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By Abdullah Shibli
May 21 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Once the Covid-19 pandemic is under control, and the world economy is back on its tracks, the status and fate of the 2030 Agenda, also known as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), needs to be reassessed. The year 2020 was supposed to kick-off the Decade of Action. With just 10 years to go, plans were made to undertake “ambitious global efforts” to deliver the 2030 promise—by mobilising more governments, civil society, businesses, and calling on all people to make the Global Goals their own.

Before the worldwide lockdown began in March, various stakeholders of the SDG movement were planning to undertake a full-scale five-year evaluation. Fifty-one countries had signed up to conduct voluntary national reviews (VNR) by May 2020, a process through which countries assess and present progress made in achieving the 17 goals. The process came to a complete halt with the current pandemic crisis.

The “pandemic pause” is a blessing in disguise. It gives all the stakeholders a chance to undertake a thorough review of where we stand as well as what needs to change. Are all the 17 goals equally important? A partial answer was provided by Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee. “Think of the bureaucratic capacity it takes to achieve these things. How are countries going to keep track? We need to go back to the drawing board,” he said.

The next question is, how do we reprioritise and revamp the SDGs? While advances made in some SDG indicators have been eroded, this should not deflate our energy. However, a few SDG targets now assume greater priority. The health aspect of SDGs is more important and can be used as an entry point. Experts suggest that the experience of Covid-19 can be used to redesign the food supply chain. Furthermore, there is an urgent need for engagement with the private sector and civil society to chart the path that lies ahead and to cope with future pandemics.

Even before Covid-19 hit us, concerns were voiced in SDG progress review meetings as evidence mounted about the slow progress and lack of scale required to reach the targets before the decade ends. Earlier this year, the UN reacted by sending out a clarion call for action. “Today, progress is being made in many places, but, overall, action to meet the Goals is not yet advancing at the speed or scale required. 2020 needs to usher in a decade of ambitious action to deliver the Goals by 2030,” it cautioned. According to one estimate, more than five billion people will lack access to essential health services by 2030. Those services include the ability to see a health worker, access to essential medicines, and running water in hospitals.

Covid-19 thus poses a real challenge, to put it mildly, and some have gone as far as to warn the developing countries that the looming crisis threatens to devastate employment gains, food security and equity in education. The World Bank also raised a low-level alarm when it declared that the coronavirus is a serious obstacle for 240 million Asians trudging along on the road to poverty elimination.

If things had gone as planned, by end-May, each of the 51 countries was expected to submit its SDG voluntary national review report describing its experiences, including successes, challenges and lessons learned during the five years of implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Bangladesh had signed up for its second VNR. All this will now cease.

Concurrently, on pause is the next meeting of the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), the central global platform for follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) was scheduled to convene the 2020 session of HLPF in New York from July 7-16, and receive a progress report in the completion of the 2020 targets: responsible consumption and production (SDG12), biodiversity (SDG15) and some selected indicators of SDG13 and SDG14.

Turning to Bangladesh, after the hiatus period forced by Covid-19 ends, the Prime Minister’s SDG Directorate needs to evaluate two key metrics: the impact of the pandemic on the poor and the status of SDGs. All economic crises adversely affect the poor and the present crisis is no exception. From all accounts, the short-run impact of the pandemic and the lockdown is being felt very strongly by low-income people. In line with its SDG commitment, the government’s immediate goal ought to be to facilitate the re-employment of workers (SDG8), feed those who lost their sources of income (SDG2) and strengthen healthcare and provide medical support (SDG3).

Apart from lost jobs, hungry mouths and deteriorating health conditions, other collateral damages will emerge due to the interlinkages between the SDGs. Poverty (SDG1) will take a hit and so will the quality of education (SDG4). Other goals to asses are water and sanitation (SDG6), reduced inequalities (SDG10) and peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG16). One should not be too surprised if our post-pandemic review shows that it has not only devastated the economy, but also wiped out many of the SDG gains.

According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ provisional estimates, GDP growth this year will be 5.5 percent, in contrast to the 8.2 percent projected earlier. This is higher than the 3.8 percent and 2-3 percent forecast by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, respectively. On the positive side, we have already seen an increase in the budget allocation on health and an improvement in the environment.

Recovery is a complex and non-linear process. The pandemic has exposed fundamental weaknesses in our global system. It has shown how the prevalence of poverty, weak health systems, subpar education, and a lack of global cooperation exacerbate a health crisis. In our effort to return to normalcy, we must not lose sight of the lessons gained from the pandemic.

Globally, the pandemic has exposed the widening SDG needs gap. The world currently (pre-pandemic) spends approximately USD 7.5 trillion on health each year or 10 percent of global GDP. While spending has increased steadily, dangerous public health gaps exist, especially in rural or conflict-ridden areas where access is difficult and infrastructure is lacking.

This access is complicated by a shortage of trained healthcare workers. The 2020 State of the World’s Nursing report found that the world would need six million more nurses by 2030 to reach global health targets. Shortages of healthcare workers are felt most acutely in low- and middle-income countries.

As cities and societies start emerging from the crisis, governments should focus on key factors that contribute to the spread of epidemics and other public health risks: inadequate infrastructure, lack of services, and substandard housing.

In a sense, the process of recovery might strengthen our SDG efforts if the government of Bangladesh, in collaboration with civil society, NGOs, and the private sector, look afresh at the 17 goals and focuses its attention and resources on those that need reinforcement.

Dr Abdullah Shibli is an economist and works in information technology. He is Senior Research Fellow, International Sustainable Development Institute (ISDI), a think-tank in Boston, USA.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Images taken when Amnesty's South Sudan researcher and Crisis Response team's arms and military operations investigator visited 12 military training sites in South Sudan in early 2020 to document violations of the UN arms embargo. They also witnessed evidence of child soldiers being used and diversion of arms.
 
This image shows a Mi-24 attack helicopter, one of four that South Sudan purchased from Ukraine in 2015. When the arms embargo was instituted in July 2018, these helicopters were in disrepair and unserviceable, unable to fly. However, during the embargo the helicopters underwent maintenance and repairs, using components imported in violation of the embargo. This one is pictured at Juba International Airport (JIA) in early 2020. Credit: Amnesty International

By Brian Castner
JUBA, South Sudan, May 21 2020 (IPS)

Earlier this year, just before the coronavirus virtually shut down international travel, I sat under a mesquite tree and listened to a rambling speech by a South Sudanese general at a military base outside of the capital, Juba.

I was in that war-weary country to investigate violations of the arms embargo, which is up for renewal by the United Nations Security Council this month. The embargo is about two years old, and though it hasn’t solved every problem, violence and human rights abuses have significantly decreased in the country since the main torrent of guns and ammunition was choked off.

That day, I had come to see the commander of the dusty improvised camp at Gorom brief a party of diplomats and international ceasefire monitors on his progress training South Sudan’s newly established VIP Protection Force.

But instead, the general rattled off a litany of complaints – not enough supplies, not even bedding to sleep on. He said this while seated in front of a wall of unopened cardboard boxes, ten feet tall and forty feet long, all stuffed with sleeping mats donated by Japan.

There was a certain “which do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” quality to the presentation.

I wasn’t there for logistical gripes, though. I was there to find out if their weapons were newly shipped in, and thus broke the embargo, and so when the general said he had four shipping containers full of small arms that he had collected from his soldiers as part of the disarmament process, I was interested.

I made it to twelve military and training camps in South Sudan, and this was the only one with a nominally established armory. This was my best chance yet.

But when one of the general’s officers opened the four containers for me, they weren’t filled with guns. Instead they were stacked to the ceiling with bags of rice and durra, a kind of grain. These units weren’t disarming. They were hedging their bets against a return to war.

The general was unapologetic. “These are the forces that will impose the peace in Juba,” he said. “These soldiers are the backbone of this peace.”

He said out loud what many fear: that even after so much bloodshed in South Sudan’s civil war, when given the chance at a negotiated settlement, the generals will still search for peace at the end of a rifle.

Images taken when Amnesty’s South Sudan researcher and Crisis Response team’s arms and military operations investigator visited 12 military training sites in South Sudan in early 2020 to document violations of the UN arms embargo. They also witnessed evidence of child soldiers being used and diversion of arms.
 
Amnesty’s investigators observed that several South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) soldiers were armed with Mpi-KMS-72 rifles manufactured in the former East Germany. Credi: Amnesty International

On March 23rd, in the face of a mounting global health crisis, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire. Suffice it to say it was not heeded.

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, South Sudan is not the only place where a pandemic disease is poised to run rampant through a state of endemic conflict. Officially, South Sudan has only a few dozen cases. So too places like Syria, though as we have come to know, this is mostly a function of testing.

Meanwhile, in Yemen the number of cases is skyrocketing, and in Somalia, gravediggers in the capital can’t keep up with the surge in demand and the number of cases in Shabab-controlled territory is unknown.

Adding the coronavirus to these ongoing conflicts will only increase human suffering, and yet, at a time when the world could join together to confront COVID-19, so many wars continue to take their toll on civilians.

The Syrian government and Russian air force have in recent months continued to bomb schools and hospitals around Idlib. In the civil war in Libya, outside powers from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates have pumped in enough mercenaries and materiel that civilian casualties, from artillery and airstrikes, have actually increased since the start of 2020.

Across the Sahel, from Mali to northern Nigeria and Cameroon, and elsewhere in Africa, as far south as Mozambique, armed groups who have pledged allegiance to the group calling itself Islamic State are burning villages and beheading civilians.

And in western Myanmar, where the government’s crimes against humanity forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, the military and Rakhine rebels continue to fight; in April, a World Health Organization worker driving coronavirus samples was killed in the crossfire.

And violence continues in South Sudan as well, as a fringe rebel group continues their fight against the government and longstanding inter-communal rivalries breed abductions and gunfights. Meanwhile, victims and survivors of mass atrocities during the conflict continue to be denied justice.

Fueling this instability and impunity are continued violations of the UN arms embargo. During our investigation, we found recently manufactured Chinese ammunition in the hands of the feared National Security Service.

We found the government’s fleet of heavily armed Mi-24 attack helicopters, broken before the embargo was established, newly fixed and flying, ready to be used again to attack civilians as they had during the civil war. We found Kalashnikovs from Eastern Europe, some even made in the old East Germany, newly imported and in the hands of government forces and opposition alike.

The civil war in South Sudan was decidedly low-tech, and featured horrific atrocities, including hundreds of people gathered up and gunned down in mass executions, often along ethnic lines.

But while the arms embargo has proven no panacea, since its adoption in July of 2018 there has not been a single documented large-scale massacre of civilians, certainly not of the scale seen in the early days of the conflict.

Some fighting and human rights violations continue, but nothing compared to what we saw before the embargo in 2014, back when tens of millions of rounds of ammunition where being shipped in at a time.

The fight against COVID-19 has been described as a war. I don’t think that framing is accurate or helpful at all; I bet most of us who have experienced the chaotic messy violence of human beings killing each other would agree.

Wars destroy, but the response to a pandemic requires the opposite; an act of building, creating a resilient society where we take care of each other. And we have a common inhuman foe outside ourselves to mobilize against: a grotesque ball of goo covered in spikes.

Unfortunately, at the UN, the old divisions threaten this unifying opportunity. The rift between China and the United States has stalled a resolution on a 90-day humanitarian ceasefire that would allow for COVID medical aid to reach civilians.

And the question of arms embargoes gets wrapped up in discussions of dropping sanctions generally. Though they are considered by the same council, the arms embargo should not be seen as punitive in nature.

It is not a targeted sanction, it is a necessary tool for curbing human rights violations by all parties, and could not possibly be misconstrued as impeding a country’s ability to treat COVID-19.

We face an uphill battle to get the South Sudan arms embargo, but there is still space for hope. The UN Security Council can move with purpose and good will and see the obvious truth: guns don’t vanquish a disease.

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, South Sudan was a place that had more attack helicopters than ventilators. It makes no sense to lift an arms embargo on a fragile country with a legacy of impunity for war crimes and a looming public health challenge.

The UN Security Council should vote to renew the embargo and give the South Sudanese the space and chance to build a peace founded on justice and respect for human rights.

 

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Excerpt:

Brian Castner is the weapons expert on Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Team.

The post As COVID-19 Burns, World’s Forgotten Wars Continue to take Toll on Civilians as Well appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Demonstrators demand clarification of the murder of land rights activist Samir Flores and the shutdown of a thermoelectric plant in the state of Morelos, in central Mexico, in a February 2019 protest on Mexico City's emblematic Paseo Reforma. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 20 2020 (IPS)

Since 2012, Teresa Castellanos has fought the construction of a gas-fired power plant in Huexca, in the central Mexican state of Morelos, adjacent to the country’s capital.

“We don’t want the power plant to operate, because it will cause irreparable damage, polluting the water and air. This project was imposed on us; we have to defend the water and the land. This is not an industrial zone,” the activist, coordinator of the Huexca Resistance Committee, told IPS.

During the tests, the constant noise of the turbines also altered the life of this small community of just over 1,000 people, mostly farmers, near the Cuautla River, within the rural municipality of Yecapixtla."Development banks must have safeguards and principles for sustainable investment. National regulations are needed, which define climate finance and green finance, what principles govern them, what are the climate risks. The trend should be to increasingly finance green projects and less and less hydrocarbons." -- Liliana Estrada

The Central Combined Cycle Plant, located in Huexca and with a capacity of 620 megawatts based on gas and steam, is part of the Morelos Integral Project (PIM), developed by the state Federal Electricity Commission (CFE). It also consists of an aqueduct and a gas pipeline that crosses the states of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala.

The People’s Front in Defence of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala and its ally, the Permanent Assembly of the People of Morelos, have managed to get several court orders that have blocked the operation of the plant, the 12-km aqueduct and the 171-km gas pipeline since 2015.

Castellanos, who has won an international and a national award for her activism, has been involved in the battle against the plant from the very start, which has earned her persecution and threats.

The opposition to the power plant by local communities that depend on planting corn, beans, squash and tomatoes and raising cattle and pigs, focuses on the lack of consultation, the threat to their agricultural activity, due to the extraction of water from the rivers, and the discharge of liquid waste.

In February 2019, a public consultation that did not meet international standards supported the completion of the project.

A few days earlier, activist Samir Flores had been murdered, a crime that remains unsolved – just one more instance of violence against environmentalists in Mexico. Despite Flores’ murder, the government of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador went ahead with the referendum and upheld the result.

Public funds have fuelled the conflict, as the state-owned National Bank of Public Works and Services (Banobras) lent some 55 million dollars for the pipeline.

As in the case of other projects, development banks have become a financial pillar for the oil industry in Latin America’s second-largest nation, population 130 million.

The National Bank of Foreign Trade (Bancomext), Banobras and Nacional Financiera (Nafin) have funneled millions of dollars into building pipelines and oil and gas facilities in recent years, even though the climate change crisis makes it necessary to abandon such investments.

