levels of acute and chronic malnutrition among children.

It has dawned upon us that there is a global food crises and supply chains are badly affected throughout continents. There is an awareness that food systems are interconnected between sectors- i.e, directly linked to energy supply (fuel, fertilizer), health, education, economy, water shortages, infrastructure, social services, climate adaptation and transportation. The Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGS) are challenged.

To address this unprecedented alarming situation, where needs are competing, this imperative must be addressed with focus on every continent equally. In the Southern Africa region we require immediate support to help the exhausted communities.

National governments are central to country both in humanitarian and development spheres. The best way is to support the government plans. This is the time to revisit and realign priorities with clearly defined goals. Strong political will and leadership are required. A combination of both international and national assistance should focus on supporting government priorities. Resources, both national and international are necessary. Impact can be better when International organizations, including UN agencies, regional financial and development institutions, together with NGOs commit to support national priorities with enhanced coordination and collaboration.

With a multi-dimensional and targeted approach gains can be achieved. The Southern Africa Development Agency (SADC) plays an important role both regionally and extending to the Continent. In this context, the African Union (AU) Heads of state has endorsed the outcomes of the Third Africa Rural Development Forum (ARDF-3) in Kinshasa held in January this year recognizing the imperative for a multi-dimensional and a holistic food systems approach. The Region is endowed with vast lands and water resources for agriculture and other natural resources. With urgent investments good gains can be realized in the immediate term in food production. In the medium to longer term, with climate adaptation and support to resilience building activities, there is hope for recovery and stability.

Prosperity and progress will show their full faces when the dignity of women, children and the youth, together with other vulnerable is recognized and accorded due place in the society. Development will be meaningful when their roles are accommodated into every activity. The future generation needs to be well nourished, preserved in an integrated and inclusive way.

Advocacy and a holistic engagement are the requirements to address hunger, food insecurity and nutrition with the provision of evidence based data and information in the Southern Africa region. Technical support to data collection and analysis through the use of latest technologies and tools will ensure evidence driven decision making. Strong political will can help formulate appropriate policies and programs that create conducive environment for development. Innovative solutions can be developed through South South collaboration building on good practices and with the support of development partners.

There is certainly hope in overcoming the current situation in the region by strengthening the nexus between humanitarian and development. To attain results a “Culture of Cooperation” must be forged.

Dr. Menghestab Haile, is the Regional Director for the Southern Africa Region for the UN World Food Programme. With a background in meteorology, Dr. Haile has been integrating climate and weather analysis into food security systems in many parts of the world.

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 5 2022 (IPS)

The world is sailing into a perfect storm as key leaders seem intent on threatening more war, albeit while proclaiming the noblest of intentions. By doing so, they block international cooperation to create conditions for sustainable peace and shared prosperity for all.

Anis Chowdhury

Monetarist counter-revolution
The 1970s saw Milton Friedman disciples’ monetarist counter revolution blaming stagflation on ostensibly Keynesian economic policies. In 1974, Nixon replacement President Gerald Ford declared inflation “public enemy number one” and US “determination to whip inflation”.

Monetarists wanted tighter monetary policies to fight inflation. Curbing rising prices was deemed urgent, even though it would increase joblessness. They advocated abandoning expansionary fiscal measures for more growth and jobs.

But US Federal Reserve Bank chair Arthur Burns still considered ensuring full employment his top priority. For Burns, addressing inflation ‘head-on’ – as urged by his detractors – was too costly for the economy and people’s wellbeing.

Nevertheless, the monetarist ascendance was confirmed when the 1946 Employment Act was replaced. The successor 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act is better known as the Humphrey-Hawkins Act for its sponsors, including the Democrats’ 1968 presidential nominee.

In early 1980, Burns’ Fed chair successor, Paul Volcker insisted, “[M]y basic philosophy is over time we have no choice but to deal with the inflationary situation because over time inflation and the unemployment rate go together.… Isn’t that the lesson of the 1970s?”

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Thus, ‘fight inflation first’ became the clarion call in 1980. This was the pretext for sharply raising US interest rates, while claiming that reducing inflation would somehow eventually create many more jobs. The UK and many other industrial countries followed, deepening recessions and raising unemployment.

By post-1950s’ Western standards, the 1980s saw very high unemployment. Unemployment in rich developed OECD countries averaged 7.3% during 1980-89, compared to just under 5% during 1974-79, and under 3% during the 1960s.

