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View of the United Nations General Assembly, which on three occasions this year has censured the invasion of Russian forces in Ukraine and where many countries have expressed non-alignment with the positions taken by the contenders. CREDIT: Manuel Elias/UN

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jun 20 2022 (IPS)

Numerous countries of the developing South are distancing themselves from the contenders in the war in Ukraine, using the debate on the conflict to underscore their independence and pave the way for a kind of new de facto non-alignment with regard to the main axes of world power.

Meetings and votes on the conflict at the United Nations and in other forums, the search for support or neutrality, and negotiations to cushion the impact of the economic crisis accentuated by the war are the spaces where the process of new alignment is taking place, according to analysts consulted by IPS.

Once Russian forces began their invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the United States “activated and consolidated the transatlantic alliance with Europe to confront Moscow, and has been seeking to draw in allies in Asia, but the situation there is more complicated,” said Argentine expert in negotiation and geopolitics, Andrés Serbin, speaking from Buenos Aires."But if the confrontation escalates and spreads beyond Europe, it will be difficult to stay non-aligned. Our countries will then have to learn to navigate in troubled waters.” -- Andrés Serbin

Serbin, author of works such as “Eurasia and Latin America in a Multipolar World” and chair of the academic Regional Economic and Social Research Coordinator, believes that many Asian countries do not want any alignment that would compromise their relationship with that continent’s powerhouse, China.

The rivalry between the United States and China – a growing trading partner and investor in numerous developing nations – fuels the distancing demonstrated by countries of the so-called Global South in the face of the conflict in Ukraine, a priority for the entire West.

Doris Ramirez, professor of International Relations at the Javeriana University in Colombia, argues that “now countries are better prepared to take a position and vote in international forums according to their interests and not according to ideological alignments.

“Emblematic cases are India, which is not going to break its excellent relations with Russia, its arms supplier for decades, or Saudi Arabia, now more interested in its relationship with China as the United States withdraws from the Middle East,” Ramirez observed from Bogota.

The struggle between nations that were ideologically aligned – with the United States or the then Soviet Union – led in 1961 to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which sought to stay equally distant from the dominant blocs while promoting decolonization and the economic interests of the South.

Its promoters were prominent leaders of what was then called the Third World: Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz “Tito” of Yugoslavia and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

Over the years, the Non-Aligned Movement grew to 120 members, many of which were clearly aligned with one of the blocs and, although it still exists formally, its presence and relevance declined not only with the disappearance of its leaders, but also when the socialist bloc ceased to exist as such after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The display board of the votes at the UN General Assembly on the suspension of Russia from the Human Rights Council reflected the diversity of opinions, with more countries taking independent positions with respect to those of the Western powers. CREDIT: UN

UN display board reflects new non-alignment

The invasion of Ukraine was quickly addressed by the 193-member UN General Assembly, which on Mar. 2 debated and approved a resolution condemning the invasion by Russian forces and demanding an immediate withdrawal of the troops, reiterating the principle of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.

After 117 speeches, the vote – for, against, abstentions and absences – reflected on the display board at UN headquarters, became a first snapshot of the current “non-alignment” – the decision by many countries of the South not to subscribe to the positions of Moscow or its rivals in the West, led by the United States and the European Union.

The resolution received 141 votes in favor, five against (Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Russia and Syria), 35 abstentions and 12 absences.

“It is difficult for a country to support an invasion, it is not possible to find within the UN or international law a formula to justify it,” said former Venezuelan ambassador Oscar Hernández Bernalette, who has been a professor at the University of Cairo, in Egypt, and the Central University of Venezuela.

Therefore, “in order not to remain in the orbit of Moscow or Brussels or Washington, abstaining from voting is a way to demonstrate neutrality,” said Hernández Bernalette.

Russian anti-aircraft units during maneuvers in Egypt in 2019. Moscow’s military cooperation partly explains the political position of African countries, distant from the stances taken by their former colonial rulers, and their growing ties with powers such as Russia and China. CREDIT: MinDefense Russia

Of the 35 countries that abstained, 25 were from Africa, four from Latin America (Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua; Venezuela was unable to vote because of unpaid dues) and 14 from Asia, including countries with a strong global presence such as China, India, Pakistan and Iran, and former Soviet or socialist republics such as Laos, Mongolia and Vietnam.

A second resolution was discussed and approved at the Assembly on Mar. 24, to demand that Russia, on humanitarian grounds in view of the loss of civilian lives and destruction of infrastructure, cease hostilities.

The vote was practically the same, with 140 votes in favor, the same five against, and 38 abstentions, which this time also included Brunei, Guinea-Bissau and Uzbekistan.

A third confrontation took place on Apr. 7, to decide on the suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, made up of 47 states chosen by the General Assembly, which meets several times a year in Geneva, Switzerland.

Moscow’s critics then drummed up 93 votes in the Assembly, but there were 24 against and 58 abstentions – evidence of independence and criticism of the web of alliances and institutions that guide international relations.

This time, countries that previously abstained, such as Russia’s neighbors in Central Asia, and Algeria, Bolivia, China, Cuba and Iran, voted against the proposal, and many of those who previously supported it, such as Barbados, Brazil, Kuwait, Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, abstained.

The Summit of the Americas this June in Los Angeles, California served as an opportunity for a group of heads of state in the hemisphere to distance themselves from Washington by boycotting the meeting in protest against the exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. CREDIT: US State Department

Grouping together, but in a different way

Bilateral and group forums and negotiations are being put on new tracks as the conflict in Ukraine drags on, with new proposals for understandings and alliances, and also new fears.

The impact of the war on the energy markets – as well as on food and finance – was immediate and created room for new realignments. Thus, the United States, as it watched the price of fuel rise at its gas stations, went in search of more oil supplies, from the Middle East to Venezuela.

Washington held two significant summits in recent weeks: one in Jakarta, with 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) interested in sustaining their relationship with the US while maintaining the ties woven with China, and another in Los Angeles, California: the ninth Summit of the Americas.

This triennial meeting served as an opportunity for governments in this hemisphere to demonstrate their independent stance and refrain from automatic alignment with Washington. In addition to the three countries not invited (Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela), the heads of state of seven other countries decided not to attend, to protest the exclusion of their neighbors.

This snub marked the Summit, in which Washington was barely able to cobble together an agreement on migration, with other issues pushed to the backburner, while Latin American countries, still lacking a united front, continue to develop their relations with rivals such as Russia and China.

In the Caribbean, in Asia and especially in Africa, the old relationship between former colonial powers such as France and the United Kingdom – which are confronting Moscow as partners in the Atlantic alliance – and their former colonies is also waning.

“The world no longer works that way,” said Hernandez Bernalette. “For many African or Asian countries, the relationship with new economic players such as China is much more important, in addition to the ties, including military ties, with Russia.”

However, the loose pieces in the international scaffolding also give rise to fears and problems that seriously affect the developing South, such as the possibility of an escalation of the conflict between China and Taiwan, or the grain shortages resulting from the war in Ukraine and affecting poor importers in Africa and Asia.

Serbin said that for the countries of the South, and in particular for those of Latin America, the conflict “offers opportunities, for the placement of energy or food exports for example, provided that the necessary agreements and balances with rival powers are maintained.”

“But if the confrontation escalates and spreads beyond Europe, it will be difficult to stay non-aligned. Our countries will then have to learn to navigate in troubled waters,” he concluded.

Karuta Yamamoto, Dalton Tokyo Junior High School, Tokyo, Japan: “I try to not to use a (disposable) plastic bowl when I order food such as ramen noodles. I also share information about the harmful effects of plastic with my classmates. Credit: Karuta Yamamoto/IPS

By Andrew Lee, Karuta Yamamoto, SooJung (Chrystal) Cho, and Warren Oh
Seoul, Tokyo, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Jun 20 2022 (IPS)

Have you ever watched the movie “Free Willy”? A young boy, Jesse, had an Orca whale friend named Willy. Jesse freed Willy into the wild ocean believing that it was the best decision to make for his friend. Well, that was a long time ago.

If Free Willy was made in 2022, would we have the same ending?

With over 165 million tonnes of plastic waste found in the ocean these days, it makes us wonder if Willy would truly feel safe in our plastic-filled waters.

Considering that more than 100 million marine animals die every year due to plastic pollution, wouldn’t the aquarium be a safer habitat for Willy today?

Let’s explore what causes plastic waste in the ocean, how ocean ecosystems are impacted, and what actions we must take to reduce them to protect marine life and ultimately sustain our world’s biodiversity.

One day while I was watching TV, I became so disturbed by a campaign that showed images of fish suffering and sea turtles tangled up in plastic bags and fishnets.

About 8 million tonnes of plastic annually end up in the ocean, with about 5 trillion plastic pieces floating in the sea. It’s no wonder so many sea animals get entangled in them. It restricts their movements which leads to their premature death.

That is why I question if Willy would truly be free in our ocean today.

Furthermore, how do plastics end up there in the first place? Well, ALL of us human beings are the direct cause of it! The plastic trash we nonchalantly throw away flows into the rivers which carry it to the ocean – including discarded nets, lines, ropes, and abandoned boats by fishers.

Which countries are most responsible for it? According to the University of Georgia, countries like China and Indonesia top the list of countries causing plastic pollution, blocking the global sea.

However, we all know Willy is not the only marine animal affected by the plastic waste in the ocean – all marine life and ecosystems are affected by it, which directly affects our biodiversity negatively.

Why should we care? Because it affects ALL of humanity! We, too, are affected.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 12-14,000 tons of microplastics are ingested by North Pacific fish yearly because a lot of them mistake plastics for food.

These are the same fish that we humans consume! According to Luís Gabriel A Barboza and others, in the journal Science Direct, 49% of the fish they analyzed had microplastics inside the gastrointestinal tract, gills, and dorsal muscle.

Considering we are at the top of the food web for seafood, we eat an estimated 842 microplastic items per year from fish consumption. That’s horrific!

According to a study by Joana Correia Prata and others, microplastics may disrupt immune function and cause neurotoxicity in humans.

So, in short, we end up eating the plastic trash we throw in the ocean, from which we will inevitably get sick.

Just think about it: we eat over 40 pounds of plastic (18 kilograms) in our lifetime. That’s the size of a large bag of dog food! Even worse, that plastic might even contain harmful toxins!

Now, how does that make you feel?

Similarly, marine animals also get hurt by plastic litter. According to EcoWatch, one in three marine animal species get entangled in the trash.

Isn’t it sad that 86% of innocent sea turtles get suffocated, drowned, or entangled in plastic?

What about microplastics? When marine animals ingest plastic, they can die of starvation because their stomachs are filled with plastic debris and often cut by plastic and suffer internal injuries.

If we don’t stop the accumulation of plastic waste in the ocean, what will become of our marine animals and us?

According to Condor Ferries, by 2050, fish will be outnumbered by our dumped plastic. If you were to go snorkeling by then expecting to see beautiful sea life, you’d be shocked to discover dirty plastic swimming around you in its place.

Under these circumstances, how does plastic waste impact ocean water? According to Okunola A Alabi and others, plastics in the oceans do not degrade completely. During the plastic degradation process, toxic chemicals like polystyrene and BPA can be released into the water, causing water pollution.

In addition to water pollution, plastic waste also threatens marine animal habitats. The harsh conditions and constant motion in the ocean break down plastic into particles of less than 5mm in diameter, called microplastics which are dispersed even farther and deeper into the sea, where it contaminates more habitats.

If Jesse were to free Willy into the ocean now, how would Willy feel when he ingests microplastics with every breath he takes? Something needs to be done for other animals like Willy. What action can we take to solve this problem?

Soo Jung (Chrystal) Cho: Students at Seoul Foreign School, Korea, participate in and promote a zero-waste lifestyle by using reusable water bottles instead of single-use plastic bottles. Credit: Soo Jung (Chrystal) Cho/IPS

Well, we don’t need to be great to do something grand.

Even a tiny seed of an idea can lead to a thoughtful solution.

Let us share what we do to reduce plastic waste in our daily lives.

As middle school students, we bring our reusable bottles to school and drink from the water fountain.

We use shampoo bars instead of shampoo from a plastic bottle.

Andrew Lee, Seoul Korea: Demonstrating how harmful liquid shampoos and soaps can be. This is in addition to the plastics used for their containers. Using natural soaps is environmentally friendly. Credit: Andrew Lee/IPS

In addition, instead of using plastic bags for our groceries, we carry our reusable shopping bags.

And when we go to a take-out place, we bring in our pots so that the restaurant does not need to use plastic containers. For example, when we go to a ramen noodle take-out place, we carry our pots and give them to the restaurant owner. Then he uses ours instead of disposable plastics (see main picture).

We also carry our slogans to public places such as schools and grocery stores as our campaign to educate people about reducing plastic waste and protecting ocean animals and the environment (See pictures 1~4).

These may be small actions, but they actively help reduce plastic waste. If you join us in our zero-waste lifestyle, we can make our community practice zero waste.

If our community goes zero waste, perhaps we can help our country practice zero waste. If our nation goes zero waste, our neighboring countries can join us, and eventually, we can make this whole world practice zero waste!

This type of chain reaction is not a far-fetched idea. We can make this happen!!

Warren Oh, Seoul Foreign School: “I created these slogans to use when participating in the Adidas Run for the Oceans: Help End Plastic Waste Challenge 2022. Locally, I support zero waste in my community, encourage recycling and continue to shop with Eco-Bags in Seoul.” Credit: Warren Oh/IPS

One small step is all it takes to start changing INACTION into ACTION! Many parts of the world already practice zero waste, such as Japan, Costa Rica, Dominica, and Guatemala, where over 80 percent of their waste is reused and recycled.

It is our duty as global citizens to keep marine animals and their habitats safe from our plastic wastes. Aquatic animals do so much for us.