They have also financed renewable energy projects, but in much smaller amounts than fossil fuels.

The construction and operation of the Central Combined Cycle Plant, of the state Federal Electricity Commission, financed with public funds, unleashed a conflict with residents of Huexca, a small community in the central Mexican state of Morelos, which has brought the operation of the thermoelectric plant to a halt. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Energy reform pillar

The energy reform that then conservative president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) enacted in 2013 opened the sector to private capital, broke the monopoly of the state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) oil giant and CFE, and made Mexico an attractive market for international investment in the sector.

To support this transformation, the state development banks also opened their coffers.´

Since 2012, Banobras, which finances infrastructure and public works and services, has lent at least 721 million dollars for the construction of gas pipelines, 10.2 billion dollars for oil and gas projects, 251 million dollars for electrical cogeneration, from steam generated in hydrocarbon plants, and eight million dollars for the construction of a thermoelectric plant that will burn fuel oil in the northwestern state of Baja California Sur.

Bancomext, which provides financing to exporters, importers and nine strategic sectors, has delivered some 500,000 dollars to oil companies in the eastern state of Tamaulipas and another 446 million dollars in Mexico City. It has also provided 65.4 million dollars to gas initiatives in the northern state of Nuevo Leon and 626.7 million dollars in Mexico City.

In addition, it has contributed 1.5 billion dollars for the supply of gas through pipelines to the final consumer; 324 million dollars for the extraction of oil and gas; 216 million dollars for the construction of public works for oil and gas; 126 million dollars for the manufacture of products derived from oil and coal; nearly seven million dollars for oil refining; 0.65 million dollars for the commercialisation of fuels; 0.25 million dollars for the drilling and maintenance of hydrocarbon wells; as well as 0.25 million dollars for oil platform maintenance and services.

In February, Bancomext granted a loan of 7.1 million dollars to Grupo Diarqco, in what it presented as the first credit to a private Mexican company in the industry, to exploit an oil field in the southeastern state of Tabasco.

Nafin, which grants credits and guarantees to public and private projects, created in 2014 the Energy Impulse Programme for these initiatives, endowed with more than a billion dollars.

It also manages, along with the economy ministry, the Public Trust to Promote the Development of Energy Industry National Suppliers and Contractors, designed for the industrial promotion of local production chains and direct investment in the energy industry, which this year has a fund of some 41 million dollars.

Missing: social and environmental safeguards

As in the case of the Morelos Integral Project, the gas pipelines have been a source of conflict with local communities, arising from the lack of socio-environmental safeguards and standards to guarantee that a project and its financing will respect the human rights of potentially affected communities.

Nafin and Banobras lack such safeguards, while Bacomext has had an “Environmental and Social Risk Management System Guide” since 2017, with no evidence of whether and how it has been applied to energy projects financed since then.

Since 2003, three platforms of international standards have emerged, to which Mexico’s development banks have not adhered, on human rights; social and environmental assessments and impacts; the application of safeguards; stakeholder participation; complaint resolution; and transparency.

The planet needs 80 percent of the global hydrocarbon reserves to stay underground in order for the temperature increase to remain at 1.5 degrees Celsius, as set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The treaty, signed by 196 countries and territories in 2015, will enter into force at year-end and is considered indispensable to avoid irreversible climate disasters and human catastrophes.

Liliana Estrada, a researcher with the Climate Finance Group of Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS that most investment in energy still goes to fossil fuels.

“After the reform, they have to enter into strategic projects and follow the guidelines of the government; they cannot go against these strategic lines. The gas and gas pipelines became strategic,” with the boost to the megaprojects of the López Obrador administration, said the representative of this coalition of non-governmental organisations and academics.

These credits are part of the fossil fuel subsidies that Mexico has pledged, to several international bodies, to eliminate.

The Mexican energy industry has also attracted international private banks, which have lent 55.95 billion dollars to 12 corporations, according to “Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2020”, released in March by six international environmental organisations.

The CFE received some 5.4 billion dollars from 12 banks between 2016 and 2019, and Pemex received 48.3 billion dollars from 20 foreign banks.

Based on Huexca’s experience, Castellanos demanded that these investments be stopped.

“If it’s our company, as the government says, then we can close it down. We have to defend the space in which we live, because we only have one planet and it belongs to all of us, it belongs to every living being, and it is our obligation to contribute something to this planet, because we are only here for a short while, we are guests of the earth”, she said.

Estrada called for sustainable financing regulations and questioned the lack of government leadership in this regard.

“Development banks must have safeguards and principles for sustainable investment,” she said. “National regulations are needed, which define climate finance and green finance, what principles govern them, what are the climate risks. The trend should be to increasingly finance green projects and less and less hydrocarbons.”

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People wearing face masks at a Bus stop in Macau, China near a public hospital. This week’s 73rd World Health Assembly had member states adopt a resolution to review the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2020 (IPS)

This week’s 73rd World Health Assembly had member states adopt a resolution to review the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. The World Health Organisation (WHO) will also undergo  an evaluation for its response to the outbreak.

At the virtual assembly, Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying they did their “best to stem cross-border transmission” and to help other countries in need. He said in that China supported the idea of a “comprehensive review” of the world’s response to the pandemic, once it has been contained, in order to measure efficiencies of the responses.

“This work should be based on science and professionalism, led by WHO and conducted in an objective and impartial manner,” Xi said, adding that “solidarity and cooperation” are the strongest way to defeat the virus.

Xi also announced that China  would fund $2 billion over the next three years, with a focus on developing countries, to support their  efforts to combat COVID-19.

China’s response to COVID-19 has also come under heavy scrutiny, especially as reports continue to emerge that China may have a significantly higher number of COVID-19 cases than the country’s data shows.

President of the assembly, Keva Bain from the Bahamas, lauded the WHO and its director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, calling his leadership through this time “inspiring.”

“This era of COVID-19 ushers in new technology,” she added. “It requires new knowledge, new innovations, flexibility, [and] meaningful, respectful country interactions as well as new and greater global partnerships.”

Harsh criticism from U.S.

The assembly ended on the heels of United States President Donald Trump presenting his letter to Tedros, which defended cutting support  to the organisation in April.

In the letter posted on Twitter, Trump claimed the WHO did not maintain the same level of scrutiny for China as it did for the U.S. and that its failure to hold China accountable for its lack of transparency regarding data of its COVID-19 cases has “been extremely costly for the world”.

However, some experts believe that such harsh criticism of the WHO at this time could be problematic.

Dr. Jennifer Huang Bouey, a senior researcher at the Center for Asia and Pacific Policy, told IPS that the WHO has played a key role in containing a virus that is so global.

“I found it very unfortunate that this happened at this moment because WHO is in a primary position to do the coordination and the technical support for a disease that can cross borders,” she told IPS. “This is exactly the time that countries need to work together and help countries that have weaker systems.”

Bouey’s research has focused on how China’s public health response has been shaped since it first addressed the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis almost two decades ago. SARS is also a viral respiratory disease, caused by the SARS coronavirus or SARS-CoV.

“During SARS there was no data-collection system at all,” she said, “but after SARS the government put in a lot of funding to centralise the surveillance system.”

She attributed China’s failure to respond appropriately in part to the miscommunication between local and central government, belonging to a “very top-down system” where locals don’t want to be held accountable for an emerging disease.

Regardless, she said the disease is “ruthlessly revealing” some of the problems at both country level and international level, and that WHO should not be blamed for its initial response in January, because the scale of the pandemic was not fully realised at that point.

Way forward

Meanwhile, other experts have said what will make a difference is how these current reactions translate to proper action in the future.

“It is one thing to talk about diagnostic tests, medicines and vaccines being universally, timely and equitably available, but if countries and multilateral institutions providing funding to developers do not do so with the necessary strings attached, then these will remain words on paper and will not translate into medicines in health care providers’ and patients’ hands,” Katy Athersuch, a senior policy adviser at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign, told IPS.

She said that it’s crucial that data and technology being used to test and document the cases are “openly shared to ensure that production can take place on the scale that is needed in order to provide for people everywhere in the world, not just for those in the highest income countries.”

Bouey echoed a similar sentiment, and said there are lessons every country can take from the crisis.

“We’re always in the cycle of either neglect or panic, so whether COVID-19 can help us overcome that — to put into a plan, or regulation, [to see] whether these surveillance systems are still sensitive and whether we are still up to date on the strategies for a pandemic — these are lessons for every state and also for international organisations.”

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The post COVID-19 – China Tells World Health Assembly They Did their Best appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

At the World Health Assembly, Chinese President Xi Jinping said they did their “best to stem cross-border transmission” of COVID-19 and help other nations.

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Emmanuel Nsabimana, a casual labourer at the National Tree Seed Centre, in Huye, in Rwanda’s Southern Province, has worked planting trees for over 40 years. He believes there has been considerable improvements in the seed quality from the centre since the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) became one of the contributors to its restoration. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

By Emmanuel Hitimana
HUYE, Rwanda, May 20 2020 (IPS)

In 2011, when Rwanda committed to restoring 2 million hectares of land in a global effort to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested areas by 2020 — it seemed like a big ask. 

The densely populated and geographically small African nation had many limitations which could stand in the way of this as well as a commitment to achieving forest cover increase of up to 30 percent of total land area by 2030 as part of the Bonn Challenge.

Aside from limited land availability — Rwanda’s land area only encompasses 2.4 million hectares or 24,000 square kilometres — the country’s terrain did little to support the efforts. The country’s topography includes steep slopes, and it is the country with the highest mean soil erosion rate, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

There were other factors too:

• A majority of the population — some 98 percent — were using trees as an energy source and the situation was not expected to change soon;
• 70 percent of the land was used by smallholder farmers, and the diversity of tree species was also low, with limited quality seed available. 

But by 2018, Rwanda, along with South Korea, Costa Rica, Pakistan and China, was considered one of the lead countries in the world with its successful restoration programme.

How did the country manage to restore more than 800,000 hectares — almost half of its original pledge — in less than a decade? 

Part of the answer lies in the restructuring and strengthening of the country’s National Tree Seed Centre, located in Huye, in Rwanda’s Southern Province, some 133 kilometres from the country’s capital.

The centre is tasked with centralising the supply of tree seeds across the country, including establishing new seed sources, improving trees with growth deficiencies, and collecting and certifying seed.

Until 2014, the Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB) managed the centre. But farmers complained that they were unable to grow plants from almost 90 percent of the seeds from the centre.

Emmanuel Nsabimana, a casual labourer at the National Tree Seed Centre, has worked planting trees around Huye for over 40 years.

He remembers the attitude of local farmers and communities.

“Farmers were always bitter towards the centre because they thought that it was incapable of providing them with adequate seeds,” he recalls.

“Many would return the seeds.”

But in 2014 the centre shifted from RAB to become a unit of the Rwanda Forestry Agency. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — one of the founders and Secretariat of the Bonn Challenge, along with the German Government — stepped in to become one of the most significant contributors to the restoration of Rwanda’s National Tree Seed Centre.   

IUCN also partnered with the Rwandan Government, the Belgian Development Agency (ENABEL) and the University of Rwanda (UR) to strengthen the centre.

IUCN supported capacity building, including the training of staff, providing equipment to the centre, upgrading and developing infrastructure like greenhouses, maintenance of the seed stands where seeds are collected form, and rehabilitation of seed store where seeds are kept before they are distributed, Jean Pierre Maniriho, Forest Landscape Restoration Officer at IUCN, tells IPS.

“Before partners came in, many things were not going well. For example, we did not have a cold room, which was bad for seeds. We were only two staff, and the stock was also old. But we have steadily improved until now,” Floribert Manayabagabo, the production officer at the National Tree Seed Centre, says. His job is to make sure the seeds harvested at the centre are ready for market.

Manayabagabo thinks that the centre’s success story is thanks to a combination of great partnerships that ensured the centre now has good infrastructure that includes nurseries, a laboratory, a modern cold room and five full-time staff.

Maniriho says seed quality and quantity are essential to ensure sustainability and to meet demand.

Currently, 30 percent of the seeds come from the nearby 90-year-old, 200-hectare Arboretum of Ruhande, which surrounds the University of Rwanda.

The seeds from the arboretum include 207 exotic and indigenous species, explains Emmanuel Niyigena, a field officer at the centre. 

The remaining 70 percent come from the outside of the centre, with a significant amount of seeds sourced from nine agro forestry-related cooperatives within Rwanda, and the remaining seed being imported from Kenya.

One of many nurseries at Rwanda’s National Tree Seed Centre. The centre is tasked with centralising the supply of tree seeds across the country, including establishing new seed sources, improving trees with growth deficiencies, and collecting and certifying seed. Credit: Emmanuel Hitimana/IPS

It’s Eric Kazubwenge’s job to make sure that the seeds from the centre never disappoint. He is in charge of seed inspection and regulation at the centre.

“We normally do a physical inspection to make sure that they are not damaged. Then we proceed with laboratory testing before we conduct other testing in the nursery where seeds are conserved to make sure they will not resist soil plantation.”

He adds that multiple tests are continually carried out to ascertain how long a seed can grow in a nursery or how much moisture they need to survive.

Kazubwenge learnt many of these skills in Kenya, where he was trained through an IUCN partnership.

While Kazubwenge’s training was highly technical, members of cooperatives involved in seed supply chain also received training.

Kazubwenge tells IPS that previously it was very difficult for the cooperatives to supply to the centre the good seeds as they couldn’t distinguish good from bad quality seeds. The Tree Seed Centre was also unable to test and prove the quality of seeds due to lack of equipment (seed laboratory was not well equipped). This combination of limitations meant only a handful of seeds provided to the forest growers before 2014 had been fruitful.

“Our stock is (now) full of good seeds in terms of quality and quantity, thanks to cooperatives that were trained in seed collection and selection through IUCN partnership,” Janviere Muhayimana, who is in charge of the seed stock, tells IPS.

The centre also ensures farmers and the community are given the necessary information about the planting of the improved seeds.

Nsabimana concurs: “There are no more complaints (from farmers) as the seeds respond well to the soil.”

The researchers are optimistic about the future.

Kazubwenge’s vision for the centre’s future involves advanced technologies that will allow him to “carry out genetic assessment and analysis because it gives us deep knowledge about the compatibility of seeds according to their origins”.

Maniriho sees Rwanda on a good path to become a regional seed hub.

“Deforestation is a global challenge. What we have in Rwanda is what exactly is happening in Burundi or Malawi. We are importing seeds from Kenya today, but tomorrow others may be importing from us. We can make those connections that can encourage and strengthen the reciprocal partnership in seed supply and keep us from sending money overseas to only import seeds that we are sometimes capable of producing.”

Rwanda’s successful steps towards meeting its reforestation pledge proves a powerful example of how nature conservation can support livelihoods ahead of the IUCN World Conservation Congress, which will be held in France in January 2021. Held every four years, the Congress is a meeting of conservation experts and custodians, government and business representatives, indigenous peoples, scientists, as well as other professional stakeholders, who have an interest in nature and the sustainable and just use of natural resources. One of the major issues addressed will be the managing of landscapes for nature and people.