Debt crises, lost decades
The sharp US interest rate spike triggered debt crises in Poland, Latin America and elsewhere in the early 1980s. Earlier, US commercial banks had enjoyed windfall gains following the two oil price spikes in the 1970s.

The US government had long provided concessional low interest rate loans to allies to secure support during the Cold War. Flush with deposits from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members in the 1970s, they pushed loans to borrowing governments, many in Latin America.

With the interest rate spikes, borrowing countries suddenly faced liquidity crises, also creating systemic risks for their US and UK bankers. Successive US Treasury Secretaries, James Baker and Nicholas Brady, came up with various debt restructuring schemes to contain the problem, with the latter adopted.

Meanwhile, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank financial support was tied to short-term stabilization programmes and medium-term liberalizing reforms, packaged as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) with explicit policy conditionalities.

The liquidity crises were due to the sudden sharp interest rate increases. But instead, these were portrayed as solvency crises stemming from weak ‘economic fundamentals’, blamed on ‘over regulation’ and protectionism.

Although African countries were generally not able to borrow as much, they too faced problems as commodity prices collapsed with the growth slowdowns. Many were forced to seek financial support from the IMF and World Bank, and thus obliged to implement SAPs as well.

The liberalizing and deregulating SAP reforms were supposed to usher in rapid growth. Instead, however, both Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa experienced “lost decades of development”.

Stagflation in Europe
Stagflation in our times is expected to be initially most severe in Europe. This has been caricatured as fighting for Ukraine until ‘the last European’ as it bears the brunt of NATO imposed sanctions on Russia. Besides oil and gas, they will pay more for imported wheat, fertilizers and other Russian exports.

But other economic trends will likely make things worse. First, some rich economies – particularly the UK and the US – are weaker now, having lost much of their manufacturing edge. Others have been experiencing declines in productivity growth since the mid-1970s.

Second, low wages – due to labour market deregulation and ‘off-shoring’, i.e., relocating production abroad – have meant less productive activities have survived. Very low interest rates – due to ‘unconventional’ monetary policies since the 2008-09 global financial crisis – have allowed unviable ‘zombie’ enterprises to stay alive.

Third, the declining labour income share has increased income inequalities, lowering aggregate demand. But demand has been sustained by rising household debt. Low, if not negative real interest rates have also encouraged more corporate debt, but with less used for productive new investments.

Fourth, the pandemic has raised all types of debt – household, corporate and government – to record levels. Fifth, countries, especially smaller ones, are now far more internationally integrated – via trade and finance – than in the 1970s.

Therefore, small interest rate increases can have devastatingly large impacts on household, corporate and government finances. Advanced countries are thus likely to see severe economic contractions and rising unemployment.

Meanwhile, more racism and intolerance in recent decades show little sign of receding. Worse, these are likely to worsen as political elites compete in the ethno-populist league to blame Others for their problems. The recent European decision to privilege Ukrainian refugees is a poignant reminder of what is in store.

But impacts on developing countries are likely to be far worse due to capital outflows, declining development finance and aid, as well as slowing world trade after decades of globalization. Increasing inequality since the 1980s and declining growth since 2014 – now worsened by the pandemic – will not help.

Thus, instead of striving to ensure sustainable peace, necessary to improve conditions for all, the world seems set for sustained conflict. This has involved easy resort to sanctions, namely war by economic siege, hurting all. We all thus risk the prospect of mutual destruction instead of shared prosperity for all.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Shyam Khadka
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Apr 4 2022 (IPS)

India began its journey as an independent nation in 1947 with fresh memory of the Bengal Famine of 1943 which claimed 1.5 to 3 million lives. Against this backdrop, the First Five Year Plan (1951-56) prioritized agriculture which, however, shifted to heavily industrialization in the second Plan.

Shyam Khadka

The mid-1960s was a difficult time when consecutive droughts hit food production and India had to import about 11 million metric ton (MMT) of wheat per year – about 15% of its domestic food grain production – under US Public Law 480. With the availability of high yielding miracle seeds of wheat and rice accompanied by increasing use of chemical fertilisers, provision of minimum support price (MSP) for rice and wheat, expansion in irrigated area, and gradual mechanization of farms, Indian agri-food system fortunately took a definitive positive turn beginning late 1960s. As a result, India has become the largest producer of milk (187.7 MMT in 2019-20) and cotton (37.5 million bales in 2019-20) and the second largest producer of rice (117.5 MMT in 2019-20) and wheat (106.2 MMT in 2019-20), fruits (97.97 MMT in 2018-19) and vegetables (183.17 MMT in 2018-19). India today is not only food self-sufficient but also a net exporter of agricultural produce. In short, the success of Indian agriculture in last six decades has been nothing less than spectacular.