Not only do they provide us with food to eat, but they are a part of vital ecosystems on which our world’s biodiversity depends.

So, exercise your power by doing your part to keep the ocean clean and safe for them.

Those who are able and willing to practice the zero-waste movement – COME, I ask you to join us in our action!

Use your creative minds to envision a plastic-free ocean. Marine animals like Willy will never be free unless we, as citizens of the world, take action to clean up our trash in the sea.

For the love of marine life, as Mother Teresa said, let’s do small things with great love. How would YOU like to start contributing? Our oceans need to thrive for ALL of us to survive!

 

 

Andrew Lee, Karuta Yamamoto, SooJung (Chrystal) Cho, and Warren Oh are middle school learners living in the USA and Asia. They participated in a joint APDA and IPS training on developing opinion content. Hanna Yoon led the course and edited the opinion content. 

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

This opinion piece is the second in a series written by learners from middle and high schools in Asia and the USA.

By Ghazal Vaisi
NEW YORK, Jun 20 2022 (IPS)

The Islamic Republic of Iran faces widespread anti-government protests amid an economic crisis while doing little to ease tensions with the international community as it becomes a nuclear threshold state.

Iran’s continued lack of cooperation and transparency with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) foreshadows the death of the Iran nuclear deal and poses a potential threat not only to Iran’s future but also to the international community.

Many Iranians fear Tehran’s current course of action exposes the country to a military conflict that would potentially destroy Iran and its economy as it is.

The negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which would curb Iran’s ability to build an atomic bomb, have floundered since the US refused Iran’s demand to delist the IRGC from the US Foreign Terrorist Organizations‘ list.

The Islamic Republic’s response to the IAEA’s resolution on Wednesday could deal a “fatal blow” to the stalled talks, according to Director-General of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi.

In response to the agency’s request for transparency about uranium traces found at three undeclared sites, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi rejected the resolution saying, “The Islamic Republic will not take even a single step backward from its positions.”

The regime removed 27 surveillance cameras used by the agency to monitor its nuclear facilities. The action breaks the IAEA’s “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s nuclear facilities, inviting escalation of the case to the UN Security Council should Iran not cooperate by September.

Tehran’s lack of cooperation has already impacted Iran’s currency value and puts military confrontation on the table in September, possibly sooner, should the Islamic Republic’s leadership not change its course.

With the death of the Iran nuclear deal, Iran will face new economic challenges as it can no longer count on billions of dollars in sanctions relief, as it did in 2015.

The sanctions relief package would have included over $100 billion in oil revenues that are currently held as frozen assets in Chinese, South Korean, and Indian banks. Iran will also miss out on a flood of trade and investment opportunities and cannot count on oil exports as its primary source of income.

Additionally, over four decades of economic isolation, sanctions, and mismanagement have left Iran’s economy vulnerable to the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When the war broke out, Iran’s inflation stood unprecedented, at 43.3%.

Russia’s prolonged assault on Ukraine exacerbates Iran’s economic decline. Since the war started, 60% of Iran’s annual grain imports from Russia and Ukraine are now at risk. Many ships carrying millions of tons of grains remain stranded in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports by Russia’s blockade.

The war also jeopardizes Iran’s last economic lifeline, revenues from oil exports, which were already heavily sanctioned. Iran now competes with Russia, the world’s second-largest oil exporter, seeking other buyers for their discounted oil, as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have sanctioned Russian oil imports.

Before the war, China had been Iran’s top oil buyer. However, Iran’s crude oil exports to China have plummeted since Russia launched its offensive in February, along with increased Russian oil exports to China.

The Islamic Republic’s foreign policy and allocation of resources have only hurt Iran’s financial outlook and demonstrate their priorities. Instead of compromising for the betterment of their people, Iranian leaders have cut subsidies for flour-based products amid global wheat shortages to give the IRGC financial room to operate and fund their nuclear, drone, and missile program. The decision to cut subsidies has resulted in a 300% increase in bread prices.

Many Iranians struggled to keep up with soaring prices of essential foodstuffs like cooking oil, chicken, eggs, and rice, even before global food shortages. What frustrates Iranians is that even if Iran changes its foreign policy and gains access to its financial resources, there is still a great deal of doubt that it would improve Iranians’ lives.

The dire economic climate has triggered civil unrest across Iran. Economic protests quickly turned political. Chants like, “Our enemy is here. They are lying that it is the US,” and “clergy, get lost” can be heard amongst other anti-governmental chants.

While lacking the willingness to feed their people, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, and his network of IRGC generals have shown willingness and capability to crush mass protests using the IRGC security forces, police, and intelligence services.

Iranians’ lack of representation, political freedom, free elections, and media coverage of this failure to provide basic human necessities has forced virtually every corner of society, from students to retirees, to take to the streets, knowingly risking their lives. Sanctioned by the US, impacted by war, abandoned by Khamenei, and crushed by the IRGC, Iranians have nowhere to turn for help.

In addition to the economic woes Iranians face due to Tehran’s mismanagement, they now face a larger threat, a potential military conflict. On Thursday, after Iran rejected the IAEA’s resolution, the US proposed bipartisan legislation to help Israel and the GCC nations improve their air defense to prepare against an evolving Iranian threat. Israel is already conducting air force exercises over the Mediterranean Sea.

Tehran’s hardliner policies and lack of transparency with the IAEA jeopardize the livelihood of Iranians and the international security at large. Iran’s leadership now holds the future of not just their citizens but that of the entire Middle East and other parts of the world should Iran become a nuclear nation.

Suppose Iran fails to comply with the IAEA resolution in September, and Iran is considered a threat. In that case, Iran’s case might move to the UN Security Council, where harsher punishments, or worse, a military conflict, await Iranians.

Whether Iran remains a threshold nuclear state or decides to build atomic bombs, it will eventually invite military action against itself, which will devastate Iran’s economy beyond repair, and leave Iranians’ livelihoods as collateral damage yet again.

Ghazal Vaisi is an Iranian-born international affairs analyst focusing on the evolution of authoritarianism in the modern world. Her writings have appeared in the Middle East Institute, Independent Farsi, and Iran International.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 2022 (IPS)

The 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO) has implicitly rubber-stamped a widely-condemned policy of “vaccine apartheid” which has discriminated the world’s poorer nations, mostly in Africa and Asia, depriving them of any wide-ranging intellectual property rights.

As Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said at the conclusion of the WTO’s ministerial meeting last week: “The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful”.

“The European Union (EU) has blocked anything that resembles a meaningful intellectual property waiver. The UK and Switzerland have used negotiations to twist the knife and make any text even worse. And the US has sat silently in negotiations with red lines designed to limit the impact of any agreement.”

The Geneva-based WTO, whose members account for nearly 98 percent of world trade, takes decisions by consensus resulting in a rash of compromises on some of the disputed issues.

Lawson said: “This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines and treatments for everyone, everywhere. The EU, UK, US, and Switzerland blocked that text.”

This so-called compromise, he argued, largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances. And it tries to restrict even that limited right to countries which do not already have capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines.

“Put simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives”, he warned.

Summing up the conclusions of the meeting, the New York Times said last week that WTO members agreed to loosen intellectual property rights “to allow developing countries to manufacture patented Covid-19 vaccines under certain circumstances.”

”The issue of relaxing intellectual property rights for vaccines had become highly controversial. It pitted the pharmaceutical industry and developed countries that are home to their operations, particularly in Europe, against civil society organizations (CSOs) and delegates from India and South Africa.”

Oxfam’s Lawson said: “South Africa and India have led a 20-month fight for the rights of developing countries to manufacture and access vaccines, tests, and treatments. It is disgraceful that rich countries have prevented the WTO from delivering a meaningful agreement on vaccines and have dodged their responsibility to take action on treatments while people die without them.”

“There are some worrying new obligations in this text that could actually make it harder for countries to access vaccines in a pandemic. We hope that developing countries will now take bolder action to exercise their rights to override vaccine intellectual property rules and, if necessary, circumvent them to save lives.”

In a statement released last week, the People’s Vaccine Alliance, said waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines have sparked worldwide debate, from Washington to Beijing and Davos to the World Trade Organization.

A group of Nobel laureates wrote to President Biden arguing that a temporary waiver of COVID-19 patent rights is essential to halting the global pandemic.

“Waiver advocates say that prioritizing the intellectual property rights of vaccine developers (many of whom have received governmental support) is making the vaccination rollout slow and unaffordable for billions of people in less-wealthy nations”.

Supporters of the status quo say a waiver would chill investment in the very pharmaceutical research that led to the vaccines’ creation, the Alliance said.

https://peoplesvaccinealliance.medium.com/open-letter-former-heads-of-state-and-nobel-laureates-call-on-president-biden-to-waive-e0589edd5704

The Alliance also pointed out that In October 2020, South Africa and India proposed a broad waiver of the Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement covering COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments.

The EU, UK, and Switzerland blocked that proposal. The US supported an IP waiver for only vaccines. The final text agreed is a watered-down waiver of one small clause of the TRIPS agreement relating to exports of vaccines. It also contains new barriers that are not in the original TRIPS agreement text.

Ben Phillips, author of ‘How to Fight Inequality’ told IPS that rich countries had acted to protect the monopolies of big pharmaceutical companies to determine production levels of pandemic-ending medicines.

In doing so, he said “they are not only causing deaths in developing countries, they are causing deaths in their own countries’ too. It’s not Northern interests vs Southern interests. It’s a handful of oligarchs who cannot share vs 8 billion people who want to be safe from pandemics.”

“Almost everyone in every country in the world”, he said, “would be better off if big pharmaceutical companies made slightly less obscene profits so that enough doses of pandemic-ending medicines could be made by multiple producers across the world to reach everyone who needs them on time.

The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the rot of the system of monopolies over production of vital medicines. Everyone can see it, and it will fall. How quickly it falls is the only question left. People are organizing nationally and internationally and they won’t let this pass again,” Phillips declared.

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs), told IPS “unequal access to vaccines is a global scandal that flies in the face of the economic, social and technological progress we claim to have made as humanity”.

He pointed out that CSOs around the world have long called for equity in health care and an end to excessive profiteering by the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of people’s well-being.

“We need to closely examine the reasons for the lack of political will to meaningfully address these issues.”

Meanwhile, in a statement last March, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said more than 10.5 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, “enough to protect the entire world population from severe symptoms, hospitalization and death.”

But despite this achievement, Bachelet insisted that the “grim reality” was that only around 13 per cent of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated, compared with almost 70 per cent in high-income countries.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) ,has insisted that inaction risked penalizing the planet’s most vulnerable people and countries.

“We are at an inflection point in history”, he said. “We have the tools to end the acute phase of the pandemic, if we use them properly and share them fairly. But profound inequities are undermining that chance.

“Countries with high vaccination rates are reopening while others with low vaccination rates and low testing rates have been left behind. The result is more than 60,000 deaths per week, along with an increased risk of the emergence of new variants.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Two young victims of human trafficking, who were rescued from the Dzaleka Refugee Camp, are receiving support at a shelter in Malawi. Credit: UNODC

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

In addition to slave selling and buying deals in public squares, as reported time ago in ‘liberated’ Libya, a widespread exploitation of men, women, and children has been carried out for years at refugee camps worldwide.

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

“I even witnessed a kind of Sunday market, where people come to buy children who were then exploited in situations of forced labour and prostitution,” on 11 June said UNODC’s Maxwell Matewere.

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


The Dzaleka Refugee Camp, the largest in Malawi, was established in 1994 and is home to more than 50,000 refugees and asylum seekers from five different countries. It was originally designed to accommodate 10,000 people.

Most of the 90 victims so far rescued are men from Ethiopia, aged between 18 and 30, while there are also girls and women too, aged between 12 and 24 from Ethiopia, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

 

A trafficking processing hub

The UNODC report also explains that women and girls are exploited sexually inside the Dzaleka refugee camp, or transported for the purpose of sexual exploitation to other countries in Southern Africa, while male refugees are being subjected to forced labour inside the camp or on farms in Malawi and other countries in the region.

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

 

Everywhere

Other refugee camps, like the Rohingya ones in Myanmar, which host up to one million humans, are also being under scrutiny.

Add to this millions more of humans falling easy prey to traffickers and smugglers, victims of wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, not to mention around six million Palestinian refugees.

 

A whole continent on the move

Ever greater numbers of vulnerable people are risking their lives on dangerous migration routes in Latin America, forced to move by the global food security crisis spiralling inflation, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said ahead of 2022 World Refugee Day.

“We are having countries like Haiti with 26% food inflation and we have other countries that really are off the charts even with food inflation,” said Lola Castro, WFP Regional Director in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

The dramatic deterioration in people’s daily lives has given them little option but to leave their communities and head north, even if it means risking their lives, she explained.

“All of you are watching caravans, caravans of migrants moving, and before we used to talk about migration happening from the north of Central America, but now, unfortunately, we talk about migration being hemispheric. We have the whole continent on the move.”

 

The Darien Gap

One of the clearest signs of people’s desperation is the fact that they are willing to risk their lives crossing the Darien Gap, a particularly arduous and dangerous forest route in Central America that allows access from the south of the continent to the north.

“In 2020, 5,000 people passed by the Darien Gap, migrating from South America into Central America, and you know what, in 2021, 151,000 people passed, and this is 10 days walking through a forest, 10 days through rivers, crossing mountains and people die because this one of most dangerous jungles in the world.”

For these migrants the reason why they are on the move is simple, the WFP official explained: “They are leaving communities where they have lost everything to climate crisis, they have no food security, they have no ability to feed their people and their families.”

UN data indicates that of the 69 economies now experiencing food, energy and financial shocks, 19 are in the Latin America and the Caribbean region.