** Writing with Nalisha Adams in Bonn.

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Excerpt:

How did Rwanda manage to restore more than 800,000 hectares — almost half of its original pledge — in less than a decade? 

The post To Restore Forests, First Start With a Seed appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Handover ceremony at UN compound in Beijing for donation of critical medical supplies to the Chinese government. Credit: UNDP China

By Simi Mehta
NEW DELHI, May 20 2020 (IPS)

Coronavirus outbreaks in China and later across the globe have been unprecedented in both its scale and impacts. In the era of changing world order, this pandemic has drawn the global attention towards the threats posed by the non-traditional security challenges.

All military prowess and records of economic progress have been rendered impotent vis-à-vis the coronavirus disease. With a total of around 5 million cases worldwide (and only about 83,000 in China), the wheels of power display of major powers like the US, China, Russia, Spain, France, Germany, Italy have come to a grinding halt.

The objectives of national health policy, health security of the countries, including the concept of collective health security of the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations have raised questions on their seriousness, claimed efficacy and efficiency.

Regarding the origins of the virus, there have been different narratives. This article analyses the discourse claiming that research and development programmes for medicine, vaccines, and treatment for health risks and planning and investment for intensive research on bioweapons by major powers led to the creation of the dangerous strand of contagion called the novel coronavirus.

Allegations on China

There is no denying that the place where it all originated was in Wuhan, China. Thousands of people began to suffer with a respiratory illness that could not be cured. The WHO has described coronavirus as part of the family of viruses, which ranges from the common cold to Middle East Respiratory Syndromes (MERS) and SARS.

It has the capability to transmit between animals and humans. Very soon, a school of thought contrary to the claims of the Chinese government that it was in the wet market selling exotic and wild animals- including bats, that was the cause of this pandemic, began to emerge.

However, counter-claims posit that The Wuhan Institute of Virology National Biosafety Laboratory in the vicinity of the wet market had deliberately created this virus. What raises arguments in favour of the counter-claims include: China did not raise an alarm globally about the existence, leave aside spread of the virus until major outbreaks were reported from late January 2020 onwards.

Various conspiracy theories have been circulating that this virus was made to escape the laboratory as bio-weapons either by accident or design. Some reports have also claimed that this virus was originally stolen by Chinese agents from Canadian laboratory in July 2019, which has level 4 of biosafety- dealing with the most dangerous pathogens for which there are few available vaccines or treatments, similar to that possessed by the Wuhan laboratory.

Further, it has rejected international fact-finding mission into its country. Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and the Washington Post have suffered collateral damage and some of their employees have been asked to wind up their operations in the country.

Even academic research papers on coronavirus has borne the brunt by the gag-order of the Chinese authorities to intervene in the independence of the scientific process. Those research articles focusing on the COVID-19 have to now undergo extra vetting before they are submitted for publication.

As a result, the initial global empathy for the Chinese suffering from the wrath of this virus steadily turned into suspicion and panic. This culminated into pent up anger seeking reparations from China for being culpable for the origin and spread of COVID-19.

Unfazed by Chinese criticism, US President Donald Trump eloquently named the coronavirus as the Chinese virus. He has also accused the WHO of siding with China in hiding the facts and suspended its contribution to the multi-lateral body and said that the WHO “should be ashamed of themselves because they are like the public-relations agency for China.”.

Calls for an international investigation to know the ‘truth’ behind the origin and spread of the virus have become intense. With its one-party authoritarian system, China was initially on the defensive and flagrantly refused all such calls; which, in effect added to the case in point that there is ‘something’ that it wanted to hide from the rest of the world.

However, with growing international pressures and the most recent draft resolution led by Australia and the EU and supported by 122 countries at the World Health Assembly of WHO, China finally relented and agreed to the call for a “comprehensive review” of COVID-19 pandemic in an “objective and impartial manner”.

It is even pointing to the proactive help it is providing to several countries, in terms of sending protective gears, face masks, gloves, etc. However, complaints have been raised as several of these have malfunctioned and/or were defective.

Conclusion

In 1919 George A. Soper1 wrote that the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic that swept around the earth was without any precedents, and that there had been no such catastrophe ‘so sudden, so devastating and so universal’. He remarked that, “The most astonishing thing about the pandemic was the complete mystery which surrounded it. Nobody seemed to know what the disease was, where it came from or how to stop it. Anxious minds are inquiring today whether another wave of it will come again”.

With close to 3 million positive cases and around 0.2 million deaths worldwide, the coronavirus has compelled people to draw parallels with the history of lethal viruses like the 1918 Spanish flu.

This great human tragedy created by COVID-19 is compounded because of the absence of a definitive cure and/or a vaccine. Experts opine that it would be possible only by the first quarter of 2021. The prevailing obscurity in China with respect to the causes of origin and global spread of the virus has led to conspiracy theories to emanate from various parts of the international community. Demands have begun to be made to hold China accountable for the health crisis and that it should pay the countries of the world for their health and economic hardships.

Trump has indicated that the US has begun its investigations to claim ‘substantial’ damages from China as the ‘whole situation could have been stopped at the source’. The champion of having China included in the world system- Henry Kissinger warned that COVID-19 was a danger to the liberal international order.

Even a veteran Cabinet Minister of Government of India, Nitin Gadkari stated in an interview to a private news channel that the coronavirus is ‘not a natural virus, rather it emerged from a lab’.

This, perhaps explains India’s cautious next steps of charging its northern neighbour China as the country responsible for the manufacture of the virus that has brought incredible and unprecedented mayhem in the lives, livelihoods and economies around the world.

Therefore, it would be in the best interests of China to ensure transparency and allow international investigations into the disease, as it is totally unbecoming of permanent member of the UN Security Council wielding veto powers.

The worldwide panic created by the prevailing health insecurity would redefine the meaning, definition and practical implications for programmes and policy of all countries of the world. Putting it into perspective, the global health management body- the WHO needs to be reformed, and so should the UN Security Council.

It remains to be seen how the world navigates through the crisis and whether comprehensive public health would figure in their national security agendas in the post-COVID-19 world order. Nonetheless, it is time that the multilateral agencies take suo moto cognizance of the havoc created by China and act as per the norms of international law for ensuring collective security.

1 Major George A. Soper was Sanitation Engineer with Department of Health, USA. His area of specialty included study of typhoid fever epidemics. He was also the managing director of American Cancer Society from 1923 to 1928.

 

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Dr Simi Mehta is the CEO and Editorial Director of Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), New Delhi. She can be reached at simi@impriindia.org.

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Secretary-General Antonio Guterres walking across the empty corridors in the locked-down UN Secretariat building in New York. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2020 (IPS)

As a spiraling financial crisis threatens to undermine the UN’s day-to-day operations worldwide, a proposal being kicked around, outside the empty corridors of the UN, has triggered the question: will senior officials, including the Secretary-General, the Deputy Secretary-General (DSG), Under-Secretaries-Generals (USGs), including 60 heads of UN agencies, Funds and Programs, and Assistant Secretaries-Generals (ASGs), volunteer to take salary cuts— even as a symbolic gesture?

Kul Gautam, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of the UN children ‘s agency UNICEF, told IPS: “I think it would be an excellent gesture of solidarity for the UN’s senior most officials, including heads of agencies, to agree to and announce a voluntary pay cut for themselves in response to the financial crisis resulting from COVID-19 that is impacting the UN system itself and the peoples of the world it serves.”

Dr Leila Fourie, Group CEO of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and Fani Titi, CEO of Investec, who are members of the UN Secretary-General’s Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance, said: “ We are proud of the leadership shown by South Africa’s President in responding to the pandemic. This is why we have both chosen to join the President in donating 30% of our salaries for three months to COVID-19 relief efforts.”

Asked about a gesture by UN staff in Cabo Verde to donate their salaries, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters May 19: “We have staff in New York who have donated goods and services to the pandemic, whether it’s to deliver food. So, I think it’s not uncommon for UN staff to either volunteer or to give back to the communities where they work”.

He also said that in Cabo Verde, half of the UN country-team members, around 50 staff from UN entities and the Resident Coordinator’s office, made donations to the Government’s COVID-19 efforts.

This totaled slightly less than $5,000 and directly helped 46 families in need. The Prime Minister was very moved by the gesture and thanked the UN publicly, said Dujarric.

In an opinion piece published by IPS in April, Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, a former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the UN (2002-2007) and Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN (1996-2001), underscored the point that “If the liquidity crisis keeps on affecting the work of the UN and its mandate delivery, the UN staff as a privileged part of the humanity, should join in making creative efforts placing interests of the world body ahead of their sacrifice.”

“One such measure could be for UN staff to allow the UN to withhold 20% of their monthly salaries to offset the impact of the current liquidity crisis in the coming months”.

“When the liquidity situation gets better, say in six month’s time, that 20% would be paid back”.

UN Secretary-General (S-G) and his Senior Management Team, he said, should lead by example announcing they would do so voluntarily.

Elaborating further, Ambassador Chowdhury told IPS: “To that I would now add that for the S-G and his Senior Management team, there should be a self-announced 20% pay cut for the next six months.”

“That would be welcomed by the international community wholeheartedly and would show the commitment of UN leadership to the broader mission of the UN for humanity”, he noted.

As a support, staff for day-to-day work and positioned at bottom most levels, this proposal should exclude all the General Services (GS) staff of the UN., said Ambassador Chowdhury, a former Chairman of the UN General Assembly’s Administrative and Budgetary Committee during the 52nd session of the UN General Assembly (1997-1998).

The United Nations, which remains closed till the end of June – and perhaps extended through August or September – due to the coronavirus pandemic is facing a growing cash crisis, due in large measure, to late or non-payment of dues by an overwhelming majority of the 193 member states.

The numbers are staggering: $1.63 billion is owed to the UN’s regular budget and $2.14 billion to the peacekeeping budget.

The United States apparently owes about $486.7 million in unpaid arrears but has promised to deliver by the end of the year—depending largely on the fluctuating political mood swings of a volatile American President.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says “unpredictable cash inflows” have been exacerbated by the deadly COVID-19 pandemic while seriously threatening the U.N.’s ability to do its work—even as nearly 36,000 staffers worldwide are working from home.

As of January 2019, the gross salary of an Under-Secretary-General, the third high ranking job in the UN hierarchy, was $198,315 and an Assistant Secretary-General pulled in about $179,948, excluding post adjustments, hospitality expenses and travel per diem.

The proposed program budget for 2020 (a/74/6 sect. 1) does not provide a breakdown of the actual salaries of the SG and DSG but the “post costs” for the SGs salary and benefits were increased from $457,500 in 2018 to $585,200 both in 2019 and 2020, excluding hospitality expenses, a residence and a car.

The proposal for voluntary pay cuts come at a time when some of the world’s political leaders, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and three Presidents– Halimah Yacob of Singapore, Cyril Ramphosa of South Africa and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya– have all taken voluntary salary cuts, along with some of their deputies and senior staffers.

At a press conference in late March, Ardern announced she, and other lawmakers, will be taking a 20% pay cut for the next six months, in solidarity with those affected by the coronavirus.

Which begs the question: Why aren’t other Western leaders following in her footsteps?

Ian Williams, author of UNtold, President of the New York Foreign Press Association and a former President of the UN Correspondents Association (UNCA), told IPS comparisons are odious, as Shakespeare correctly said.

He pointed out that years of anti-UN propaganda by US conservatives has left the impression that UN staff in general, let alone senior management, are paid massive amounts.

But over the decades, emoluments for public servants have been held down while those for corporate management have ballooned, he noted.

And while the UN staff are paid salaries, the private sector are “compensated” with stock grants and options and bonuses. There is no doubt that by their own self-proclaimed standards, as business tanks, so should the CEO salaries but whether that should apply to international civil servants is moot, he added.

However, said Williams, while UN managers might be poor relatives to their private counterparts, odious comparison still apply.

They are much better paid than junior staff, and immeasurably better off than most of “us, the peoples of the world.”

“So while on one level they should not take a payout to reflect the crisis in the world economy and the effects on the UN budget, they should indeed “volunteer” to take a hefty drop in pay, for the sake of their collective reputation as public servants and for the image of the international organization as whole. Few will starve as a result,” declared Williams.

Martin S. Edwards, Associate Professor and Chair, School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, told IPS: “I’d say there are two reasons this is not likely to catch on”.

The first is a simple collective action problem. It’s not easy to get people to agree to cut their pay voluntarily.

“These things normally take top-down leadership in firms, so Guterres would have to be the one to lead (and the one to ask his colleagues to also pony up)”.

The second is political. While it’s a nice rhetorical move, it plays into the hands of the penny-pinching Trump White House and confirms their suspicions that UN officials make too much money, he said.

“I don’t think that would be enough of a move to unlock the US contribution. The bigger issue is that this is a drop in the bucket. The fiscal crisis facing the UN is in the billions, and no amount of voluntary staff reductions can make up this difference”, Edwards declared.

Ambassador Chowdhury said UN management mentioned in its April 1 advisory that “although the immediate impact of the move to alternate working conditions in response to the COVID-19 outbreak will lead to reductions in travel, contractual services and general operating expenses across all budgets, we also anticipate new demands upon our operations and services as we respond to the global health crisis.”

It needs to be remembered that in facing the past financial and liquidity crises as the one is being faced now, the regular staff salary has never been cut or affected negatively, he pointed out.

The word “layoff” has no relevance in terms of the service conditions of UN staff and does not appear in any decisions by the United Nations. That is not an option to tackle the current liquidity crisis, he noted.

“I also pointed out earlier that in view of its mission and mandate, unlike the private sector, UN staff has not lost any part of their salary and other benefits, like medical insurance and pension contributions”.

That means whether the program of work and mandate delivery is negatively affected by the current liquidity crisis, the staff salary and other entitlements would continue unaffected, he added.

“Only an internal management decision could make the withholding of 20% of the salary for the six-month-period possible. It is important that the S-G takes the lead in this regard.”

“In my opinion piece, I emphasized that the UN Secretariat should brace itself to perform its global responsibilities in a high-spirited way and in an effective and efficient manner. No more business as usual.”

Meanwhile, in the corporate sector, the voluntary pay cuts have been on the rise.

At Best Buy, CEO Corie Barry has taken s 50 percent cut in her base salary while senior executives in the company have taken a reduction of 20 percent; John Lansing, chief executive of National Public Radio (NPR) has taken a 25 percent cut while other executives will have their salaries reduced by 10 to 15 percent.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city has announced pay cuts upward of 20 percent system-wide.

According to Business Insider, leaders from some of the companies affected by the pandemic, particularly airlines, “are forfeiting their paychecks as the pandemic worsens”.

These leaders include the co-founders of Lyft, executives at Airbnb, and the CEO of Marriott. And in the media and entertainment sector, Disney’s Executive Chairman Bob Iger is forgoing his salary for 2020, while the top five Comcast executives are donating theirs to charity. At Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said he would be giving up 100% of his salary for the next six months.