The success, however, has come with significant costs. The resource intensification that the Green Revolution requires has adversely affected natural resources and environment. India pumped 245 million cubic meters – about 25 percent of total groundwater withdrawn globally – for irrigation in 2011. As a result, ground water in 1,034 blocks (16% of total blocks) are over-exploited. Worse, ground water table has become critical in 4% and semi-critical in 10% of the blocks. Similarly, some 37% of land area in the country (120.4 mn ha) is affected by various types of land degradation. Subsidy policy-induced non-judicious use of fertilizers has led to the chemicalization of soil and pollution of water through leaching and run-off. Despite abundant supply of food grains, in 2020 41.7% of under-5 children suffered from stunting. India is home to 208.6 million – or over a quarter – of world’s undernourished people. Other challenges that Indian agriculture faces today include uneven regional growth, rising fiscal constraints, mounting and unsustainable level of subsidies, small holding size and further fragmentation of holdings and accompanying land tenurial issues, and low resource use efficiency, particularly of water. These factors act as serious impediments for sustained agricultural growth and farmers’ livelihoods.

Amidst the success and emerging challenges NITI Aayog, the apex public policy think tank of the Government of India and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) decided to facilitate a national dialogue among key stakeholders including government agencies, academia, civil society organisations, farmers, private sector, international organizations, media and others to articulate a vision for 2030 and pathways for the remandating of agriculture in India. To this end, 10 thematic papers were commissioned from distinguished professionals. A 3-day national dialogue entitled, ‘Indian Agriculture Towards 2030: Pathways for enhancing Farmers’ Income, Nutritional Security and Sustainable Food and Farm Systems” was held in January 2021. NITI Aayog and FAO have now come up with a publication with the same title (Chand, R., Joshi, P, and Khadka, S., Editors (2022), Springer).

In addition to the challenges enumerated above the books also deals with issues of climate change and its impact on agricultural production and farmers’ incomes and the strategies to mitigate such change; growing incidence of pests, pandemics, and transboundary diseases and threat to biosecurity affecting agricultural production; and alternative farming systems for transformative and sustainable agroecology and biodiverse future. The role of science, technology and innovation is identified as key to sustainable and resilient agriculture. Similarly, role of structural reforms and governance are discussed in detail and the role of price policies, market reforms and institutions are being highlighted for an efficient, inclusive and sustainable agriculture.

The National Dialogue identified pathways for transformation with emphasis on remandating Indian agriculture in a way that makes it more productive, efficient, resilient, resource conserving, nutrition centered and globally focused. These transformational outcomes are to be achieved by focusing on following pathways:

• Increasing investment in agriculture, first to reverse the declining trend and then achieving ‘efficient’ growth rather than growth alone, increased adoption of improved technology, reorienting agricultural science, technology and innovations, applying digital solutions and artificial intelligence, better use of information and communication technology, application of One Health concept;
• Making Indian agriculture globally-focused, shifting attention from self-sufficiency to adding value through increased processing and achieving a high rate of export growth
• Enhancing the efficiency of the water and other resources, mainly by correcting distorted water pricing, adopting water conserving technologies and agro-ecological approach, changes in the cropping pattern, and reversing neglect of rainfed areas;
• Making agriculture climate resilient, by adopting several no-regret technological and institutional options as well as by undertaking more targeted research, use of big data analytics, and adoption of a science-based and green growth approach;
• Tackling nutrition and food safety, by diversifying diet, reducing post-harvest losses, encouraging bio-fortifications, empowering women, enforcing food safety standards, improving water sanitation and hygiene, and promoting food safety awareness and nutrition education;
• Focusing sharply on innovations, incentives and institutions that contribute to enhance productivity, enhance resilience to climate change, incentivize water and energy conservation, and by adopting more conducive regulatory environment such as for exploiting ground water; and
• Adopting appropriate policies and improving governance such as by reducing distortion caused by the MSP, accelerating rural infrastructure creation, ensuring greater engagement of the state governments, enhancing access to credit and extension services, and expansion of contract farming.

As emphasised by Honourable M. Venkaiah Naidu, Vice-President of India in his foreword, the book ‘provides a sound basis for reflection because they distil important lessons and present an array of policy options for the government to choose from’.