 

Highest ever number of displaced children

Conflict, violence and other crises left a record 36.5 million children displaced from their homes at the end of 2021, UNICEF estimates – the highest number recorded since the Second World War.

This figure, which was reported by UNICEF on 17 June, includes 13.7 million refugee and asylum-seeking children and nearly 22.8 million children who are internally displaced due to conflict and violence.

These figures do not include children displaced by climate and environmental shocks or disasters, nor those newly displaced in 2022, including by the war in Ukraine.

20 people on the run… every minute

Every minute 20 people leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror, according to UNHCR.

But while the world’s specialised bodies have been making legal distinctions between migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless people, retruerness, etcetera, the fact is that all of them are victims of stargeering inhuman suffering.

 

100 million… for now

At the end of 2021, the total number of people worldwide who were forced to flee their homes due to conflicts, violence, fear of persecution and human rights violations was 89.3 million, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported ahead of this year’s World Refugee Day annual marked 20 June.

 

Armed conflicts in 23 countries

If ongoing conflicts remain unresolved and the risks of new ones erupting are not reined in, one aspect that will define the twenty-first century will be the “continuously growing numbers of people forced to flee and the increasingly dire options available to them.”

Regarding the conflict-driven wave of forced displacement, UNHCR citing World Bank data, reports that in all, 23 countries with a combined population of 850 million faced “medium or high-intensity conflicts.”

Poor countries host 4 in 5 refugees

Data from the UNHCR report underscored the crucial role played by the world’s developing nations in sheltering displaced people, with low and middle-income nations hosting more than four in five of the world’s refugees.

With 3.8 million refugees within its borders, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees, followed by Colombia, with 1.8 million (including Venezuelan nationals), Uganda and Pakistan (1.5 million each) and Germany (1.3 million).

Relative to their national populations, the Caribbean island of Aruba hosted the largest number of Venezuelans displaced abroad (one in six), while Lebanon hosted the largest number of refugees (one in eight), followed by Curaçao (one in 10), Jordan (one in 14) and Turkey (one in 23).

All the above adds to the specific case of the increasing number of victims of climate change, on whom IPS has already reported in its: What Would Europe, the US, Do with One Billion Climate Refugees?

 

Not new, Europeans have largely traded in humans

Such horrifying practice was intensively widespread more than four centuries ago, mostly by European powers, who captured, chained and shipped millions of Africans to their descents’ country: the United States of America, as well to their colonies in Latin America and the Carribeans.

Just see what the UN secretary general, António Guterres, stated In his message on last year’s International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Today “we honour the memory of the millions of people of African descent who suffered under the brutal system of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade”.

This trade created and sustained a global system of exploitation that existed for more than 400 years, devastating families, communities and economies, the UN chief stated.

We remember with humility the resilience of those who endured the atrocities committed by slave traders and owners, condoned by slavery’s beneficiaries, added Guterres.

“The transatlantic slave trade ended more than two centuries ago, but the ideas of white supremacy that underpinned it remain alive.”

"While there is no singular cure for hate speech, my wish is for young people to stand up and fight against it." Credit: University of the West Indies (UWI)

By Isheba Cornwall
MONA, Jamaica, Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

Hate speech is a phenomenon that can be defined as threatening speech or writing expressing prejudice towards a specific group, primarily based on race, religion, or sexual orientation.

As a black undergraduate student from Jamaica, especially being a part of Generation Z, I have experienced countless attacks in the form of hate speech. This phenomenon has grown immensely over the years, taking different shapes and forms. One major reason for this is the advancement of technology, and more so the creation of new media or social media.

However, what is interesting is that the same platforms used to immortalize hate speech can also be used to combat it in creative ways. We must realize that we are an unhappy generation of young people.

Because of the contrasting beliefs and viewpoints that we have surrounding identity, we are constantly struggling to embrace each other’s uniqueness. Sadness consumes us and acts as a catalyst for hate speech. Which, if left untreated, catapults into violent behaviors.

We are often unimpressed by the power of language and uninterested in how our speech can cause harm. Many reasons come to mind when I think about why the contagious disease of hatred continues to spread.

One main reason is the lack of education, which stems from being socialized in a way that glorifies hate and celebrates violence. This is not an idea based on mere observation but rather the reality for many Caribbean people — including myself— who were raised in vulnerable communities.

The sad truth is, the individuals tasked with taking care of us were themselves brought up in toxic environments that failed to teach them how to properly engage with other people, especially those who may be different from them.

Therefore, the need to voice any dissatisfaction was almost always done in a way that exudes hate. This is what they learned. And indeed, this is what they know.

It is like a full circle: older generations teach us, their children, to express hate, and so the cycle of hate continues. Although there are many ways to combat this viewpoint that promotes hate speech, including via institutions of socialization such as schools and churches, other stakeholders have a role, including the media. They are needed to grow a community of emotionally intelligent and understanding people.

From a Caribbean perspective, hatred spreads because of negative stereotypes emerging from our history, for example, through colonization. Negative stereotypes see some groups or individuals as being different or inferior to others.

For example, a lighter-skinned individual is given a job over a dark-skinned woman like me. Or a man is given more pay than my friend who is a woman who is equally qualified.

Harmful stereotyping fuels hate speech and appears when we see the idea that one group is superior and another inferior. This has pitted us against each other, and to reinforce this, we take to social media and spew hateful comments to individuals hailing from groups viewed as “less than.”

Unfortunately, this way of thinking has been embedded in our minds and without the desire to unlearn these tendencies, hate speech — and ultimately violence — will persist.

Hate speech is one of those problems that can influence society and develop into something worse. Hateful phrases and casual racist comments — the language used to highlight our distaste for something, or someone, are all-powerful, impactful, and dangerous.

Especially when many people believe them. Hate speech, if left to flourish, can lead to grave acts of violence on a large scale. And it is no secret that hate speech contributes to hate crime.

Therefore, we need innovative and creative ways to combat hate speech. I believe that both traditional and new media can provide support. For instance, by conceptualizing and creating educational, fun, and engaging programs on television and radio for young people.

But to convince youth, they must believe that whoever is sharing this information with them understands their circumstances and that the story told to them is relevant to their lives.

With cultivation theory in mind—a theory that suggests that individuals who mostly consume television programs are more likely to perceive the real world in a way most commonly depicted in television messages, we could argue that constantly showcasing programs that show acts of hate speech as unacceptable, could have a positive impact on viewers which can influence their behavior.

With the rise of social media, the transmission of information is as fast as the speed of light, and sadly hate speech, or cyberhate, follows closely behind. There has never been a time that I have been scrolling on social media that I did not come across some offensive speech. It is alarming that a single person does not engage in hate speech; rather it is often a large group of individuals—perhaps due to misconceptions and misinformation.

Creative campaigns via social media platforms can also help to combat the problem. This will not solve the issue; however, social media can be used to fight hate speech through “counter-speech.”

That is sharing easily digestible content focused on inclusivity, equality, and diversity. Imagine funny videos teaching youth how to respectfully disagree with each other, or ‘live’ sessions with influencers speaking about their experiences with hate speech.

Live sessions with influencers utilizing humor and creative campaigns would be pretty powerful nowadays and could also make a very accurate statement so loud that young people would be forced to listen and pay attention to it.

A lot more can be done, for instance, by creating codes of conduct that would somehow influence online behavior. The ultimate goal would be to educate youth so that they want to be respectful and not indulge in hate speech.

I can see and imagine a society filled with love, peace, and understanding. While there is no singular cure for hate speech, my wish is for young people to stand up and fight against it so that this disease will have no place in our society.

We must rethink and redefine our ideas about identity, gender, and race. And those working together to create new pressure points to tackle hate speech need to listen to the voices of young people.

The author is a social media strategist, radio host and producer, and undergraduate student of the Integrated Marketing Communication program in the Caribbean School of Media and Communication at the Mona Campus in Jamaica of the University of the West Indies, a member institution of the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI).

To learn more about the issues and the work the United Nations is doing to counter hate speech, visit Hate Speech | United Nations. Please join the #NoToHate campaign to counter hate speech (feel free to use assets available here)

Source: UN Academic Impact, United Nations

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

On Monday June 20, there will be an informal high-level UN meeting to mark the commemoration of the first International Day for Countering Hate Speech.

Afghan women. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

Gynophobia is defined as an intense and irrational fear of women or hatred of women, it may be characterized as a form of specific phobias, which involves a fear that is centered on a specific trigger or situation, which in the case of gynophobia is women.

After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, in August 2021, the Taliban completed their shockingly rapid and forced advance across Afghanistan by capturing Kabul on 15th August. What followed this takeover has since then been a series of human rights violations, humanitarian catastrophe, roll back on women’s rights and media freedom – the foremost achievements of the post-2001 reconstruction effort. The country has also been enduring a deadly humanitarian crisis, with malnutrition spiking across the country with 95 percent of households experiencing insufficient food consumption and food insecurity, according to this report. The number of malnourished children in Afghanistan has more than doubled since August with some dying before they can reach hospitals.

According to this report, 9 million people are close to being afflicted by famine in Afghanistan, millions have gone months without a steady income. Afghanistan’s economic crisis has loomed for years; the result of poverty, conflict and drought. This, combined with a sudden drop-off in international aid, has made it more tough for Afghans to survive, adding to this list is illicit opium trade and the worrying drug addiction, an ongoing challenge for the country.

However the priority for the Taliban was not saving the economy and the country from these disasters, instead under the cloak of religion, it didn’t take too long for the fundamentalist group to focus and display its misogynistic gynophobia towards the women and girls in the country, as it was expected. What Taliban fears, yet again, Afghan girls attending school beyond 6th grade, a decision directly affecting 1.1 million secondary school girls, depriving them of a future.

Taliban officials have also announced women and girls would be expected to stay home and if they were to venture out, they would have to cover in all-encompassing loose clothing that only reveals their eyes, making it one of the harshest controls on women’s lives in Afghanistan since it seized power in August last year. They fear women journalists so much, they ordered all female newscasters to cover their faces while on air.

International rights groups, Human Rights Watch says the list of Taliban violations of the rights of women and girls is long and growing. Amongst many that have been listed, include appointment of an all-male cabinet, abolition of the ministry of Women’s Affairs and replacing it with the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. Banning secondary education for girls, banning women from all jobs, blocking women from traveling long distances or leaving the country alone. “They issued new rules for how women must dress and behave. They enforce these rules through violence,” it stated in this report.

Women in Afghanistan since last August have been fighting back, through protests demanding the right to work and to go to school.

Sara Wahedi

“We don’t need any more condemnation”, says Sara Wahedi, CEO and Founder of Ehtesab, Afghanistan’s first civic technology set up. “It is infuriating because most Afghan women knew this would happen, and we told the international stakeholders if they wanted to deliberate with them (the Taliban) then to have very specific points that would keep the Taliban accountable, that never happened, and now there are these flood gates where they are doing what they want to do, they are repeating everything from 1996.

“We know what is happening is terrifying, it’s unjust, it’s inhumane, what is the international community going to do to facilitate accountability measures now,” says Wahedi.

In 2021, Wahedi was named one of the Next Generation leaders by TIME Magazine, her mobile app, Ehtesab, crowd-sources verified reports of bombings, shootings, roadblocks and city-service issues, helping residents of Kabul to stay safe. As a young tech entrepreneur, Wahedi says she is amongst the few who got her education and the freedom to do what she wanted, as the times were different

“I feel incredibly guilty, I think most Afghan women who are out of Afghanistan, who were able to pursue education to the highest level feel a crippling sense of anxiety and guilt. Education is ingrained in our psyche right from the time we are born from our parents, but for our country it was also different because we have seen war, we have seen instability, it is even more pertinent to get out of this life, all Afghan girls, they know this and to have it taken away from them so violently, it’s obviously affected their mental health, and I feel an inexplicable level of guilt to be in this position,” Wahedi says.

Women and girls have continued to bear the brunt of restrictions under the Taliban and their imposed doctrine, as seen in the past. The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (UNHCR) in this report said, “What we are witnessing today in Afghanistan is the institutionalized, systematic oppression of women.”

In this interview given to CNN, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Afghanistan’s acting Interior Minister and Taliban’s co-deputy leader since 2016 said, “We keep naughty women at home.” After being pressed to clarify his comments, he said: “By saying naughty women, it was a joke referring to those naughty women who are controlled by some other side to bring the current government into question.”

With the Taliban coming into power, there is no doubt that the women in Afghanistan will continue to face an uncertain future and in order to avert the irreversible damage being done to the female population, international communities and organizations must not just condemn the Taliban, but also hold them accountable and speak up on behalf of Afghan women, before they are all forced into invisibility. Whatever little progress was made by women in Afghanistan, the Taliban have through their rules and policies reversed them, pushing women towards invisibility and exacerbated inequalities against women. What they fear – women being educated, being seen, having an identity, agency, work, job, rights, freedom and their ability to hold them accountable. The realities of life under the Taliban control, whatever the timeline may be, remains the same.

Sania Farooqui is a New Delhi based journalist, filmmaker and host of The Sania Farooqui Show where she regularly speaks to women who have made significant contributions to bring about socio economic changes globally. She writes and reports regularly for IPS news wire.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Salvadoran fisherman Nicolás Ayala, 63, walks to his boat at the San Luis La Herradura pier, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, to begin a 24-hour fishing stint offshore. He said that due to the lack of a breakwater at the mouth, where the sea meets the estuary, boats have capsized and some of his colleagues have drowned, leaving their families unprotected because they have no kind of insurance. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador , Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

At the pier, Salvadoran fisherman Nicolás Ayala checked the pocket of his pants to make sure he was carrying the hypertension pills he must take when he is at sea on a 24-hour shift. He smiled because he hadn’t forgotten them.