Gautam said more importantly, as many governments are announcing financial relief packages for their citizens who lose their jobs and to rescue private companies and employers whose businesses are suffering, there must be a concerted effort to require a drastic reduction in the grotesquely huge pay and perks packages enjoyed by CEOs and senior executives of large corporations in many countries.

“In fact, legislation offering bailouts for large corporations – e.g. airlines, cruise liners, banks, hedge funds, large hotel chains, etc. must require drastic cuts in their executive salaries and allowances to be eligible to receive any publicly subsidized financial assistance, including loans.”

That would generate real resources, said Gautam, to compensate their workers at the risk of losing jobs and would be a welcome move towards a fairer and more just world economic order.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Employees work on the solar panels of the El Romero plant, in the desert region of Atacama in northern Chile. CREDIT: Acciona

By Inga Vesper
May 19 2020 (IPS)

With widespread calls for green transitions in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, developing countries are predicted to remain at the bottom of the global economic ladder, a study claims.

Oil prices have fallen to record lows and climate change is prompting global economic shifts, but low- and middle-income countries risk missing out on green opportunities due to their lack of industrial production expertise.

An analysis in Research Policy measures the green growth potential of all countries, based on traded products.

Policy makers in developing countries should strengthen green production capabilities based on their renewable resources and existing expertise

It found that non-industrialised countries are at a disadvantage, as they have a smaller knowledge base from which to produce green products.

The researchers created a new index—the Green Complexity Index—which calculates a country’s ability to competitively export green, technologically-advanced products, based on a list of 293 products chosen from trade bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the OECD and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

They examined which green products economies might be able to transition to, based on current technological expertise.

Lead author Penny Mealy calls this the “ladder of technology development”.

“In sectors where countries have developed technological know-how, they can move on and progress to more advanced products,” says Mealy, an economics researcher at the University of Oxford. “In many ways, the set of green products mirrors that.”

This factor could leave developing countries in the lurch, the study found, as they have fewer areas of green expertise. A ranking of the Green Complexity Index, demonstrating how countries fared in terms of green product development between 1995 and 2014, showed that most developing countries remained near the bottom of the list.

There are, however, a few promising exceptions, Mealy says. Uganda, for example, significantly improved its position in the index due to its expertise in green materials.

The researchers projected that Uganda’s knowledge of plaiting plant-based materials gives it an advantage in producing environmentally-friendly mats and screens, which can be upscaled into brooms and brushes and, eventually, polypropylene sheeting.

Paul Steele, chief economist at the International Institute for Environment and Development, an independent research organisation, says that developing countries whose economies are less dependent on fossil fuels and monocrops might find it generally easier to transition to the green economy.

“This can be seen with ecotourism in Bhutan and Nepal, organic agriculture in Uganda and other parts of Africa, and solar, wind and hydropower in Laos and Morocco,” he tells SciDev.Net.

Policy makers in developing countries should strengthen green production capabilities based on their renewable resources and existing expertise, the researchers urge.

The sooner a country gains green production capabilities, the more able it is to branch out in the future, the researchers add.

Benjamin Sovacool, who teaches energy policy at the University of Sussex, says that a lot of the barriers developing countries face in branching out has to do with property. “A lot of their infrastructure is owned by foreign actors,” he says.

South Africa, for example, is seeing large investment from international actors primarily concerned with their shareholders, not sustainability. This raises conflicts, Sovacool says, as the country’s efforts to develop further rely on providing affordable energy to all, which is easier with fossil fuels.

“You can’t just have renewables for the sake of it, they have to be cheaper than coal,” Sovacool says.

But Mealy argues that developing countries have one advantage: They are not locked into complex industrial production systems and may be able to skip steps in traditional development, such as fossil fuel reliance for energy production or heavy industry.

“If anyone could leapfrog it’s developing countries because they don’t have the incumbency effect that developed countries do,” Mealy says.

Steele agrees: “Overall, developing countries have the sorts of resources that make it possible to transition to a green economy, and in some cases, they have more access to the sources that can power renewables.

“Their economic and policy structures are less locked into the brown or dirty economies, making green development more possible.”

 

This story was originally published by SciDev.Net

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By Aurelia Bruce
May 19 2020 (IPS-Partners)

 

What is happening now

In the early months of 2020, much of the globe was put on pause as governments fought to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. For many, work came to a grinding halt as factories and shops were forced to close their doors, transforming a global health catastrophe into a labour market and economic crisis.

The shock to almost all economic sectors, particularly micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, was instant and severe – essential lockdown measures and restrictions on movement resulted in a surge in insolvencies and lay-offs. Without the financial buffers of investments and savings, many are at risk of:

• poverty
• poor housing conditions
• malnutrition
• limited access to healthcare

There is particular concern for vulnerable workers such as young people, who are disproportionately affected by poor working conditions, and unstable and informal working arrangements.

What we expect

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicts that some countries could be dealing with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic for years to come. Preliminary analysis of the economic impact of the outbreak by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), suggests that global unemployment could rise between 5.3 million and 24.7 million.

Although these forecasts are not certain, one might argue they are conservative considering the 22 million jobs that were lost following the 2008 global financial crisis. In the UK, a University of Essex study predicts that the lockdown could cost the country 6.5 million jobs. Restrictions imposed to combat the outbreak are also causing some employers to lower their wages and working hours. In the long-term, this is likely to lead to a rise in underemployment.

During an economic downturn, we would expect an increase of informal self-employment, covering unregulated, unregistered or untaxed activities. However, in the case of this pandemic, incomes from these sources are amongst the hardest-hit.

Globally, workers in this sector are expected to see a 60 per cent decline in earnings, with those in Africa and Latin America losing as much as 81 per cent of their income.

What was happening before

While the forecasts may seem gloomy, the pre-COVID-19 numbers were not exactly encouraging either. For 2019, data from the ILO shows that only 3.3 billion, 57 per cent of the world’s working-age population, were employed. While 2.3 billion people were out of the labour force, another 188 million were unemployed; 165 million were employed but willing and available to work more hours; and 119 million were part of the potential labour force, which includes those who can work but are not seeking employment.

Furthermore, regardless of geographic location, young people in the labour force were facing higher rates of unemployment than adults, as seen in the chart below. Of the 1.3 billion people between ages 15 and 24, one-fifth of them were Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), and 75 per cent of them were in informal employment.

Although the potential impact of the pandemic on young people has not been quantified in specific numbers, it is obvious that youth, particularly those in entry-level jobs, non-standard work and those easily replaced by automated processes would be disproportionately affected.

Young workers are also heavily concentrated in sectors most disrupted by restrictions, such as tourism, hospitality and retail. So, the pre-COVID-19 trends tell a story of a tremendously underutilised labour force, particularly amongst our youth who were often left with little to no social protection, paid leave, unemployment benefits or remote working options.

Source: Own creation using ILO data

What needs to happen

In summary, whilst unemployment rates have held relatively steady overall, youth unemployment rates remain twice as high in many regions. Decent work deficits persist and labour underutilisation rates are largely ignored. The socio-economic effects of the pandemic will continue to gravely affect the unemployed globally, with up to an additional 24.7 million people facing job loss.

But along with the challenges, there are opportunities. The current economic recovery plans and COVID-19 response measures offer a chance for countries to address existing and emerging labour market issues.

Across the Commonwealth, there is a strong commitment to working towards a robust and coordinated strategy to tackle underemployment and high youth unemployment, as well as the additional threats posed by the pandemic. That is why the Commonwealth is bringing together governments and experts for a virtual series on the ‘Economics of COVID-19’.

Covid-19 seminar series

Critically, this will provide a space for policymakers to consider forward-thinking and targeted measures to support enterprises and entrepreneurs; and to strike at the core of joblessness, effectively utilising workers’ skills and preparing them for the labour market of the new digital economy

For more information or questions about registration please contact: economicevents@commonwealth.int

The author is Assistant Programme Officer Social Policy Division at the Commonwealth Secretariat

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The Russian capital, Moscow. The country has one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics with new infections rising at a rate of 10-15 percent per year and at least 1.2 million people infected. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, May 19 2020 (IPS)

In Russia, which has one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics, an already fragile healthcare system is buckling under the pressure of dealing with COVID-19.

The country has the second-highest number of reported coronavirus infections (as of May 19), hundreds of hospitals have reported outbreaks and death rates among doctors and other frontline health workers have been far above that in other countries.

It also has one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics with new infections rising at a rate of 10-15 percent per year and at least 1.2 million people infected.

According to a statement from Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), more than 100 of the country’s AIDS prevention and control centres have been “mobilised to support the country’s fight against COVID-19“.

While health officials assured that quality care for those with HIV continues, as resources are stretched to keep the COVID-19 in check, those working with people living with HIV (PLWHIV) say they have experienced problems.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one source told IPS: “There are people trapped in one part of Russia but not registered as living there because of the lockdowns. This means they cannot get their medication.

“Then there are migrant workers who normally bring their meds with them, then go back home after a few months to get their refill. They cannot get them now. Or there is a single mother who cannot leave their kids at home to get their medicine. So, volunteers deliver them to these people’s doors.”

Sources told IPS that local community groups and volunteers have also resorted to making illicit arrangements with doctors to deliver ARVs to people who need them.

“This is not something that is openly talked about because the people involved in this should not be doing this, but doctors realise they have no other choice or people could die,” one source said.

Disruptions to treatment for PLWHIV can be fatal. If a person adheres to treatment, their HIV viral load drops to an undetectable level. But if ARV treatment is not regular, a person’s viral load rises, affecting their health and potentially eventually leading to death. Even minor interruptions can affect the health of PLWHIV.

Although the World Health Organisation has said there is no evidence that the risk of infection or complications of COVID-19 is any different among PLWHIV who are clinically and immunologically stable on antiretroviral treatment compared with the general population, it is thought that people who have compromised immune systems are at greater risk of suffering severe illness from COVID-19.

Lockdowns across the country have also made it difficult for people in at-risk groups, such as drug users and sex workers, among others, to access harm reduction services.

Some facilities which provided treatments for drug users have been repurposed to deal with COVID-19 and it has also been decreed that drug users can only get treatment for drug dependency if they are in an acute condition.

There are concerns that these limits on the availability of treatment for drug users could push them into more risky drug-taking behaviour and put them in more danger of contracting HIV.

Anya Sarang, President of the Moscow-based Andrey Rylkov Foundation (ARF), a grass-roots organisation with a mission to promote and develop humane drug policy, told IPS: “But what is defined as an acute condition? These [drug users] are among the most vulnerable people in society at the moment and they cannot get help.”

Job losses during the crisis have also had an impact, driving some into poverty.

Sex workers are among some of those who have suffered most financially during the pandemic.

“They are having a very hard time. Many have lost all their work, and then lost their homes, and are now struggling to even eat, let alone get HIV medicines,” a senior worker at one NGO working with PLWHIV told IPS.

Meanwhile, Enji Shagieva, secretary of the Russian Forum of Sex Workers (RFSW), wrote for the AFEW health rights organisation earlier this month outlining the risk that many face.

“Organisations working with sex workers have cancelled outreach visits to places where sex workers still continue their activities, at their own risk. HIV testing and the distribution of condoms have been stopped. Sex workers still need condoms…,” she said.

Amid these problems, though, networks of local organisations and activists are working to ensure vital services are still being provided for PLWHIV and at-risk groups.

Russian NGOs explained to IPS how they had adapted to lockdown restrictions to find ways to continue providing harm reduction services, including providing clean needles and syringes for drug users to lessen the risk of contracting HIV.

Sarang said: “We normally went out for three or four hours every night and set up a mobile point where people could come and get needles etc. but we had to stop that during lockdown.”

“But we have managed to carry on using existing community networks in our city for needles/ HIV test distribution, increasing digital outreach, and case management, for example taking people to pick up their medicine,” she added.

Shannon Hader, Deputy Executive Director, Programme, UNAIDS, told IPS: “COVID-19 raises more challenges for HIV treatment and service provision, but the issue is how countries and partners meet these challenges.”

Hader said HIV treatment and prevention delivery systems already in place in many developing nations could be altered to meet current challenges: “There are opportunities for innovation and flexibility in service models for HIV which mean that those services need not be interrupted. We can put services into the hands of the people that need them themselves.”

“I am optimistic that if there is the political will, then developing countries will be able to come up with solutions and that there will not be a competition [for healthcare resources] between HIV and COVID-19,” said Hader.

Meanwhile, ARF is also running support groups through social media and regularly collecting feedback from at-risk communities to talk to people and help them where possible.

“All we are doing is trying to help people that need it wherever we can,” Sarang said.

Related Articles

• Ensuring Russia’s Sex Workers’ Rights Essential for Wider Gender Equality
• **Correction**How the COVID-19 Pandemic is Affecting Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health

The post HIV Services Take a Backseat to COVID-19 in Russia appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

In Russia, which has one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics with the rate of new infections rising by 10-15 percent per year and at least 1.2 million people infected, an already fragile healthcare system is buckling under the pressure of dealing with COVID-19.

The post HIV Services Take a Backseat to COVID-19 in Russia appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By David Nabarro and Joe Colombano
GENEVA, May 19 2020 (IPS)

When the COVID-19 virus travelled from Wuhan, China halfway across the world through Europe, the Americas and beyond in the space of a few weeks, it gave us proof, if one was ever needed, of how tightly interconnected we all are. Not only are our globalized economies interdepended, but also we ourselves are one with the environment around us, and with one another. We are one humankind sharing one planet. And yet, all too often we seem to forget it, as we carelessly revert to misguiding differences between “us” and “them.” Take, for example, the distinction between rich and poor countries, or as economists put it, between advanced economies and least developed countries. In the face of COVID-19, the only difference that matters is if we are sick or healthy. Other than that, we are all the same, regardless of economic status or geographic location.

Or are we really? Clearly we do not mean to say that differences do not exist. Indeed, the virus has shown us that, far from being the great leveler and equalizer that it was initially purported to be, it matters who you are and where you are. It matters if you are an African American in Chicago, a member of the First Nations in Northern Canada, a Rohingya refugee in Myanmar, a Dharavidweller in Mumbai, an informal worker in Nigeria, an older person in a residential home in the UK, an inmate in a South American prison, a meat processor in America, an immigrant labourer in a dormitory in Singapore, a female healthcare professional in any hospital around the world, or someone on a low income just about anywhere. It matters a lot. It makes the difference between being infected or not; between having access to testing or not; between health and illness, life and death. COVID-19 may be a challenge we all face, but it is our ability to respond to it that differswhether within or between countries.