Shyam Khadka is a former senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations who served as representative in India (2015-18) and was Senior Portfolio Manager in United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (1997-2014). An international development professional, Khadka works on policies, programs and projects that aim at developing agriculture, ensuring food security, and reducing poverty globally.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Brasil Biofuels' biodiesel plant in Envira, Amazonas state. The company foresees investments of 1.8 billion reals in a biorefinery in Manaus that will begin production in 2025 (Image: Brasil BioFuels)

By Monica Prestes
MANAUS, Brazil, Apr 4 2022 (IPS)

Oil palm, known as dendezeiro in Brazil, can produce up to ten times more vegetable oil per hectare than other crops, but it is regularly condemned as harmful to the biodiversity of tropical forests in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Now, its cultivation looks set to advance in the Brazilian Amazon.

In December, Brasil BioFuels (BBF) and Vibra Energia – the country’s largest distributor of biofuels – announced plans to build a biorefinery for “green diesel” in Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas state. Produced from soybean and/or palm oil, the fuel is seen by many as desirable for low-carbon futures, as it is less polluting than fossil-based diesel.

“This is the crop with the most devastating potential in the world being implemented in the heart of the world’s largest tropical forest,”

Lucas Ferrante, researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research


The refinery is currently in the study phase, and is still without an environmental license or deadline to start construction. But with planned investments of 1.8 billion reais (US$378 million) and a start of operations in 2025, the venture could produce up to 500 million litres of diesel per year.

To reach this volume of production, BBF plans to plant 120,000 hectares of oil palm by 2026, in areas yet to be defined. This would increase the area devoted to oil palm in Brazil by about 60%, with the crop used in a variety of consumer products already occupying 201,000 hectares in the country, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Brazilian law states that oil palm should only be cultivated in areas that were deforested before 2007. BBF’s president, Milton Steagall has assured that the crop already follows these sustainable standards, and also contributes to carbon sequestration in previously degraded areas.

“Oil palm does not occupy forest space. We are talking about areas that were ‘anthropised’ before 2007, and which would be difficult to recover, because frequently they have already turned into pasture,” Steagall told Diálogo Chino. “We take degraded areas and make a perennial crop, which is not mechanised, does not require much fertiliser, and produces for 35 years.”

Steagall added that the refinery will help to power 20 thermoelectric plants in operation and another 14 being planned in the Amazon. For this reason, he said, it will be vital to offer a source of clean energy to the region’s thermoelectric plants, which currently operate with fossil diesel.

However, researchers and environmentalists have criticised the expansion of infrastructure for the production of palm oil in the Amazon.

“This is the crop with the most devastating potential in the world being implemented in the heart of the world’s largest tropical forest,” said Lucas Ferrante, a researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA). He described oil palm as “a proven predatory crop, which causes enormous loss of biodiversity”.

There are multiple impacts that the advance of oil palm plantations can have on tropical forests – which have mainly been seen in the palm hotspot of Southeast Asia, where habitat loss has put at least 193 species at risk of extinction. And according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, only 15% of species that inhabit tropical forests can survive in oil palm plantations.

 

Palm oil in Brazil goes against the world

In 2010, the Brazilian government launched the Sustainable Palm Oil Production Programme with the expectation of leveraging Brazilian production and developing in the Amazon region, but the programme has not taken off. Less than 3% of Brazil’s biodiesel today comes from oil palm, according to the National Petroleum Agency.

Palm oil uses

From soaps to margarine and biofuels, palm oil is used in almost everything, including in the generation of the electrical energy we use. It is the world's most widely used oilseed product
Even though more than 90% of the crop’s planting is in the states of the Amazon, it has not brought the expected benefits to the region, partly due to the weak action of environmental agencies, says Carlos Rittl, a specialist in public policies from the Rainforest Foundation.

“There is no way to fulfil the commitment of only producing in an already deforested area without governance, without control and without enforcement of environmental laws,” says Rittl, reinforcing that, even though oil palm contributes to sequestering carbon by replacing degraded pastures, it stimulates new deforestation. “Oil palm is pressuring cattle ranching into new areas of native forest,” he adds.

This is occuring, Rittl recalls, amid the ongoing dismantling of environmental protection agencies in Brazil and successive record years for deforestation and invasions of protected areas. Between 2019 to 2021, the average annual deforestation in the Amazon was 56.6% higher than the 2016 to 2018 period.