At the age of 63, “we are just aches and pains now,” he told IPS, while showing other pills he carried with him to relieve a toothache and other ailments.

Ayala lives in San Luis La Herradura, a small town located on the coastal strip of the department of La Paz, in south-central El Salvador, on the banks of the Estero de Jaltepeque estuary, which leads to the Pacific Ocean.

Waves of vulnerability

“I am worried that I will suffer a health mishap and I won’t be able to continue working and I will be left on the street, ruined,” he added, noting that, as an artisanal fisherman, he does not have any type of coverage for illness or work-related accidents.

This should not be the case, and they should be covered, as it is one of the highest risk jobs in the world, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

But that is the reality of the thousands of people dedicated to small-scale fishing in El Salvador and the rest of Central America on the two coasts of the isthmus, an activity that is vital for the food security of a large part of the 43 million inhabitants of this region, many of whom suffer serious social deprivation.

Like other sectors of the population, artisanal fishers work in almost absolute vulnerability, without any social measures to protect them or provide adequate coverage from the accidents or illnesses they face on a daily basis, and with only precarious health systems to rely on.

Ayala said that since there is no breakwater at the mouth, the point where the estuary lined by mangroves meets the sea, the waves become dangerous and sometimes overturn small motorboats.

And even if the fishermen know how to swim, they can drown anyway, because their boats fall on them or they get entangled in the nets. Two or three people a year die this way, he added.

“We have nothing, no accident insurance or anything, here only God can bless us, if we drown. If they find our bodies, that’s good, if not, well, the crabs can eat us,” he said, only half jokingly.

According to a FAO report from January 2021, in El Salvador in 2018 the fishing sector employed about 30,730 people, with a total fleet of 13,764 boats, 55 of which were used by the industrial sector and the rest by artisanal fishers, 50 percent of whose boats were motorized.

Fishers weigh part of the day’s catch, after fishing near the Estero de Jaltepeque estuary, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador. Most small-scale fishers in Central America do not earn enough and have to work harder and harder to support their families. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Social security for all

FAO urged the countries of Central America to begin efforts to incorporate artisanal fisheries into national social security policies, during the Mesoamerican Forum on Social Protection in Artisanal Fisheries and Small-scale Aquaculture, held in May in Panama City.

The UN agency pointed out that worldwide, small-scale fishers account for half of the world’s fisheries production and employ 90 percent of the sector’s workforce, half of whom are women.

More than 50 million families in the world depend on small-scale fishing, according to FAO data.

In the case of Central America, the regional director of the Organization of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector of the Central American Isthmus (OSPESCA), José Infante, commented that all of the countries have been developing social protection systems for their populations, but that not all sectors have the same access to them, which increases inequality and vulnerability for those who are excluded.

“The artisanal fishing sector is the perfect example of this,” said the OSPESCA director.

These workers, like so many others without coverage, worry about reaching old age and no longer having the energy to go to sea on a daily basis, or suffering a work-related accident that leaves them unable to work.

A Salvadoran fisherman shows some of the shrimp and other kinds of seafood he caught off the Pacific coast of El Salvador. FAO urges governments in Central America to promote social protection for small-scale fishing workers, given their vulnerability and the important role they play in food security in the region. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The uncertain future

“It will be a very difficult situation; If we don’t have a pension tomorrow we’re going to have a tough time,” Nicaraguan fisherwoman Arelis Flores, 23, mother of one, told IPS.

She is president of the Abraham Moreno cooperative in the Venecia Community, a village of fishers and farmers where 400 families live, located in the municipality of El Viejo, on the Pacific coast of the department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua.

“Around here only teachers retire (with pensions),” Flores said in a telephone interview, adding that her community is made up of poor families with very low levels of schooling.

Fishing in their village consists mainly of breeding red snapper (Lutjanus guttatus) in aquatic cages made with nets in the mangroves.

For his part, Salvadoran fisherman José Santos Martínez, also a resident of San Luis La Herradura, told IPS that artisanal fishers are about to finalize a proposal to present to the country’s authorities, demanding social coverage, in order to reduce their vulnerability.

Martínez is the president of the Salvadoran Confederation of Small-Scale Fishing, Aquaculture and Small-Scale Livestock Farming, the first of its kind in the country, which brings together three federations with a total membership of 3,500 men and women.

“If we are sick we can go to a national hospital, like every citizen, but we have no injury or sick leave coverage for the days we have to stay at home recovering,” said Martínez, 57.

By contrast, those who have a formal sector job, working for a private or state-owned company, are covered by the Salvadoran Social Security Institute (ISSS).

The ISSS, although it has many needs, is considered to provide better service than the national public hospital network, which covers everyone in this country of 6.7 million inhabitants.

Martínez said that achieving something similar for the artisanal sector would be a great step forward, given the accidents and illnesses suffered by fishers in their line of work.

Salvadoran fishers can join the ISSS as self-employed workers, but those interviewed told IPS that they could not afford the 40 dollars a month that the coverage costs.

Martínez said that, in his case, he suffers from intense back pain because of the impact from the constant bouncing of the boat over the waves.

“Because of that, I hardly go out fishing anymore,” he said.

He added: “Illnesses become more complicated, and in the end we die, we have no pension, no decent insurance, our families are completely unprotected.”

Martínez said the government should create a mechanism that offers coverage, but the problem is how to pay for it.

However, different proposals can be analyzed, he said. As an example, he pointed out that for decades artisanal fishers have paid a road tax charged to motorists of 0.20 cents of a dollar per gallon of fuel purchased, even though they are clearly not using the fuel to drive on the country’s roads.

“We have paid millions of dollars to the State, without receiving anything in return. Well, part of that money could be returned to us in the medical coverage we need,” he argued.

This charge of 0.20 cents per gallon of gasoline was recently eliminated, since it made no sense to charge small-scale fishers for using the roads.

Gregorio Torres, president of the La Paz Federation of Fishing Production and Services Cooperatives, which brings together 900 fishers from this department in central El Salvador, complained that small-scale fishers are unprotected against illnesses and accidents at work, and need government support to obtain this type of coverage. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Decent work

His colleague, Gregorio Torres, said that the artisanal fishing sector is key, as it provides fresh products to the country’s markets and helps boost food security, but workers have been unprotected, without pensions or accident insurance.

“We don’t have any of that, and it would be a good idea to push that FAO idea forward,” he commented, referring to the proposal to include them in the social security system.

Torres is president of the La Paz Federation of Fishing Production and Services Cooperatives, which brings together 900 fishers.

Public policy expert Nayda Acevedo told IPS that social security strategies are government tools to minimize the impact of inequalities on vulnerable populations.

In the case of Salvadoran artisanal fishers, the government should focus on promoting “decent work” in that sector, so that the seasonality and irregularity of their incomes can be overcome, she said.

And within the range of social security policies, the State could focus on the most urgent ones, such as medical coverage, she added.

In the meantime, fisherman Nicolás Ayala, at the San Luis La Herradura pier, climbed into his boat, revved up his 60-horsepower engine and headed out to sea, through the estuary.

“As long as I don’t die today, that’s good enough,” he said with his characteristic dark humor and a wry smile, as he motored off in his boat.

The potential shortages of some commodities may generate internal instability in many countries, increasing internal and external migratory flows. Credit: FAO

By Mario Lubetkin
ROME, Jun 16 2022 (IPS)

If the war in Ukraine and other conflicts around the world continue, the challenge for 2022 will be to guarantee greater access to existing food supplies, and sufficient food production by 2023.

As we approach four months since the start of the war, data continues to show a trend of rising food prices, particularly in the poorest countries, while concern grows about the possible effects of these increases.

It will be the most fragile countries in Africa and Asia that will pay the highest price, even though many European countries are 100% dependent on Russian fertilizers, the world's leading exporter. This is the case of Estonia, Finland, Lithuania and Serbia, while countries such as Slovenia, North Macedonia, Norway and Poland, among others, are also heavily dependent on these fertilizers

The potential shortages of some commodities may generate internal instability in many countries, increasing internal and external migratory flows.

Russia and Ukraine together account for 30% of world exports of wheat and corn, and 63% of sunflower seeds. According to experts, there is already a shortage of three million tons of these grains this year, despite increased exports from other countries, such as India.

Rising energy and fertilizer prices may cause an increase in hunger by several tens of millions of people, severely increasing the figure of 811 million already suffering from hunger in 2020.

That figure continued to increase due to the effects of COVID-19, by more than 100 million in 2021, putting the next global harvest at risk.

According to a recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), some 193 million people in 53 countries were already acutely food insecurity and in need of very urgent assistance in 2021, almost 40 million more than in 2020.

Famine warnings remain high in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen.

It will be the most fragile countries in Africa and Asia that will pay the highest price, even though many European countries are 100% dependent on Russian fertilizers, the world’s leading exporter.

This is the case of Estonia, Finland, Lithuania and Serbia, while countries such as Slovenia, North Macedonia, Norway and Poland, among others, are also heavily dependent on these fertilizers.

In addition, more than 50 nations in other parts of the world are at least 30% dependent on Russian fertilizers.

Egypt and Turkey are among the countries that may be most affected by their reliance on imported wheat and corn from warring European nations, as well as several African countries such as Congo, Eritrea, Madagascar, Namibia, Somalia and Tanzania.

In relation to the increase in food prices, there are countries like Lebanon where the increase has already exceeded 300%. However, even more developed countries are feeling the impact of the conflict, as in the case of Germany, where prices have risen by 12%, and the United Kingdom, where they have risen by more than 6%.

By the end of March, just over a month into the war, food products had already increased by 12.6%, the highest increase since 1990 according to FAO data.

Reduced production can lead to an immediate drop in food quality, causing an increase in the critical situation of obesity that already exceeds 600 million people, while more than 2 billion are overweight, which can also increase health risks, from cardiovascular conditions to diabetes.

“We need to keep the global trading system open and ensure that agrifood exports are not restricted or taxed,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu.

According to Qu, it is necessary to increase investments in countries affected by current food prices, reduce food waste, and improve and make more efficient use of natural resources such as water and fertilizers.

There is also a need to promote social and technological innovations that will significantly reduce market disruptions in agriculture, as well as to improve social protection and personalized assistance for the farmers most affected by this crisis.

The Chief Economist of FAO, Máximo Torero, recalled the proposal of this specialized organization based in Rome to create a global instrument, called the Food Imports Financing Facility, worth 9,000 million dollars to cover 100% of the food costs for the most affected countries in 2022.

Excerpt:

This is an op-ed by Mario Lubetkin, Assistant Director-General at FAO

Children in an intercultural bilingual education primary school classroom in the district of Chinchaypujio, Anta province, in the southern Andean department of Cuzco, Peru. Each of these classrooms has between 10 and 13 students in different grades, at the kindergarten, primary and secondary levels. CREDIT: Courtesy of Tarea

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jun 16 2022 (IPS)

“I always express myself in Quechua and I don’t feel I’m less of a person,” said Elías Ccollatupa, 47, who has been a bilingual intercultural teacher for more than two decades in the Chinchaypujio district, one of the nine that make up the province of Anta, in the department of Cuzco, in the southern Andean region of Peru.

Ccollatupa spoke to IPS by telephone from his Quechua farming community of Pauccarccoto, which is in the district of Chinchaypujio, while the laughter of children at recess resounded in the background. According to official figures, they are part of the 1,239,389 students receiving intercultural bilingual education in this South American country."It is valuable for children to learn in their mother tongue and then move on to a second language. Their cognitive structure is formed in the first five years of life and has to be strengthened in early and primary education. Teaching in the mother tongue boosts children’s intellectual development and when they learn the second language they do very well.” -- Alfredo Rodríguez

A teacher for 21 years, he expressed his concern about the government’s intention to relax the current policy that guarantees the right to intercultural bilingual education, i.e., that learning takes place respecting the student’s native language and cultural identity.

Peru approved the Bilingual Intercultural Education Sector Policy in 2016 and although implementation has been patchy, Ccollatupa, a member of the Tarea (Task) Educational Publications Association, said the existence of this regulatory framework is important.

“This way we ensure that our native languages do not disappear from the map and that our cultures remain alive,” he said.

In the middle of the 20th century, the Peruvian government began to adopt policies to guarantee the right to bilingual education for the indigenous population, within the framework of international mandates, but without putting a priority on their implementation.

The persistent demand of indigenous peoples’ organizations, other non-governmental organizations and the Ombudsman’s Office contributed to the institutionalization of these policies and to an increased budget until the National Intercultural Bilingual Education Plan was approved in 2016, after consultation with indigenous peoples.

The Plan, which includes the Sector Policy, is a five-year plan that officially expired in 2021, but will remain in effect until it is replaced.

At the national level, there are almost 27,000 schools authorized to provide bilingual early childhood, primary and secondary education in the 48 languages of Peru’s native peoples, where the teaching staff must demonstrate that they master the local language. As of February 2022, the Ministry of Education had filled 61 percent of the 44,146 bilingual teaching positions.

The alarm bells rang in January, at the beginning of the school year, when a directive of the General Directorate of Alternative Basic Education, Intercultural Bilingual and Educational Services in Rural Areas, under the Ministry of Education, requested the list of schools where there was a shortage of bilingual teachers in order to reclassify the schools, to make it possible to hire teachers who only speak Spanish.

Children in the courtyard of a school in the Andes highlands community of Pauccarccoto, Chinchaypujio district, in the southern Peruvian department of Cuzco, who receive bilingual intercultural education in Spanish and their mother tongue, Quechua. CREDIT: Courtesy of Tarea

A remnant of colonialism

The Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (Aidesep), which represents the indigenous peoples of the country’s Amazon region, issued a statement against what it described as a “policy of annihilation” of intercultural bilingual schools.