David Nabarro

People in the developing world are most at risk. Take, for example, the first line of defense against the virus, as recommended by the WHO: frequent hand-washing. While this is part of daily life for all of us in the North, the latest UN SDGs Progress Report reminds us that 2 out of 5 people worldwide do not have a basic hand-washing facility with soap and water at home. In the least developed countries, it is less than one out of three people (28 per cent). This means that, globally, an estimated 3 billion people are still unable to properly wash their hands at home, and are therefore deprived of the most basic and effective prevention measure against COVID-19.

Or look at extreme poverty, a scourge that burdens the developing world most. According to the World Bank, COVID-19 has the potential of pushing an additional 40-60 million people back into extreme poverty. This would be an unfortunate reverse in decades of progress against global poverty. To make things worse, developing countries risk being hit by COVID-19 at the time when their economies are already weakened by the effects of low commodity prices, fleeing foreign capital and weakening currencies. In some instances, this volatility impacts the prices of food, with potential deleterious effects on the nutrition of the most vulnerable.

In the face of COVID-19, the advanced economies cannot afford to leave the developing world to fend for itself. After all, developing nations now suffer the impact of the pandemic through no faults of their own, the virus having reached their shores from the North, in the form of international travel. There is a real possibility, even likelihood, of major fiscal and financial crises in several large emerging economies and perhaps dozens of smaller ones. This would hamper our efforts to bring the pandemic under control. It would trigger social instability that is hard to reverse, and compound existing humanitarian crises. Even without invoking the moral imperatives dictated by our common humanity, it is in the political and economic interest of every country that the developing world is protected and spared the worst of this crisis.

Joe Colombano

The good news is that we know how to do this. Our multilateral system is designed to face multidimensional challenges and has decades of experience: the WHO to help keep the pandemics under control, the FAO to help identify the food import needs and food supply bottlenecks, the IMF to promptly fund what is needed, the World Bank to help rebuild, etc. What is now needed is adequate urgent international financing coupled with unequivocal political support. We need a “pandemic Marshall plan” for the developing countries, possibly in the form of a massive open spigot from the IMF, to do what the Fed did in the U.S., or the ECB in Europe, to inject liquidity, help orchestrate a rollover of sovereign debts and avoid the risk of a financial crisis.

It is true that COVID-19 knows no borders and makes no distinctions when it strikes. In that sense it is the ultimate global challenge. But countries are not equally equipped to deal with it, and it would be bad for the world if differences between nations blunt the collective response. The world needs the multilateral system like never before: budgets should be increased and not cut, and political support should be undivided. Our world is tightly interconnected: we are only as strong as the weakest amongst us.

David Nabarro, WHO Special Envoy on COVID-19, and Joe Colombano, economist

Read COVID-19 narratives of David Nabarro : https://www.4sd.info/covid-19-narratives/
and join his Open Online Briefings : https://www.4sd.info/covid-19-open-online-briefings/

 

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The post EXCLUSIVE: In the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic We Are Only as Strong as the Weakest of Us appeared first on Inter Press Service.

UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Yanghee Lee, pictured in Kuala Lumpur on 18 July, 2019. Photo: AFP

By C R Abrar
May 19 2020 (IPS-Partners)

“We all knew that [Aung San Suu Kyi] was put on a pedestal or portrayed as the icon of democracy and human rights, but ever since [her party] has taken office [after the 2015 election] and ever since she took the office of the State Councillor, all of her actions and her words, statements point otherwise”, noted Professor Yanghee Lee, in one of her last conversations with Al Jazeera as the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Burma. “Perhaps the world didn’t really know who she was”, she said.

At a time when the world, including neighbouring Malaysia and Thailand, have shunned the Rohingya (acknowledged as the most persecuted minority in the world), at a time when the Burmese state audaciously tramples the whole corpus of international human rights instruments being aided and abetted by major powers; at a time when those who stand for reason, rule of law and justice feel betrayed by the high and mighty of the world, Yanghee Lee stood firm as a beacon of hope.

A developmental psychologist and professor with decades of involvement in the UN’s rights bodies, Lee held the mandate of the Special Rapporteur from 2014 until end of April this year. Over the years, she made extensive visits to the region, including Burma. Her objective reporting on the human rights situation in Rakhine and the rest of Burma did not augur well and during their last one-to-one meeting, the de facto head of Burmese government Suu Kyi threatened visa denial if the UN Special Rapporteur kept pushing the “UN line”. Lee refused to be cowed by the former human rights icon’s interference and Suu Kyi delivered on her threat—she has been denied entry to the country since 2017. Lee viewed the Burmese decision “as a strong indication that there must be something terribly awful happening in Rakhine, as well as in the rest of the country”. While holding office, she was one of the very few global public figures who unwaveringly championed the Rohingyas’ quest for dignity, justice and protected return to their homeland.

Yanghee Lee’s tenure came to be largely dominated by the Burmese state’s attempt to complete the “unfinished business” of Rohingyas’ physical and historical existence, the Burmese equivalent of the Final Solution, in the early fall of 2017. The genocidal terror that was unleashed resulted in the exodus of at least 750,000 people into neighbouring Bangladesh. It was presented as a clearance operation of “ARSA terrorists”, a pretext enthusiastically accepted by Islamophobic western governments, world media and “security experts”. Choosing to ignore the genocidal nature of these “security clearance operations”, the emerging chorus of policy and media discourses faulted the Burmese military for “disproportionate and excessive use of force”, despite Lee calling out the “the hallmarks of a genocide” by Burma. As a matter of fact, on August 10, 2017, at least two weeks prior to the alleged ARSA attack on Burmese police outposts, Lee warned of the buildup and ominous movement of security forces in northern Arakan and appealed for restraint and respecting human rights.

In her parting statement to the Human Rights Council, Lee noted, “(w)hen I took up my mandate in 2014, I had thought that by 2020 a rights-respecting democracy would have been firmly established in Myanmar… Rather than a nation that protects human rights, I observe rights violations that continue to routinely occur and a country that stands accused of the most serious crimes under international law.”

Lee proposed ways to move towards an equal, tolerant and pluralistic society, including through victim-centered transitional justice mechanisms. Among other things, the UN expert underscored the need to bring the entire government and security forces under civilian control and initiate extensive legal reforms—including of the Constitution, land laws, the Citizenship Law and laws that violate fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, assembly and religion. “An end to impunity is the lynchpin for Myanmar to succeed in its transition to democracy. Perpetrators of human rights violations and international crimes must be held accountable,” she argued.

Yanghee Lee was appalled at the world’s reaction to the Rohingya plight—particularly that of the Security Council, which could not manage to agree on a single unified stance on an unfolding genocide in real time. She made her feelings loud and clear. Lee felt it was “shameful” that China and Russia, being UN security council members, have not taken any action against Burma. “China cannot be a global leader if it ignores such atrocities,” she noted. The Special Rapporteur also said the US decision to impose sanctions against senior military leaders in Burma did not go “far enough” and recommended these be tougher and applied to more generals.

She was disappointed at the response of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to the developments in northern Arakan. The situation posed an increasing risk to the peace and security of countries of the region, she warned, urging them to prioritise human rights in its dealings with Burma. She expressed regret at the lack of response from the Government of India on her request to visit the country to meet refugees there. She reminded them that it is incumbent on member states to respect mandates established by the Human Rights Council and provide timely and reasonable answers to such requests.

The UN’s role in addressing the Rohingya plight has been palpable. Lee personally appealed to Secretary General Antonio Guterres for an international investigation, to no avail. In October 2017, when The Guardian reported the scandalous news of Renata Lok-Dessalien, UN Resident Coordinator in Burma, compromising UN Human Rights Up Front policy by prioritising a cozy relationship with Burma’s rulers, Guterres relented and commissioned former Guatemalan foreign minister Gert Rosenthal to do an internal assessment of the UN’s performance in Burma. The Rosenthal Report condemned the organisation’s “obviously dysfunctional performance” over the past decade and noted “the overall responsibility was of a collective nature; in other words it can truly be characterised as a systemic failure of the United Nations.” Accordingly, no UN official was held accountable, and Lok-Dessallien was even rewarded with a larger portfolio when she was appointed head of the UN in India!

Yanghee Lee was unequivocal in expressing her disappointment of the UN system in dealing with the Rohingya issue, particularly the UN’s technical agencies in the New York headquarters and in Burma. She was brutally honest about how she felt about the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by the Burmese government, UNHCR and UNDP in early June 2018 purportedly “to assist the process of repatriation from Bangladesh”. The document was not made publicly available, nor was there any transparency about its terms. UN’s failure to defend the self-identity of the Rohingya and their refugee status appalled her. “I am dismayed about the fact that the parties to the MoU, including the United Nations agencies involved in this process, have apparently failed to recognise Rohingya living in Bangladesh as refugees and as Rohingya”.

The tendency of concerned states, including Burma and Bangladesh, to deny any role to Rohingya refugees was of grave concern for her. “Most frightful … is the fact that the Rohingya refugees have not been included in any of the discussions … around this MoU nor consulted in relation to the repatriation process as a whole”, she noted, posing the uncomfortable but pointed question to the Council—”how can the process of repatriation be voluntary with the people who the process is for excluded from it? How can you be sure that any return is based on individual informed consent?”

Conveying the common view among Rohingya refugees to the Council, Lee said “it is futile to speak about their safe, voluntary, dignified and sustainable return unless the root causes of their exodus are properly addressed”. She argued that to ensure such repatriation, the international community must ensure that Burma dismantles the system of discrimination against the Rohingya by law, policy and practices that continue to exist, and guarantee fundamental human rights to them, including by restoring their citizenship rights and property.

Helping lay the foundation for global justice for both Rohingyas and other victims within the UN’s system of accountability has been the single most important contribution of Professor Lee to Burma’s oppressed communities (not just the Rohingya), especially given that the country does not have national or domestic justice and accountability mechanisms that recognise and are capable of processing the gravest crimes in international law, such as crimes against humanity and genocide. Her persistent demand for an independent investigation into Burma’s state crimes against the Rohingya led to setting up of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (FFMM) by the UN that was succeeded by the creation of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) by the Human Rights Council in September 2018. The IIMM became operational on August 30, 2019—it is mandated to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes and violations of international law and prepare files for criminal prosecution.

Despite widespread skepticism, it was the relentless effort of Lee that led to the huge success in setting up of an accountability mechanism. She even wrote the TOR of the personnel of IIMM and prepared its budget. All these were achieved with the meagre support of a desk officer and a research assistant. Acknowledging her significant role, Rohingya genocide scholar Maung Zarni succinctly noted “No Yanghee Lee, no Fact Finding Mission and The Gambia-vs-Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice”.

In our meeting during her last visit to Bangladesh, she underscored the need for sustained engagement of civil society against all odds. Brushing aside my shyness, I told her that we celebrate her good fight against a system that stands for the status quo and the powerful, and has repeatedly failed to deliver justice. I added, she was the role model for those who stand for justice for the wretched of the earth. Maintaining her graceful composure, she smiled. Gracias, Professor Yanghee Lee.

C R Abrar is an academic. He is the Coordinator of Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The post Yanghee Lee: Champion of justice for Rohingyas appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UNICEF/Andrew Esiebo

By Danny Bradlow
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, May 19 2020 (IPS)

Sub-Saharan Africa has a debt problem. According to the most recent World Bank debt statistics, in 2018 the region had about $493 billion in long term external debt.

About one third, $117 billion, was in the form of tradeable bonds. About half of the $17 billion in interest payments Africa made in 2018 was to these bondholders.

To put this debt in perspective: In 2018, the region’s total external debt was equal to 36% of its gross national income. Debt service payments that year contributed to the region’s 3.6% of GDP budget deficit.

A year later, in 2019, many African countries spent more money servicing their debts than they did on health.

Needless to say, Africa’s debt problem is complicating its efforts to deal with the profound social, health, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The international community has taken some steps to help Africa deal with this issue. The G-20 countries have agreed to a debt payment standstill on all debts owed to official creditors based in their countries.

Some of these countries are also contributing to a fund to help the poorest countries meet their obligations to the IMF. Unfortunately, the international community has not convinced bondholders to contribute to this effort.

There are several reasons for this failure. First, the bondholders are a large and diverse group. They each have their own investment strategies and view of their responsibilities to their clients, which include both individuals and companies.

Second, there is variation in the terms and conditions of the different bonds that need to be reconciled and incorporated into one regional relief package.

Third, different African countries have different views on what they need to deal with the crisis in their country. Some want maximum debt relief. Others, more confident in their ability to service their debts and weather the crisis, want to avoid the “guilt by association” that would attach if they are too closely associated with those countries seeking debt relief.

Finally, there is a risk that speculators will buy these bonds, which trade on an open market, at their current discounted prices and seek to enforce their original terms against the debtor countries.

World Health Organization, Burundi

History teaches that this last risk is very real. In the 1990 many African countries had unsustainable debts. They owed $255 billion to their official creditors and $28 billion (17% of the total) to private creditors.

Bilateral and multilateral creditors launched the HIPC initiative in 1996 to help highly indebted poor countries. Thirty-one African countries benefited from this debt forgiveness. Private creditors did not participate.

Unfortunately, this created an opportunity for speculators, now more accurately called vulture funds. They bought the debts of countries like Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Uganda very cheaply.

They demanded that the countries meet their contractual obligations and pay them in full. They sued any country that refused. This strategy earned them returns of between 300% and 2,000%.

To date, they have used this strategy – or are using it – against approximately 15 African countries.

Any effort to help Africa deal with its bondholder problem must satisfy three objectives. First, it must offer immediate debt relief to those African countries that need it in order to deal with the COVID induced crisis that they are currently experiencing.

This means that Africa cannot wait for the inevitably time-consuming and laborious negotiating process with a reluctant group of bondholders to produce a result.

Second, it should mitigate the risk that the benefits of the debt relief will be captured by the vulture funds.

Third, it needs to ensure that after the crisis abates African states will not either be saddled with undue debt burdens or denied access to the financing they need to restart their economies and promote the sustainable development of their populations.

Fortunately, there is a way for Africa to meet all three objectives. It should create a special purpose vehicle –the DOVE (Debts of Vulnerable Economies) fund — that will demonstrate to the financial markets how a responsible creditor treats African debtors in crisis.

The DOVE fund will do three things.

First, it will buy African bonds on the open market at the prevailing discounted prices. It will then notify all other bondholders that it expects to participate in all future bondholder discussions about the management of African bonds.

Second, it will inform both the debtor country and the financial markets that it commits to hold its bonds and to implement a standstill on any payments due on them until the global health crisis abates. The fund will also pledge that once the global economy begins to grow again it will work with African debtors to ensure that the debt does not become an unreasonable burden on their efforts to rebuild their economies.

It will stipulate that any future debt renegotiations will be consistent with all applicable international standards such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Principles on Responsible Investment, and the UNCTAD Principles on Promoting Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing.

Third, the DOVE fund will advocate that all private sector creditors should participate in a comparable standstill, both on debt payments and bond trading, and should applying the same principles as the DOVE fund in determining what to do with the debt of the participating countries after the crisis ends.