Although palm oil has little share in Brazil’s fuel matrix and it is not even self-sufficient in that it requires imported oil. Cultivation of oil palm has almost doubled in the last decade in the country, according to IBGE, driven by fiscal stimuli that helped attract agribusinesses to the Amazon.

But while Brazil invests in oil palm to target biofuel and energy markets, growing international pressures are leading two major buyers – Europe and the United States – to discuss import barriers.

The EU also hopes to eliminate palm oil-based fuels by 2030 – five years after the Brazilian refinery goes into operation – while Germany has announced the end of the use of palm oil for the production of biofuels as of 2023.

In China, there are discussions aimed at reducing the import of palm oil without certification, says Rittl. The certification body, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), has been working to reduce the environmental impact of the country’s procurement, as it is also a major importer.

“If we have an expansion of production in Brazil beyond domestic use, there will soon be no room in the market,” says Rittl.

 

Expropriation of land for oil palm plantations in quilombola communities has generated conlfict (Image: Negritar Produções)

 

Palm oil impacts on traditional Amazon communities

The advance of palm oil has already had negative impacts on traditional communities in the Amazon, according to André Carvalho, a professor at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA). “Studies confirm the almost complete loss of character of the way of life in the region, food insecurity, besides the expropriation of land and violence in the field, including murders,” he told Diálogo Chino.

Did you know...?

Brazil is the world's tenth largest palm oil producer. In Latin America, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador are also major producers. 11 companies account for Brazil's production
This is the case for Acará, a municipality in the northeast of Pará state, where Afro-Brazilian quilombola communities claim an area from which they say they were expropriated by Agropalma, a palm oil producer with RSPO certification.

José Joaquim Pimenta, president of the association that brings together six quilombola communities, said that the expropriation occurred more than three decades ago. At first, Agropalma’s expansion occurred “on a small scale”, Pimenta says, through land purchase. But starting in 1987, the company acquired a farm and went beyond the limits of the property.

Pimenta says the company “invaded traditional territories, initiating grilagem [land grabbing]. Between 1987 and 1990, it cut down a very large natural reserve area to plant oil palm.” In 2015, the legal fight to return to these areas began.

In 2018, the Federal Court suspended the registration of two Agropalma farms on suspicion of illegal occupation, falsification of documents and notary fraud, following a request from the State Public Ministry of Pará (MPE-PA).

Agropalma argued that the lands were “acquired in good faith”. After the Federal Court confirmed the irregularities, the company said it “did not oppose the court decision to cancel the registrations” and is waiting for the land title to be regularised.

However, even with the registrations suspended, Agropalma continues to occupy the area, and conflicts with the quilombolas have been intensifying. “Recently, we have been prevented by Agropalma from accessing part of the forest, stretches of the Acará river where we used to fish, and even cemeteries where our ancestors are found,” says Pimenta.

In February, the restrictions “almost led to a confrontation” against armed Agropalma security guards, Pimenta says. At the time, quilombolas were camping in the disputed area as a protest against the company’s failure to comply with a recommendation by the MPE-PA to allow access to the site. Human rights organisations have been trying to mediate the dialogue between them.

 

Quilombola communities are resisting the encroachment of oil palm plantations onto their territories (Image: Joaquim Pimenta)

 

Oil palm reduces Amazon biodiversity

Oil palm already brings harmful consequences to biodiversity in the Amazon. Alexander Lees, a researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University, is one of the authors of a paper warning of the loss of bird habitat in the municipalities of Moju and Tailândia, in northeast Pará, where there are extensive oil palm plantations.

“Oil palm is an extremely predatory crop for Amazonian biodiversity,” Lees told Diálogo Chino. “While in primary forest, we easily find more than 300 species of birds, in the midst of oil palm this number is around 20. It is even lower than in pastures.”

Incompatible with family-based agriculture, the palm also ends up competing with subsistence crops such as cassava, an important source of income for small farmers, according to Auristela Castro, researcher at the Federal University of West Pará. She explains that oil palm generates “an atmosphere of uncertainties and threats” to the quality of life of small farmers.

“Oil palm production practices are still far short of the pillars of social equity and environmental sustainability,” adds Castro.

Asked about the environmental impacts and the intensifying land disputes related to palm oil, Steagall replied that the company seeks to “respect the rules and plant only within the zoning areas [intended for oil palm]”.

 

Palm oil or renewable energy

Despite palm oil’s high yield per hectare, and even though it guarantees a cleaner fuel than those from fossil sources, Lees believes that the best way forward is to reduce its demand in the market. “Exchanging fossil fuels for biodiesel in thermoelectric plants and cars is very good, but even better would be to replace thermoelectric plants for solar and wind energy, replace cars for bicycles and electric buses,” he says.