Alfredo Rodríguez, an advisor to Aidesep’s steering committee on the issue, criticized government officials for putting the right to work of non-bilingual (non-indigenous) teachers above the right of indigenous children to be educated in their mother tongue.

In an interview with IPS in Lima, he mentioned the case of the Urarina native communities, located in the Chambira river basin in the Amazonian department of Loreto, in the extreme north of the country. Twenty teaching positions were awarded there this year to monolingual Spanish-speaking teachers, even though the children at the schools in the area speak their mother tongue, Urarina.

“This is part of the colonial mentality in the minds of those people. They want to force everyone to speak only Spanish because they believe that indigenous languages are dialects without cultural importance and that the backwardness of Peru is due to diversity, that we must homogenize everyone,” said Rodriguez.

He asserted that the authorities’ lack of respect for and appreciation of the country’s cultural and linguistic diversity was part of the “political system” of the “criollos” (descendants of the Spanish colonizers).

He said that attitude was shared by President Pedro Castillo, who describes himself as a rural – but not indigenous – teacher of peasant farmer origins, who taught in villages in the northern department of Cajamarca and was a trade unionist, before entering politics.

“Those who believed that Pedro Castillo was an Indian were mistaken and today, in the educational administration, they are moving towards ethnocide, the annihilation of indigenous civilizations and cultures,” Rodríguez said.

In Peru, a country of more than 32 million inhabitants, almost a quarter of the population aged 12 and over self-identifies as Amazonian or Andean indigenous people. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, there are 5,771,885 indigenous people in the country.

Shipibo Konibo indigenous children taking part in an event held in the area of Cantagallo, a part of Lima where numerous families of that Amazonian people have settled since the 1990s. Communities of this native people are located in the Amazonian departments of Ucayali, Madre de Dios, Loreto and Huánuco. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Neglect of indigenous children

The Aidesep advisor argued that the right to intercultural bilingual education needs to be reinforced in order to reduce the inequalities affecting indigenous children and adolescents.

He referred, for example, to the fact that 94 percent of teachers in this area do not have teaching degrees, as documented by the Ombudsman’s Office. “The Ministry of Education does nothing about this. There are intercultural universities in name only, without economic resources due to the 500 years of neglect of these populations,” Rodríguez complained.

“It is valuable for children to learn in their mother tongue and then move on to a second language. Their cognitive structure is formed in the first five years of life and has to be strengthened in early and primary education. Teaching in the mother tongue boosts children’s intellectual development and when they learn the second language they do very well,” he added.

However, he considered that due to the lack of attention from the State, the current scenario is that they do not learn their mother tongue well and they learn Spanish in a distorted fashion, which is reflected in their writing and reading skills.

This situation reinforces discrimination and racism. Rodriguez explained that indigenous adolescents drop out of school or lose out on scholarships in universities because of the shortcomings of a secondary education provided by inadequately trained teachers.

Aidesep has submitted a set of proposals to the government.

These include not changing the classification of the institutions that provide intercultural bilingual education services, and implementing special training programs for indigenous teachers.

In addition, they propose the creation of a curriculum reform commission to design content appropriate to native peoples in accordance with Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which refers to the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples.

According to the last National Population Census of 2017, 40.5 percent of the population that self-identified as indigenous or native in the Andean and Amazon regions had partial or complete secondary education, in a country with 55 officially recognized native peoples.

Of the total number of indigenous people, 23.4 percent had primary education and 26.3 percent had higher education, while 9.4 percent had received no education at all and 10.8 percent (mainly women) could not read or write.

Raising awareness among families and communities

Teacher Elías Ccollatupa was trained in intercultural bilingual education, as was his wife. Their mother tongue is Quechua and they taught the language to their son and two daughters, who he said “are proud to speak it.”

As a teacher and now as head of Chinchaypujio’s intercultural bilingual education network, he maintains a strong commitment to the right of children to be educated in their mother tongue. He is in charge of six schools from first to sixth grade, each with an average of 12 students.

“I see with concern that in the primary grades of six, seven, eight years old they only want to be taught in Spanish, and that’s because they are children of young mothers and fathers who left the community and have the idea that Quechua is no longer useful,” Ccollatupa said.

It is a kind of language discrimination, he added, a question of social status, as if people who spoke Spanish were superior to those who spoke their native language. “But when it is explained to them, they understand; it’s a question of raising awareness among the families and the authorities: Spanish is important, I tell them, but that does not mean you have to leave Quechua aside,” Ccollatupa said.

He proposed the incorporation of a component of awareness-raising and coordination with the educational community in each territory where intercultural bilingual education is provided, a task that, although it should be the responsibility of the teachers, is not being adequately carried out due to lack of time.

Ccollatupa also raised the need to understand the educational service from a cultural point of view in order to learn about the experiences in each locality where teachers work. To this end, he remarked, it is important to establish alliances with the community’s elders and to address the question of local knowledge with them and create connections with other kinds of knowledge.

Women display sorted gums and gum resins at a local market in Marsabit County. The women have greatly benefited economically through harvesting and selling non-wood products. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
Nairobi, Jun 16 2022 (IPS)

Clad in traditional regalia and necklaces of richly coloured beads that form magnificent patterns around their necks, an army of women from the pastoral Rendile community that resides at the heart of Marsabit, a county in Kenya’s arid north, is on a mission.

Shoulder-to-shoulder, they are walking towards economic freedom armed with relevant tools up the hill to tap gum and gum-resins from acacia trees.

“We face a myriad of challenges. First, we have to fetch water before harvesting gum from acacia trees. We then sort and dry it before taking it to the market for sale. From gums and gum-resin sales, I am able to meet my family’s needs. No need to sell my sheep and goats at a throw-away price,” says Caroline Sepina, a 47-year-old mother of six, as she carefully sorts the gum, which retails at $ 5 (Ksh 550) per kilogram.

Gums and resins are hardened plant exudates obtained from Acacia, Boswellia and Commiphora species in African drylands.

In Kenya’s drylands, human survival is continually faced with multiple challenges with minimal options for alternative livelihoods.

There are no men within the manyattas in Ndikir, a village located in the Marsabit sub-county. Because of the drought, men have had to move to the nearby Samburu county, searching for pasture and water for their livestock.

Here, the women are left behind, but unlike in the past, when they would be unemployed, they now have alternative livelihoods which complement their livestock.

According to Leuwan Kokton, assistant chief of the Ndikir sub-location, men usually migrate with the livestock to the nearby Samburu county to avoid severe drought, with a few livestock left to help cater for children’s upkeep and sometimes, medication.

“Through this economic venture, I do not have to sell sheep from my herds to cater for my household needs. All I need to do is just walk to the nearby trees and tap the non-wood products, then sell them at the market. This helps me preserve my sheep and goats,” Joseph Longelesh, a resident of Ndikir village told IPS in an interview.

The gums and gum-resins of commercial importance collected from the forests in Kenya include arabic, myrrh, hagar and frankincense. Kenya has resources of gums and resins with commercial production confined to the country’s drylands. Gum arabic comes from Acacia senegal or Acacia seyal, while commercial gum resins are myrrh from Commiphoramyrrha, Hagar from Commiphora holtziana and Frankincense from Boswellia neglecta S.

Traditionally, the resin of Myrrh Hagar is suitable for treating inflammation, arthritis, obesity, microbial infection, wounds, pain, fractures, tumours, gastrointestinal diseases, snake bites and scorpion stings.

Tommaso Menini, the managing director for African Agency for Arid Resource (AGAR), told IPS that gum and resin are directly connected to environmental conservation. The idea is to make the pastoral communities see an alternative source of livelihood apart from livestock.

“Hagar is now an incredibly sought-after product from mostly Chinese buyers because it is highly used in their traditional medicine. Having a nearly 1.4 billion Chinese population means that the demand is high,” Menini told IPS.

“In the last years, we have seen an increasing presence of Chinese buyers setting up a base in Kenya. Before, we had agents who would send several containers to China, but since they are setting up in Kenya, they are now driving prices up because there is more demand.”

For Janet Ahatho, assistant natural resources Director at Marsabit County, these non-wood products have been in existence. Still, the locals had not been exposed to its economic potential and how to exploit them for monetary gains.

“As a county government, we have mapped the areas and worked with the locals. The people who collect the products and sell them are the herders themselves. They have attached that kind of importance to these trees, hence helping in environmental conservation,” says Ahatho.

In Marsabit county, these non-wood products are commonly found in Laisamis, Moyale and North Horr sub-counties.

“Environment destruction is reduced because we have environmental management committees in each sub-county, and they are the ones engaging the collectors and the sellers of the product. They are trained to train the community on why it is important to conserve the tree species,” says Ahatho.

In 2005, the  Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development, through the technical cooperation programme of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), carried out resource assessment and mapping of gums and resins in Kenya.

For Ilkul Salgi, the World Vision’s Integrated Management of Natural Resources for Resilience in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (IMARA) field officer, the locals who reside in arid counties, including Marsabit, are usually faced with drought, conflicts and how to conserve the environment amid the climate crisis.

Engineer Chidume Okoro, a Network for Natural Gums and Resin in Africa (NGARA) chairperson, says production is far from sustainable, particularly for frankincense, with debarking frequently damaging or killing trees.

According to Chidume, production of gum and resin in large quantities for commercial purposes should be done with great care, by training the locals on how to do it sustainably while saving the acacia trees.

“With much focus on exporting bulk raw materials and poor management of the resource, export markets are underexploited. Gender inequities and power imbalances exist and in some cases have led to unequal access and control over benefits from these natural resources,” Okoro told IPS.

Since exploring the non-wood products, Sepina says her children have always had balanced meals, and she can pay her children’s school fees.

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Greenpeace activists in the Forest in Democratic Republic of Congo. Credit: Kevin McElvaney / Greenpeace

By Tal Harris and Raphaël Mavambu
KINSHASA, Jun 16 2022 (IPS)

Nine of the 16 oil blocks to be auctioned in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) next month overlap Protected Areas, according to a review of official government maps by Greenpeace Africa.

Minister Didier Budimbu, who had previously insisted that “none” of the blocks overlaps Protected Areas, confirmed Greenpeace’s findings in a statement yesterday.

Plans to auction rainforest for oil were reactivated in April, five months after the signature of a $500 million forest deal signed with the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) at COP26.

Greenpeace Africa and others have expressed alarm that three of the blocks overlap with the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, a biodiversity hotspot containing about 30 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to three years of global emissions. Oil drilling could release the immense stocks of carbon they store, warned Professor Simon Lewis of University College London.

That Protected Areas are also at risk became apparent last month when the Hydrocarbons Ministry itself published a video featuring a map of six of the 16 blocks : five of them are clearly shown to overlap Protected Areas.

The voice-over praises the “meticulousness” with which blocks had been “selected,” mindful of environmental “sensibilities,” and claiming input from unnamed environmentalists.

Peatland Forest in DRC. Credit: Daniel Beltrá / Greenpeace

Another official online source, the Environment Ministry Forest Atlas of the Democratic Republic of Congo, shows nine of the blocks overlapping Protected Areas, including a national park, nature reserves, and a mangroves marine park.

The Ministry’s statement to Greenpeace Africa asserts: “It’s been decided that Protected Areas containing mineral natural resources of high economic value will be degazetted.”

While it describes the overlaps as “very negligible,” a simple review of the map shows significant overlap in at least three cases, including that of Upemba National Park, part of which occupies about a third of the Upemba block.

Irene Wabiwa Betoko, International Project Leader for the Congo Basin forest at Greenpeace Africa said: “The auction of new oil blocks anywhere during a climate crisis that disproportionately affects African people is mad.

Greenwashing the auction of blocks overlapping peatlands and Protected Areas is the height of cynicism. Doing so with such amateurism is particularly disturbing.”

In its statement to Greenpeace Africa, the Ministry emphasizes that no areas inside UNESCO World Heritage sites are up for auction and that overlaps are restricted to other Protected Areas. Congolese law, however, makes no distinction, in terms of oil exploration, among Protected Areas.

Block 18, one of the few that doesn’t encroach on a Protected Area, is only about twenty kilometers from Salonga National Park, a UNESCO site. In July 2021, the DRC government succeeded in removing Salonga from the List of World Heritage in Danger after it promised to update UNESCO, no later than 1 February 2022, on “the progress made towards the definitive cancellation of the oil concessions” there.

Over two months after the deadline, the government reported that the park’s steering committee decided on 14 December 2021 to “initiate actions for the[ir] definitive cancellation.” Instead of finally acting, the government continues planning to act.

“The mouth that says all the right things about the climate and biodiversity crises works separately from the hand that signs the contracts that make them worse. This disconnect also characterizes DRC’s donors: their COP26 speeches in praise of the Congo rainforest have resulted in an agreement that is an open invitation to oil companies,” added Irene Wabiwa.

The agreement signed at COP26 does nothing to protect peatlands of the Cuvette Centrale from the oil and gas industry, and is hardly more demanding with regard to the integrity of Protected Areas.

Instead of banning extractive industries in them, the 2 November letter of intent seeks only damage control. It calls for a study “to determine to what extent the titles […] of hydrocarbons overlap with and/or have an impact on protected areas, […] with a view to adopting appropriate prevention or mitigation measures […]”.

Greenpeace Africa calls on the DRC government to cancel the auction of new oil blocks: “Instead of auto-pilot steering Congo into a climate catastrophe, the government and the international community must invest in ending energy poverty by accelerating investments in clean and accessible renewable energies,” concluded Irene Wabiwa.

Tal Harris is International Communications Coordinator, Greenpeace Africa: and Raphaël Mavambu is Communications and Media Consultant, Greenpeace Africa.

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Hunger and food insecurity impact more than 38 million Americans. Black and Hispanic families and other minority groups including LGBTQ folks, consistently and disproportionally experience food insecurity.