It can remind them that most of the leading financial institutions in the world are signatories to the Principles on Responsible Investment, and many of them have policies that require them to be socially and environmentally responsible in all their operations. Many of them also have human rights policies that confirm that they respect international human rights.

In addition, many of them have acknowledged that their companies should serve the interests of all their stakeholders and should not prioritize the interests of their shareholders. Their stakeholders include their borrowers and those innocent third parties – such as citizens – affected by their actions and decisions.

The DOVE fund should also have the following characteristics so that it can function effectively.

First, it must be independent of both creditors and debtors. To demonstrate its independence the fund should be managed by an independent board representing all stakeholders. These include the debtor states and their citizens, the creditors and the investors in the DOVE fund.

This board would hire a manager to implement its strategy for assisting the debtor countries and advocating for a new approach to all other bondholders.

Second, the fund can be established in a neutral jurisdiction but it should be based at an African institution such as the African Development Bank.

Third, the fund should only buy the bonds of African countries that choose to participate in its operations. Some countries, given the terms of their bonds and their ability to meet their contractual obligations, might be wary of participating in these operations. They may fear that it will complicate their future access to financing.

Fourth, the fund needs to be large enough to be an influential voice in any discussion among bondholders about the treatment of the participating African countries’ debts. It should raise its resources from a range of sources including governments, international organizations, foundations, financial institutions, companies and individuals.

The purpose of raising funds from foundations, companies and individuals is both political and financial. Their involvement will increase the pressure on other bondholders to comply with the DOVE fund’s objectives.

The DOVE fund could encourage these groups to participate by issuing a social impact bond which would only offer holders a return that is linked to the post-crisis growth rate of sub-Saharan Africa and/or to the level of debt payments actually received by the DOVE fund after the crisis.

Such bonds are likely to appeal to African individuals and companies, members of the African diaspora and Africa’s friends who are interested in contributing to its efforts to deal with the profound COVID-19 induced crisis that the continent is facing.

Financial institutions could contribute “in kind” by making a binding commitment to participate in any debt payment and to comply with the objectives of the DOVE fund.

Clearly, the biggest portion would need to come from governments and international organizations.

One way governments could contribute is by donating a portion of their current holdings of special drawing rights, the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset, to be used by the DOVE fund.

The IMF could contribute through a sale of a portion of its gold holdings, which are currently valued at about $138 billion at current market prices and at about $4.5 billion at historical cost.

Africa is facing a profound crisis that could set its development back a generation. It needs a solution to its debt problems that makes sure that no future African leader is forced to ask, as did former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere: Should we really let our people starve so we can pay our debts?

The post Africa Needs a DOVE Fund: Or Should We Starve So We Can Pay our Debts? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Danny Bradlow is SARCHI Professor of International Development Law and African Economic Relations, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, South Africa, Email: danny.bradlow@up.ac.za

The post Africa Needs a DOVE Fund: Or Should We Starve So We Can Pay our Debts? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, May 19 2020 (IPS)

Economic growth is supposed to be the tide that lifts all boats. According to the conventional wisdom until recently, growth in China, India and East Asian countries took off thanks to opening up to international trade and investment.

Such growth is said to have greatly reduced poverty despite growing inequality in both sub-continental economies and many other countries. Other developing countries have been urged to do the same, i.e., liberalize trade and attract foreign investments.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Doha Round ‘dead in water’
However, multilateral trade negotiations under World Trade Organization (WTO) auspices have gone nowhere since the late 1990s, even with the so-called Doha Development Round begun in 2001 as developing countries rallied to support the US after 9/11.

After the North continued to push their interests despite their ostensible commitment to a developmental outcome, the Obama administration was never interested in completing the Round, and undermined the WTO’s functioning, e.g., its dispute settlement arrangements, even before Trump was elected.

To be sure, the Doha Round proposals were hardly ‘developmental’ by any standards, with most developing countries barely benefitting, if not actually worse off following the measures envisaged, even according to World Bank and other studies.

GVC miracle?
According to the World Bank’s annual flagship World Development Report (WDR) 2020 on Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains, GVCs have been mainly responsible for the growth of international trade for two decades from the 1990s.

GVCs now account for almost half of all cross-border commerce due to ‘multiple counting’, as products cross more borders than ever. Firms’ creative book-keeping may also overstate actual value added in some tax jurisdictions to minimize overall tax liability.

WDR 2020 claims that GVCs have thus accelerated economic development and even convergence between North and South as fast-growing poor countries have grown more rapidly, closing the economic gap with rich countries.

Automation, innovative management, e.g., ‘just-in-time’ (JIT), outsourcing, offshoring and logistics have dramatically transformed production. Labour processes are subject to greater surveillance, while piecework at home means self-policing and use of unpaid household labour.

WDR 2020 out of touch
WDR 2020 presumes trends that no longer exist. Trade expansion has been sluggish for more than a decade, at least since the 2008 global financial crisis when the G20 of the world’s largest economies and others adopted protective measures in response.

GVC growth has slowed since, as economies of the North insisted on trade liberalization for the South, while abandoning their own earlier commitments as the varied consequences of economic globalization fostered reactionary jingoist populist backlashes.

Meanwhile, new technologies involving mechanization, automation and other digital applications have further reduced overall demand for labour even as jobs were ‘off-shored’. Trump-initiated trade policies and conflicts have pressured US and other transnational corporations to ‘on-shore’ jobs after decades of ‘off-shoring’.

Nonetheless, WDR 2020 urges developing countries to bank on GVCs for growth and better jobs. Success of this strategy depends crucially on developed countries encouraging ‘offshoring’, a policy hardly evident for well over a decade!

As the last World Bank chief economist, albeit for barely 15 months, Yale Professor Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg recently agreed, “the world is … retreating from globalization”. “Protectionism is on the rise — industrialized countries are less open to imports from developing countries. In addition, there is by now a lot of competition”.

The Covid-19 crisis has further encouraged ‘on-shoring’ and ‘chain shortening’, especially for food, medical products and energy. Although the Japanese and other governments have announced such policies, ostensibly for ‘national security’ and other such reasons, Goldberg has nonetheless reiterated the case for GVCs in Covid-19’s wake.

Trade does not lift all boats
After claiming that “economists have argued for centuries that trade is good for the economy as a whole”, Goldberg has also noted that “trade generates winners and losers”, with many losing out, and urges acknowledging “the evidence rather than trying to discredit it, as some do.”

Following Samuelson and others, she recommends compensating those negatively effected by trade liberalization, claiming “sufficient gains generated by open trade that the winners can compensate the losers and still be better off” without indicating how this is to be done fairly.

Compensation and redistribution require transfers which are typically difficult to negotiate and deliver at low cost. Tellingly, like others, she makes no mention of international transfers, especially for fairly redistributing the unequal gains from trade among trading partners.

Interestingly, she also observes, “There are plenty of examples, especially in African countries, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few… even when the tide rises, only very few boats rise. Growth doesn’t trickle down and doesn’t improve the lot of the poor.”

Unlikely Pan-Africanist
After decades of World Bank promotion of the ‘East Asian miracle’ for emulation by other developing countries, especially in Africa, Greek-born American Goldberg insists that what worked for growth and poverty reduction in China will not work in Africa today.

Echoing long time Bank critics, she argues, “If trade with rich countries is no longer the engine of growth, it will be more important than ever to rely on domestic resources…to generate growth that does trickle down and translates to poverty reduction.”

Instead, as if supporting some contemporary pan-Africanists, she argues, “Africa needs to rely on itself more than ever. The idea that export-led industrialization as it happened in China or East Asia is going to lead growth in Africa becomes less and less plausible”.

She argues that “the African market is a very large market with incredible potential. It has not been developed yet. So, regional integration might be one path forward. Rather than opting for global integration, which may be very hard to achieve these days when countries are retreating from multilateralism, it might be more feasible to push for regional trade agreements and create bigger regional markets for countries’ goods and services”.

Acknowledging “We are still a very long way from there because most countries are averse to this idea — they see their neighbors as competitors rather than countries they can cooperate with”, not seeming to recognize the historical role of the Bank and mainstream trade economists in promoting the ‘free trade illusion’ and discrediting pan-Africanism.

The post Covid-19 Straw Breaks Free Trade Camel’s Back appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
Singapore, May 18 2020 (IPS)

When the United States and China signed the First-Phase of their Trade Agreement in January this year, President Donald Trump called it a “momentous step”, and the world believed they had stepped back from a dangerous brink. But, alas, to cite an idiom that is so current today, it was but a ‘false positive’. As the globe reels from the surgoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is possible that the rapid deterioration of US-China relationship can become one of the worst side-effects of this raging virus.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

In this election year, things had looked good for Trump in January. His domestic support base was solid. The economy was doing well, The Democrats were on a bit of a disarray. Trump had lowered the temperature in relations with North Korea. Now, with the deal with China, his re-election seemed a shoo-in. Then came the pandemic. The US economy took a nose-dive. Unemployment soared, Anxious to return to early normalcy, the While House took measures that deepened confusion. One way out for Trumps was to assume the role of a wartime-President. An enemy was needed. Initially, it was the ‘virus’, but it was too invisible’ to be useful. Something more tangible was required, China fitted the bill.

What made it easier was that as the pandemic spread many in the world did not see China as quite the Caesar’s wife. It was accused of concealing some critical early developments with regard to it. The pathogen first spread from Wuhan in China. The prevalent political system aided suppression of some facts. This was a cause for umbrage to many, including the Europeans who suffered greatly. But the Europeans had no reason to politicize it. To many analysts, Trump and his team did. It would help rally their cohorts. Furthermore, for a variety of reasons, China’s popularity in the US was low. And, of course, there could be nothing unfair in love and war.

So, Trump and the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led a chorus of anti-Chinese tirade. They accused China of hiding the enormity of the virus threat. They also alleged, without seeing the need to produce evidence. that the pathogen originated in a Wuhan laboratory. The Chinese originally responded that these things were better left to scientists than to “Politicians who lie for their own domestic political ends”. Later they issued a lengthy rebuttal of what they said were “ preposterous allegations” by some leading US politicians. To make it appealing to ordinary Americans, the Chinese, rather adroitly began their briefings on the 30-page 11000-word article by invoking the American Republican hero, President Abraham Lincoln.

Lashing out at the World Health Organization which had been generous in its praise of China’s handling of the Corona crisis. Trump withdrew its funding calling it a “Puppet of China”. Thereafter, the US sent a missive to 60 countries asking for support for Taiwan’s participation in the organization, to broaden all efforts to fight the pandemic (Taiwan is being praised as a success-story in this regard). At the same time, the US stopped a draft-text from being voted upon in the United Nations Secretary Council calling for a ‘cease-fire’’ in various global conflicts to help troubled countries to better combat the COVID.

Because of the situation, China was running far behind the pace needed to meet the first year’s goal of purchase of American goods, which was to have been a US$ 77 billion increase over 2017 levels according to the January phase One deal. The Chinese asked for renegotiation. Trump has declared he was ‘not interested’. He accused his predecessors in the White House for alluring China to ‘take advantage of the US for many many years doubtless in livid rage at former President Barrack Obama’s recent criticism of his handling the current crisis. Not only that. There are now hints that Trump may default paying the US$ 1.08 trillion debt owed to China, and even seize the latter’s assets! Thus would have a huge impact on the global market economy and the US-China economic relations would lie in tatters!

On the military front the clouds are also darkening. A guided-missile American destroyer “USS Barry” passed through the Taiwan strait twice in April, Another US naval vessel, the “USS America recently conducted exercise in the East China Seas and the South China sea. In March, Trump signed into law the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act, following which the Chinese Media warned Taiwan against its allowing the US to town the island into a powder keg.

China has its own legislation about Taiwan. The anti-secession law passed by China’s Parliament in 2005 mandates Beijing to declare war if Taiwan formally declares independence. Taiwan therefore, maintains the most studious “red-line” on China’s foreign and security policy.

In all fairness, the US security establishment recognizes that. Hopefully, the US institutional mechanism can restrain the onslaught of a war for overt political gains of one segment of the polity that could devastate the entire nation. At the same time the Chinese would. it is assumed, have the good sense not to self-destruct themselves by initiating something drastic and foolish like seeking to attack Taiwan with the US engrossed in battling the virus. Both sides, the Americans and the Chinese, have recently been relentlessly citing the Greek historian Thucydides, who warned against miscalculations leading to when he observed “when Athens grew strong, there was great fear in Sparta”. Let us hope both sides, the Americans and the Chinese, pay heed to their own perceived forebodings!

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

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

The post The Hotting-Up of the Sino-American Spat: Most Dangerous Side-Effect of Covid-19? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Remittances now account for an important portion of GDP in Latin America and the Caribbean and support millions of families, so the drop in this source of income is shaking the economies of many countries and deepening poverty in the region. CREDIT: World Bank

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 18 2020 (IPS)

Remittances that support millions of households in Latin America and the Caribbean have plunged as family members lose jobs and income in their host countries, with entire families sliding back into poverty, as a result of the COVID-19 health crisis and global economic recession.

The region will receive a projected 77.5 billion dollars in remittances this year, 19.3 percent less than the 96 billion dollars it received in 2019, according to provisional forecasts by the World Bank.

The damage “can be understood from the angle of consumption. Six million households, of the 30 million that receive remittances, will not have them this year, and another eight million will lose at least one month of that income,” expert Manuel Orozco told IPS from Washington, D.C.

Remittances in the region average 212 dollars per month, according to studies by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Remittances “represent 50 percent of the total income of the households that receive money from family members abroad, and increase their savings capacity to more than double that of the average population,” said Orozco, who heads the migration, remittances and development programme at the Inter-American Dialogue organisation.

“The projected fall, which would be the sharpest decline in recent history, is largely due to a fall in the wages and employment of migrant workers, who tend to be more vulnerable to loss of employment and wages during an economic crisis in a host country,” the World Bank stated in a report.

The cause of this was the shutdown of entire segments of economic activity in an attempt to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus, which deprived migrants of their sources of employment and income, thus undermining their ability to send money back home to their families.

This is a global phenomenon, with remittances falling by at least 19.7 percent to 445 billion dollars in low- and middle-income countries as a whole: dropping by 23 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 22 percent in South Asia, 19.6 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 13 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

Remittances “are a vital source of income for developing countries,” World Bank Group President David Malpass said Apr. 22, noting their role in alleviating poverty, improving nutrition, increasing spending on education and reducing child labour in disadvantaged households.

Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), listed the drop in remittances among the factors that will depress the region’s economy to an unprecedented level, -5.3 percent, with the risk of poverty climbing from 186 million to 214 million inhabitants: 33 percent of the total population.

An empty money transfer office in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is usually packed with migrants sending remittances home from the U.S. to their families in Central America. The city, dedicated to leisure and tourism, has been paralysed by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving thousands of migrant workers without employment or income. CREDIT: Western Union

Anxiety from the north

The countries that will be hardest hit are those of Central America and Haiti, according to Bárcena. Remittances make up between 30 and 39 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product (GDP), and last year accounted for 21.8 percent of Honduras’ GDP, 21.2 percent of El Salvador’s and 13.8 percent of Guatemala’s.