The researcher adds that replacing palm oil for others derived from vegetables would not solve the deforestation problem. This is because the production of a tonne of palm oil requires 0.26 hectares of land. Though this is less than for soybean oil, for example, which demands at least two hectares, according to a WWF survey, it is not insignificant.

Carlos Rittl agrees that it is necessary to prioritise renewable sources over thermoelectric plants, currently the main end use of palm oil from the Amazon. For him, photovoltaic energy is the best bet for Brazil: “In 2025, it will be the cheapest energy in the world.”

 

This article was originally published by ChinaDialogue

Pooja Shukla may have lost an election, but the 25-year-old activist is determined to ensure the poor are catered for and women are protected. Credit: Mehru Jaffer/ IPS

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, India, Apr 4 2022 (IPS)

Pooja Shukla, 25, a socialist candidate, has lost her maiden elections to the provincial parliament in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India. But Shukla is no loser.

A day after the results were announced on March 10, Shukla was back to a rousing reception in her constituency in North Lucknow to thank her supporters for polling 1,04,527 votes for her.

She was with the people again on March 18 on Holi, the festival of colour held annually to celebrate the end of winter and in anticipation of new beginnings.

Shukla told the IPS that she was hoping to win. Of course, she is disappointed, but electoral defeat would not stop her from continuing her struggle to get economic and social justice for the people of her constituency.

Although Shukla belongs to the upper caste community of Brahmins, she has worked hard to develop a personal connection with a cross-section of those who live in North Lucknow, one of the city’s nine constituencies. Lucknow is the capital of UP, the country’s largest, but economically and socially, it is one of its least developed states. More than 400,000 voters are registered in North Lucknow, nearly half of whom are impoverished women.

The constituency is home to Muslims, upper-caste Hindus and thousands of impoverished people belonging to communities who have been living for decades in makeshift shanties, often on the bank of open drains. Some are daily wage earners, and others are without paid work.

Shukla won hearts because she has knocked on every door in North Lucknow and continues to spend time with citizens.

“I have visited every single home in every single neighbourhood in North Lucknow. I will continue to do so as I really care for members of all communities that reside within my constituency,” Shukla adds.

This first-time contestant had faced Dr Neeraj Bora, a seasoned politician from the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing party. Despite the formidable challenge, Shukla was leading on the day the votes were counted. She was ahead before her rival finally defeated her by 33,985 votes until noon.

Out of 403 seats in the UP-state parliament, the socialists won 111 seats. The Samajwadi Party (SP) of socialists came a distant second to BJP’s 255 seats, but the party has emerged as the largest opposition party in UP.

This was a golden opportunity to strengthen democracy by converting the numbers won by the SP into a viable opposition to the ruling party, Shukla believes. A well-meaning, vocal opposition is needed, she says, when the ruling party seems to want to wash its hands of all its social responsibility in favour of outsourcing businesses and privatising even essential services like education, health, and employment opportunities.

“Democratic values strengthen when the opposition to the ruling party is strong,” says Shukla, who believes that elections are held to elect representatives who will provide affordable homes, education, and health facilities to voters.

Shukla feels that socially conscious people don’t have to be Marxists to dream of justice in society. The desire to want to see all citizens cared for fairly and equally by the state is a desire of all decent human beings.

Shukla was the youngest candidate in the polls, nursing a constituency that is a sprawling, chaotic cluster of college campuses, traffic jams, markets spilling from every corner and rows of slums with open drains that overflow and swallow up lives during rainfall.

Her dream is to invite educationists to open model public schools for the majority of the poor people in her constituency. She wants low-cost houses for the poor and free health services. She says that time is on her side. She will find many more opportunities to contest elections.

“To win elections is important for me as I want to be a lawmaker and make sure that people-friendly legislation is passed in parliament to protect the interest of the most vulnerable in the country,” Shukla says.

Until she makes it to parliament, she plans to work tirelessly to raise literacy in her constituency and lower the poverty rate. She wants clean drinking water, cleaner drains, and better roads. Women’s safety is her priority, as is a regular and fair wage for the many communities of artisans like potters and weavers.

Shukla has witnessed the police lathi-charge citizens who dared to ask the government for jobs. Social activists have been jailed, kicked around, and beaten in lockdown for participating in protests and questioning the government in UP. There are countless incidents of gruesome crimes perpetrated against women.