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, USA, Jun 15 2022 (IPS)

This September, the White House will convene a conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Leading up to the conference, the White House is organizing several virtual listening sessions across America to hear firsthand from people impacted by food insecurity and to collect ideas about how to end hunger and hunger-related diseases and disparities.

Hunger and food insecurity impact more than 38 million Americans. Black and Hispanic families and other minority groups including LGBTQ folks, consistently and disproportionally experience food insecurity compared with their white and straight counterparts particularly. Thus, this attention to the issue is long overdue.

African Americans still trail Whites in the overall use of the internet; 34% of Black adults do not have access to home broadband and 30.6% of Black households lack high-speed home internet. In addition, racial minorities and those with lower education levels and income are less likely to have broadband service at home

However, the strategy the White House is taking – hosting virtual listening sessions – is problematic in many ways. As much as they have good intentions, it may not yield the much-needed input necessary to accelerate progress and make significant policy changes to end hunger.

Instead, sadly, the White House hearings will likely only provide a small picture of the problem as it will be an effort the privileged are most able to join. Participating in these hearings necessitates that you have access to the Internet and you are aware of the listening sessions.

This likely means you are part of networks or have access to channels where the announcement was disseminated. Most importantly, joining the listening sessions is something that one must have the privilege of extra time to attend.

Unfortunately, Americans who are impacted hardest by food insecurity – the people President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris need to hear from – may not have one or all of these privileges. For instance, if we look at Internet access, according to Pew Research Center Report,

African Americans still trail Whites in the overall use of the internet; 34% of Black adults do not have access to home broadband and 30.6% of Black households lack high-speed home internet. In addition, racial minorities and those with lower education levels and income are less likely to have broadband service at home.

Moreover, according to Pew Research, 10 percent of Americans that do not use the internet live in rural areas– areas where food insecurity is prevalent. The major reason many Black families living in urban and rural communities do not have access to the privilege of having internet access is the cost.

Unsurprisingly, because of persistent racial inequities, African Americans and other minority groups that are most impacted by hunger may not have the privilege of time, since many have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Worse still, for many African Americans, despite working more every year, they hold much less wealth and experience higher rates of unemployment and have no tangible economic advancements.

Thus, rather than hold virtual listening sessions only to create a national plan on how to address hunger and food insecurity, the White House should consider adding other creative platforms to be more inclusive.

The most obvious one to implement is bringing the listening tours offline to the people in the communities and spaces where food security impacted people live in.

The easiest way to do this is to hold meetings and convening gatherings where people already go. As an example, the White House could convene in-person roundtable listening sessions at food banks across America, where according to Feeding America, close to 60 million Americans who are food insecure visit regularly.

Doing so would require the White House to partner with food banks and other organizations where people impacted by food security get food from.  Another prime location for listening sessions would be churches. Churches have an existing relationship with their participating members and can be used as a platform to solicit for stories and ideas.

The Center for Disease Control and other groups  that worked to increase the number of people that got vaccinated successfully undertook this same tactic and saw an increase in the number of people agreeing to be vaccinated. As an example, partnering with Black and African American churches in areas with low vaccination rates resulted in an increase in the number of people getting vaccinated.

Additionally, rather than hold a few virtual listening sessions that have set dates and times, the White House could partner and coordinate with hunger and food insecurity community-based organizations that have existing relationships with the people so that they hold multiple listening sessions.

These groups can create ways for additional feedback and ideas to be shared with the White House, and at the same time, the White House can use these community-trusted organizations to share additional updates on future White House efforts to end hunger. It’s a win -win.

Without a doubt, solving complex problems like hunger and food insecurity needs to be a united effort where everyone’s input, voice, and ideas are listened to and considered.

Achieving that necessitates that the White House considers other creative ways to solicit ideas and stories from those who have been impacted by hunger and food insecurity and to center the ideas they provide in the national plan outlining how America will end hunger. It is the right thing to do.

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

Ingabire Muziga Mamy, Managing Director, Charis Unmanned Aerial Solutions Rwanda, provides drone services for spraying gardens with pesticides, among other farming activities in Rwanda. Technology is crucial to improving food security, researchers say. CREDIT: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
KIGALI, Jun 15 2022 (IPS)

A few years ago, after coming up with a project of launching the first-ever unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in Rwanda, entrepreneur Mamy Muziga Ingabire identified the need to provide farmers with information related to their activity – such as the health status of crops.

“Major focus was to leverage drone technology to support smallholder farmers in increasing their productivity,” Muziga told IPS in a recent interview.

Muziga is the Managing Director of CHARIS Unmanned Vehicle Solutions, one of the Rwandan-based companies providing drone-based solutions.

Several solutions and applications have been introduced to provide Rwandan farmers with innovative technology for accessing timely information on climate change, crop health, and diseases affecting them for informed decisions. Using ICTs gives farmers more access to market information, weather, and nutrition.

Several solutions have developed during the implementation phase, including the project for the Nitrogen fertilisation of wheat crops using drone technology in Musanze, a district in Northern Rwanda.

A drone with fixed cameras and sensors is sent across the field, takes accurate images of the plantations and the land, and collects precise data. This data provides specific indicators that enable operators to know the crop’s health and what it needs as fertilizer to grow properly.

While entrepreneurs and officials hail gains smallholder farmers enjoy by using these technological solutions for a sustainable food value chain; researchers say it’s important to raise awareness about what these technologies can do for actors along the agriculture value chains.

The importance of science, technology, and innovation (STI) as an important driver of African integration was the main topic of a recent scientific conference in Kigali, Rwanda, attracting researchers, members of the private sector, civil society, and farmers’ organisations from across Africa.

The conference focused on new applications such as drones, precision agriculture, and mobile applications or other hardware systems to automate redundant processes and reduce dependency on human labour in the agriculture value chain.

To bridge the STI policy and practice gaps to transform agricultural development and food systems within the continent, researchers agreed that the current impacts of climate change on food security in Africa should not allow anyone to relax.

Dr Canisius Kanangire, the Executive Director African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), observed that agriculture in Africa is [still] characterised by low productivity, reflected in insufficient food production.

“We need to find the innovative solutions to key issues affecting food systems (…) Climate change is still having a growing impact on the African continent, hitting the most vulnerable hardest, and contributing to food insecurity,” Dr Kanangire told IPS.

While researchers seek to enhance the utilisation and adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies, value-adding processes, and loss-reducing practices among smallholder farmers in Africa, some experts in food systems believe that scaling these innovative solutions is still challenging.

“It is not only for the scientific community to develop solutions, but there is also a way to look at how end users can cope with these technologies,” said Claver Ruzindaza, an agricultural extension professional in Kigali.

With current efforts to deliver hi-tech services through public and private partnerships, researchers seek to equip smallholder farmers in Africa with knowledge of agronomic techniques and skills to improve their productivity, food security and livelihoods using innovative technologies.

“We need to change this narrative which maintains the [African] farmer into the poverty status at a point where a farmer is always synonymous to a poor person,” Kanangire said.

Despite the vast agricultural potential, the latest estimates by the African Development Bank indicate that African countries are experiencing one of the highest prevalence of undernourishment in the world. Official reports show that out of about 795 million people suffering from chronic undernourishment globally, 220 million live in Africa.

Nevertheless, AAFT has developed seed varieties that are more productive and resistant to diseases and droughts, which could increase farm productivity and food availability on the continent has been executed in Malawi and Zimbabwe, while it is currently being expanded in Uganda and Ghana.

Martin Bwalya, Acting Director for Knowledge Management and Programme Evaluation at the Africa Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), told IPS that Africa needs to adopt innovations to reduce reliance on food imports.

“The continent is highly vulnerable because we are importing a massive amount. Close to 30 per cent of food in the continent is being imported,” Bwalya said.

As current efforts focus on mitigating the commodity disruptions caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, experts in Kigali unanimously acknowledged the importance of promoting intra-African trade. Growing Africa’s agribusiness sectors by using innovative solutions to help smallholder farmers to become more productive was crucial.

“This agricultural transformation in Africa requires the concerted effort of all stakeholders including policymakers, researchers, private sector and farmers,” Kanangire said.

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The Helping Young People Elevate (HYPE) Center is a center that is designed for youth who experienced homelessness, human trafficking, and systematic oppression.

By SeiMi Chu
Stanford, Jun 15 2022 (IPS)

Arien Pauls-Garcia’s journey to working with at-risk youth in California was long and dangerous and started at 19 when she found herself sold and exploited by traffickers.

Now, she is the Program Manager and Victims Advocate for at-risk minors at the Central Valley Justice Coalition in Fresno, California. She works with youth identified as at-risk of being sexually exploited.

It took time, grit, and strength for Pauls-Garcia to come this far.

Pauls-Garcia grew up in poverty in Humboldt County, California. As she went through tough family situations, such as having several stepdads and her mother experiencing numerous mental health problems, she used MySpace, a social networking platform, to talk to someone who would understand her.

She met a man who turned out to be a ‘Romeo pimp,’ a commonly used term to define traffickers seducing young girls or boys into believing they were loved. Romeo then sold her to another man with whom she spent four years.

Pauls-Garcia went through traumatic experiences—she was beaten, raped, branded, and forced to have an abortion by her traffickers.

“I experienced very horrific things that a person should never experience. I didn’t run or leave because of the shame, guilt, and embarrassment. I believed it was my choice to be in that situation and that I would not be accepted back into society,” Pauls-Garcia reflected.

When Pauls-Garcia escaped her trafficker, she tried to figure out how to become a person and not an object for sale.

“I really wanted to contribute to society and figure out my goals. I attempted to find a job for a year and a half,” Pauls-Garcia elaborated. She could not find employment because she had a record of misdemeanor charges of solicitation and trespassing.

However, through determination, she slowly built her life. This year marks her 10th freedom anniversary. She became one of the faces of the AB-262 bill. This new legislation allows human trafficking survivors to apply for vacatur relief by establishing clear and convincing evidence that arrests and convictions directly resulted from human trafficking.

Pauls-Garcia is also working on getting her record cleared up. She will graduate with her Bachelor of Science in Justice Studies at Grand Canyon University and plans to apply for law school.

As she continues to build her life, Pauls-Garcia wants human trafficking victims to know that the journey will be hard.

“It won’t always be sunshine and daisies. But the work that you put into yourself will be worth it in the end. If you mess up, that’s okay. You don’t have to ever go back to that life; there will always be a solution to our problem. Just keep fighting for it, and it will happen,” Pauls-Garcia said with powerful conviction.

California received the highest number of substantive signals related to human trafficking out of all 50 states in 2020.

Signals made to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in California increased in 2020. Compared to the hotline’s data report in 2019, more than 113 phone calls, 187 texts, and 20 webchats in 2020 were made.

National Human Trafficking Hotline connects victims and survivors to services and support groups.

In National Human Trafficking Hotline’s 2019 California data report, 3,184 phone calls, 935 texts, 208 emails, and 88 webchats were made to the line. However, the signals increased in 2020—more than 113 phone calls, 187 texts, and 20 webchats were made in 2020 than in 2019. The number of human trafficking cases continues to rise in California.

Marty Parker, Special Agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), noticed increased human trafficking cases since the pandemic.

“I can imagine that there were potentially people who had lost their jobs because of COVID-19. And were, therefore, desperate, which either got them into prostitution on their own or were more vulnerable to be trafficked into prostitution,” Parker said as reflected on the impact of the pandemic on human trafficking.

Parker handles child exploitation and human trafficking cases. Her squad is located in Oakland, California, and they work joint proactive operations with local police departments. Her job includes many tasks, such as recovering victims of trafficking, arresting suspected pimps and traffickers, and making contacts with law enforcement agencies.

“What we see on a day-to-day basis is people who are being trafficked are US citizens, normal people, your friends, kids, neighbors. This is everybody’s problem. This is a domestic problem. It impacts every city and every town,” Parker said.

In 2013, Parker’s squad successfully prosecuted a popular escort website called MyRedBook. The website included advertisements for girls and pornography.

“If we’ve got a girl who needs justice, we’re going to go after the bad guy. If there’s a missing kid, we’re going to find them,” Parker stated.

Parker works on human trafficking cases to give a voice and justice to survivors. Many of them were taken away from their families, and their childhood was stripped away. Parker said housing was a huge issue when survivors tried to regain their lives. Since there are a limited number of temporary and domestic violence shelters, sometimes there are no empty beds.

SF SOL (Safety, Opportunity, Lifelong relationships) Collaborative aims to create a continuum of care for youth experiencing or are at risk of experiencing commercial sexual exploitation. They have served over 300 youth so far. The California Department of Social Services funds them. Their collaborating partners include the City and County of San Francisco, Department on the Status of Women, Freedom Forward, WestCoast Children’s Clinic, Family Builders by Adoption, and Huckleberry Youth Programs.

Nazneen Rydhan-Foster, Program Manager of SF SOL, oversees the budget, project management, and anti-trafficking initiatives. One of their successful projects includes collaborating with the Helping Young People Elevate (HYPE) Center.

The HYPE Center is designed for youth who experience homelessness, human trafficking, and systematic oppression.

“What’s great about this center is that it’s made by youth and for youth. We really hope to see this center live on, be there, and serve the youths in San Francisco.”

The center went through some rough moments because they had to shut down their center when COVID-19 hit. However, they slowly opened up.

Breaking the Chains, a non-profit organization in Central San Joaquin Valley, California, started with a safe house for adult female survivors. They house six survivors who spend nine months to two years in the facility. On a day-to-day basis, they now serve an average of 90 to 100 clients. Since 2015, Breaking the Chains has offered services to over 800 clients. Its mission is to provide hope, healing, and restoration to all lives impacted by trafficking.

Tiffany Apodaca, Co-Founder of Breaking the Chains, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and abandonment, also noticed increased human trafficking cases since the pandemic.