“We’re talking about fragile states, with collapsed health systems, weak or corrupt governments, and budgets that were already insufficient to meet people’s needs and are worse off now,” Victoria Gass of the U.S. division of Oxfam’s anti-poverty coalition told IPS from New York.

Orozco stressed that it will affect the consumption capacity of 20 percent of Central Americans, who will be forced to use their savings, on average a quarter of all remittances, for immediate expenses such as buying food and medicine.

In El Salvador, for example, Gabriela Pleitez, 35, who lives in the capital, no longer receives the 200 dollars a month sent to her by her mother, a dental assistant, and her brother, a taxi driver, who live in Los Angeles, California and found themselves suddenly unemployed.

Gabriela completed the 400 dollars she needed to get by with unsteady work as a real estate agent or by selling clothes and beauty products. Now she takes in some money as an assistant at a stand that sells traditional foods.

“I don’t buy bread anymore, and I’m eating less. If you manage to get 10 dollars you have to think carefully what to spend it on. If I don’t pay the water bill, they will cut it off. My landlord won’t charge me rent for three months, in accordance with a government decree, but then he will want me to leave,” she told IPS.

Another Salvadoran, Rosa Ramírez, a 56-year-old mother and grandmother still in charge of an adult daughter and four children, said the pandemic dealt her small flower arrangement business a death blow. “The situation was difficult before, and now, with homes and businesses closed, I’m out of work,” the resident of Zacatecoluca, in the central department of La Paz, told IPS.

Young Latin Americans migrate in search of opportunities and older family members are dependent on their support through remittances to cover essential expenses such as food and medicine. CREDIT: IFAD

Her lifeline is her son Luis, 27, who found a job in 2018 as a carpenter in Stafford, Virginia, in the U.S. southeast, after fleeing from gangs who demanded he make payments to keep them from attacking his then three-year-old daughter.

Luis used to send her between 350 and 400 dollars a month “to pay bills, the rent, and medicine, because I’ve had high blood pressure for years and I can’t go without my medicine,” Rosa said. But now her son has only sent her half that because “he is working fewer hours, one day he gets a job and the next he doesn’t.”

Rosa’s daughter received a temporary 300 dollar aid package provided by the government for the most vulnerable, and was able to cover basic expenses. But Rosa is now anxious about how she will make ends meet. Her daughter, Gabriela, would like to emigrate to the United States, but she has been told that the legal process could take eight years.

Another hard-hit country is Mexico, where 42 percent of the population of 130 million lives in poverty. In 2019, 36 billion dollars in remittances came in, mostly from the 37 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States.

Seven million households received remittances in 2019, but this year 1.7 million of those households will not receive them, Orozco calculated, due to the wave of unemployment that is hitting the U.S.

Intra-regional migration in the South

South America has a more even spread of migration that provides it with remittances, between North America, Spain and other European countries, and the sub-region itself, greatly increased by the millions of Venezuelans who fled to neighbouring countries in the last six years due to the economic, political and humanitarian calamity in their country.

This is the case, for example, of 26-year-old Laura (who preferred not to give her last name), who works in a veterinary clinic in Lima, “which has practically been left without clients due to the lockdown ordered by the Peruvian government. My husband, who used to do various jobs, is not bringing in an income either,” she told IPS from the Peruvian capital.

Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean will rise with the fall in economic activity, the largest seen in the region in almost a century, and this time there will be little relief from remittances because the COVID-19 pandemic has also sunk the economies of host countries. CREDIT: UNDP

Laura regularly sent 100 dollars a month to her mother, a widow raising two teenage children on the meager salary (equivalent to five dollars a month) of a school teacher in Barquisimeto, a city in central-western Venezuela.

With each remittance, her mother “could buy some medicine, some meat, milk and eggs to complete the CLAP (the acronym for the bag of basic foodstuffs that the government delivers monthly at subsidised prices to poor families), but now I can’t send her almost anything, we’re just trying to scrape by in Lima,” said Laura.

Of the Venezuelans working in Peru, 46 percent were street vendors, 15 percent were employed in shops and six percent worked in restaurants – activities that have all faced restrictions in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research by Cécile Blouin of the Pontifical Catholic University in Lima.

In the last five years, 1.6 million Venezuelans have migrated to Colombia, 880,000 to Peru, 385,000 to Ecuador, 370,000 to Chile, 250,000 to Brazil and 145,000 to Argentina, according to a platform of United Nations agencies and NGOs monitoring the phenomenon.

The Venezuelan diaspora was added to more traditional migration flows, such as that of Paraguayans in Argentina: 550,000 migrants who sent home some 70 million dollars in 2019, a figure that was already declining due to exchange controls in Buenos Aires.

One third of the 1.3 billion dollars that Bolivia received in remittances in 2019 came from Bolivian migrants in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, but the figure has dropped since March with the measures put in place in the attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19.

In Peru, which has three million citizens living abroad, a quarter of the 3.3 billion dollars the country received in remittances in 2019 came from the 350,000 Peruvians living in Argentina and the 250,000 in Chile.

Until this global upheaval, remittances were counter-cyclical: workers sent more money to their families when their home countries were experiencing crisis and hardship, which this time they have not been able to do because the pandemic and recession have affected all countries.

But there is some hope for the future. According to the International Monetary Fund, after falling -3.0 percent in 2020, the world economy will grow 5.8 percent in 2021 (Latin America 3.4 percent) and remittances will also increase at a similar rate. In low- and middle-income countries they will total 470 billion dollars.

But for millions of Latin American families, like those of Gabriela and Rosa in El Salvador or Laura in Venezuela, that’s too long a wait.

With reporting from Edgardo Ayala in San Salvador.

The post Coronavirus Leads to Nosedive in Remittances in Latin America appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A trafficked survivor reunites with family in Vietnam. Courtesy: Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Australia, May 18 2020 (IPS)

A single mother, Mai (name changed) had the responsibility of providing for her young son and grandparents, who had brought her up in a poor rural province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. While she was looking for employment, somebody approached her on social media with an offer of a high-paying job in China. When she arrived in China, she was sold into a forced marriage.

For two months, Mai suffered violence and beatings from her ‘husband’, who kept her locked in the house. When she tried to fight back, the ‘husband’ sold her to another man seeking a wife. She was forced to have sex as the family wanted a child. When she became pregnant, she was given some freedom and allowed to work in a nearby shoe factory. Desperate to escape this forced marriage and modern slavery, she managed to connect online with a Vietnamese man, who referred her to Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, an Australian charity working in Vietnam.

• A forced marriage is when a person is married without freely and fully consenting because of either coercion, threat or deception.
• The Asia Pacific region predominates in the numbers of victims of modern slavery. The region had 55 percent of the victims of forced marriage worldwide.
• Sexual exploitation was also rife in the region with more than seven in 10 victims worldwide, according to the 2017 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery.

Mai is amongst a small number of fortunate women, who were able to seek help and be rescued. She returned to Vietnam in December 2018, and after the police were able to arrest her trafficker, she was reunited with her family.

“I have been able to rebuild my life with Blue Dragon’s support. Recently, I have completed hospitality training and have a part-time job in a city café. I can save some money to send to my grandparents, who are nurturing my children,” Mai told IPS through a social worker. 

Her experience resonates with many young Vietnamese women, who are tricked and trafficked into sexual slavery. Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation rescues 110 to 130 women each year. Its co-CEO Skye Maconachie told IPS, “Once rescued and returned to Vietnam, their family situation usually hasn’t changed and they are still impoverished and vulnerable to being re-trafficked or exploited. Our teams provide emotional, psychological, basic living and legal support as they work with each survivor to help them learn skills and get employment.”

While survivors seek normalcy on first returning home, Maconachie said, “It is not until later in their recovery that the trauma they have experienced emerges and impacts them with flashbacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, low self-esteem, fear and distrust.”

Nepali girls dancing. The Asia and Pacific region predominates in the numbers of victims of modern slavery. The region had 55 percent of the victims of forced marriage worldwide. Credit Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

• Women and girls are disproportionately affected by modern slavery, accounting almost 29 million or 71 percent of the overall total.
• On any given day in 2016, an estimated 15 million people were living in a forced marriage.
• More than one third of all victims of forced marriage were children at the time of the marriage, and almost all child victims were girls, according to joint research by the International Labour Organization, and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the International Organisation for Migration.

Walk Free’s Senior Research Analyst, Elise Gordon told IPS, “Our research has indicated that traditional views of the role of women, girls and children could be contributing to increased vulnerability to forced and underage marriage, forced sexual exploitation, and commercial sexual exploitation of children in the Asia Pacific region.”

Trafficking contravenes fundamental human rights and freedoms. As Australian Red Cross’ National Coordinator for Trafficked People Program, Sally Chapman told IPS, “We are concerned that people who have been trafficked may be subject to various forms of physical, sexual and emotional violence. They are often afraid of arrest, detention and deportation; don’t trust authorities, and can also be discriminated against throughout any referral and support processes. The impact can be significant and include permanent control and/or monitoring of their movement, fear of physical retaliation, death, or reprisal against or harm to their loved ones.”

The Australian Red Cross last year provided assistance with essential items, such as food, toiletries and clothes while addressing accommodation, health and wellbeing needs to individuals identifying as being from 48 different countries.

Chapman cautioned, “During disasters and crises, people can be displaced from their homes, separated from their family members, school and employment can be interrupted, and systems of social support and law and order can break down. These factors can exacerbate the risk of trafficking, particularly for women and girls. The humanitarian impact of climate change and extreme weather events is likely to increase trafficking and forms of exploitation and slavery.”

The Australian Red Cross works to raise awareness in communities so that the general public, service providers and authorities can reduce risks; recognise the signs of exploitation, trafficking, slavery; be able to respond safely; and refer someone for help and support.  

• The hidden nature of exploitation makes it difficult to ascertain the extent of victimisation in Australia, which is primarily a destination country for people trafficked from Asia, particularly Thailand, Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Pacific Island countries.
• Recent research by the Australian Institute of Criminology (2019) estimated that only one in four victims are detected. This means that human trafficking and modern slavery victims in Australia ranged between 1,300 and 1,900 in 2015–2017.
• Modern Slavery trends vary widely across the Asia Pacific region and men, women and children are exploited for various reasons – slavery, human trafficking, slavery-like practices such as servitude, forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage or organ harvesting.

As Jenny Stanger, Executive Manager of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney’s Anti-Slavery Taskforce told IPS, “Awareness about trafficking and slavery outside the sex industry has grown only in the last decade. Human trafficking for organ removal poses new challenges. There is a global shortage of organs and there are a lot of vulnerable people who might be willing to sell their organs. There is also mounting evidence that prisoners in China are forcibly having their organs harvested for profit”.

Global Financial Integrity (GFI) estimates that 10 percent of all organ transplants including lungs, heart and liver, are done via trafficked organs. The most prominent organ traded illicitly is the kidney. The World Health Organisation estimated that 10,000 kidneys are traded on the black market worldwide annually, or more than one every hour.

Stanger, who has worked as a case manager and advocate for survivors of trafficking and slavery for over two decades, relates the story of a Filipino woman, who was approached by an Australian couple visiting the Philippines. They were looking for a kidney donor and they offered the woman money and permanent residency in Australia if she were to donate a kidney to their dying family member. The woman was advised by her own community that this was a good opportunity for her, so she agreed.

After arriving in Australia, she was treated poorly and forced to clean and cook for the dying recipient and her husband. By chance the woman disclosed the complete nature of the arrangement to a health worker in the hospital where the transplant was to take place and that person contacted Stanger for assistance. The kidney transplant did not take place and the recipient eventually died.

“In the end, the government response to human trafficking recognised the Filipino woman as a human trafficking victim. She was able to stay in Australia after she chose to cooperate with the Australian Federal Police in an investigation that was unable to be prosecuted. This failure changed Australian law forever because, at the time, the Commonwealth Criminal Code did have an offence to adequately address organ trafficking.  A new ‘organ trafficking’ offence was enacted in 2013,” Stanger explained.

• It is estimated that the illegal organ trade conservatively generates approximately $840 million to $1.7 billion annually, according to GFI, a Washington DC-based think tank, that provides analyses of illicit financial flows.
• In 2015, Australia legislated to make clear that that slavery offences have universal jurisdiction; it amended the Criminal Code to increase the penalties for forced marriage from four years to seven years’ imprisonment for a base offence, and from seven to nine years’ imprisonment for an aggravated offence.
• The ASEAN-Australia Counter-Trafficking Initiative, launched in August 2019 to fight human trafficking, modern slavery and forced labour, is a 10-year programme that will work to strengthen criminal justice responses and protect victim rights in the region.
• The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ), which actively supports the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 of decent work and economic growth, has focused much of its work on eliminating modern slavery.

“COVID 19 has demonstrated that when the whole world decides to take action to address a critical issue, change is possible. I hope that one day our leaders will truly recognise the tragedy of modern slavery and find the political will to make freedom from modern slavery a reality for everyone, ” Stanger added.

 

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

 

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The post Forced Marriage, Organ Trafficking Rife in Asia Pacific – Part 2 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The Asia Pacific region predominates in the numbers of victims of modern slavery. The region had 55 percent of the victims of forced marriage worldwide.This is the second of a 2-part series on trafficking and modern slavery in the Asia Pacific region.

The post Forced Marriage, Organ Trafficking Rife in Asia Pacific – Part 2 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Joseph Chamie
NEW YORK, May 18 2020 (IPS)

It’s an indisputable fact: the United States leads the world in the number of Covid-19 deaths. As of 15 May, three months after the country’s first confirmed coronavirus death, the US death toll from the pandemic has reached a remarkable 88,000 deaths. That rising figure is more than double the number of coronavirus deaths of the next highest country, the United Kingdom at 34,000 deaths.

The pandemic is still in its early stages and many fear the worst is yet to come. Today’s coronavirus mortality picture will no doubt change over time, continuing to evolve and remaining a long-term threat, as the coronavirus spreads death and suffering to populations across the planet.

Among the world’s ten most populous countries, representing 58 per cent of the world’s population, a strong correlation exists between population size and the total number of annual deaths from all causes.

China and India, for example, represent 18 percent of the world’s population and about 18 percent of the world’s total number of annual deaths. Similarly, the United States population is 4 percent of the world’s population and has about 5 percent of the world’s annual number of deaths

However, the distribution of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic differs greatly from the distribution of the world’s total annual deaths. Whereas the US accounts for 5 percent of the world’s number of annual deaths, the country now has 29 percent of the world’s total Covid-19 deaths. In contrast, China, which accounts for 18 percent of the world’s total number of annual deaths, now has about 2 percent of the world’s total Covid-19 deaths (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division for population size and annual numbers of deaths; Worldometer for Covid-19 deaths as of 15 May 2020.