Most political parties want women’s votes but are reluctant to share power with them. Therefore, politics in UP today is a constant struggle for any woman who joins the male-dominated world of politics. Shukla’s biggest strength is her belief in herself.

The daughter of a small property dealer, Shukla, learnt to be fearless from Beena, her mother. At first, Beena wanted her to marry a suitable Brahmin boy. However, the constant cry to marry died down after she decided to contest the elections.

Her parents suggested that Shukla choose a more respectable profession like teaching instead. The parents were pained when she was jailed in 2019, and countless criminal cases were filed against her for participating in street demonstrations.

Shukla is the eldest of three sisters, and she feels responsible for her siblings. The family reminded her she was a role model, but she refused to give up her politics. Her determination to remain engaged in public life is less frowned upon now. At least her immediate family members and neighbours are supportive. She is no longer considered a black sheep within the Brahmin community that sees itself as exceptionally respectable.

Shukla has been in the limelight since 2017 when she and fellow students waved black flags at the motor convoy of those in power. She was part of a group of students protesting against the use of Lucknow University funds for a political party event.

She was angry when jailed for protesting peacefully. After 20 days in jail, the University refused her admission for postgraduate studies. Shukla started a hunger strike and forced the University to allow all the students to continue their studies.

Today she is a youth icon. She has emerged as a leader and a role model not just for her siblings but for thousands of other youngsters, students, women and some male members of society.

Shukla says that she stands for a democratic, secular and inclusive India. How will she realise her dream in the cutthroat political culture where all that matters is power and money?

There is no substitute for commitment and hard work, she says with a smile.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Students eating lunch at Shivbhawani Primary School, Deulekh, Bajhang, Nepal. Credit: Marty Logan

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Apr 4 2022 (IPS)

When Canada and Nepal are used in the same sentence it’s usually because the former is supporting development efforts in the latter. Not when it comes to feeding children at school.

Worldwide 388 million students, or 1 in 2 schoolchildren, received at least one meal or snack per day at school before the COVID-19 pandemic in what the World Food Programme (WFP), quoting the World Bank, calls the world’s “most extensive social safety net.”

When Covid-19 hit and schools shut their doors, roughly 370 million students in 161 countries went without education and a meal or snack, “suddenly deprived of what was for many their main meal of the day”

Nepal is in a unique position because it is poised to completely take over school feeding from the WFP, which still serves some remote areas of the South Asian country, by 2024. Canada is also being watched because it is just now taking steps to create a centrally-managed programme, the last G7 country to do so, to buttress current patchwork provincial initiatives.

Motivations for governments to launch school feeding programmes vary, but are not solely linked to socioeconomic status, says Donald Bundy, Professor of Epidemiology and Development and Director of the Global Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.

“Nearly all countries view the programmes as providing a safety net for the most in need,” writes Bundy in response to email questions. “Many view the programmes as contributing to the creation of good health and education, and thus human capital. A substantial group recognize the local economic value to the agricultural sector. A small but increasing number view the contribution to environmental sustainability as important.”

When Covid-19 hit and schools shut their doors, roughly 370 million students in 161 countries went without education and a meal or snack, “suddenly deprived of what was for many their main meal of the day” says WFP’s report State of School Feeding Worldwide, 2020.

In response, governments, development agencies, donors, academia, the private sector, UN agencies and civil society organizations launched the global School Meals Coalition. Its main goals are to restore by 2023 the school feeding programmes lost worldwide because of the pandemic and, by 2030, to launch new ones to feed the 73 million students globally who lacked school meals before Covid-19.

So far, 60+ countries have joined the coalition, including Nepal but not Canada. Its success will depend on the choices that governments make, says Bundy. “Since Covid has affected economies, there has been a contraction of fiscal space which makes getting back to the original situation more difficult… It would seem that countries are prioritizing this investment in their future generations, as indicated by the creation of the coalition, but this has yet to be seen in practice.”

Nepal demonstrated its commitment to school feeding before Covid-19. From 2017 to 2020 the school meals budget almost quadrupled (from $20 million to nearly $70 million), and external funding fell from $4.2 million to $2.8 million in 2020), according to the WFP report.

 

Lunch time at Janajagriti Basic School in Dhangadhi, Nepal. Credit: Marty Logan

 

Interestingly, there have been no evaluations in Nepal of the impact of school feeding on students’ nutritional status, says WFP. The country’s School Sector Development Plan (2016-2022) calls for “midday meals in schools to reduce short term hunger among schoolchildren, and address micronutrient deficiencies through multi-fortified foods and diversifying the food basket, including with fresh and locally produced foods.”