“It increased significantly. The simple fact is what we did—we put everybody at home on electronic devices, and there were not a lot of eyes on people. If there was trafficking happening within the household, then there weren’t teachers or anybody who could put eyes on kids to see if there was any abuse,” Apodaca explained how and why human trafficking got worse during COVID-19.

Breaking the Chains is launching its expanded Juvenile Justice Program on July 1, 2022. They will start with an addition of 150 minors who are either commercially sexually exploited children (CSEC) or at-risk youth.

This article 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 labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labor in all its forms’.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavors 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 globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labor, prostitution, human trafficking”.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Pakistani migrant workers on a construction site in Dubai. Credit: S. Irfan Ahmed/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Jun 15 2022 (IPS)

Here goes another fact: 230 million migrant workers are now a major life-saving source for up to one billion people starving in the world’s poorest communities, as well as a vital lifeline for the economy of their countries of origin.

Migrant workers’ remittances amount to over 600 billion US dollars a year, which is three times greater than the whole Global Official Development Assistance, now situated at around 180 billion US dollars.

Not only: officially recorded remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries are expected to increase by 4.2% this year to reach 630 billion US dollars, according to the World Bank’s latest Migration and Development Brief released on 11 May this year.

Migrant workers' remittances amount to over 6 billion US dollars a year, which is three times greater than the whole Global Official Development Assistance, now situated at around 180 billion US dollars

At the same time, their remittances already exceed by six-fold the ‘profits’ –estimated in some 100 billion US dollars a year– made by the criminal gangs, human traffickers and smugglers, and sexual exploiters.

Moreover, migrant workers remittance flows have increased five-fold over the past twenty years, serving in a counter-cyclical capacity during economic downturns in recipient countries, according to this year’s International Day of Family Remittances on 16 June.

Obviously, this is the case of “privileged” migrants, those who have managed to survive and find a job. Tens of thousands of migrants do not have the same “luck.”

 

Hellish journeys

Nowadays, more and more millions of human beings are forced to migrate, feeling armed conflicts, man-made climate disasters, severe droughts, devastating floods, high indebtedness, starvation, shrinking humanitarian assistance, and political persecution. And death.

In fact, thousands of migrants are every year reported dead during their land and maritime journeys, in particular in the Mediterranean Sea, while attempting to reach Europe, which is seen as the promised land of democracy, human rights and equality.

 

The Gulf

Take the case of Yemen. At least 27,800 people have crossed from the Horn of Africa to war-torn Yemen in the first five months of 2022, more than the total who made the journey all of last year along what was the world’s busiest maritime migration route prior to COVID-19, according to the International Organization for Migration (OIM).

The rise in arrivals is “cause for alarm” in a country now grappling with its eighth year of conflict.

Upon arriving in Yemen, migrants face perilous onward journeys to Gulf countries in search of work, IOM reports. They often travel across conflict front-lines and face “grave human rights violations such as detention in inhumane conditions, exploitation and forced transfers across lines of control.”

“Women and girls often report experiencing gender-based violence, abuse or exploitation, usually at the hands of traffickers and smugglers.”

 

Remittances represent up to 60% of recipients’ families on average and typically more than double a family’s disposable income and help deal with uncertainty, allowing them to build assets. CREDIT: IFAD

 

The deadliest sea

Meanwhile, migrants who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe on flimsy boats often piloted by people-smugglers, are at greater risk of dying now than for years, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) reported on 10 June 2022.

Latest data visualisation figures from UNHCR, shows that there were 3,231 dead or missing at sea last year, a sharp rise from 2020.

The situation is a “widespread, longstanding and largely overlooked tragedy”, said UNHCR.

The UN agency noted that although some of those crossing the Mediterranean want a better life and better jobs, many are fleeing conflict, violence or persecution.

 

The neglected inhuman cost

During their journeys to life, migrants are easy prey to criminal gangs, human traffickers and smugglers, and fall victims of cruel exploitation and the growing wave of hatred and xenophobia, which is increasingly propelled by most politicians, let alone the right and far-right ones.

Heavily used as an electoral argument in the most industrialised countries, migrants are now perceived by voters as a threat to their own well-being and as a heavy burden to get rid of, as if this would alleviate the impact of pandemics they did not cause, wars that they have not launched, climate disasters they did not generate, and the failure to address ongoing economic hurdles, inflation, recession, etcetera.

The economic cost both migrants and their families are forced to pay for their journeys to survival often comes at the price of high indebtedness.

Meanwhile, smugglers have been demanding more and more money.

For instance, smuggling activities on the passage by sea to Italy has almost doubled, while the fee for this journey jumped from EUR 6.000 to EUR 12.000, according to a non-profit platform DoSomething report on human trafficking.

 

Swept away

Right now, several European countries are sweeping away migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

In what looks pretty much like an ‘operation dusting’ aiming at getting rid of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers by shipping them far away, the process of ‘externalisation’ of millions of victims of wars, poverty, climate crisis and political persecution, is now growing fast.

IPS already reported on such a practice in four European countries. See specific reporting on the cases of the United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary and Poland by clicking the respective links.

 

How are migrant workers’ remittances spent?

The United Nations reports the following:

• Remittances represent on average up to 60% of a recipient family’s income, and typically more than double their disposable income. The funds help deal with uncertainty, allowing them to build assets.

• Analyses of 71 developing countries show significant poverty reduction effects of remittances: a 10% increase in per capita remittances leads to a 3.5% decline in the share of poor people in the population.

• In rural communities, half of remittances are spent on agriculture-related expenses.

• Additional income increases receiving households’ demand for food, which increases domestic food production and improves nutrition, particularly among children and the elderly.

• Investment of migrants’ income in agricultural activities creates employment opportunities.

 

Migrants under fire

Last but not least: in a number of European countries, the demand for workers has been on the rise.

In the specific case of Spain, for example, in addition to the construction sector, hotels, coffee-shops, restaurants and other sectors depending on tourism, have been complaining about the growing shortage of highly needed waiters, cleaners, housekeeping workers, and so on.

The provided explanation is that Spanish citizens are no longer ready to accept highly precarious jobs, low-wages, seasonal contracts and excessively long, arduous working hours.

A quick conclusion would be to allow more migrants to do the job. But…

… But in most industrialised –and wealthiest– countries, migrants are being ‘accused’ by the rising right and far-right political parties for ‘stealing’ jobs, receiving humanitarian assistance, thus depriving the national unemployed, the youth and the elderly, and ‘wasting’ the citizens’ money… let alone of being the cause of crimes and a long etcetera.

 

What a world!

Credit: Unsplash/Pyae Sone Htun

By Jan Servaes
BRUSSELS, Jun 15 2022 (IPS)

“The illegal military junta provides further evidence to the international community of its disregard for human rights as it prepares to hang pro-democracy activists,” said Thomas Andrews and Morris Tidball-Binz, UN special rapporteurs in Myanmar for human rights and extrajudicial arbitrary executions, respectively on June 10, 2022.

“These death sentences, handed down by an illegal court of an illegal junta, are a vicious attempt to instill fear in the people of Myanmar.”

While at least 114 people have been sentenced to death (including two minors) since the coup of February 1, 2021, only 73 are actually in custody. The others are on the run or in hiding. The military junta announced last week that it will continue with four executions.

The four individuals were tried and convicted in military tribunals and reportedly had no access to legal assistance during their rejected appeals, in violation of international human rights law.

These are 53-year-old Ko Jimmy, also known as Kyaw Min Yu, the leader of the 88 Generation Student Group that stood up against the regime of former dictator Ne Win, and the ousted 40-year-old NLD MP Phyo Zayar Thaw. Phyo Zayar Thaw, a legislator for the National League for Democracy from 2012 to 2020, made a name for himself as a member of Acid, Myanmar’s first hip-hop band. Acid paved the way for other Myanmar hip-hop artists.

They were sentenced to death in January by a military tribunal along with two other anti-coup opponents on charges of treason and terrorism. The other two men are Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw, who were convicted in April 2021 of killing a junta informant in Hlaing Tharyar municipality.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, the military junta will not say where they have been holding Phyo Zayar Thaw and Ko Jimmy since their arrest. Their family fears that they have been severely tortured. If the lynchings continue, they will be Myanmar’s first judicial executions since 1988.

In a June 9 press release in the junta daily Global New Light of Myanmar, the junta defended its decision by stating that it “has every right to exercise all powers and authorities granted by the state constitution”.

Junta spokesman Major General Zaw Min Tun stated in two separate interviews with RFA Burmese that appeals against the death sentences have been completed and dismissed. So there is no more chance for leniency and “the execution will be carried out”.

Many foreign governments and organizations have condemned the decision. The spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, Stéphane Dujarric, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the decision and, referring to an article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called it a “blatant violation of the law on the life, liberty and security of the person”.

“The Secretary-General reiterates his call for respect for people’s rights to freedom of opinion and expression and also to drop all charges against those arrested on charges related to the exercise of their fundamental freedoms and rights,” Dujarric added.

The embassies of France and the United States condemned the announcement, as did the government of national unity NUG. Even Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is this year’s deputy ASEAN chairman, has urged Myanmar’s military government not to carry out the planned executions of the four political prisoners, suggesting the move may further isolate the junta and raise further obstacles to restore peace.

Also Amnesty International called the news about the resumption of executions ‘shocking’. They called on authorities to “immediately” drop the plan and called on the international community to step up intervention efforts.

“The death sentence has become one of many horrific ways in which the Myanmar military is trying to instill fear among those who oppose its rule and would contribute to grave human rights violations, including deadly violence against peaceful protesters and other civilians,” the organisation stated.

The UN also stressed that the imposition of the death penalty took place alongside the military’s extrajudicial killings of civilians, now estimated at nearly 2,000.

Jan Servaes was UNESCO-Chair in Communication for Sustainable Social Change at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He taught ‘international communication’ in Australia, Belgium, China, Hong Kong, the US, Netherlands and Thailand, in addition to short-term projects at about 120 universities in 55 countries. He is editor of the 2020 Handbook on Communication for Development and Social Change.

https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-981-10-7035-8

IPS UN Bureau

 

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The United Nations expects an increase in elder abuse because of the ageing populations: the global population of people aged 60 years and older will more than double, from 900 million in 2015 to 2 billion in 2050. Credit: Maricel Sequeira/IPS

By María Isabel Cartón
MADRID, Jun 14 2022 (IPS)

1 in 6 people over 60 years of age –nearly 141 million people globally– suffers from abuse, according to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates.

The World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD) (June 15th), aims to raise awareness and eradicate this problem that affects both developing and developed countries.

WHO defines elder abuse as "a single, or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship, where there is an expectation of trust, which causes harm or distress to an older person." It can take various forms: physical, psychological or emotional, sexual, financial abuse or neglect

WHO defines elder abuse as “a single, or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship, where there is an expectation of trust, which causes harm or distress to an older person.” It can take various forms: physical, psychological or emotional, sexual, financial abuse or neglect.

The lack of accurate data is one of the symptoms of this problem, but a 2017 review of 52 studies in 28 countries from diverse regions provided the pooled prevalence of different types of abuse:

– Psychological abuse: 11.6%

– Financial abuse: 6.8%

– Neglect: 4.2%

– Physical abuse: 2.6%

– Sexual abuse: 0.9%

 

The abusers

This violence happens at home and at institutions such as nursing homes and long-term care facilities. A staggering fact: 90% of abusers are family (adult children, spouses and partners).

But anybody can fit the abuser profile: relatives, strangers, friends, health care providers, public and private institutions… Whoever interacts with older people, especially with those who suffer a severe disability (i.e. dementia), can easily become abusers.

 

Why is that?

HelpAge International points out ageism. “Stereotypes about older people can be used to justify elder abuse or minimise its impact. In many ways, elder abuse is the most harmful expression of societal ageism”.

The normalization of this violence is a mask that makes it invisible or even an accepted or necessary conduct. So, how can we even identify it? Here are some examples:

Physical abuse: hitting, pushing and restraining by physical (tying them to furniture) and chemical means (medication). Also sexual abuse.

Emotional or psychological abuse: use of hurtful words, yelling, threatening or repeatedly ignoring the older adult. Isolation, infantilization and victimization are also forms of emotional abuse.

Neglect occurs when the caregiver does not try to respond to the older adult’s physical, emotional and social needs (housing, food, medication or access to adequate health care, including aspects such as therapeutic cruelty and therapeutic nihilism).

Abandonment (leaving an older adult who needs help alone without planning for his/ her care) is also a type of neglect.

Financial abuse happens when someone steals money or belongings from an older adult (retirement, Social Security benefits, etc.), uses his/her bank accounts or credit cards or changes names on a bank account, insurance policy, house title or will without permission.

 

Longevity and inequality

Inequality determines the way we age and is also in the roots of elder abuse.

According to a 2008 report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “the increase in life expectancy” was concentrated “in populations continuing on to higher education” and diminished “in the groups having high school diplomas or less”.

In the OECD countries, a 25 year male with a university degree may live 7,5 years more than another male with lower education level. For women, the difference is 4,6 years. It goes without saying that inequality in education and any other development indicator is worse in the “emerging economies”.

Gender is also an inequality and abuse trigger, especially at old age. In 2015, 54% of people above 60 were women (61% within those aged 80 or more). Although female life expectancy is higher, their life quality is worse because of poor health and higher rates of abuse.

During their lifetimes, women suffer marginalization and poverty. Income inequality, differences in education, health services and job market explain why many women have no retirement benefits or lower ones. Moreover, they are the principal caregivers to children and other old people, often without any compensation.

 

The gap between the narratives and the facts

The United Nations expects an increase in elder abuse because of the ageing populations: the global population of people aged 60 years and older will more than double, from 900 million in 2015 to 2 billion in 2050.