 

If Covid-19 deaths were distributed proportionate to a country’s share of world total annual deaths, a very different picture would emerge. The United States death toll from the pandemic would plummet to a fraction of its current level, from 88,000 to 15,000 and China’s coronavirus deaths would be many times larger than its current level, from 4,600 to 55,000.

If the coronavirus had first emerged in New York City rather than Wuhan, then perhaps one might expect the United States to have experienced a disproportionate share of all pandemic deaths. However, the virus first appeared in China and that country has a comparatively low number of Covid-19 deaths.

So what then is the likely explanation for why America leads the world in Covid-19 deaths?

The high numbers of American Covid-19 deaths appear basically to be the result of Washington’s peculiar response to the pandemic. That response differs markedly from those of countries that have achieved relatively low numbers and rates of coronavirus deaths

Some observers have chosen to dismiss this question at the outset by discrediting and denying the statistics relating to the pandemic. Those data, they maintain, are unreliable and should be ignored.

Cause of death data, they contend, are flawed with deaths, especially of the elderly, coming from other causes that are often attributed to Covid-19 and at other times Covid-19 deaths are mistakenly attributed to other deaths or missed entirely. Also, they believe that political considerations are greatly influencing the reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths.

Most observers recognize the statistical shortcomings of pandemic mortality data and believe that the reported numbers are likely to be undercounts of coronavirus deaths. However, they do not find the statistical limitations sufficiently compelling to explain away why the United States leads the world in coronavirus deaths.

The high numbers of American Covid-19 deaths appear basically to be the result of Washington’s peculiar response to the pandemic. That response differs markedly from those of countries that have achieved relatively low numbers and rates of coronavirus deaths.

At the start of the year, the Washington response began by dismissing early warnings, denials of likely trends and eschewing expert advice regarding the expected staggering consequences of a pandemic. It was followed by assurances by the American president that every thing was under control, the country was in far better shape than other countries, claims minimizing the impact of the coronavirus, including it is not as perilous as seasonal flu, predictions of an early resolution and a vaccine by the year’s end.

This initial phase of the White House response was later followed by the politicization of the pandemic and its reported consequences. Health, medical and mortality concerns and recommendations to address the pandemic became highly divisive partisan issues.

The pandemic turned to a political battle of “us vs. them”. Some declared that the pandemic was being used as a new hoax to bludgeon the president.

Angry protests, some armed military-style, and threats of violence erupted across the country against recommended pandemic mitigation guidelines, including shutdowns, shelter-in-place, quarantines, testing, social distancing and face masking. This was further complicated by rising distrust and growing resentment that were worsened by conflicting messages coming out of Washington and many state capitals.

When the global pandemic was declared on 11 March 2020, the number of American deaths was relatively small, slightly below 40. However, the number of Covid-19 deaths grew rapidly, reaching 4,000 by 30 March, 40,000 by 19 April and 80,000 by 9 May (Figure 2).

 

Source: Estimates from Worldometer and projections by author.

 

Further complicating matters, the 88,000 coronavirus deaths have been unevenly distributed across the American population. Covid-19 has disproportionately hit the poor, low-income workers, minority communities and elderly men.

Many have called for dramatic and speedy changes in the government’s strategies, programs, health infrastructure, finances, testing, contact tracing, case isolation and surveillance to confront the continuing spread of the coronavirus. In their view, the government’s policies and programs to confront the pandemic, which is considered far from contained, have been plagued by incompetence, callousness, duplicity, disorganization and unpreparedness.

Others consider the calls for changes in strategies and programs as unjustified attacks aimed at undermining the current Administration for purposes of political gain, especially with the presidential election on the horizon. Media and other inquiries questioning the merits of Washington’s response to the pandemic and challenging the president’s claims of achievements and successes are often viewed as nasty and reflections of personal contempt for the country’s head of state.

While America leads the world with Covid-19 deaths, it does not lead the world in the Covid-19 death rate. To date, approximately eight European countries have higher rates than the United States. For example, the coronavirus death rate of Italy and Spain is double the rate of the United States.

However, many countries have achieved Covid-19 fatality rates that are a fraction of America’s rate. In Germany and Japan, for example, the Covid-19 death rates per million population are 96 and 6, respectively, versus 268 in the United States. Other countries with low coronavirus death rates include: Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Hungary, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Singapore and South Korea.

The total number of coronavirus deaths in the United States will soon hit 100,000, eventually exceeding 200,000 and is projected to reach more than 3,000 deaths each day by early June 2020. The American president has said that those numbers of death indicate that the government’s response to the pandemic has been successful and he’s done a good job.

As stated at the outset: America leads the world in Covid-19 deaths. Before continuing to advance unfounded, self-congratulatory claims, especially well before the pandemic’s spread is contained, the government in Washington may wish to review and consider adopting, as appropriate, some of the policies and programs of countries that have been considerably more successful than the United States in reducing the pandemic’s deadly toll.

In doing so, the Administration should rely more heavily on scientific advice and knowledge-based guidance from medical and public health experts as a foundation for the government’s overall pandemic policies. That reliance would greatly contribute to developing a vital strategy needed to avoid a feared calamitous resurgence of coronavirus deaths, suffering and grief in the coming months that would also in turn set back efforts for social and economic recovery.

 

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

 

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Secretary-General António Guterres poses for a group photo with the members of the Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance. Credit: Mark Garten / United Nations

By Leila Fourie and Fani Titi
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, May 18 2020 (IPS)

Sitting on the southern tip of Africa during a time of social distancing, while the entire planet fights Covid-19, we cannot help but reflect on how vulnerable our country is to this scourge.

The pandemic has highlighted the underlying inequalities in our society. More than half of South Africa’s population lack access to piped water in their homes – never mind electricity or safe sanitation. We lack adequate medical facilities and the basics required to fight a contagious disease of this magnitude.

Never has the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development been more relevant, more critical or more urgent.

The 2030 Agenda sets out a vision for a future for the planet and its people in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It matters to all spheres of society and requires inclusive and sustainable economic development.

This is vital for South Africa, which has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world, severe poverty and rising unemployment. The COVID-19 lockdown exposes the deeply unequal nature of our society. A person from the affluent suburb of Sandton has very different health and livelihood challenges from one in the neighbouring, densely populated Alexandra township.

In this, we are not unique. Frankly, if the world had had a higher level of commitment to achieving the SDGs, this pandemic’s impact would not have been so severe. Investments in better health systems and reducing inequality would have helped tremendously in dealing with the pandemic and its socioeconomic consequences.

But there is hope. We see in public and private sector alike a renewed consciousness and a willingness to respond. This is the time for leaders to step up and take bold action.

South Africa is vulnerable as an emerging market with severe economic challenges, but is uniquely positioned to implement a sustainability-focused strategy, in a way that respects the dynamics and population demographics of the continent. We have deep and liquid capital markets that serve the domestic economy and the wider continent, as well as a strong and sophisticated financial services sector.

The government of South Africa has limited fiscal space so the financial and corporate sector have rallied to assist in putting together a responsive economic package. The urgency of the crisis has eliminated previous procedural hurdles and opened the way for strong collaborative approaches. This gives us hope for even greater partnerships post Covid-19.

We are proud of the leadership shown by South Africa’s President in responding to the pandemic. This is why we have both chosen to join the President in donating 30% of our salaries for three months to COVID-19 relief efforts.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is the largest exchange in Africa and is critical in facilitating the functioning of the South African economy. Particularly in a crisis, the financial services industry and the exchanges are vital in directing financial flows to where they are needed most.

Investec plays an important role in funding a sustainable economy that is sensitive to the world’s limited natural resources, promotes carbon reduction and contributes positively to economic growth and social upliftment.

While we respond to COVID-19, we believe we also need to ensure that recovery in South Africa is lasting and resilient. That means major reorientation of investments and the global financial system to align with the SDGs. And the pace must greatly accelerate in order to deliver during the Decade of Action.
More than anything, South Africa needs a sustainable reset – one that takes into consideration the natural resources required to support a competitive economy, but also meets the short and long-term needs of society. Development must be economically, socially and environmentally responsive, ensuring that we leave a healthier planet for future generations.

For JSE and Investec, we believe a major shift in mind-set is required. Investment strategies and expectation of returns need to include sustainability-linked metrics.

Yes, the idea of sustainability has risen in importance, however it needs to move from a values-based metric to an outcomes-based imperative. In order to help achieve the 2030 goals, policy makers need to set up an enabling framework for related investment in the pressing issues covered by the SDGs.

The will is there. We have seen a steadily increasing demand for financial products and initiatives that prioritise transparency, good governance and ultimately, action. Investors not only want to see greater sophistication and flexibility from their investments, but they also want those investments to have an impact on creating a better world.

It is important for them that our actions and products align with our commitment to support the SDGs. To this end, the JSE, which pioneered the world’s first sustainability index in 2004, has been driving a number of projects which directly underpin responsible investment.

Instruments such as social bonds, aimed at improving social outcomes and based on partnerships, are critical in making the finances available to meet the many challenges arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is one of the reasons we joined the UN’s Global Investors for Sustainable Development (GISD) Alliance – tasked with catalysing capital and skills to urgently fill the SDG financing gap. Traditional models will not meet the estimated $2.5 trillion investment needed over the next 10 years.

The coronavirus pandemic has not only demonstrated that cooperation is possible on a previously unimagined scale, but also highlighted the need for connection, even in a time of social distancing.

As part of the GISD Alliance, we are working with leaders across the world to help unlock capital flows that will explicitly support sustainable development.

Both Investec and the JSE have a long history of caring for the people of South Africa, supporting our communities and driving economic growth.

As CEOs – and as leaders, parents and grandparents – we are both personally committed to accelerating action on sustainable development and creating a better world for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

We believe this kind of collaborative approach is needed around the world, to enable all citizens to live in society in a mutually beneficial way.

If we do not invest in the world that we want, the one we get will be worth infinitely less.

The post South Africa Must Respond – & Lead– on COVID-19 & SDGs appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Leila Fourie, Group CEO of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and Fani Titi, CEO of Investec, are members of the UN Secretary-General’s Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance.

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Credit: Unsplash /Melanie Wasser

By Fairuz Ahmed
NEW YORK, May 18 2020 (IPS)

The World Health Organization (2019) states that every 40 seconds someone dies by suicide. Annually, this represents over 800,000 people, more than the number of people who die in conflict and by homicide put together. Every suicide is a tragedy that has long-lasting effects on the people left behind and most cases stem from prolonged mental health issues and abuses that are not reported.

This is the story of Maria Gomez (56), an American citizen, born in Bangladesh, and of her daughter Mila Gomez (25), a mother and daughter duo, who work to raise awareness about mental health amongst young people and teens. Both are survivors of domestic abuse. Mila has also survived attempted suicide.

A PhD from an affluent family, Maria is a distinguished member of her community, having raised mental health awareness in underdeveloped areas of South Asia for the past 14 years. She shared her reasons for stepping into the philanthropic world of empowering women and youth.

Maria completed her education from Toronto, Canada, and after marriage moved back to Asia. She had bases in three different countries due to her work and for running the family business that she and her former husband inherited. She had to travel frequently for work and when she got pregnant her mother in law assured her that she will bear all responsibility for child care and she could go back to work as soon as she feels like. Maria went back to work after three months of childbirth and since then Mila was under the care of her mother in law and sister in law.

They used to live in a joint family of 15 members. Mila was the third child of the family and the first daughter. Maria became pregnant for the second time when Mila was 3 years old but she had a miscarriage and lost the child. The doctors told her that it will be difficult for her to bear any children further. Maria started to notice hostility towards her and verbal abuse from her husband and his family since the miscarriage. It grew worse day by day. As she travelled and spent most of her time in office she tried to cope by finding solace in her work.

For Mila things went from bad to worse. Her health started to deteriorate when she was 6 years old. Malnutrition, anxiety and constantly being sick were common factors. Maria explains to the IPS : “ I was going through the motions and was under the impression that she is a problem child and physically weak. Everyone around me told me that with age, things will get better. She is my first born and my family said that as a mother I am incompetent, and I should invest my time only in my career. As I was always tied up with work, I failed to see how things were at home, and how trauma bonded or bound Mila was at home.”

Maria went on to explain that since her childhood, Mila was shy in public and generally kept to herself. Her only form of expression was through drawings. She used to spend hours in her room scribbling and painting and used to have created vivid drawings of people and occurrences or events. Mila was 13 years old when her distress started to become visible. During her seventh grade, her classroom teacher reached out to Maria expressing concerns about her well-being. She showed Maria some pictures that Mila drew which depicted abuse and scenes where a child is being tortured. After that episode, Maria started to give more attention to Mila and took her to a few doctors and therapists to find the root cause of her stress.

Picture Courtesy: The UN

The family did not take her initiative well. Maria and Mila both had to face abuse at home and were threatened. They were forbidden from going to the doctors or for therapy accusing that will ruin the family reputation and that Mila had no mental issues. There have been periods where Mila was denied food if she behaved badly and was locked in her room for days. Maria later found out that Mila was abused verbally and physically on a regular basis by a some members of the family and all they wanted was to keep it a secret. A year later Mila tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists and was admitted to the hospital. That incident made Maria evaluate her situation and compelled her to take a strong step for ensuring security for herself and for her daughter. She left the family home and traveled back to Canada and filed for divorce.

It has been 16 years since the divorce and Maria and Mila have been living happily away from all negativity. Mila’s health has gotten better with therapy and medication and since the last episodes of slashing her wrists, she did not have any relapse of suicide attempts.

Having faced the ordeal of dealing with an unsympathetic, abusive family, a child who needed support and care, and, dealing with societal pressure, Maria made it her motto of life to spread the word and mission to help others who go through similar situations. Maria founded an organization, working from grass root level to raise awareness of domestic abuse, mental health issues, and for providing youth with a safe space. So far her organization has helped many suicide attempt victims to get back on their feet. They have aided training for job readiness for youth who left their homes because of abuse and cruelty. (Due to the personal nature of the information, the name and location of the organization are being kept anonymous as per request of the interviewee).

Almost one million people die by suicide every year, and it is the third leading cause of death among young people aged 15 to 24. For Mila, extended abuse and subsequent anxiety and depression drove her to attempt suicide on multiple occasions. Sadly, reaching out for help, therapy or proper medical support is still taboo in many countries and societies.

Whilst a link between mental health and suicide is well-established in developed countries, as is the idea of traumatic life experiences, this awareness is still lacking in developing countries. The United Nations and its partners have often drawn attention to different aspects of mental health on the World Mental Health Day (celebrated annually on October 10), but it remains an exceptionally unexplored issue in parts of the world where gender, sexual-orientation and simply being a child, are part of a complex and rigid socio-cultural system that is often unshakeable.

Measures can be taken by individuals and society at large to prevent suicide and suicide attempts. But, without extensive education, resources to lift people out of social preconceptions, and the will of a society to help its constituents, stories like Maria’s and Mila’s will continue to emerge.

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