While Nepal has drastically cut malnutrition in children under five in recent decades, progress has slowed in the past few years. For example, the 36% rate for stunting (too short for age) in 2016 was greater than the developing country average of 25% and the Asia average of 21.8%.

Today the government’s diya khaja (midday meal) programme covers 71 of 77 districts and WFP is scheduled to hand over operations in the remaining districts (which are already co-funded by Kathmandu) by 2024.

While media reports highlight examples of problems, such as schools handing out dry food to students instead of cooking a hot meal and possible corruption in handling money, reactions at schools recently visited in Nepal’s Far West Province were mainly positive. Officials, teachers and parents stressed attendance had risen, and that pupils were remaining for the entire school day instead of leaving for lunch and staying at home.

Ten local food menus—based on seasonally available foods in particular regions and designed to meet nutritional targets—were credited for the change. “Students are more satisfied now because the meals change daily. With the WFP system there was only one item,” says Headmaster Dev Bahadur Chand at Nanigad Basic School in Baitadi District.

Chand was the only person we spoke to who was satisfied with the programme’s budget of 15 rupees (US$0.12) per meal per child (20 rupees in five remote districts). Others said that while the amount could cover food costs it didn’t leave enough to pay a cook or fuel and transport fees.

At the Nepal Government office that manages the burgeoning programme, the Centre for Education and Human Resources Development (CEHRD), Director Ganesh Poudel acknowledges that issue. “Each child is allotted only 15 rupees; this is the main challenge. This amount is very low—prices are increasing day by day and there are management costs. How can we survive? We have very limited resources,” he says in an interview in his office.

The other major challenge, says Poudel, is human resources. “Nearly one million people are involved in preparing and delivering the school meal programme, directly and indirectly. Some will cook, some will manage, some will pay… How can we prepare them? It requires a big amount of money and preparation.”

While WFP will no longer implement a school feeding programme from 2024, it will remain a partner in the effort, says Nepal Representative and Country Director Robert Kasca. Today, it’s working with the government to upgrade physical and human resources for school feeding in Nuwakot district, a two-hour drive from Kathmandu. Kitchens are being renovated, menus developed and an SMS-based system tested to monitor how the Rs15 allocation is spent.

“Our plan in the next five years will be to try to replicate it around the country,” says Kasca. “If we only do it in Nuwakot it’s not going to automatically happen around the country. We need to do it in many more places to start gaining momentum.”

 

Students at James S. Bell Community School in Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada where they have a salad bar style lunch programme, first developed in southern California. Credit: FoodShare/Laura Berman/Greenfuse Photography

 

In Canada, the issue is not launching more school meals programmes but getting the central government to play a guiding role, says Debbie Field, Coordinator of the Coalition for Healthy School Food. Why now? “Basically every country in the North comes up against a new crisis, which is the crisis of fast food and the crisis of health problems related to an industrialized food system,” says Field.

“First and foremost for me, it is a crisis of food and the way in which parents of all incomes are really struggling to feed their children healthy food.” Compared to 1948, when the federal cabinet last discussed school meals, “we have a vast difference of women’s participation rates in the workforce and a complete shift in our school day—most schools have a half hour a day for lunch,” adds Field.

In a written response to questions, Karina Gould, Canada’s Minister of Families Children and Social Development, wrote that the school food policy being developed would “provide access to healthy, diversified and balanced food as a matter of equity, which is essential to addressing food insecurity, reducing the risk of chronic disease and enabling every child to reach their full potential.”

Thirty-five percent of publicly-funded schools in Canada offered a programme in 2018-2019, covering 21 percent of students, from junior kindergarten to Grade 12, found a recent survey. But coverage varied immensely, with one province covering at least 90 percent of schools another just 10 percent.

Field says she is expecting the government to announce C$200 million in the upcoming budget to develop the framework for the eventual programme. But her coalition wants some of that money allocated to existing programmes in the provinces and territories. Eventually, says Field, the central government should provide $2.7 billion, or half the cost of a universal programme, with the provinces and territories contributing the rest.

“We want (the central government) to take a leadership oversight role and provide a federal framework that will allow for development of the best school food programme in the world. We want them to be visionary… and they’re responding well to this idea.”

This work was supported by a Global Nutrition and Food Security Reporting Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists and the Eleanor Crook Foundation.