During the COVID-19 pandemic rates of elder abuse have increased. Both the poor access to adequate health services and the restriction on social interactions have severely affected the elderly.

Neither population ageing nor elder abuse are new. There are countless initiatives, campaigns, plans and organizations around the globe trying to bring ageing into the public agenda, but real transformations are yet to come.

This year, WEAAD coincides with two important events. The first is the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030), aimed to align the goals of the 2030 Agenda and the ageing agenda.

 

The Decade addresses four areas for action:

– Change how we think, feel and act towards age and ageing;

– Ensure that communities foster the abilities of older people.

– Deliver person-centred integrated care and primary health services responsive to older people.

– Provide access to long-term care for older people who need it.

The second event is the 20th milestone of the Second World Assembly on Ageing and the fourth review and appraisal of the implementation of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing (MIPAA).

UN believes that “an international legal instrument for older persons would advance the implementation and accountability of MIPAA”, and admits the “uneven progress” in its implementation and “the absence of an international standard on the rights of older persons, gaps between policy and practice, and the mobilization of necessary human and financial resources”.

 

When the conquest becomes the problem

Between 2015 and 2030 the world population aged 60 or over is expected to grow by 56%, reaching 1.4 billion people in 2030 (16,5% of the total population).

By then, “older persons are expected to account for over 25 percent of the population in Europe and Northern America, 17 percent in Asia and in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 6 percent in Africa” (UNDP).

The mainstream narrative that labels groups of population as a nuisance —migrants, women, indigenous people, the elderly… the list is open— denying their humanity and emphasizing that they put “the system” at risk, makes it possible for this violence to be perpetuated.

Moreover, in the current context of questioning the role of the State and the public sector, it is worth asking whether it is possible to guarantee good treatment of the elderly when what is at stake is no longer the viability of the systems of health and social protection necessary for a long-lived population, but even its mere existence for anyone.

María Isabel Cartón is a Spanish journalist, specialized on ageing issues. She is an active member of Asociación Jubilares, an NGO that promotes the social participation of senior citizens, and works within the WHO Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities

Lawrence Akena had never dreamt of owning a cow. BRAC believes ownership of assets like livestock can get people out of extreme poverty. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
Oyam & Gulu, Uganda , Jun 14 2022 (IPS)

Lawrence Akena was born 32 years ago with microcephaly. Because of his neurological condition, he didn’t go to school or benefit from skills training.

The exclusion meant Akena survived on handouts and was one of the young persons living in extreme poverty in Kamdini sub-county, Uganda.

“He would leave home early morning for Kamdini corner just to loiter in the township. At times he would spend nights there until I picked him (up and brought him) back,” says Akena’s mother, Lili Iram.

Akena’s condition, microcephaly, affects children born with a small head or a head that stops growing after birth. It can result in epilepsy, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, hearing loss and vision problems.

The 76-year-old mother says things have changed now. BRAC, the largest NGO in the Global South, selected him among persons with disabilities to benefit from Disability Inclusive Graduation (DIG) project.

BRAC Uganda, the National Union of Women with Disabilities of Uganda (NUWODU), and Humanity & Inclusion (HI, formerly Handicap International) have implemented DIG in selected districts in once war-torn Northern Uganda since 2018. UK Aid has funded DIG through the Inclusive Futures initiative, Cartier Philanthropy and Medicor Foundation, and Sight Savers.

DIG is designed to ensure that Graduation’s four key elements, including meeting people’s basic needs, providing training and assets for income generation, financial literacy and savings support, and social empowerment, are adapted to ensure inclusion for persons with disabilities.

BRAC supported Akena with primary livelihood assets like goats, cattle, pigs, and cash for petty trade. Humanity & Inclusion and NUWODU ensured that DIG’s services, including coaching, were effectively designed to support people with disabilities.

Ownership and control mean that people with disabilities, like Akena, can create a pathway out of extreme poverty and become socially included.

“DIG has helped us a lot. We did not own a cow. We didn’t have goats and chickens. Akena is (now) always at home looking after them,” Iran says when asked about how the program affected her son.

As Iran describes her son’s transformation, Akena enters the loading shed to set his goats free so they can graze alongside two brown zebu cows. According to Iram, he suffered a major setback when his pigs died of African Swine Fever last year.

But when IPS visited Iceme village, where he lives with his mother, Akena had bought another pig which now lives in the pigsty he constructed.

BRAC Project Assistant, Derick Baguma visits Lawrence Akena and his mother, Lili Iram, to assist with their farming ventures. Credit: BRAC

By owning the household assets like cows, goats, and chickens, Akena is graduating from the extremely poor,” says Derick Baguma, a Project Assistant with BRAC.

Baguma has provided household-based coaching to persons with disabilities in Iceme and other villages in Oyam’s Kamdini sub-county to record their assets.

Asked by IPS whether he had witnessed any changes, he said the difference was visible.

“This is not how this household was. And the way Akena appears now is not the same as he was. Do you see those shelters for goats and pigs? Lawrence Akena made over 80% of the contribution to ensure they are the way they are,” Baguma says. “And yet this is a person who was spending nights at verandas in Kamdini.”

Iram told IPS that she is working hard to ensure the assets multiply so that she can invest for her son’s future survival. She and her son are regular savers in their Village Saving Loan Association (VSLA), an informal, local financial institution that relies on its members’ savings to provide loans for emergencies and to support members’ enterprises.

“I had always wished to do something for my son, but I had no support. I plan to buy a piece (of land) and plant trees for his future from the savings in our village saving box,” she says.

Asked what lessons there were to learn from the DIG model, Baguma, who lives with Down syndrome, said there was a need for extra support for households with persons with disabilities.

“That when you are designing a project, you should include persons with disabilities. And it is possible. We shouldn’t look at the expenses. At times people say it is expensive. But we should look at the end results. How impactful is it going to be? If you don’t bring in that perspective of disability, then you are not reaching every person,” he said.

Uganda’s Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development 2020 study found that households with a person with a disability spent close to 39 percent more than other households.

“Future interventions to address poverty and wellbeing needs to ensure that the gap does not widen, leaving people with disabilities and their families behind. This may, therefore, necessitate the provision of additional resources to those households,” said the report.

Finding innovative solutions allows people living with a disability to support themselves and their families. Credit: BRAC

DIG has also provided rehabilitation, psychosocial support (PSS) needs and assistive devices for persons with disabilities, such as railings for entryways, modified latrines and artificial limbs.

One of such recipients is Denis Aboke, who lives in the village next to Akuna’s. Aboke, a cancer survivor, says that he now has an artificial limb 18 years after losing his leg to cancer.

He told IPS that without DIG’s intervention, he would still be using wooden crutches.

“Amputation from cancer had rendered me completely useless. I could not go into the garden. Now I can do some farming. I’m now able to support my family. The children are going to school,” he says.

Apart from the primary assets,  Aboke also received a diesel-powered grain milling machine as part of the DIG program, earning him extra income from fellow villagers. While Aboke sees a brighter future for himself, he hopes to see organisations continue to support people with disabilities.

“My brother, I can tell you that nobody cares about people with disabilities. Landmines disabled many people, but there was no support. Health centres here have nothing to offer,” shares Aboke.

Rwot Ma Miyo Village Savings Loan Association members meeting. BRAC ensures that meetings take place at residences of persons with disabilities, so they can be included. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

Aboke’s rehabilitation was performed at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital, over 65 kilometres from his village. The hospital’s orthopaedic workshop serves clients from Northern Uganda and South Sudan.

Principle Orthopaedic Technologist Senvume Kavuma Abbey told IPS that the workshop is overwhelmed by demand, yet orthopaedic care services are least funded in Uganda.

“The government last supplied us with materials ten years ago. So, if DIG had not come in, we wouldn’t be able to provide services to those who benefitted,” explains Senvume.

Program staff arranged community outreach visits linking orthopaedic services with people with different forms of disabilities.

“We were able to see where those people were coming from, and so we designed appliances customised to their environment and their nature of work, and what they desire to do,” said Senvume

While the DIG model is relatively new to Uganda, the program partners think it can be adopted elsewhere as a tool for improving livelihoods for people with disabilities.

Shammah Arinaitwe, a Technical Specialist with BRAC Uganda, told IPS that Graduation is good for reaching poor households. She explained that it considers the recipient’s needs and what they can do and uses their experience to forge the path out of poverty.

“I will give an example. If you cannot afford 60-70 cents of a dollar per day, the project gives you a boost,” explains Arinaitwe. The comparison of someone who has benefitted from DIG is that the assets gained through their participation in the project mean they end up being able to support themselves and grow.

“If I have one cow, eleven goats, and thirty chickens, you can’t compare me with someone who does not have any,” explains Arinaitwe. “I’m glad to tell you that the same model of the project is being started in Tanzania, drawing from the lessons from Uganda.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Credit: European Commission

By Reghina Dimitrisina
BRUSSELS, Jun 14 2022 (IPS)

The fast-changing environment requires Europe’s energy system not only to adapt but to also find the right mechanisms to ensure its unity in the face of turbulent challenges.

In March 2022, European solidarity was translated into tangible policy action when EU leaders officially agreed to jointly buy natural gas, liquified natural gas (LNG), and hydrogen in an effort to protect citizens from skyrocketing energy prices and lessen reliance on Russian imports. In theory, this shows European alignment and solidarity in action. But what does this mean in practical terms?

The idea of a joint gas purchase agreements is not a new one. In April 2014, the then Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, proposed this instrument for jointly buying gas in a mandatory form, as part of the ‘EU Energy Union’ framework. Mandatory joint procurement has been welcomed but with a hint of scepticism, as Member States were not eager to pursue this united approach due to differing national policy views. That is why one year later, on 19 March 2015, the EU governments endorsed the voluntary option of this mechanism as a compromise.

Reghina Dimitrisina

However, nowadays the energy policy landscape is changing at the speed of light and this instrument might be more relevant now than ever. According to Kadri Simson, the European Commissioner for Energy, the process of joint procurement is ‘straightforward’.

‘Member States that wish to do so define their own parameters for the joint action – how much gas is to be bought, for how long, how this gas would be used in an emergency situation, and then they inform the Commission’. The Commission would then inform the other Member States of the action being taken and check that energy market and state aid rules are respected.

To this end, the EU has launched the EU Energy Platform – to pool demand, coordinate infrastructure use and negotiate with international partners to facilitate joint purchases. Importantly, Ukraine, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, as well as the Western Balkans countries, can also join this form of collective purchasing agreement.

Learning outcomes from the joint pandemic procurement

This approach might sound familiar, as the EU already managed a solidarity mechanism during the pandemic when the Commission coordinated the joint Covid19 vaccines procurement to ensure timely supply to each Member State. Some experts claim that gas is much more problematic than purchasing vaccines.

Pessimistic voices argue that the mechanism works if everyone’s in. Purchasing power works best if you’re buying a lot – and right now it’s not clear what percentage of EU’s gas would fall under the proposed joint procurement.

Moreover, the distribution aspect might be problematic. EU countries have different levels of gas reliance on Russia, and not every Member State has storage facilities or direct access to an import terminal for cargoes arriving via ship.

Nevertheless, there are also arguments in favour of this mechanism. For example, Christian Egenhofer, Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), said that an effective joint gas purchasing plan could stop the Member States from competing with each other in buying gas but also from presuming to offer shabby deals to autocratic rulers. In addition, and more long term, the joint gas purchasing platform could lead to a truly European security of gas supply policy.

The renaissance of the solidarity mechanism

Despite criticism, the crisis is pushing the EU toward a joint approach. On 27 April 2022, state-controlled Russian energy company Gazprom cut off Poland and Bulgaria from its gas supply because they refused to pay in Russian rubles, as President Vladimir Putin has demanded.

European Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen reacted and highlighted in her statement that ‘Both Poland and Bulgaria are now receiving gas from their EU neighbours. The era of Russian fossil fuels in Europe will come to an end.’ Bulgarian Energy Minister Alexander Nikolov also underlined that Bulgaria counts on the Commission’s common purchasing strategy to buy gas.

Finland also found itself in the same position on 21 May 2022, when Gazprom officially stopped gas exports as it had not received payment in rubles. Finland found the solution in a joint approach and together with Estonia concluded an agreement on the joint leasing of a floating terminal for LNG that will guarantee the supply of gas to both countries.

More recently, Gazprom extended its gas cuts on 1 June 2022 by stopping supply to GasTerra, which buys and trades gas on behalf of the Dutch government. Furthermore, it also cut off gas flows to the Danish energy firm Ørsted and to Shell Energy for its contract to supply gas to Germany, after both companies failed to make payments in roubles.

GasTerra said it had found alternative contracts for the supply of the 2bn cubic metres of gas it had been expecting to receive from Gazprom between now and October. Ørsted also declared that a gas cut would not immediately put the country’s gas supplies at risk. They would turn to the European gas market to fill the gap.

In the case of Germany, while the move appears to be largely symbolic — amounting to about 3 per cent of Germany’s Russian gas imports, according to Robert Habeck, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, ‘the situation is escalating to the point that the use of energy as a weapon is becoming a reality’.

He also emphasized that Germany can cope with the latest disruption in part by securing alternative supplies, adding that there’s no need to elevate Germany’s alert level. The country’s three-stage emergency plan, which is currently at its first level, could see its network regulator eventually ration gas if supplies get tight.

During this critical time, the solidarity mechanism is experiencing a renaissance. In the end, its effectiveness will depend on the volumes that will be purchased and how many Member States will adhere to it.

However, considering the need to reduce the dependency on Russian fossil fuels as soon as possible, it is clear that no Member State can tackle this challenge on its own. A truly united European energy front is the only way forward.

Reghina Dimitrisina is a Policy Advisor at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung’s competence center for Climate and Social Justice.

Source: International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin

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